Exit Weyler

For years a rivalry amounting practically to a feud has flourished between those choleric Spanish Generals, Don Miguel Primo de Riveri y Orbaneja, Marques of Estella, and Don Valeriano Weyler y Nicolau, 86-year-old first Marques of Teneriffe and Duke of Rubi. They have differed over the control of Catalonia, and have all but come to blows anent the conduct of the Spanish forces in Morocco. Now at last General de Rivera has triumphed. Last week, as the conqueror of Ajdir, the former capital of Abd-el-Krim (TIME, Oct. 12), he was able to demand that General Weyler be relieved by the Spanish Government of his post as Chief of Staff of the Spanish Army.

Meanwhile Americans whose memories are long, recall that General Weyler was once rather more than notorious in American eyes. As a Spanish military observer, he watched quietly enough the campaigns of General Sheridan during the Civil War. But as the Spanish representative in Cuba (1896-7), he repressed the Cuban struggle for independence with such atrocious severity that his regime was responsible for the Spanish-American War. In those days patriotic Americans reviled him as a "butcher" and a "thief." He was said to have ordered the shooting of countless Cubans out of hand. And at the same time he was alleged to have secretly sold Spanish arms to Cuban rebels, and levied "taxes" upon Cuban merchants which enabled him to return to Spain the rich man that he is. The Spanish version of the matter has usually been that his regime was considered too ineffectively mild by the Government at Madrid, which accordingly recalled him. He once remarked: "All who submitted to me were pardoned. I was naturally inflexible with traitors."

In the same spirit, he relentlessly governed the Canary Islands in the name of Spain, and was rewarded by being created the Marques of Teneriffe. His immediate past has been spent very largely amid heated politico-military squabbles, which have enlivened his existence as a fashionable Spanish grandee.

Now that he is an old man, he is said to have frequently forbidden his sons to fight duels in defense of his honor. And it is expected that he will accept the recent triumph of Primo de Rivera with stoicism, retire, and rest content with the verdict of good or ill fame which History must pass upon him.