Exit

In Spain last week the Leftist Army was estimated at 600,000 (including 10,000 non-Spanish), the Rightist Army at some 400,000 (including 50,000 non-Spanish whites, 30,000 Moors). Each side was busy with widely separated, half-hearted and ineffective offensives at the Leftist-held Ebro River salient and at Rightist-held Cordoba, but the bogged-down Spanish war made a spurt of news when at Geneva the League was suddenly told by Leftist Premier Dr. Juan Negrin that he will speed up and continue his recent evacuations of foreign volunteers from Leftist Spain until not a single member of the famed International Brigades remains (see above).

Today, the Internationals are a political embarrassment and, in overpopulated Leftist Spain, are so many more mouths to feed. For two months Dr. Negrin has been sending Internationals home by small groups. That they leave with the gratitude of Leftist Spain was indicated by the Premier. He called them "courageous, devoted men." proclaimed the "high moral value of their sacrifices" at Spain's "most critical hour," assured them that Spain would be "sad" at their leavetaking, "this new and painful service we now ask of them."

The Internationals' withdrawal will mean the end of a dramatic, widely publicized "antiFascist crusade" which started two years ago, when the first volunteers arrived. Since that time about 45,000 men, many of them Communists, some pure adventurers, some political exiles from Fascist countries, some idealistic democrats, some World War veterans and others mere youths, office boys, clerks and farm hands, have taken up arms for Leftist Spain. Many of them smuggled themselves across the French frontier in defiance of Non-Intervention Committee rules.

The greatest number in service at one time was 20,000 in February 1937. Used as shock troops, never allowed to rest for long, shifted from one busy front to another, the Internationals' casualties have been staggeringly high. They filled up bad gaps of a slowly forming Leftist Army in the early days of the war. The French volunteers led in numbers, followed by Poles, German exiles (Thaelmann Battalion), Italian exiles (Garibaldi Battalion), English, the U. S. volunteers (Abraham Lincoln and George Washington Battalions, later simply Lincoln-Washington Battalion), Canadians (Mackenzie-Papineau Battalion), many Central Europeans.

To this mixed force of many tongues was attributed several heroic defenses. The brigades' arrival at Madrid in November 1936 and their stubborn resistance in the Casa del Campo outside Madrid, probably gave Leftist General Jose Miaja enough time to organize his defenses to prevent the city's capture by Generalissimo Francisco Franco. They appeared later in the successful halt of the Rightist Jarama River drive and in the panicky rout of Italian Fascist troops in the Battle of Brihuega, on the Guadalajara Road.

News of their forthcoming departure reached 400 U. S. volunteers still fighting in the heavy Ebro engagement only by the "grapevine" route. Said one incredulous volunteer: "Don't expect too much until it comes." Revealed in Washington last week was a gift of $10,000 last July by Manhattan Financier Bernard Baruch to take 83 wounded Lincoln-Washington Battalion men home. Mr. Baruch explained : "They were willing to fight for something they believed in and I had the money to bring them home when they got hurt."

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