The Washington times., 1936-10-17

(FOLOlDtnq IS the tnHLIeLH "
the Udr logs from the Spanish
battlefront By H. r. KntcEer-
booker, famous roUir1g cores
y pondent of International NeUS
SerUice.)
BY H. r. KNICKERBOCKEK
Copyright. 1885, by international
News service)
TORRIJOS, Spain, Oct. III
think today was about as pictur-
esque as any I've had in this civil
war. We caught up with Major
Castejon all right, found him with
Gen. Jose Varela, the new com,
mander-in-chief for the columns
operating against Madrid, and my
old acquaintance, Lieut. n n
Colonel Asensio, standing on a
hill overlooking the battle OF the
Guadarrama River.
This is where the reds lost the
civil war, and I use the term adj
visedly. It is not because I am
a correspondent with the whites
that 7 write the whites are win
ming. 1t is because they are win
ming and I could see it a week
after I arrived in BurgoS. You
don't have to write propaganda
Even under a censorship you don't
have to write untruthS.
Red Morale Gone
Sometimes you have to write
something that is not the whole
truth. For example, if the whites
were not winning I should have
nothing to say about it, or put it
in such a way as to be acceptable,
the way the Madrid correspond
entS are now writing about the
defense of the capital.
But the truth and the whole
truth about this matter is that the
reds seem to have lost their morale.
They should have held, you can
say, any number of strong points
along the line away back there
from Badajoz clear up to Toledo.
But they certainly should have
held the Guadarrama River, a
perfect place to defend, with a
3O0-foot cliff on the other side of
the stream. Yet they didn't even
try to hold it. They merely blew
up the bridge and scampered.
This, I am sure, is not because
they are not brave. They are
brave enough, but they have no
discipline and no leadership. They
don't believe in officers and have
very few officers anyway. This
white side is as thoroughly diScip-
lined as any army in the world.
Discipline Counts
Imagine the difference; on the
other side committees of soldiers
meeting to debate how and
whether to hold the Guadarrama.
On this side a far-Sighted plan
of campaign worked out by Gen
eral Franco away back there in
CacereS, each move erfectly timed,
each battalion under the leader
ship of an officer who knows pre-
cisely what he has to do. The
soldiers on the white side have
not the remotest idea of what the
plan of campaign is.
All they have to do is obey
orders and they do obey. Luckily
for them a major principle of the
campaign is to waste as few lives
as possible, because the whites
have so few soldiers compared to
the Reds and so can't afford
losses. On this front I esti-
mate there must be 10 times as
many Reds as Whites, yet when
the legion takes position they
lose about two men and kill
about 200 Reds.
Well, we marched across the
Guadarrama River right along
side of Major Castejon, so he kept
his promise about letting us go
to the front with him.
Like Story Book
What a story-book war! Tur-
banned dispatch riders on Arab
horses galloping across the land
scape. Moorish troops with that
curious fatalistic quiet of theirs,
hitching up their rifles and de-
ploying across the fields. A long
line of perhaps a thousand men
over there on the left going for
ward in single file, Silhouetted
against the sky as they advance
along a ridge of hills.
Then the red planes coming
over, and we all dive into a ditch
with the famous Ell MILAN, only
Moorish major in the army, who
tells us we must not make the
slightest movement because if we
don't move the planes will think
the road deserted.
There are thousands Of us lying
there keeping quiet as mice and
the planes go on and bomb the
road away back of us where there
really is nobody, and you can hear
the wham! wham Of the bombs
and see great columns of dust rise
in the air, and we all grin and are
happy because we are fooling the
enemy nicely.