The Waterbury Democrat., 1939-02-09

In the welter of books on warning Spain 1t is interesting to find one which speaks with peculiar author ity. The famous French chief of staff, known to every member of the A. E. F., Gen. Maurice Weyand dispatched as an official observer, General Jean Duval, whose extend- ed report published last June in Paris Gibrairie Plon) under the title Lessons of the Spanish War;" gives professional account of the war in the peninsula and its lessons for both soldier and civilian. The book gains weight from the uncon- ditional endorsement of General Weygand.
 At the outset" says General Weygand in his introduction, "there was on the one hand an established government, and on the other a small group of men, determined to free their country from intolerable servitude. To begin with, odds fa- vored the former, possessed of an army and supplies, far greater ter- ritory, gold, seaports, almost the en- tire fleet, and through 1t ready ac- cess to outside aid. But the gov- ernment was without unity and was dominated by foreign influence" Crusade
 General Duval is confident that the war is regarded by the Spanish people as 8 crusade against alien communism and that 1t will unite the nation as 1t has not been united for centuries. He anticipates that the postwar government, with the realism inherent in Spanish charac- ter, will play an independent part in European affairs, leagued with neither Germany, France, Italy nor Great Britain, but cultivating friendly relations with all, while it dedicateS its energies to the rehabil- itation of its war-torn land.
 Analysing the causes of the rev. olution the general says that the republic of 1881 was torn between a multitude of parties whose am- bitions and susceptibilities were played upon by the agents of Mos COW. Communist and anarchist agi- tators led the urban workers to believe that a Union of Iberian Soviet Republics, once all power and property were in the hands of @ dictatorship of the proletariat, would guarantee them workless, taxless, carefree existence. Work CTS militia amounting to 100000 armed men, far outnumbering the regular army, were formed by the anarchist, communist, and socialist parties. These illegal organizations were covertly aided by the supine Republican ministers. Army equip ment was stored in warehouses in the large cities of eastern Spain, where 1t would be easily available to the radical mobs.
 Soviet Spain
 In 1884, as General Duval points out, the communists attempted to establish 6 soviet Spain, when they fomented bloody uprising in Cata- lonia and the Asturias. They were defeated by the Spanish army. Tn 1885 they broadened their alliance with the Socialists, left Republicans and Syndicalists, and entered the 1936 elections. Defeated by nearly half a million votes, they 'neverthe- less seized control of the govern ment and by the murder of Right ist leaders, precipitatde the present war. General Duval traces the ac- tions of the communist leaders in Spain directly to orders from the Seventh World Congress of Com munism, held in Moscow in August 1885, and quotes Russian plans for a popular front government in Spain to be followed in due course by the busting of the allied parties of the Left and formal establish- ment of 6 soviet regime.
 The French observer thus sums up the situation as of July, 1886, on the eve of the Spanish war: "When, from the tribune of the Cortes, (pariiament) Calvo Sotelo courag- eously denounced the hideous ac- tualities of the class struggle he