International Press-Cutting Bureau
110, Fleet Street, London, E.C.4.

Extract from
The Nation

New York U.S.A.

29 JAN 1938

ally overcome this defi-
 equipment. Chu Teh de-
to above that in many
of a hundred men pos-
d with hand grenades.
guerrilla troops depends
Teh claimed that with
the Eighth Route Army
man.

province are fighting as
well as organizing. In Peiping during the last two weeks
of November we heard of from sixteen to twenty attacks
on Japanese detachments along the Peiping-Hankow
Railway from Peiping to the Honan border. Only heav-
ily armed Japanese detachments, usually escorted by air-
planes, dared to venture into the interior of Hopei.
Actual Japanese military control embraced but a nar-
row strip of approximately five miles on either side of
the railway, with somewhat larger areas around the more
important cities, such as Paotingfu. East of the Peiping-
Hankow Railway the countryside was still controlled by
remnants of the Chinese divisions which had been swept
aside in the big September push. In this area at the be-
ginning of December the Japanese command was still
unable to utilize the highway from Tientsin to Paotingfu
as a regular supply line. Current reports show raiding
activities have extended to the outskirts of Peiping and
Tientsin.

The facts thus briefly outlined do not mean that the
Japanese military position in North China is untenable,
or that Japan's armed forces are likely to be driven out
of the northern provinces in the near future. They do

mean that the Japanese command is faced with a military
problem of large dimensions, which will continue to re-
quire an expensive army of occupation for many years
to come. The "pacification" of North China, certainly
of any considerable section of the interior, will not be
accomplished unless the Eighth Route Army is completely
annihilated. Failing this, from fifteen to twenty divisions
of Japanese troops will be required to maintain control
of the lines of railway communication in the northern
provinces. And the problem may become steadily more
serious if the Eighth Army is able to complete its organi-
zation of the peasants in the areas off the railway lines.
The present guerrilla operations, it is important to note,
are being carried on during the winter months, when the
grain has been cut and cover is meager—a season when
the armed Manchurian volunteers are normally driven
into the most inaccessible areas of the northeastern prov-
inces. The campaign, in other words, has got off to an
early start. Consisting of an initial force of 100,000
troops seasoned by a decade of mobile warfare under the
most difficult circumstances, and led by experienced com-
manders, the Eighth Army will almost certainly carry on
a wasting conflict which will try Japanese nerves to the
utmost. The Communist leaders are convinced that China,
because of its semi-colonial status and backward technique,
cannot defeat Japan by the orthodox methods of modern
warfare. Chu Teh made this point to me, during an inter-
view last June, in these succinct sentences: "China must
depend on its peasant and worker strength if it is to
fight Japan victoriously. For China this war must be a
totalitarian war. Even all of our four hundred millions
are not quite enough."

Laughter in Madrid

BY LANGSTON HUGHES

Madrid, December 15

THE thing about living in Madrid these days is
that you never know when a shell is going to fall.
Or where. Any time is firing time for Franco.
Imagine yourself sitting calmly in the front room of
your third-floor apartment carefully polishing your eye-
glasses when all of a sudden, without the least warning,
a shell decides to come through the wall—paying no
attention to the open window—and explodes like a
thunderclap beneath the sofa. If you are sitting on the
sofa, you are out of luck. If you are at the other side
of the room and good at dodging shrapnel you may not
be killed. Maybe nobody will even be injured in your
apartment. Perhaps the shell will simply go on through
the floor and kill somebody else in apartment 27, down-
stairs. (People across the hall have been killed.)

Who next? Where? When? Today all the shells may
fall in the Puerta del Sol. Tomorrow Franco's big guns
on the hills outside Madrid may decide to change their

range-finders and bombard the city fan-wise, sending
quince-y-medios from one side of the town to the other.
No matter in what section of the city you live, a shell
may land in the kitchen of the sixth-floor apartment
(whose inhabitants you've often passed on the stairs),
penetrate several floors, and make its way to the street
via your front room on the third floor.

That explains why practically nobody in Madrid
bothers to move when the big guns are heard. If you
move, you may as likely as not move into the wrong
place. A few days ago four shells went through the walls
of the Hotel Florida, making twenty that have fallen
there. The entrance to the hotel is well protected with
sandbags, but they couldn't sandbag nine stories. All
this the desk clerk carefully explains to guests who wish
to register. But most of the other hotels have been
severely bombed, too. And one has to stay somewhere.

The Hotel Alfonso a few blocks away has several large
holes through each of its four walls but is still receiving

124

The NATION

guests. One of the halls on an upper floor leads straight out into space—door and balcony have been shot away. In one of the unused bedrooms you can look slantingly down three floors into the street through the holes made by a shell that struck the roof and plowed its way down, then out by a side wall into the road. Walking up to your room, you pass a point where the marble stairs are splintered and the wall pitted by scraps of iron; here two people were killed. Yet the Hotel Alfonso maintains its staff, and those of its rooms that still have walls and windows are occupied by paying guests.

The now world-famous Telefonica, Madrid's riddled skyscraper in the center of the city, is still standing, proud but ragged, its telephone girls at work inside. The Madrid Post Office has no window-panes left whatsoever, but the mail still goes out. Around the Cibeles Fountain in front of the Post Office the street cars still pass, although the fountain itself with its lovely goddess is now concealed by a specially built housing of bricks and sandbags, so that the good-natured Madrileños have nicknamed it "Beauty Under Covers," laughing at their own wit.

Yes, people still laugh in Madrid. In this astonishing city of bravery and death, where the houses run right up to the trenches and some of the street-car lines stop only at the barricades, people still laugh, children play in the streets, and men buy comic papers as well as war news. The shell holes of the night before are often filled in by dawn, so efficient is the wrecking service and so valiantly do the Madrileños struggle to patch up their city.

A million people living on the front lines of a nation at war! The citizens of Madrid—what are they like? Not long ago a small shell fell in the study of a bearded professor of ancient languages. Frantically his wife and daughter came running to see if anything had happened to him. They found him standing in the center of the floor, holding the shell and shaking his head quizzically. "This little thing," he said, "this inanimate object, can't do us much damage. It's the philosophy that lies behind it, wife, the philosophy that lies behind it."

In the Arguelles quarter to the north, nearest to the rebel lines—the neighborhood that has suffered most from bombardments and air raids—many of the taller apartment houses, conspicuous targets that they are, have been abandoned. But in the smaller houses of one and two stories people still live and go about their tasks. The Cuban poet, Alejo Carpentier, told me that one morning after a heavy shelling he passed a house of which part of the front wall was lying in the yard. A shell had passed through the roof, torn away part of the wall, carried with it the top of the family piano, and buried itself in the garden. Nevertheless, there at the piano sat the young daughter of the house, very clean and starched, her hair brushed and braided, her face shining. Diligently she was beating out a little waltz from a music book in front of her. The fact that the top of the piano had been shot away in the night did not seem to affect the chords. When passers-by asked about it, calling through the shell hole, the child said, "Yes, an *obús* came right through here last night. I'm

going to help clean up the yard after a while, but I have to practice my lessons now. My music teacher'll be here at eleven."

The will to live and laugh in Madrid is the thing that constantly amazes a stranger. At the house where I am staying, sometimes a meal consists largely of bread and of soup made with bread. Everybody tightens his belt and grins, and somebody is sure to repeat good-naturedly an old Spanish saying, "Bread with bread—food for fools!" Then we all laugh.

One of Franco's ways of getting back at Madrid is to broadcast daily from his radio stations at Burgos and Seville the luncheon and dinner menus of the big hotels, the fine food that the Fascists are eating and the excellent wines they drink. (Rioja and the best of wine areas are in Fascist hands.) But Madrid has ways of getting even with the Fascists, too. Mola, a lover of cafes, said at the very beginning of the war that he would soon be drinking coffee in Madrid. He was mistaken. Then he said he would enter Madrid by the first of November. He didn't. Then he swore he would enter the city on the eighth of December. He didn't. But on the evening of the eighth some wag remembered, and the crowds passing that night in Madrid's darkened Puerta del Sol saw by moonlight in the very center of the square a coffee table, carefully set, the coffee poured, and neatly pinned to the white cloth a large sign reading "For Mola."

Bread and coffee are scarce in Madrid, and so are cigarettes. The only cigarettes offered for sale more or less regularly are small, hard, and very bad. They are so bad that though they cost thirty centimos before the war they bring only twenty now despite their comparative scarcity. The soldiers call them "recruit-killers," jocularly asserting that they are as dangerous to the new men in the army as are bombs and bullets.

Bad cigarettes, poor wine, little bread, no soap, no sugar! Madrid, dressed in bravery and laughter; knowing death and the sound of guns by day and night, but resolved to live, not die!

The moving-picture theaters are crowded. Opening late in the afternoon and compelled to close at nine, they give only one or two showings a day. One evening an audience was following with great interest an American film. Suddenly an *obús* fell in the street outside. There was a tremendous detonation, but nobody moved from his seat. The film went on. Soon another fell, nearer and louder than before, shaking the whole building. The manager went out into the lobby and looked up and down the Gran Via. Overhead he heard the whine of shells. He went inside and mounted the stage to say that, in view of the shelling, he thought it best to stop the picture. Before he had got the words out of his mouth he was greeted with such a hissing and booing and stamping of feet and calls for the show to go on that he shrugged his shoulders in resignation and signaled the operator to continue. The house was darkened. The magic of Hollywood resumed its spell. While Franco's shells whistled dangerously over the theater, the film went its make-believe way to a thrilling denouement. The picture was called "Terror in Chicago."