1937-04-17 — Page 11

THE CHINA MAIL, APRIL 17, 1937.

Death-Raining Skies Of Torn Madrid

wood.

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is

somehow

o-night and

no

Here is a picture of Madrid un- Winter is nasty in Madrid. There life which strikes them above all wrong if it had not been for the der fire of the terror, death and are sudden shifts in temperature is the food queue. Queues are blood on the street, which caught destruction that for weeks have and the cold is peculiarly penetrat everywhere; you cannot walk three my attention and set me to asking tested the morale of the people of ing, particularly that proverbial blocks in any part of town-during questions. They talked excitedly, the city.

wind from the Guadarramas which the morning without seeing long. bitterly, but obviously the idea of By HERBERT L. MATTHEWS will kill a man but will not extins lines of women. Sometimes it is to giving up their places in line or guish a candle. This year there has buy a few pounds of dried olive foregoing their purchase never oc- HERE are six-storey houses in been an unusual amount of rain seeds to use as fuel; sometimes it curred to any of them

the Rosales district, on

the and fog.

Coal is scarce. The rail- is for oil, sometimes for rice-or western edge of Madrid, where 100 roads into Madrid have been cut for cauliflowers or oranges,

Suppose some autocratic power kilo bombs have ploughed right nearly three months. Truck trains Women wait hours in the cold, were to say to the inhabitants of through and into the ground. ex must concentrate on bringing only perhaps all morning. Those at the ong Kong: posing parts of rooms on each floor. the necessaries of life and war end of the queue might well find every night hereafter for weeks It is like a strange and horrible materials.

supplies exhausted before they ar- and months, the city must remain atage scene where the fourth wall

None of you is non-existent so that the charac- without steam heat or blazing fire about those lines is the good hum- may leave your

There are ways of keeping warm rive, yet the astonishing thing in total, darkness.

homes after 10 ters can present a tragedy before an

o'clock. No restaurants may be the women wait. places, but you cannot cook food our with unseen audience. If one were to cut

without something to heat your There are

ver any

complaints, open for dinner-no_movies, down like that through life in Mad-

stove. And so there is an inces- never any sad or disgruntled faces. theatres, no cabarets, no bars. Your rid under the siege, what could be sant search for wood--any kind of They gossip and laugh and build houses and apartments must not seen?

themselves little fires, if there

show a gleam of light. Although it The nonchalance of these people A bomb landed in a square off the any refuse around, and

is Winter, they will not be heated. And sleep if you can, for outside is staggering to behold. One would Castellana a few weeks ago. Several the time passes.

you will hear the boom of cannon think that all their lives they had people were killed and a half-dozen Now and then carts will drive lived amid the booming of cannons, wounded. From the Telefonica into town, perhaps with a load of

all night, and perhaps the roar of

car the explosions of shells and the few of us had spotted the location cabbages. It makes a triumphal enemy planes carrying death and destruction to you and your loved rending crashes of aerial bombs. and we rushed down there to see procession, for housekeepers ·and They seem to possess a sense that what had happened. Ambulances even passers-by, seeing it, will fol- ones. is almost animal-like in its egoism. were just taking away the dead low doggedly to the stopping place "Inconceivable!" the reader will There is surely no people in the and wounded. A man with a has--and then the line is already made say. But that is exactly what has world who circumscribe their lives tily bandaged head was being led and the sale begins.

happened to Madrid. so tightly as the Spaniards. Their off by some friends. But it was

It takes fortitude and high spir- There are no gay white ways in individualism has something pri- not that which caught our aston- its to do that sort of thing, week Madrid under the siege. The Gran mitive about it. You have to go ished attention. A tree had been after week, and still keep on smil Via, where fashionable crowds were back through the historic stages of blown down by the explosion and ing but the Madrilenas are doing wont to stroll at night while stores society, through nations, city at least ten people were hacking it, and more. Those lines are there and cafes, restaurants and theatres States and even tribes, to the dawn furiously away at the trunk and when the bombers come over and blazed with light, now dies an un- of social life, when only the branches. In a quarter of an hour when the shells fly and they are natural death when night falls. By family mattered. To touch a nothing was left but a short stump still there afterward. In Tetuan a 6 o'clock everything is, dark and Spaniard to the quick you have to where the trunk had broken off, and few weeks ago an Insurgent pur- the crowds rushing home from strike at him personally, at his a boy was chopping at it dilligent- suit plane swooped down low over work seem like ghosts fitting family and his private possessions. ly, as close to the ground as he a main street where there was a through an unreal world.

By 9 Walk up the Alcala some after could get, so that none of that pre long queue of women before a gro- the bustle has disappeared and

cer's shop. At a cruelly precise guardsTM commence noon when the Gran Via, just to cious fuel would be lost. your right, is being heavily shell- In Rosales, in Arguelles, in moment the machine gunner let go at each passer-by From 10 o'clock ed, as it often has been in the past Tetuan the districts of Madrid full blast straight into the petrified on it is a city of the dead, and woe three months. "You would look in that have been most heavily bombed group of housekeepers. Some twelve betide

or fourteen were killed or wound- abroad. vain on the faces of the people it is a common sight to see men,

wed. strolling up and down for any ap- women and children foraging among

proper I arrived on the scene about like net preciation of the fact that death the ruins of houses for parts of and havoc are within 100 yards or beams, pieces of flooring, broken twenty minutes later. The bodies run of the so of them. The crash of a shell furniture anything so long as it had been taken away to the morgue, the password and have all the do

the wounded to a hospital. might induce the men to interrupt is wood and will burn.

And ments necessary, go out no

a

At a

time

4

Jook

found

lking

the passwo

Even peo paper men, who at night,

their conversation for passing when Rosales was a death trap the then the line had re-formed! I than is absolutely necessary—wh comment. The women go on with authorities tried to discourage the should never have noticed anything is, perhaps, a few times a week. their shopping, the children their play. What is there to it practice by forcing people to give excited about? The shelling is 100 yards away!:

up the wood they collected, but others came and it was hopeless.

The shells were hitting at about three-minute intervals, but the op- portunity was too precious. They lingered a few seconds longer than they should have, for as they bustl ed back across the street the next shell crashed into

the building,

There is a building in town that has been shelled many times. Us...” ̈· ually the shelling has taken place between 4 and 5 in the afternoon. The pavement is the most danger ous spot in town. Those of us news sending down' a shower of stones paper men who have to pass it four and glass. Somehow they escaped. or five times a day do so at a walk In the restaurant. where I eat that is a half a run, and we breathe lunch nearly every day, Sebastian, a sigh of relief as we duck around the head waiter, invariably pre- the corner. Yet how often in our sents a complicated menu with due haste do we pass children spinning anavity and seriousness. One's tops that very sidewalk, while eye passes- sadly, across the

long their mothers look on complacent lists of fish, meat, fowl, cheeses, des- serts, and, finally, having – reached During a bombardmen militia the end of the printed part, alights men work like Trojans in their on a few miserable lines written in efforts to stop people from crossing ink. "What will you have to-day?" in front of the building but quite asks Sebastian, no doubt from force unsuccessfully. One would expect of habit. As if there were a choice! that passers-by, who could take any All that the menu offers is rice number of side streets, would give cooked in rancid olive oil, a thin the spot a wide berth. Not the slice of beef, breaded and fried in Madrilenos! A shell bursts and the same oil, and oranges-jast the street is cleared as if by magic; that and nothing more, day after a minute later people are bustling day, week after week. And Sebas- by again, pointing excitedly at the tian runs the best restaurant In damage which the last shell has town! done.

That is very natural, of course. The imagination which could Wartime anywhere, is a time for substitute for fear and prudence is tightening the belt-above all in a lacking. The Spaniard is a realist: city under siege. No one is starv- he is alive, strong, well. These ing here, and no one is going to are facts, palpable facts. The con- starve, but these are lean days, and ception of himself blown to bits is Madrid is a hungry city. That is a figment of the imagination. And why, when newcomers first arrive so he politely walks on.

in the capital, the feature of daily

Cook

by

Gas