THE TRAGEDY OF SPAIN
BARCELONA is not known to have fallen at the moment these words are being written, but it appears impossible that any prolonged resistance can be maintained. With the capture of the city by General Franco and his Italian and German allies the main phase of the war, if not the war itself, must be held to have ended. The conflict has now lasted for two years and a half. For Spain it has involved the double ordeal of a bitter civil war and of extensive foreign invasion. For this country and France it has involved decisions far- reaching and possibly disastrous in their effects, based on a choice not between a safe course and a dangerous but between two almost equally dangerous. The case for non-intervention when the Spanish conflict broke out was overwhelming; for France, which urged it from the first, it was imperative, for the division of opinion in that country in 1936 was such that intervention on one side in Spain would have meant civil war at home. But the whole situation was changed when certain States, notably Germany and Italy and to a much smaller extent Russia, violated their non-intervention pledges and took an active, and in the case of the first two a decisive, part in the Spanish War. The results of the Anglo-French policy so far are two-fold : a general war has been avoided, and the Spanish Government has been defeated.
The words " so far " are an essential qualification, for the harvest of the Spanish conflict has not begun to be reaped. Over what is past controversy will rage in- definitely. Whether sharp action by Britain and France in reply to the intervention by the dictatorships would have checked the intervention—as the effects of the Nyon Conference might seem to suggest—or precipitated the general conflict which it was the supreme purpose of the non-intervention policy to avert no man can determine. But on one point there must be general agreement. When non-intervention had been decided on, in accord- ance with Mr. Eden's sound doctrine that the Spanish peoples must be allowed to settle their own destiny by themselves, and maintained even when Germany and Italy had refused to allow them to settle it by themselves, abandonment of that policy in the interests of the Spanish Government in this last week would have done the minimum of good and the maximum of harm. It could not have saved Barcelona and it would have involved the gravest risk of that extension of the conflict which the non-intervention policy was designed to avert. Governments which for two years had maintained the policy as the lesser of two evils could have no ground for abandoning it at the eleventh hour.
Even with the fall of Barcelona, the Spanish War is not over. Madrid is still in the hands of the Government and resistance in and to the south of the capital may still be prolonged for months. If it is the critical situation which the end of the war can hardly fail to create in Western Europe may be postponed. Signor Mussolini has undertaken to withdraw all his forces from Spanish territory " at the end of the war," but he will accept no one else's verdict on what the end of the war means. Before Italy thinks of withdrawing her troops, she will unquestionably present a list of demands to France. It will then be seen whether they are such as can be discussed with some hope of agree- ment, or whether Signor Mussolini is openly challenging France to war. If that conflict broke out, it is incon- ceivable that it could, like the Spanish, be localised.
