NEWS OF THE WEEK
EVERYTHING that has happened in Spain in the past week, including the naval aspects of the Bilbao " blockade," is overshadowed by the barbaric horror of the bombing of the old Basque capital, Guernica, by General Franco's aeroplanes. Never in modern history has Europe known anything comparable. No military objective was involved. Guernica is—or was, for it has ceased to exist- __ an open town fifteen miles from the front lines. The moment chinen for its destruction was what must have been well known to be the market-day, when hundreds of peasants had flocked in from the countryside. The bombaiddent, systematic, sustained, merciless, was continued for three hours and a quarter by successive squadrons of aeroplanes methodically marshalled. A hospital containing 42 wounded men was destroyed and every patient killed. As the panic-stricken populace fled to the fields they were pursued and machine.' gunned with relentless precision from the air. The_number of .casualties is unknown, but a town of 7,000 inhabitants, to which must be added several thousand refugees and a market-day influx from the country round, has been wiped out. The Spanish civil war, unexampled in the brutal fury exhibited, has produced incidents bestial beyond belief, notably the bombing of the refugees from Malaga in January, but the sickening butchery at Guernica has no parallel. It takes rank among crimes which their very hideousness prints indelibly on history.
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