Fifty-two, 53, 54day after day the Basque soldiers defending Bilbao cut calendar notches in their dugout walls, as Rightist troops inched ever closer and still the city did not fall. Three times in the past century Bilbao has been besieged, in 1874 for 125 days, but Bilbao has never been captured.
Bilbao has never been attacked by as modern an army as Generals Franco & Mola had at their command last week, nor was the capture of the city so vital a point in any of Spain's previous civil wars. On the hillsides...
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