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With this program, General Franco found himself surrounded in Seville last week not only by his Spanish staff but by individuals in Spanish uniform who obviously were Italians and Germans. Hitherto bombing by planes of the Franco-Mola forces had been so inaccurate that in London, famed Hector Bywater could write that thus far not a single Spanish ship seemed to have been sunk by air bombs. Two days later planes of the Revolution put the Government's best and biggest war boat Jaime Primero (James the First) out of action with 625-lb. bombs which scored direct hits on her forecastle head. This was not Spanish marksmanship and neither the planes nor the bombs nor the airmen were Spanish.
Held by the Revolution last week were all Spanish Morocco, the two largest Balearic Islands, whose political boss Juan March was contributing all the aid he could from Paris, and a great crescent- shaped swath of Spain swinging from Navarre around Madrid and down through Andalusia. The Government on the other hand held the region of Madrid, the east coast of Spain, part of the north coast and strong cities such as Barcelona, Valencia, Malaga.
Paradoxically in Seville and its languorous province of Andalusia the Revolution found itself embarrassed by enthusiastic assumption on the part of the local populace that it stood for restoration of the Monarchy. In charge of Seville, Generalissimo Franco had put General Gonzalo Queipo de Llano y Sierra, an officer so strongly Republican that he was forced to flee Spain during the reign of King Alfonso. Last week, although Generalissimo Franco had ordered all his forces to fly the flag of the Republic (which was the same as that flown by the Madrid Government they were fighting), General Queipo de Llano, as a matter of popular expediency, advised that King Alfonso's red, yellow and red Bourbon banner be permitted to float over the Revolution in the south.
In the north, still more paradoxically, General Mola, who served under several of King Alfonso's Cabinets and is supposed to have the most Monarchist leanings of any commander in the Revolution, continued his refusal to have anything to do with Alfonso XIII's heir Prince Juan, whom he recently sent packing out of Spain (TIME, Aug. 17). The exiled King, who is at pains to keep repeating that he never abdicated, was at Dellach in Austria for the mournful second anniversary last week of the death of his youngest son, Gonzalo, in a motor accident. Said he: "I am in deepest mourning over the events in Spain." Savage Sieges. Main fighting of the week was a series of attacks by General Mola in efforts to dislodge Government forces from Irun and San Sebastian, and the grim advance toward Madrid of Generalissimo Franco's columns of Spanish Foreign Legionnaires and Moors, but the most desperate and cruel conflicts were at Badajoz, besieged by the Revolution, and at Government-besieged Oviedo, where in 1926 Generalissimo Franco was married.
Inside Badajoz, according to reports from Lisbon, the defending Government forces held as hostages all Rightists on whom they could lay hands, threatening to butcher them if the city was bombed.