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First news service really to cope with the Revolution was Universal which soared over censorship with an airplane ferrying regularly from Madrid to Paris the dispatches of tough old Correspondent Karl H. von Wiegand, who appears to enjoy risking his life on everything from the Graf Zeppelin to Ethiopia (TIME, Jan. 27). Some 40 miles from crass and modern Madrid is mellow and historic old Toledo, and out to it went Hearst's von Wiegand escorted by Red Militia. Wrote he afterwards: "A militiaman with a .32 calibre, nickelplated revolver in his hand stood at my side in a narrow and barricaded street only 180 yards from the Alcazar [fortress of Toledo]...From the battered, smoke-begrimed windows of the magnificent fortress the intermittent bursts of rifle and machine-gun fire, replying to the Radical Government besiegers, seem to have aroused the deepest hatred of the Red elements. ... As we passed the Archbishop's Palace one of my Militia escorts remarked, 'I'd like to hang the Archbishop to a tree!'. . . The rebels are said to have taken 60 horses with them into the Alcazar and their only food now is horseflesh, potatoes and wheat." Into the Alcazar in 1907 as a 14-year-old cadet went Generalissimo Franco to study in its Infantry School.
In the Hall of Ambassadors of the Alhambra in Granada squatted last week marooned U. S. tourists watching troops of the Revolution taking over the proletarian quarter below. A Government air bomb fell in the garden of the Hotel Washington Irving in which six U. S. tourists were staying. Only Spaniards were killed. One, an expectant mother, convulsively gave birth to two dead babes as she expired. Later the Vicomte de Sibour, with a plane borrowed from London's Drygoods Sportsman H. Gordon Selfridge Jr. (TIME, Aug. 17), began taking off tourists, four at a time. To rescue the 19 remaining, General Queipo de Llano sent from Seville a giant German Junkers transport, escorted by a scouting plane. This outfit safely evacuated Granada's U. S. tourists, flying them to Seville, whence they jounced by bus to Cadiz, boarded the U. S. cruiser Oklahoma and were taken to British Gibraltar, mostly dead broke. French tourists in Granada were not permitted to leave by officers of the Revolution, keenly suspicious that the French "Popular Front" Government of Leon Blum is helping the Spanish "Popular Front" Cabinet in Madrid.
"Private Aid?" In perfect agony at Paris all week was new Premier Blum, as French politics split wide open into factions, respectively, for the Spanish Government and for the Spanish Revolution.