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Intervention. Obviously Spain's Civil War still depended largely on decisions yet to be made by Europe's Baldwins, Blums, Hitlers, Mussolinis and Stalins. Il Duce with a characteristic gesture last week opened the bag of information about Spain which his espionage service keeps replenishing daily, shook out through his press spokesman Editor Virginio Gayda of Giornale d'ltalia whole pages of minute particulars of Soviet, French and other "neutral" aid to the Spanish Leftists. So rich was this shower of charges in detail that only the chiefs of other espionage services were in a position to estimate its exactness. Laymen and journalists noted that Italy's charges amount to saying that Socialist Premier Blum, while prating of neutrality, has been winking at wholesale smugglery of munitions and warplanes from France to the Leftists, permitting Soviet general staffers to direct operations from French soil, enabling Russian bombing planes to arrive nightly. According to Editor Gayda, units of the Soviet Navy were steaming from the Black Sea last week bound through the Dardanelles for Spain and trouble. At Paris the office of the Premier denied nothing in detail, issued blanket denials and blanket charges of Italian bad faith.
The calm British termed "unprecedented" last week the lack of respect for their Navy's traditional might shown by Rightist aviators off Mallorca. They impudently dropped 15 bombs, none of which hit the British destroyer Gallant, were repelled by her shellfire, and when London asked apologies these were profusely given —but still those Spanish aviators had been "unprecedentedly" cocky. The Rt. Hon. Stanley Baldwin, weary of office and about to retire as Prime Minister, was doing his best to think chiefly of the Coronation, but all Europe realized that Russia, Italy, Germany and France were feverishly cheating on their pledges of neutrality toward Spain, daily running heavy risks that their machinations may touch off a Great War.
"Pirates." Rightist warships blockading the port of Bilbao, and keeping off British ships which were trying to deliver food which the Leftists had bought in England, were "pirates" in the eyes of London which ordered His Majesty's mighty warship Hood to the scene. Excitement over this slumped when the British Cabinet, covertly favorable to Franco, advised British ships not to try to enter Bilbao as the harbor might have been mined. This ingenious supposition enabled His Majesty's Government to achieve much the same blockade objective as that of the "pirates" without being in the least piratical.