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The rich who passed the Spanish War in Biarritz and Monte Carlo can now live well at Madrid's Palace Hotel or Ritz, at Barcelona's Ritz or Colon. They can eat game, fish, fowl, meat, and Madrid's Ritz has a good swing band. The fairly well-to-do can get enough to eat by keeping chickens in their apartments. But to the poor everything is rationed. The bread ration consists of two small rolls, hard from brown flour adulterated with chick peas, beans, potatoes, sometimes gravel. The olive oil in which Spaniards cook everything is rancid; the good oil was sold to Italy. Eggs are rationed at one per person per week, cost as much as $1.50 a dozen. Milk is a luxury and coffee does not exist. Tobacco is rationed at 40 cigarets per week to men, none to women. In cafes boys and old men crawl under chairs to retrieve butts, which are made into bootleg cigarets.
There is no hard money in Spain, no more big duros for shopkeepers to clank on their counters. The paper money of large denominations is printed in Leipzig, the small bills in Milan. That, too, is symbolic. At the end of July there were 80,000 German engineers, craftsmen and clerks in the country, 30,000 Italian laborers and farmers.
With 100,000 to 150,000 tons of gasoline in storage, Spain could probably wage a short war. If Britain withstood a Blitzkrieg and dragged the war through the winter, Spain would soon be helpless. But if Britain begins to totter, Don Ramón Serrano Suñer might well push El Caudillo beyond the verge of battle.