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Out of 473 elected Deputies, only 188 attended. Anarchists and Trotskyite Communists staying away. After a series of emotional speeches the Cortes voted unanimous confidence in the Negrin Government and adjourned for the day. Two facts were important. Into the hall to take his seat stepped 75-year-old Manuel Portela Valladares, Premier of Spain in 1936 when the Popular Front took power, and politically about as Red as U. S. Senator Carter Glass. Since the beginning of the war he has been a voluntary exile in Paris. Last week he promised allegiance to the Negrin Government, brought three other conservative Deputies with him as a sign of truce between the Popular Front and Centre Right Republicans.
Down the street at the same time occurred a meeting of the Socialist U.G.T. labor unions, backers of disgruntled ex-Premier Largo Caballero, chief thorn in the Negrin Government's side. Largo Caballero controls but seven of U.G.T.'s original 42 assorted unions, has forced the expulsion of 29 others. Those 29 held a meeting of their own last week, and insisting that they were the real majority of U.G.T., voted confidence in the Negrin Government's "win the war first" program.
The saga of Harold E. Dahl, the U. S. aviator who fell into Rightist hands while fighting for the Leftist air-force and whose pretty wife has interceded on his behalf with General Franco, this week comes to its climax—Aviator Dahl's trial. Moaned he last week: "I lie in this cell at night and think of her and myself alone together on some South Seas island. . . . Then I come to and say 'What's the use? I'm going to be bumped off by a firing squad.' "