Last Retreat

One of the greatest mass flights in modern history came to an end one afternoon last week when 40,000 soldiers of the once-fine Catalonian Army and a few straggling civilian refugees evacuated the Spanish border village of Puigcerda, crossed into France and closed the last gate to northern Loyalist Spain behind them. A few fanatical anarchists committed suicide by staying behind and fighting the Insurgents to the end, but at exactly 2:40 p. m. Friday, Feb. 10, a handful of Rebel troops of Generalissimo Francisco Franco nailed their red & gold banner to a telegraph pole at the edge of the rock-bedded river which separates Puigcerda from the French border village of Bourg-Madame. All of Catalonia was theirs. On the other side of the river, less than 500 yards away, several thousand Loyalist soldiers dumped their arms and ammunition into piles at the roadside and tramped dejectedly off to French concentration camps.

The main Loyalist job in the closing hours of the retreat from Catalonia was to get as much war supplies as possible into France and out of General Franco's hands. Tanks and heavy artillery pieces rumbled over the frontier in endless lines. At Le Perthus alone more than 10,000 trucks rolled into France between midnight and noon of the last day. Overhead roared squadrons of Loyalist airplanes, headed for landing fields in the interior of France. Many of the troops found their own way of disposing of small arms. They shot their cartridges away at birds and tin cans, tossed their grenades into ditches in such numbers that many a French child was kept indoors lest he pick one up, pull the pin and kill himself.

By the time the Rebel advance contingents had reached the border posts last week more than 100,000 civilian refugees had made their way into France. The 150,000 defeated Catalonian soldiers swelled the refugee ranks to far more than the backward, rural Pyrenees district of France could handle. Camps had been built for the internment of the Loyalist fighting forces but these makeshift shelters were able to hold only 100,000. The rest of the soldiers and most of the civilians were forced to camp in the open.

The men foraged for food and wood to keep bonfires going, their only protection against the misty cold. There were no hospital facilities to take care of the 20,000 wounded. Soldiers and civilians injured in air raids wandered around, their wounds festering after days of inattention, looking for aid. Correspondents roaming through the refugee region sent back countless vignettes of human suffering: one crazed refugee, his arm blown off by an air raid, carrying his baby under his good arm, was looking for his wife and remaining children, who he did not know had been killed in the same air raid; new born babies nestling beside new born lambs; soldiers and civilians sleeping among flocks of sheep for warmth.

The French Government did all that was possible last week for the immediate problem, that of providing food for the half-starved Loyalists. Toward settling the bigger problem, resettling the refugees either in Spain or in some other country, the Loyalist Government made the first step. It issued to the refugees a printed form asking: "What do you want to do? Remain in France? Have you means to do so? Work in America, [South and Central] in your profession? Return to [Insurgent) Spain? What motives impel you to adopt this decision?" Officials of the Loyalist Ministry of State declared that their Government intends to see this resettlement project through to the end, even if it means paying the expenses of those refugees who choose to go to Mexico or South America.

Meantime, the Loyalist Government arranged with France to use the sizable gold holdings it still has in Paris to pay for part of the refugees' expenses in France.

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