Combatants Settle Down to Cat-and-Mous2
Tactics; No Change V ithin the Past Year Hendaye, Nov. 6.
The second year of the siege of Madrid ends tonight and at dawn the former Spanish capital will start the third year of its investiture which in loss of human lives and property surpasses all sieges of modern times with the exception of Verdun during the Great War.
It was two years ago tonight that the Caballero government fied from Madrid and the Foreign Legion, the Moors, the Requetes and the Falangists of Generalissimo Francisco Franco arrived at the Manzanarez river and began the siege of a stubbornly resistant city.
In those two years, with a whole "army at its gates, Madrid has successfully resisted air and artillery [attack. Official Spanish records show that in two years upwards of 18000 shells have fallen on the unhappy city, and their fall has been charted by the municipal authorities. Madrid is caught in an angle of fire from Francos batteries at Carabanchel and in the Casa de Campo, but the besiegers no longer maintain a continuous fire and the guns shoot only spasmodically, they ere often silent for days at a time.
To resist it has cost Madrid 5,500 civilian casualties including nearly 1,500 dead, 20,000 military wounded and dead and at least 4300 buildings wholly or partially destroyed. At one time, General Jose Miaja, Madrid's defender, held the city with 150.000 to 200,000 troops, but these lines have been thinned down to provide sorely needed reserves for the Valencia and Alamaden front and neutral observers estimate the present Madrid defence force at a maximum of 30,000.
Against those stubbornly determined 30,000 specialists, chiefly sappers who burrow far underground to plant mines under nationalist guns and trenches, antiaircraft gunners, artilleryman, machine gunners and grenadiers, Generalissimo Francisco Franco is estimated to have 175000 men assembled from the Sierra Guad-arrame, past the former capital to Aranjuez.
In the past year, the lines have not budged. Since Brunete, which was a costly Republican sally, there has been no serious effort to drive the Nationalists back from Madrid.
Both sides have settled down to a cat-and-mouse siege, neither wasting men or munitions to try to force an issue—United Press.
French guards have been strengthened to frustrate attempts to cross the frontier by fugitives from a German concentration camp recently established meat Merzig about two and a half miles from the frontier, for some 300 prisoners, most of them believed to be Austrians and German Catholics.
Numerous fugitives have reached the frontier during the past few days. They assert that they have been told that "France is over there; try to get across and do not come back to Germany."
Some. women and children are among those who have been attempting to cross, but the French authorities have hitherto refused to admit anybody without regular papers, although exception was made yesterday in the case of three sick mothers from Vienna, who are taken to a hospital in Thionville—Reuter.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.