Text Books in the Trenches I
---Hazen Sise, December 30th, 193

AM A CANADIAN speaking from Madrid. I am here trying 'l0
I make myself useful to the Spanish folk, because I believe their

cause to be desperately important for all of us. Not only 18 it
important when measured against those ideals of Democracy for
which our forefathers fought and died; but it has a more urgent
practical importance. If Fascism is allowed to prevail in Spain there
are many of you listening tonight whose lives will be thereby affected
in none too comfortable manner.

If you were to have to see the blood and destruction on the pave-
ments of Madrid you would realize what Fascist aggression really
means. And you would perhaps form the opinion that Hitler was not
simply da.y-dreaming when he wrote “Mein Kampf”.

For myself, I have come to the sober realization that life for me
would be intolerable in a world dominated by the repressive phil-
osophy of Fascism and so I am here to do what I can.

Somewhere in Spain

Tonight I want to describe for you a Christmas night in the
front line “somewhere in the Sierra de Guadaramma”. This lovely,
snow-clad range of mountains closes the View like a theatre backdrop
if one looks north-west from Madrid. On a clear day these peaks
seem to rise up at the end of the street; actually they are about
35 miles away.

  On Christmas afternoon we visited the Escorial, that massive
granite pile, half palace, half monastery—--cut off from the likes and
aspirations of the people. As we stood admiring this imposing building
in the setting sun we heard in the distance the rumble of Franco_’s
guns bombarding Madrid.

We afterwards found that these shells fell in the centre of the
city far from any military objective and, of course, a number of
people were killed.   A

Remember this when you next hear Franco described as the
true champion of the Spanish people and of the Christian church.
On the Anniversary. of the day Christ was born Franco murdered
a number of non-combatants, just ordinary people like you or me--~
people he claims to be liberating from the horrors of Bolshevism--
with shells fired from German or Italian guns. Think it over and see
if it makes sense.  

We drove away from the Escorial. We were most courteously
received and the commandante of an adjacent sector of the front
line was sent for. Commandante corresponds to the rank of ‘major. In
about twenty minutes he arrived_———-an absurdly young man with a
strong, handsome, passionate face, fringed with beard. With him was
his wife, bareheaded, a cape flungover her shoulders. She had that
soft beauty of the women in early nineteenth century prints, and, as
we discovered later, was but fifteen years old. The commandante
was twenty-four. This is certainly a young man’s war---at least on
the Government side. Think that fact over too.