week the school will be under way. We have selected the students carefully and expect they will turn out well. Did my first hitch-hiking in Spain the other day and saved about seven hours by doing so: four hours saved by not waiting for the train that was sure to come late anyway, and three hours by making a trip in one hour that the trains would have taken four hours to make. The difficulties of war play hell with the railroad system. Sometimes the bloody trains (which many times have to burn wood now instead of coal)---the Asturians are too well hemmed in by the fascists---have to stop to get up enough steam to continue and the lines are simply crowded with all sorts of troop, Red Cross, food, and munition trains. The railroad stations are always crowded hours and hours before the train arrives. The International Red Aid has hospital stations in every railway depot where they do wonderful work, handling primarily sick and wounded troops but, if there is also room, handling all other troops which are in motion. They dish out hot coffee at intervals during the night, and gave me my best breakfast in Spain one morning when, in addition to the usual coffee, bread and butter, they also fished out some canned meat. The Barcelona business has been very much exaggerated in the foreign press. It was started by the Trotskyites (P.O.U.M.) who influenced a very small minority of the C.N.T. and F.A.I. However, the good sign is that nobody will openly defend them; both the C.N.T. and F.A.I. papers have publicly disavowed them, and, while it is impossible to say how far it will go, the responsible heads of the C.N.T. have agreed to make a cleaning out of the C.N.T. If any- thing more were needed to show the counter-revolutionary role of the Trotskyites, that was probably it. Bob Minor is back in the country again---he rushed up to the front as soon as he got here. He was accompanied by 38