Loyalist Defenses on Lérida Front

Peces Històriques Triades Per Josep Maria CasasúsYour correspondent entered Lérida today. It is not very hard to do. All you have to do is keep your legs moving steadily and control a slight tickling sensation between your shoulder blades and the base of your neck as you cross a railway yard and come under machine gun fire from a tower 500 yards away. I am now able to reveal that the Government holds almost a third of the town and all the east bank of the Segre and is controlling the junction of three great main roads in Cataluña, one going north to Balaguer and France, one east to Barcelona and a third southeast to Tarragona. If Franco’s troops had been able to conquer the eastern part of Lérida, they would have had access to these three trunk lines into Cataluña. As it is, they are bottled up in the old medieval part of town facing the Segre River, and the Government is heavily fortified along its banks, with the railway station, rail yards and all the road junctions safe behind them. […] The troops holding eastern Lérida are veterans of the siege of Madrid and already have constructed ditches and communication trenches, taking advantage of every fold of the ground that means the difference between being sniped through the head and being able tot go about business calmly and quietly. Fortifications ha progressed so far and were being run out so skillfully that your correspondent seemed back in the old days of Usera and Casa del Campo before Madrid. Only here it was green, flowering and abundant. Pear trees were candelabraed along they grey walls where picks had opened holes for snipers. Trenches angled through kitchen gardens full of peas, beans, cauliflower and cabbage. Poppies were bright in the green wheat between the almond trees and the bare grey white hills of Madrid seemed far away. […] Today the front is 160 kilometers from Barcelona where the Segre River splits the town of Lérida. That is as close as it was four weeks ago.