Bulletin

              SPANISH MEDICAL AID COMMITTEE
24 New Oxford Street, W.C.1
HOLBORN 1866, 0605
Bulletin for August 1938
" Having been home on a month's sick leave, my arm having been broken with shrapnel in one of the air-raids on Valencia," writes Nurse Madge Addy, " I have devoted the whole of the time to trying to raise funds for Medical Aid for Spain.
" I want to try and bring your readers into close contact with some of the appalling suffering and horror that is being perpetrated on Government Spain by Germany and Italy. Try and imagine perhaps on a lovely sunny morning what it is like to hear that ghastly drone of engines and to look up and see five or six bombing planes coming right for you. The women and children run about screaming and throwing themselves down on the ground, the anti-aircraft guns start their hysterical barking and the bombs begin to fall with a dull explosive thud. Half the earth seems to fly into the air, a cold, sick feeling creeps over you. A bomb has dropped just at the back of our house, the whole place is shaking, shrapnel from the bombs flies about wounding people a little distance away from where it actually fell. The planes have wheeled round and now they are heading for Majorca again, the guns gradually become silent. Another raid over, you are whole and safe this time. We got to the little house at the back, and after an hour five mutilated bodies were dug out. Grandmother, grandfather, daughter and child, and one brother who had been discharged from the army having lost his leg. Lower down the ambulance is busy taking the wounded to hospital, rescue work is done quickly and expeditiously as the planes are back again in one or two hours. I have seen little children with their arm or leg blown off, there is no bleeding since the bombs are white hot, and so cauterize the stump leaving a raw, charred mass. Others have been killed and the terrific shock causes blood to gush out of the mouth and nose, giving the dead a bloated, ghastly appearance. Bear in mind this is only one little section of a raid just near where I lived, these sights and horrors are strewn about wherever the raiders have been. One cannot help but notice that this consistent raiding takes place in the poor, congested quarters. The hysteria and grief after a raid can be imagined by mothers and all people to whom family ties mean something. I have seen distracted women hugging a little mutilated body, vomiting with shock and grief saying  " my little Nina, she was so pretty," and if you could see that tiny little contorted object, your heart would bleed.   I got to a woman one night and was running my