The scene moves to Madrid, with another map showing the front line running west of the city, with a rebel salient in the Ciudad Universitaria, which the loyalists are shown attacking.The city is the village inverted; while the earth of Fuentedueña is simply upturned, the streets of Madrid look as if they have been maniacally plowed.

Thus rhythm changes with location; anonymous peasants are juxtaposed with historical figures like La Pasionaria and Manuel Azaña, president of the Republic.

[1]At the end of the film, the loyalists have driven off the rebel attack on the bridge over the Jarama, keeping the road open, and the water is shown flowing to the fields: the irrigation has succeeded.

[2] In December 1936, several literary figures, including Lillian Hellman, Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos, Dorothy Parker, and Archibald MacLeish, formed and funded a company they named Contemporary Historians, Inc., to back a film project proposed by Dutch filmmaker Joris Ivens.

[8] A review in The New York Times found Hemingway's narration "a definitely propagandist effort" and preferred the camera work that "argues gently and persuasively, with the irrefutable argument of pictorially recorded fact, that the Spanish people are fighting, not for broad principles of Muscovite Marxism, but for the right to the productivity of a land denied them through years of absentee landlordship.