Doves of War: Four Women of Spain. Paul Preston

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СКАЧАТЬ lot thinner. Moreover, shrugging off the injunctions of the head nurse, Isabel, she was now flirting very heavily with magallón who claimed to be in love with her. Although Isabel rightly suspected the relationship, she said nothing to Pip who regarded her as ‘that damn, filthy-minded, frustrated, cackling old hen’. ‘It makes me livid because I know that even if I had sat all night on duty in complete silence knitting the matter would be exactly the same. And what right has she to think the worst of me?’¹⁰⁷

      Pip was disgusted by the strange combination of spiteful gossip and reformatory school atmosphere at the hospital. She found it difficult to relate the petty jealousy behind the denunciations to

      the pretty illusions of heroism and justice with which I came to this filthy country. Everyday I think more of giving up the whole thing and going home. Why should I go on helping such a set of swine at the cost of feeling continually ill and tired and being covered in boils and lice. And yet I know that if I go home and have no worries, I shall worry so much about Ataúlfo that it will be worse, and I am too much in all this war to be able to walk out and leave it flat for good.

      Pip continued to get thin since everything she ate nauseated her. Much as she delighted in weight-loss, she was concerned by the fact that she got palpitations just from walking up stairs. She infinitely regretted her flirtation with magallón and tried to break it off gently. Even though his wife came to join him, he continued to importune Pip.

      Driving to Prince Ali’s base at Fraga, twenty-five kilometres to the south east of Lérida, she saw convoys of lorries. Franco was preparing the final offensive of the war, against Barcelona, which suggested that the hospital would be moved again.¹⁰⁸ On 22 December, she drove to Épila and immediately began to feel better. She went to a hairdresser in Zaragoza, lounged around with Ataúlfo and briefly put the horrors of the hospital behind her. Christmas Day was organised on totally English lines, complete with turkey and plum pudding and a tree with lights. However, it did not feel like Christmas – partly because, despite the Orléanses’ hospitality, she was depressed to be an outsider at another family’s festivities. ‘The only thing that makes me realise it really is Christmas Day is that I have eaten too much and feel sick.’ In fact, she was also downcast by a letter from her mother. Recounting a conversation that she had had with the Infanta in London, Margherita van Raalte relayed yet another version of the Orléans family explanation for Ataúlfo’s disinclination to marry Pip: ‘she says that Princess Bea is terribly fond of me but Prince Ali is set on royalty and that Ataúlfo is not in love with me as he knows me too well, but is fonder of me than anyone else.’ Despite again being told that it was futile to hope, her interminable optimism came to the fore again. ‘I can’t help my feelings and unless something unexpected happens I shall just go on waiting until the day he marries someone else. I have bloody little hope but still a lot of patience and no other desire in life to fix myself to.’ At least she had the brief consolation that, at midnight on 31 December 1938, Ataúlfo kissed her for the first time in all the years that she had known him. They danced until dawn on New Year’s Day.¹⁰⁹

      By 2 January 1939, Pip and Consuelo were back at Monte Julia where there were no wounded since the Nationalist advance had moved on so rapidly towards Barcelona. The food was almost as poisonous as the atmosphere among staff with little else to do but gossip. The love-sick magallón had boasted to his wife Mercedes that he had slept with Pip. Mercedes, in turn, had discovered from Consuelo that this was untrue. Consuelo wanted Pip to confront him but she could not see the point of having a row. She wrote phlegmatically in her diary:

      I would get him slung out willingly if it was not that I am fond of his wife and don’t see why I should hurt her for pride’s sake. God, what filthy swine men are. The trouble is the lousy brute is quite capable of getting angry and going to other people with the story. I would like to reassure his wife that I think him an ugly, slimy, oversexed little pimp so she need have no fear. I would also like to tell him just what I think of him and that one more word out of him and I will go straight to the Teniente Coronel.

      She decided to sleep on it. In fact, she did nothing. In any case, she was too occupied with the altogether more exciting news that Princess Bea and Prince Ali were moving to Monzón, forty-eight kilometres to the northwest of Lérida, and barely half an hour’s drive away. Princess Bea asked her to help with the move and also to accompany her on an inspection of the front.¹¹⁰

      Pip was even more delighted with the war news – ‘our advance is simply shooting along to Tarragona; each day is better than the other’. By the time that she set out with Princess Bea, the Nationalists had already captured Tarragona and Reus. Writing at Mora del Ebro of her satisfaction at the speed of the advance on Catalonia, she noted: ‘The amount of prisoners taken daily is colossal and there is hardly any fighting and very few wounded especially down here.’ They drove to Reus along tranquil lanes through ochre hills dotted with blossoming olive and almond trees. Their idyllic journey belied the fact that they were only a couple of days behind Franco’s forces. As they caught up with the troops marching on Barcelona, Pip began to record fascinating details. At a factory, the returning owner was greeted with pleasure – real or feigned? – by ‘all his workmen and servants’. Outside one of the factory sheds lay the corpses of six Republican soldiers: ‘They were killed yesterday evening so are quite harmless as they don’t smell or anything.’ The roads were packed with troops ‘in groups of about fifty, each with its flag, hundreds and hundreds, dirty, unshaven, carrying guns with their pack and blankets tied round them, all terribly tired, as they had averaged thirty kilometres per day for three days’. Through Pip’s innocently enthusiastic eyes a unique picture emerges.

      It is fun to see newly taken big towns. Auxilio Social distributing bread from lorries, men sticking up anti-Red and up-with-Franco posters everywhere, people clearing up debris in the streets, putting down telephone wires, looking for houses for hospitals and offices, and dozens of simple sightseers. Unluckily the fun of a frantically pleased population waving flags and making whoopee was missing as all the Catalans are red so don’t look on us very much as heroic liberators.¹¹¹

      Despite the comfort of travelling as Princess Bea’s companion, Pip made the courageous decision to join a unit of Franco’s Moroccan Army Corps. It meant risking the Infanta’s displeasure and giving up the possibility of frequent meetings with Ataúlfo, but ‘after all, I came here to work’. To her chagrin, Mercedes Milá would not permit her friend Consuelo to join the same unit. ‘God knows that I don’t want to go all alone to a new equipo miles from Princess Bea and her family where I know no one and there is no one who can speak a word of English or has anything even distantly to do with my previous life.’ Her decision was all the more plucky given her own war-weariness.

      This time last year I was in Ventosilla wildly excited that at last I was off to the front. How much one year can wear out one’s enthusiasm and vitality. It seems at least five years since I left Ventosilla and God how sick I have got of the war in that time … if I have to spend another wartime Christmas here I shall die of depression and worries and illnesses … If only the war could be over so that I could stop worrying about Ataúlfo and go away somewhere and never move, speak or think for a month. I am tired out both morally and physically.

      Her new unit was in the agreeable surroundings of the elegant resort of Sitges to the south of the Catalan capital. Billeted in a fashionable hotel, the sun and the beach cheered her as did the news that Barcelona had fallen on 26 January 1939. The prospect of being among the first to enter the city excited her and her morale was further bolstered by the fact that she was the most competent of the nurses in her new unit and was given plenty of responsibility. On 27 January she visited Barcelona with the rest of her unit.

      It is a lovely big spacious town and СКАЧАТЬ