Doves of War: Four Women of Spain. Paul Preston

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СКАЧАТЬ Ataúlfo], most depressing of all, my optimism. A year ago today, Consuelo and I were running single-handed a hospital of eighty-two beds and we had thirty-six new patients. This year I went to St Thomas’s Hospital and made two beds in an empty ward and was taught a few things I have already done hundreds of times.’ The next day was her twenty-third birthday, enlivened by telegrams from Princess Bea, Prince Ali and Ataúlfo. Suggestions that she return to Sanlúcar cheered her up as did a stint on the men’s surgical ward at the hospital. ‘There is something very funny about scrubbing the bottom of a London policeman.’

      Her dejection finally began to dissolve after an invitation by a social acquaintance, Maureen Schreiber, to join a field hospital leaving for France in January 1940. Presented to the French by Lord and Lady Hadfield and organised by Mary, the wife of Brigadier-General Spears, it was large and well-equipped, with thirteen doctors, x-ray facilities, one hundred beds, trucks and tents. Pip agreed – with no illusions. There was no excitement, just a sense of duty and a desperate need for something to distract her from the endless longing for Ataúlfo. ‘I must do something and that will be about the best. I would far rather go to Spain and ignore the whole thing for evermore, but I can’t do that so I had better work … Am I going to spend all my life drifting about in wars from one hospital to another with no aim and no ambition … I am tired out from war already and I know what it is going to be like so it is no adventure any longer.’ She really wanted to go to Sanlúcar but dared not, knowing she could spend only a finite period there and that the pain of separation would be ever more unbearable. It was thus with dread in her heart that she accepted the invitation to join the Hadfield-Spears ambulance unit.¹³⁴ Burnt-out by her front-line experience, she wrote: ‘I suppose I ought to be glad to have had six months rest since I left Madrid, but it has not been a very happy one and soon I must go back to the sickening smell and sound of it again.’¹³⁵

      To say that she had left her heart in Spain was an understatement. In mid-December, she received a visit from Últano Kindelán and his English wife Doreen. Most of her diary entries recount a lively social life that left her deeply miserable and a sense of alienation. Now ‘a breath of my beloved Spain’ filled her with joy. ‘The realisation that Spain is not all a dream, that they all exist and want me back and that one day I can go. It was wonderful and I felt alive and interested in life again for a moment.’ She wished she could accept their invitation to go back to Spain with them. As it was, she had to meet her colleagues from the medical unit: ‘hard-faced wispy old hags except one pop-eyed nit-wit’. She was gratified by a telegram on 16 December from Ataúlfo: ‘Thanks letters. Can’t see why you shouldn’t come here for next five years.’ On the following day, it was backed up by another from Consuelo which read: ‘For the Lord’s sake do what Ataúlfo says in his telegram. You will regret it all your life if you don’t come.’ Her reaction – that, despite her longing, to go without a prospect of fulfilment would just be to condemn herself to unhappiness – was both courageous and momentous. ‘For five years I have chased after Ataúlfo like a fool. Now if he wants to, he can come and fetch me but if he does not want me I won’t go back.’ She began sporadically to get angry with Ataúlfo by way of reconciling herself to what was likely to be a final break. Her wretchedness was not diminished by the packing-up of Seaford House in advance of it being abandoned by the family for good.¹³⁶

      Nineteen-forty started with more telegrams from Ataúlfo, more heartache for Pip and relief that she would soon be off to France. The telegrams provoked tears and intense hurt by forcing her to contemplate her impossible situation. As departure for France beckoned, she began to regret rejecting the invitations to Sanlúcar. In bitterly freezing weather, she left London on 29 January 1940. She spent a pleasant fortnight in Paris, shopping and taking advantage of well-stocked and cheap restaurants. With the war seemingly a long way off, she bought clothes, gramophone records and ‘material for curtains etc for my future rooms’. On 12 February, the unit moved to northeast France, setting up a hospital between Nancy and Sarrebourg in the Moselle. Although the hospital was near the front, there was virtually no military action and the work was inconsequential and tedious. It was enlivened by one daring visit to the Maginot line to peer at the Germans and by occasional concert parties.¹³⁷ Her hopes were raised by a possibility that Ataúlfo would come to London as adjutant to Juan Antonio Ansaldo who had been named Spanish Air Attaché.¹³⁸ She was pleased too when her experience and her good French and English saw her given considerable responsibility. As the work increased, she was moved to write: ‘I am gradually getting happier here and more or less contented. All bothers of life are so far away from one here that one can’t worry so very much.’ She forged a friendship with another English woman in the unit, Dorothy ‘Dodo’ Annesley, and even had a mild flirtation with an American officer called Etienne Gilon.¹³⁹

      However, Pip’s version of the phoney war was coming to an end. On 22 April, the hospital was shelled, which stirred unpleasant memories of her ordeal at Escatrón. Her combat experience in Spain singled her out in the unit and gave her a maturity not shared by her older companions. On the other hand, she never entirely escaped from her time and class, writing after one day in the operating theatre, ‘We had two buck niggers today. I hate niggers.’ Rumours of Mussolini joining the war at Hitler’s side led to speculation that Franco would not be far behind. The idea caused her deep disquiet. ‘I can’t imagine anything very much more hellish than fighting against Spain. It was bad enough worrying about Ataúlfo when I was on the same side, but it will be far worse when we are on opposite sides with no news.’ The German assault on the Low Countries provoked an ambiguous reaction – ‘Altogether the Germans have been very spirited. They have bombed masses of French towns last night … Winston Churchill is now Prime Minister of England instead of Chamberlain. I think he is dreadful but perhaps he will do something for a change because so far the Germans seem to be having everything all their own way.’ She was quite blasé about the advancing Wehrmacht. ‘Evidently the Germans have dropped some men in parachutes near here and they have not been caught. So we are all to expect to be murdered in our beds or something.’

      The surrender of the Dutch on 15 May did not affect her good humour. A newly arrived and pompous new nurse, a friend of Lady Hadfield, seemed to Pip to be ‘an awe-inspiring old hag if I ever saw one’. As the Germans reached Amiens and Arras, the stream of casualties increased somewhat. When they took Abbéville and were closing in on Boulogne, she began to get concerned for the British Expeditionary Force – ‘Hopeless pansy performance we are putting up.’ She bitterly regretted not being nearer the front line and felt that her unit, being ‘smart’, would never be put in serious danger. When wounded German prisoners came in, Pip was appalled by the hostility that they provoked. ‘We are nurses. And to a nurse, there is no such thing as nationality. One patient is the same as another whether black or white, a Frenchman or a German.’ The fall of Belgium at the end of May left her worried about the BEF being cut off and massacred. Orders came on 30 May for the unit to be evacuated but nothing happened for a week. With the patients packed off, the nurses spent the time drinking, partying, picnicking, fishing and squabbling, with Pip distributing succour to those who had lost fiancés. With no newspapers and only sporadic news on the radio, it was an idyllic interlude – ‘I have not been so happy since goodness knows when.’¹⁴⁰

      The unit left Alsace for the south on 7 June. Pip found it all a great adventure until Mussolini’s entry into the war on 10 June once again provoked her worries that Franco would not be far behind. The unit was to set up as a poste d’embarquement, with two hundred beds in a tent at a railway station near Rosnay. However, the speed of the German advance saw them swept up in the flood of refugees heading south. The German occupation of Paris forced the abandonment of plans to set up a new hospital to back up a French defensive stand. The group moved on, staying in requisitioned chateaux. By 16 June, they were near Vichy. News of Pétain’s СКАЧАТЬ