Doves of War: Four Women of Spain. Paul Preston
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was normally surrounded, Ataúlfo ‘was looking very clean and smart’ and Pip thought him ‘devastatingly attractive and goodlooking despite the fact that he is really quite ugly’. Escatrón was near enough to the front to be within artillery range. Pip found the bombardments enthralling. ‘I was scared pink, but of course did not say so.’ She was about to experience several days’ carnage that would see her remarkable powers of endurance pushed to the limit. Badly wounded casualties began to pour in. Illuminated by oil lamps, she and her unit worked incessantly throughout the daily bombardments. Since most of her fellow nurses were terrified and took shelter, she stayed up entire nights at a time to be with the patients, sleeping in her uniform in the ward. There was little food for either the staff or the wounded. ‘It is awful being here bombarded all day in a ward of wounded begging to be moved, and so petrified that they pretty well die of fright.’ Her indefatigability was remarkable: ‘Well, everything stops sooner or later one way or another, though I hope this won’t stop by us all being killed, which is quite probable if they go on bombarding every day.’81
Despite the appalling existence in a virtual hecatomb, Pip was alarmed by suggestions that her unit should be withdrawn further away from the front. She was delighted to have to advance, in the middle of the night, to Caspe which had been captured by the Nationalists on 16 March. Driving in pitch darkness over boulder-strewn tracks, her car hit a huge rock and was badly damaged. On the verge of nervous as well as physical exhaustion, at Caspe they had to create a new hospital. As more casualties flooded in, she learnt that her car (which she called Fiona) had been stolen. She had hardly slept for a week: ‘I finally got to bed semi-conscious at about eleven after more casualties had arrived. If life goes on like this much longer we will all die. It is more than any one can stand.’ Yet, after a night’s sleep, she was back in the fray. Ataúlfo appeared with biscuits, chocolate, shortbread and wine and a message from Princess Bea that it was time for Pip to stop risking her life. Yet, far from taking the opportunity to leave, she was determined to stay at the front.
The strain remained intense. Just when she thought that she could go to bed, a large number of wounded were brought in. ‘The floor was covered in stretchers, blood everywhere, everyone shouting, the poor patients moaning and screaming, and so instead of going to bed it started all over again.’ The experience was, not surprisingly, changing Pip. She wrote on 21 March: ‘Six months today since I left home and it seems like six years! Home seems so far away, and such a completely different world that I cannot imagine ever going back.’ Two days later, she wrote: ‘How any nurse can look at a man, let alone touch him, I don’t know after all the unattractive things one has to do with them.’ As she became more skilled as a nurse, she got more exasperated with the village girls who came in to help. In the light of the tribulations that she had undergone, she was mortified when, on an unannounced inspection, Mercedes Milá raged that the hospital was untidy and the nurses were wearing make-up. ‘After all the weeks of filth we have been through, the very first time we have time to make ourselves respectable she has to come and tell us we are too painted.’ Milá’s reprimand was outrageously unfair. The endless stream of casualties meant that the nurses were going for days on end without sleep. Pip described herself as looking ‘like a dead cat’. On some nights, she could find no time to write up her diary.82
The attrition took its toll. Already shocked and still reeling from the shelling at Escatrón, in the last six days of March, Pip got to bed twice, for six hours on each occasion. She was working shifts of forty-two hours with six-hour breaks that were often interrupted by the unexpected arrival of horrendous casualties. In the midst of this, she was invited to dine with some of Consuelo’s friends on the staff of General José Monasterio Ituarte. Monasterio was the head of the Nationalist cavalry. At the battle of Teruel, he had led the last major cavalry charge in Western Europe. During the current Aragón offensive, his mounted brigades, supported by the Condor Legion, were running ahead of the main advance. Pip found him charming, ‘although very quiet and serious’. She was particularly delighted when he announced that her car had been found abandoned by a roadside. The occasion recharged her batteries for the unit’s next move behind the rapidly advancing Nationalists. They were sent on to Gandesa to the southeast, in the province of Lérida in Catalonia.83
Yet again miracles of improvisation were required to pack up the entire unit, including making arrangements for the twenty-seven seriously wounded men who had to be left behind. In Gandesa, Pip’s group had to share an abandoned school building with an Italian unit. It was a startling change of personnel and of scenery, as spring took over from the ferocious winter conditions in which she had worked. She found the Catalans in Gandesa irritating and, along with virtually everyone in the unit, was frustrated by an inability to understand the Catalan language. The Italians in the other part of the hospital seemed to confirm everything that is said about their presence in Spain – ‘very amiable and fearfully smart, but over-amorous’. A lull in the endless arrival of casualties allowed her to come to terms with the attrition of the previous month. ‘I was in the depths of despair, sick of life and all I am doing, and wondering what has happened at home. I decided I was either going to go crazy or get tight.’ She opted for the latter and drank herself sick on sherry and brandy. When she came to, she wrote: ‘What I am turning into I don’t like to think, getting so tight that I am sick at 6 o’clock in the evening. I went through half an hour of pure hell, being sick at intervals, with the world spinning round me.’ That episode had to be put immediately behind her. A massive influx of casualties saw her drawing on astonishing resources of stamina and competence.84
Finally, she got a weekend’s leave. Princess Bea had moved into a requisitioned palace at Épila, thirty kilometres to the southwest of Zaragoza, in order to be near the men in her family who were posted nearby. Ataúlfo was now a pilot. Pip arrived at Zaragoza too late to travel on to Épila, so she stayed at the Grand Hotel. She lamented: ‘I was very ashamed of turning up to dinner at the Grand Hotel in my filthy uniform, with burst shoes and torn stockings, my face unpainted and my hair on end.’ Nonetheless, to get away from the front in such circumstances was something rarely vouchsafed to her counterparts in the Republican nursing services. Pip had dinner with the prominent British Conservative, Arnold Lunn, a Catholic and an old Harrovian, who was in Spain writing articles about ‘Red horrors’. Lunn was one of the English pro-Nationalist propagandists who had been involved in supporting the cover-up of the bombing of Guernica. For Pip, the main thing about being with him was to be able to eat ‘good food with the right amount of knives and forks’. When Pip got to Épila, she luxuriated in her ‘first bath for more than two months’ and in the opportunity to relax in comfort with her friends. Ataúlfo took her to recover her car, which she found minus windows, number plates, tools, papers and her passport. General Kindelán’s driver fixed her car. Of course, what she valued most about this period was to be clean, warm and well fed. She was able to go to the hairdresser and also went shopping with Últano Kindelán. A greater change from the horrors of her unit could hardly be imagined. The combination of uninterrupted nights and cleanliness made for ‘a short piece of heaven’. In the Grand Hotel in Zaragoza, she met two aristocratic acquaintances, Alfonso Domecq and Kiki Mora ‘who were both tight as usual and had just bought a large white rabbit and a white duck’. After chasing the two animals around the hall, Últano caught the duck and tied string around its neck and wings so that he could take it for walks. The sense of wild release after the tribulations of the front left Pip disorientated – ‘I have never hated anything more in my life than the idea of going back to the equipo. I don’t want ever to see a hospital again in my life.’85
Nevertheless, she did return to her unit, which had now moved south to Morella in the harsh and arid hills of the Maestrazgo between Aragón and Castellón. The return was a rude shock: ‘How I hated the jerk back to this life, stretchers being carried in dripping blood all over the front doorstep, the smell of anaesthetic, the moans and shouts. I have gone all squeamish in my few days away.’ Her depression was perhaps linked with the fact that she was laid low by an illness which saw her confined to bed with a raging fever. She was finally diagnosed