Doves of War: Four Women of Spain. Paul Preston
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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 request for an armistice left Pip weeping with ‘the sudden feeling of the bottom dropping out of one’s world’. As they neared Bordeaux, there was deep anxiety that their convoy would run out of petrol or be cut off by the vertiginous German advance. In either case, Pip was determined to start walking along with other refugees and head for Spain. Depressed and frightened by the prospect of being captured and sent to a German concentration camp, they pressed on, without food, towards Bordeaux.
On 22 June, with wounded British soldiers and a motley group of refugees, they were taken out to sea. There they were picked up by the British light cruiser, HMS Galatea, which took them to St Jean de Luz to pick up the British Ambassador. By 24 June, the unit was on board a troop carrier, the SS Ettrick, en route to England. Among those on board were a group of Polish troops. Pip was instantly entranced – ‘wonderful tall, dark, strong-looking people’. She nursed the wounded soldiers on board and, since her friend Dorothy was ill, Pip also looked after her. Despite her lack of sleep and the cramped conditions, her irrepressible optimism reasserted itself – ‘the Polish troops on board are heaven and have wonderful singing orgies on deck every evening’. The ship reached Plymouth on 26 June. She reached Chirk only to discover, to her horror, that her mother was in Liverpool on the point of leaving for Canada with her four granddaughters.141
Chirk and London were equally depressing. On arrival in the capital, she was told that a young man, James Cassell, who had written to her in France and proposed to her, had committed suicide, leaving a note which read simply ‘Goodbye, Pip.’ When she made enquiries about the Orléans family, she was devastated to be told that they were so pro-German that the British Royal family was livid with them and that Ataúlfo had not been allowed into the country as assistant air attaché to Juan Antonio Ansaldo. Such gossip was wildly exaggerated but it was true that the Civil War had left enormous admiration for the Third Reich on the Spanish Right. The men of the Orléans family had flown with German and Italian aviators throughout the war. Although upset by these rumours, Pip’s reaction was not without shrewdness.
Why do I have to go on being nuts about a man who has always behaved like a prize shit to me and is now violently pro-German. I ought to be furious but it is exactly what I expected of him, the great spineless sod. He is led by his parents wherever they fancy. And to think that we have all been brought up together for two generations and that they are monarchists and Catholics and yet pro-German. They deserve all they would get if the Nazi regime spreads to Spain.142
The mental turmoil occasioned by the Catholic royalist Orléanses’ pro-German stance helped Pip to see Ataúlfo in a slightly harsher light – ‘I still like him better than anyone else in the world which is probably why I mind so terribly his upholding the other side. I hope I never have to see him again, the filthy bastard.’143 Her mind was taken off Ataúlfo by an encounter with ‘Dodo’ Annesley and Marjorie Fielden who had been with her in the nursing unit in France. Dodo intended to organise a hospital for the Poles in Scotland and wanted Pip to take charge of the nursing staff. In fact, she had to do everything – find suitable premises, raise the necessary funds, purchase surgical equipment. Having committed herself to Dodo, she was then offered a job in Spain by a man called Hugh Smyth. He told her, implausibly, that it would be with the British diplomatic corps. Other evidence