Doves of War: Four Women of Spain. Paul Preston
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more Spanish’. She went up to Chirk in her Super Swallow Jaguar. She found her mother was making plans for her twenty-first birthday party on 16 November. Accordingly, Pip reminded her of her Spanish project and Margot van Raalte was far less insouciant than she had been three months earlier. Now, she was concerned about her daughter’s safety in the midst of so many men and decided to write to Princess Bea. Pip, confident that she could bring her mother around, had begun to read another blood-curdling account of Nationalist heroism, Major McNeill-Moss’s The Epic of the Alcazar, which she found ‘very interesting and exciting’. McNeill-Moss’s book consisted of a romantically heroic account of the Republican siege of the Nationalist garrison in the Alcázar of Toledo from July to September and a notoriously mendacious whitewash of the Nationalist massacre of the civilian defenders of the town of Badajoz on 14 August 1936.48
The big leap forward in Pip’s plans came when Princess Bea replied to Margot Howard de Walden’s letter. Her enquiries had revealed that the level of confusion in Nationalist Spain was such that nothing for Pip could be organised from London. However, a change in her own circumstances opened the way for Pip. Prince Ali had been bombarding Franco with pleas for an active role in the fighting. Through the intercession of General Kindelán, the head of the Nationalist air force and the most prominent monarchist among the Nationalist generals, his wish had finally been granted. Accordingly, Princess Bea was going to return to Spain in the autumn to be near her husband’s air base in the south. To Pip’s intense delight, the Infanta proposed that she accompany her, assuring Margot that she would look after Pip ‘as if she were her own daughter’. Under these circumstances, her parents did not object. Half a century later, her brother was still perplexed by their lack of anxiety.49
Pip’s girlish joy was all too understandable since she was not only going to Spain but proximity to Touffles was virtually guaranteed. ‘Princess B really is a saint,’ she wrote on 8 August. ‘It will be so nice to go with her.’ She had little notion of the horrors that she would encounter. On 26 August, she wrote: ‘What an adventure though a gruesome one.’ With her Spanish future apparently resolved, she devoted much of the summer at Chirk to riding, playing tennis and learning golf. Princess Bea arranged a Spanish teacher, named Evelina Calvert, and Pip set herself a tough schedule in preparation for the journey. She was ecstatic when she learned that Princess Bea planned to take her to Sanlúcar by car on 22 September, via Paris, San Sebastián, Salamanca and Seville.50
Her preparations became frantic – increased efforts to improve her Spanish and some half-hearted dieting which got her weight down to 12 stone 3 pounds. A daily round of shopping, visits to the hairdresser (on one occasion to have her eyelashes dyed), inoculations, arrangements for her passport and visa for Spain. This included a visit to the Foreign Office where she was interviewed by William H. Montagu-Pollock, one of the four men with principal responsibility for British policy on Spanish affairs. That she was received by a functionary of such eminence was an indication of her social, if not her political, importance. On 18 September, she went with Princess Bea to Portsmouth to meet ex-Queen Victoria Eugenia of Spain. As the day for her departure drew near, she began to worry – ‘I am almost frightened of going to Spain now’ (19th); ‘Somehow now the great moment has come, I feel almost scared and rather depressed’ (20th); ‘I wish I knew exactly what I was going to and where … I still can’t really believe that this time next week I shall be in the middle of war. A strange and exciting life.’51 What a contrast with Nan Green who knew rather more, from her husband’s letters, about the hell into which she was going.
Pip’s reasons for going to Spain had little to do with the real issues being fought out there. She lacked the ideological conviction of either Nan Green or even Gabriel Herbert who was a devout Catholic and believed that Franco’s war effort was a crusade to save Christian civilisation. According to her sister Gaenor, Pip’s views were ‘a simple expression of support for her friends, and therefore pro-monarchy and anti-Communist’. In the case of one friend, Ataúlfo de Orléans Borbón (Touffles), much more than friendship was at stake. There can be no doubting that Pip went to war for love. It helped that her parents had been much taken by Prince Ali’s repetition of the canard that the military had rebelled in July 1936 because a Communist takeover in Spain had been imminent. However, her plans would probably have come to nothing if her adored Princess Bea had not taken a hand. Pip’s eventual placement as a nurse would owe much to the Infanta’s prominent position in the Nationalist organisation known as La Delegación Nacional de Asistencia a Frentes y Hospitales, a patrician welfare operation headed by the Carlist María Rosa Urraca Pastor and largely run by monarchists.52
Complete with trunks and hatboxes containing the accumulated fruits of her last months’ shopping trips, Pip left England in some style in Princess Bea’s chauffeur-driven limousine on 21 September 1937. At Dover, they were met by the station master in his top hat and were swept into a private compartment on the boat train.53 Then it was on to Paris for some more shopping and a visit to the World’s Fair. This was the great exhibition for which Picasso’s Guernica was commissioned by the Spanish Republican Government.54 Interestingly, for someone just off to the Spanish Civil War, Pip did not see it, instead spending her time at the German and English pavilions. On one side of the Pont d’Iéna on the Rive Droite of the Seine, the German pavilion, designed by Albert Speer, glaring at its equally pugnacious Soviet rival, was an architectural representation of Nazi aggression. Huge, thirty-three-feet-high statues of muscle-bound Soviet heroes strode triumphantly forward, their way apparently blocked by the naked Teutonic heroes guarding the German design, a huge cubic mass, erected on stout pillars, and crowned by a gigantic eagle with the swastika in its claws. For Pip, this was ‘the best’. The British pavilion symbolised the tired gentility of appeasement. The British displays were of golf balls, pipes, fishing rods, equestrian equipment and tennis rackets while the German and the Italian were of military might. Pip thought the British pavilion ‘very bad’.55 She and Princess Bea were then driven on 23 September to Biarritz where Pip was delighted to discover that she could understand most of the Spanish that she began to hear. They were received by Sir Henry Chilton, the British Ambassador to Republican Spain. The pro-Nationalist Chilton had been on holiday in San Sebastián when the Civil War broke out and had refused to return to Madrid. With the aid of the French Ambassador to Spain, they managed to get across the frontier to San Sebastián on the following day. With the beautiful resort bathed in sunshine, it was like being on holiday.
The unwarlike nature of the trip continued when she and Princess Bea were joined for dinner by one of General Alfredo Kindelán’s sons, Ultano. Pip went to the cinema with him, then for a long walk and a mild flirtation – ‘If it had not been for the fact that he has known Ataúlfo and Alvaro all his life and would certainly have told them I would have had a spot of fun but I would have been ragged for the rest of my life so I refrained and bade him a polite goodbye at the hotel.’ Pip saw her first sign of the war when they drove to Santander along the route that the Nationalists had taken on their campaign in the north earlier in 1937. They met Touffles, ‘much thinner and very sunburnt … Madly attractive.’ He went out of his way to talk to her and she admitted that ‘alas I still like him more than I want to’. He told her about the capture of Santander and took her to the German airbase from which he flew as a navigator. ‘They fly huge Junkers. His is a beauty with two engines and a retractable undercarriage.’ This means that he must have been flying in the experimental Junkers Ju 86D-I. It was a curious time for Pip, a mixture of tourism and initiation into the war. They visited the beautiful medieval village of Santillana del Mar and La Magdalena, the great English-style royal country residence on a hill overlooking the bay of Santander. ‘It had been ruined inside by the Reds and is still being cleaned up by Red prisoners who are camped in the park. They all looked well and happy.’56
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