Paul Preston - Doves of War - Four Women of Spain

By the third week of November, the Nationalists had pushed the Republicans out of the territory captured in July. The Republicans retreated back across the Ebro into Catalonia. Pip’s hospital was to be moved again. As she thought about leaving the hospital, a drunken Legionario told her that he regarded her as his mother. The Pip who was always eager to please was moved to reflect on the consolations of her work.

It really is awfully nice to be able to do things for people and them be grateful even if I do have to lose my temper with them often. I like being relied on for everything. Whatever bothers them, they ask me. Sometimes it is to do with their wound or illness, sometimes clothes, sometimes a quarrel which I automatically have to decide for them, sometimes I am a go-between to get them leave to visit relations or friends. I pretty nearly am their mother, though God forbid I ever have forty-seven children.

These satisfactions were little enough consolation for the petty jealousies that surrounded her. ‘Everyone thinks I am so calm and unemotional; that I don’t mind all the rows and muddles there are but it is driving me potty. Only seeing everyone else in such a state makes me pretend to be even calmer than I would normally appear.’

By the end of November, she was in a country house called Monte Julia in the deserted hills near Tremp in the north of Lérida. She threw herself into converting it into a hospital, rounding up charladies in nearby villages and requisitioning furniture from deserted houses. Her ownership of a car put her right at the heart of the operation. ‘I am going to buy myself a chauffeur’s uniform and give up being a nurse. All I seem to do is drive my car.’ She was also, as a result of her various ailments, getting a 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.