Doves of War: Four Women of Spain

By this time, a bottle of Johnny Walker had both appeared and as quickly half-disappeared. Apparently, this sumptuous lunch had been taken over the bonnet of the ambulance despite the presence all around of starving desperados. According to Vilallonga, whose memoirs are replete with assertions of his sexual magnetism, his new acquaintance informed him that there were bunks inside the ambulance. On repairing within, he discovered couchettes of roughly the size of a first-class cabin on a transatlantic liner. This facilitated an afternoon of ecstatic lovemaking. On dressing, he asked her, ‘Do you do this kind of thing often?’ With an uncharacteristically dismissive tone, the Pip of this account replied, ‘Only when I feel I need it and not always for pleasure. But it’s good for my physical and mental health.’ That was the last time that he saw her until the end of the Second World War. He often thought of her. With his wonderfully snobbish and sexist hauteur, he wrote: ‘I kept the memory of someone out of the ordinary who had provoked my curiosity. She was a long way from being beautiful, but she had the unmistakable style of certain women, especially in England, who immediately attract the attention of those of us who are great enthusiasts for horses, creatures that, along with the bull, I regard as being among the most splendid products of nature. I have never made a mistake whenever I have judged a woman by comparing her with a pure blood mare.’77

The account is certainly untrue. Vilallonga claims that Pip was driving an ambulance sent out by her father and describes it as having been specially constructed by Daimler to the most luxurious standards. Elsewhere, he describes the ambulance as a Bentley. On other occasions, José Luis de Vilallonga claimed that his first meeting with Pip took place during the battle of the Ebro in the summer and autumn of 1938.78 It is possible that the entire story is a fictional amalgamation of the experiences of both Pip and Gabriel Herbert. Pip’s only vehicle in Spain up to this time was her by-now battered Ford. There is no record of Pip ever owning or driving an ambulance in Spain.

Her hesitant sexual behaviour at the time had nothing in common with the cold-hearted and voracious siren depicted in his account. It is a regular lament in her diary that she was rarely able to wash, invariably slept in her crumpled clothes and that her nurse’s uniforms were spattered with blood and mud. It is therefore not plausible that she could have been seen in the streets of Teruel looking like a model from the pages of a fashion magazine. Moreover, at this time, the conditions in which she lived and worked had left her with a chronic throat infection which left her completely run down. In any case, her otherwise copiously detailed diary makes no mention of the incident. Her days were usually occupied fully either in the operating theatre, in her billet or else travelling in her car. Such an erotic encounter might have been expected to be mentioned. She describes in full her constant efforts to fend off the frequent approaches of amorous, or more aggressively predatory, soldiers in the streets and once, by drunken intruders into the room she shared with Consuelo. For this reason, she had been given by Álvaro de Orléans a pistol with which to defend her virtue.79

After Teruel, Pip’s unit was ordered to move on to Cariñena. After the recapture of the city, Franco lost little time in seizing advantage of the massive superiority in men, aircraft, artillery and equipment that the Nationalists now enjoyed over the depleted Republicans. He assembled an army of two hundred thousand men for an offensive across a 260-kilometrewide front through Aragón following the eastwards direction of the Ebro valley. Loading up the car with her gramophone, records and radio, Pip set off in a convoy after the rapidly advancing Nationalist troops. Thereafter, they were sent northwards to Belchite which had been recaptured by the Nationalists on 10 March. The town was virtually destroyed. There, she and Consuelo cleared rubble and scrubbed floors to make one of the less damaged buildings usable for the unit. Queuing for water at a fountain, she was told that there were eighty-five prisoners of the International Brigades nearby, mostly Americans but also some English. ‘They will all be shot as foreigners always are.’ It is an indication of her identification with the Francoist cause, the brutalising effects of the war and, perhaps, her basic class prejudices, that she could seem so unaffected by the atrocity about to be committed. At the end of the day, she merely commented, ‘I have never enjoyed a day more but I have never been dirtier.’ Her good spirits were shattered on the following day. While she was working in the operating theatre, looting soldiers stole a case of records, 1000 cigarettes, her pistol and, the worst blow of all, the radio that Ataúlfo had given her in Gibraltar for her twenty-first birthday. She then had to spend a day kneeling at the riverside scrubbing bloodstained operation sheets in the icy water. Her distress was compounded by news of the German advance into Austria. It provoked agonies about her understandable identification with the Nationalist cause, which was, at the time, also the cause of the Axis. ‘Oh God, I hope there won’t be another war. What can I do if there is, as all my sympathies will be against England. What hell life is.’80

The speed of the Nationalist advance required them to move on to Escatrón, forty kilometres further east, in a bend in the River Ebro. This involved a journey over stony roads through scenes of desolation littered with corpses, dead horses, barbed wire and abandoned trenches. It was rendered somewhat more tolerable for Pip by the recovery of her radio and the news that Ataúlfo was not far away. She was thrilled when he visited despite it being so long since she had been able to have a bath: ‘my uniform was black, and my hands too, as well as swollen and rough, my face dusty and unpainted and my hair all dirty and tangled’. Unlike the dirty soldiers by whom she 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 with the beginnings of paratyphoid – a fever resembling typhoid but caused by different bacteria.86 In consequence, she was allowed a few days’ convalescence in Épila. She drove there in her car and it was severely damaged along the way by unmade roads. Princess Bea was back from the recently captured Lérida. As part of her work with Frentes y Hospitales, the relief organisation which provided welfare for the old, women and children, she would enter occupied areas with the Nationalist forces.87 Still very weak, Pip was able to stay because her car was not ready for the return journey. She managed some relaxation, gossiping with Princess Bea, playing cards and ping pong with visiting German and Italian aviators. She even had an evening out in Zaragoza with Ataúlfo. They went to a sleazy cabaret in ‘an old theatre with semi-naked women who came out on stage and who could neither dance nor sing. A fair smattering of peroxided tarts and swarms of dirty, tight and noisy soldiers all singing and shouting lewd remarks at everyone.’88

During her stay at Épila, Pip met Juan Antonio Ansaldo, one of Spain’s most famous aviators. Ansaldo was a monarchist air ace and playboy who had once organised Falangist terror squads. He had piloted the small De Havilland Puss Moth in which General Sanjurjo had perished on 20 July 1936 when leaving Portugal to take charge of the military uprising.89 Ansaldo now commanded one of the two Savoia Marchetti 79 squadrons of the First Brigade of the Nationalist Air Force (Primera Brigada Aérea Hispana) while Prince Alí commanded the other. Ansaldo’s wife Pilarón was both a flyer and a nurse who had just been asked to work in the Ciudad Universitaria on the outskirts of Madrid. On the very edge of the besieged capital, it was the most dangerous area and women were not usually allowed to work there. Pip hoped to find out how to volunteer to go too.90

Inevitably, after the pleasures of Épila – ping pong, music, decent food, whisky and even a flight in a Luftwaffe aircraft – the return to hospital duty was depressing: ‘Morella is the lousiest, most boring place in the world, and not a thing to do all day.’ She felt low because she was still suffering from paratyphoid. She was pleased, however, by the possibility that she and Consuelo, for their gallantry under fire, would both be proposed for the Cruz del Mérito Militar con Distintivo Rojo, the highest award for bravery that could be awarded to a woman. It was eventually awarded in May 1939.91 She was also cheered by a letter on 5 May from her mother who was delighted by some articles about Pip in the British press. Margot promised her a new car and a full bank account when she returned home and announced an imminent visit to Spain. In fact, Pip, always her best when the going was most difficult, perked up when the hospital got busy again about a week later. A stream of wounded saw her attend fourteen operations in thirteen hours. She was irritated by the petty jealousies among the nurses and felt put upon by the hostility of Captain Ramón Roldán, the hospital chief surgeon. As a Falangist, he deeply resented the aristocratic origins and monarchist connections of both Pip and Consuelo. Just as she got the news that her mother was arriving on 19 May, the entire hospital had to move with the advancing Nationalist forces nearer to the province of Castellón, to the village of La Iglesuela del Cid. When her martyred car got there, she and Consuelo were billeted by Ráldan in the most dingy dungeon just off the operating theatre. However, on the following day, 23 May, she was able to go on leave to see her mother who had arrived with her brother John at Princess Bea’s home in Épila.92

Margot was obliged to wait until Pip was ‘disinfected and de-loused’ before she could see her. When she remonstrated with Princess Bea about the horrors being experienced by Pip, the Infanta replied, ‘I promised you, dear Margot, that I would look after her as my own daughter; and if I had a daughter she would surely be at the front.’93 Pip spent ten days with her mother in Zaragoza with daily visits to Épila. One evening, she met Peter Kemp, the Englishman who had volunteered for Franco and was now a lieutenant in the Spanish Foreign Legion. He told her a gruesome tale about the sadism of his colonel. An Englishman had crossed the lines claiming plausibly to be a sailor who had ended up at the front after getting drunk in Valencia. When Peter Kemp requested permission to set him free, the colonel ordered him to shoot the sailor. When Kemp stared unbelievingly, the colonel shrieked, ‘What is more, shoot him yourself or I will have you shot.’ He duly took the man into the countryside, they shook hands and he was shot. Pip commented, ‘A nasty thing to have to do.’ Her account implies that Kemp shot the man himself94 There was a standing order from Franco that all captured foreigners be shot. This was rescinded on 1 April 1938 when he needed prisoners to exchange for the 497 Italians captured at Guadalajara.

On her return to her unit, still weak from the paratyphoid, Pip was driven by the constant humiliations to which Captain Roldán subjected her and Consuelo to contemplate leaving. Once more, her mind was taken off the problem by her work. She took part in an operation on a twelve-year-old girl who had been playing with a hand grenade that had exploded –

I think I minded seeing her being treated and operated on more than anything else I have seen so far. I can’t bear to see children hurt. She was blood from head to toe, her whole body one mass of burns and superficial wounds, both her knees had to be operated, one arm amputated above the wrist as her hand had been blown clean off, the thumb of the other hand (or what was left of it) amputated and two holes in her forehead and all one side of her face sewn up. Apart from which she is temporarily blind in one eye and permanently in the other. She is getting on quite well now but moans and shouts all day as she is in awful pain. I had a terrible quarrel with Roldán yesterday evening to get him to allow her aunt to stay with her all night.

To Pip’s horror, Roldán planned to leave Consuelo behind when the unit made its next move. However, Pip was prostrated with a fierce attack of the paratyphoid that had afflicted her for the previous two months. Left behind, she and Consuelo found refuge in another hospital and volunteered to work at an emergency clearing station right at the front. However, Pip’s delight at this opportunity was short-lived. With her temperature at 39.8°, she was sent to rest at Épila. She stayed there for a month and then, on 7 July, she returned to England for five weeks of convalescence. Exhaustion, the trauma of her front-line experiences and serious illness had at last brought her down.95

Pip reached England completely drained. She spent six weeks recuperating mainly at Chirk and more briefly in London. In the capital, she attended the lavish society wedding of her sister Gaenor and Richard Heathcoat-Amory on 18 July. She was the first of eight bridesmaids attired in ‘picture dresses of white chiffon, the bodices made with heart-shaped necklines and short, puffed sleeves, with narrow waist-belts of silver ribbon and headdresses of stephanotis with bows of blue ribbon’.96 With her health restored, Pip set off back for Spain on 19 August 1938, accompanied by Consuelo, who had joined her in London. They travelled by sea with sixteen pieces of luggage ‘including two packing cases’. Pip was heartened to have been told by a fortune-teller that, within six weeks, she would be engaged to be married. ‘I hope she is right because that is exactly what I intend.’ It was a slow and boring trip to Gibraltar where she was cheered by the prospect of seeing Princess Bea and even more delighted to collect a new car, ‘very large and impressive, black with pale brown leather inside and all its gadgets attached’. Her old car, already without wheels, had met an untimely end in Épila when the garage roof had collapsed on it. Spending time with Princess Bea and anticipating seeing Ataúlfo, her spirits soared. En route to Épila, they stayed at the ancient Roman town of Mérida in Badajoz. It was crammed with aviators who had been moved down because of the minor Republican counteroffensive in Extremadura. ‘I do love being back here. I adore seeing everyone in uniform and a vague atmosphere of war.’ In her absence, Prince Ali had been promoted to full colonel and was now in charge of the newly created Segunda Brigada Aérea Hispana, which was about to go into action on the Ebro front.97

Once at Épila, Pip was overjoyed to discover that Ataúlfo had fourteen days’ leave which he planned to spend driving around southern Spain with one of his German fellow aviators, named Koch. She and Consuelo were invited to accompany them. Pip wrote in her diary: ‘I really must marry that man but my luck does not seem quite to run to that as yet, but as I have waited four years now I suppose I can wait longer.’ She had a wonderful time on the trip, driving over dusty roads through villages of white houses shimmering in the blazing sun passing donkeys laden with panniers overflowing with grapes. ‘I am so pleased with life that I don’t know what to do with myself. It is fun to feel like this. It must be years since I last felt such an untroubled confidence in Life. I love every moment of it.’ The idyll was nearly interrupted when Koch was summoned to Zaragoza because of the simmering Munich crisis. It seemed that Ataúlfo would have to drive him there. However, a return to Épila would mean that Pip and Consuelo would need to seek a new medical unit and return to front-line duty. The danger was averted when Koch flew back to Zaragoza and Pip was able to go on falling deeper in love with Ataúlfo. Unfortunately, when driving from Seville to Malaga, things came to a head. He told her that her mother had tried to get him to marry her sister Elisabeth and called him a pansy when he demurred. He then said, ‘After Alonso died, I promised Mama that I would only marry a Princess.’ She was devastated – ‘Such a simple sentence and it just sent all my hopes and the foundations of my life crashing. I had not realised until he said that, just how much I had been building on the chance of my marrying him one day.’ Ataúlfo’s was a noticeably different version of the story about the Infanta Beatriz told to Pip by Princess Bea and was probably an equally feeble subterfuge to avoid telling her that he just had no inclination to marriage.98