by Jana Petken
He kissed her again, and his tears settled on her lips. “I’ll love you forever, María Martinéz.”
“And me you, always, always.”
When he left her at the side of the road, María kicked herself for not saying more in those last few precious minutes with him. In truth, fear had stilled her tongue. Fear that should she speak, emotions would tumble out of her mouth, tears would fall, and in her anguish, she would beg him to stay with her. Her silence had been the only way she could hold back the tears. Saying things always made her more emotional than just thinking them. She was determined that he shouldn’t see her fall apart in his arms, a quivering wreck, filled with fear and trepidation in this new terrifying world that surrounded her. She wasn’t so much worried about her own safety. People wouldn’t bomb a hospital, would they? But Carlos would be in the thick of things somewhere. He was much too dedicated not to be. She had no idea what he was going to do or where he was going to go, but she had suspected for a long time now that he was a soldier – but no ordinary soldier.
María and Lucia began their walk to the hospital in biting cold, damp air that made their eyes and noses run. María covered her head with a scarf, buttoning up her coat until its collar sat just under her chin, and dragged her suitcase behind her on the uneven muddy thoroughfare. She had a good idea of what she would find inside the hospital building because of all the vehicles that were queuing up to get at least within a decent distance of the entrance. Doctors on the roadside performed rudimentary surgery in a vain attempt to save lives, but patients too badly injured to survive were left to take their last breaths on pavements and grassy verges.
“The hospital can’t hold any more people,” María said to Lucia, walking a short distance behind her.
“I don’t suppose we’ll even have time for a drink of water before we start,” Lucia called back to her.
“No, I don’t suppose we will. We’ll probably waste hours trying to find out where we’re supposed to go.”
When they reached the hospital grounds, they had to fight their way in through hordes of people as lost as they were. They left their luggage by the desk just inside the entrance. There was no one at the desk to greet them. No receptionist dressed in a crisp white uniform and giving directions offered a warm welcome; no porters walked the hallways in an orderly fashion. The women walked a little farther through the reception hall and at the far side were met by stretcher-bearers running with casualties bouncing precariously on tops of blankets knotted at the corners to allow the bearers to grip on to them. María stopped in her tracks and took in the chaos that greeted her eyes. Doctors shouted orders at tired nurses with sunken eyes and unkempt hair, while soldiers and civilians alike, the walking wounded, wandered around aimlessly, begging for treatment. There were no shiny disinfected floors; instead, they ran with blood trails into every open door.
For the rest of the day, María felt as though she were in the middle of a hellish nightmare without end. She felt like a dead person haunting the living, unable to connect with them, on a different plain entirely. There had been no introductions and no time to be shown sleeping quarters. She had been thrown into the very deep end of an ocean of death, filled with dying and bloodied human beings who didn’t care that she’d just travelled all night in an uncomfortable truck whilst dodging bullets.
After their arrival, they worked solidly for two days and two nights and slept no more than four hours in that time. Adrenaline pumped through María’s veins, so instead of feeling tired, she found herself bursting with energy. She was placed in the triage room, the first port of call for the wounded. As soon as the badly injured saw the medical teams in cotton aprons, their frightened eyes lit up with hope. As far as they were concerned, it was a foregone conclusion that they would now be saved, for many of them had already waited six or seven hours before getting even this far. María had completed only slightly more than basic training in Valencia, but as she watched wounded after wounded being carried in, she suspected that Lucia had been right. Her duties would far exceed that of an auxiliary nurse.
Some of the injuries were truly horrific and left María to wonder how one human being could inflict such torturous agonies on another. After the first week, she believed that she’d seen just about every grotesque, bloody, and poisonous wound that had ever existed, but they kept coming in. Those whose injuries were severe were given morphine to make them more comfortable, but nothing else could be done for them, and they died almost as soon as they made it through the doors. Others died on the operating table, unable to survive even with frantic attempts by the doctors to keep them alive.
In those first few days, she remembered one man in particular who had had his leg smashed by a piece of a mortar shell that had almost sliced it in two. Bone and nerve endings stuck out through ripped skin looking like the roots of a tree. She had been particularly interested in him because he was English. She had comforted him before and after his surgery. She had asked him about home and pretended she knew his town in the north of England. He survived with the leg patched up and still intact, but when she saw him again three days later, he was back on the operating table, begging for her help. She smelled the gangrene as soon as she entered the operating theatre, but he smiled at her and thanked her for her kindness.
“How does it look?” he asked her.
She looked down his leg to just below the knee and felt the bile rise in her throat. Maggots crawled in and out of his skin and were all over the plaster cast that had been put on previously, but he felt nothing from his hip down.
“You’ll be walking around in no time,” she lied, just before the anaesthetic took hold.
His name was Robert, and although she knew that he was now upstairs in a ward, she was loathe to see him, as he had lost his entire leg, and she had known all along that he would.
“María, you mustn’t take it all so personally,” Lucia had told her over a quick cup of coffee. “You told him what he wanted to hear, and that probably gave him the will to get through it all.”
“I know, but I can’t stop thinking about my brothers and what I would think if a nurse gave either of them false hope. I would probably be angry because it’s dishonest.”
Lucia shook her head, telling her, “Look, I’m no expert in war wounds, but I guess that Robert will be glad he bumped into you and that you were the one he saw and spoke to just before they operated. At least he will be able to go home and tell his family about his experiences here, which is a lot more than those dead soldiers in the morgue will do.”
María wrote letters to her parents whenever she could. Sometimes they were written quickly before her shift started, and at other times she wrote during her short off periods, when sleep was not always possible and her need to share her experiences overwhelmed her. She had seen Carlos on one occasion since her arrival, and they had managed to share an hour together in a small bar just behind the hospital building. They’d sat holding hands with eyes that bored into each other, trying to capture every second of every expression and every passionate glance, which would be bottled up until the next time.
While María had at least some contact with Carlos, Lucia had to be content with her attacks of ferocious letter writing to Pedro and her dangerous night-time excursions to the front lines to see if he was there. She also sent letters with anyone who went back to the front lines or with people going backwards and forwards to Valencia. Her problem was that she didn’t actually know where he was or in whose battalion he was in, where he might be fighting, or if he was even still alive. Her father had not written for a long time, and even her mother had not been able to furnish her with any information about Pedro or about any letters he might have sent to her Valencia address. She asked wounded men lying on stretchers if they knew of a Peter Merrill, but she knew deep down that the question was futile. It was the not knowing that hurt the most, although Lucia recalled that in María’s opinion, knowing was not always comforting either, especially if the person was found t
o be dead.
In the third week, María received orders that she would be swapping shifts with another nurse on front-line duty. She was desperate to get into an ambulance and feel some fresh air on her face instead of the suffocating stench of sweat, infection, gangrene, and death inside the hospital building. She was also hoping and praying that she’d see Carlos on the lines or that she might meet someone who knew him.
At ten o’clock that night, she left the grounds and joined the convoy waiting to load up at the gates. Greg Mathews, an English socialist, was her designated driver, and her ambulance number was 4325. They didn’t talk much on the short journey, which was perilously close to where the main fighting was taking place, but she did ascertain that he was from Yorkshire and had worked in a coal mine near Leeds. He was there, he told her, because he was afraid of the Nazis and because he had read so much about the suffering of people who believed in the same ideology that he did. He told her that he had felt compelled to stop reading about it and actually do something constructive. María had smiled, thanking him on behalf of her country, but she couldn’t help but feel ashamed when she wondered if any cause was worth dying for. Tens of thousands would die, and the spoils of victory would go to the few, she thought, the powerful players protected in deep trenches and surrounded by those who would lay down their lives for them. The few would survive and win forever, written into history as heroes. Then they would carry on with their lives with political policies that would benefit them and not the majority of the people left widowed and orphaned by war.
The tents and trenches surrounding the royal hunting grounds covered a larger area than María had envisioned. Thousands of soldiers and civilian fighters alike swarmed the muddy ground and burnt-out greenery that were once part of a forest of pine and eucalyptus trees, jasmine bushes, geraniums, and pleasant duck ponds. The smell of gunfire hung in the air, a reminder of the conflict that was unceasing in its rampage of death and destruction. Shell-shocked soldiers looked around them. Some were eating out of tin cans that sang musically as the soft rain hit them, while others lay uncomfortably under makeshift tents or blankets.
María wandered from station to station, helping the wounded and following brusque orders from doctors who probably hadn’t slept in days. She tried not to take deep breaths, having discovered in the moment that she had gotten out of the ambulance that on the lines, the rancid taste of war hung in the cold, damp air, surpassing even the sickening odour of the hospital. Corpses, wet with rain, were thrown unceremoniously onto the backs of ambulances arriving in a steady stream, for the drivers had been told that no more bodies were to be taken to the morgue. The bodies were to be stripped of identification tags and then driven to designated sites within the republican zone to be buried in makeshift pits marked with flags. The orders had been clear; there was no time for proper burials, save a short prayer. The flags would guide the authorities back to the grave sites at a later date, and if possible, bodies would be identified and repatriated to their families.
At seven o’clock in the morning, María moved back to the rear medical station, ate a piece of bread and cheese, and drank a strong hot cup of coffee. Medical aid trucks lined the road. She looked at the foreign registration numbers and was surprised to see that many came from other European countries, including Britain.
“Excuse me,” she said to a young Englishman who was changing a wheel on the truck parked next to hers. “Are you with the Spanish Medical Aid Committee out of London?”
“I am, indeed. Why, who wants to know?” he asked her, eying her up and down at the same time.
“Oh, I just wondered,” María told him. “My parents are involved in that organisation. I wonder if you’d be able to get a letter to them from me. I don’t think they know where I am. I’ve written several times, but I’ve not received a reply lately.”
“That’s war for you,” the Englishman told her matter-of-factly.
“Will you take the letter?” María asked again.
Again the Englishman cast his eyes over her body and licked his lips, whilst María’s indignation grew:
“Will you?” she asked again.
“Yes, why not? I’ll do that for one as lovely as you,” he said eventually. “My co-driver is going back to London tomorrow. I’ll ask him to take it with him. I don’t suppose you fancy meeting up later for a drink, do you?”
“Actually, I have a boyfriend, but thanks all the same,” she told him.
24 November,1936
Dear Mother and Father,
I have sent letters but have received none lately. Either they are lost in transit or you don’t know where to find me. Anyway, I’m well and truly in the war now, doing a worthwhile job in the nursing corps. I have so much to tell you, but I don’t know where to begin and don’t have much time.
The good news is that you can find me now through the committee that you told me about in September (in the last letter I received from you). I am with the Second Auxiliary Nursing Corps Española, and I will be with them for some time to come.
I hope that you are both well and that the aunts are also fine. I hope you got the news about Pedro. Is there any news of Miguel yet? I will send you a longer letter next time, now that I am confident that they will reach you.
I love you all and miss each and every one of you.
Love,
María
PS: Don’t worry about me.
Chapter 65
Early on 2 December, Ernesto arrived in London to a bitterly cold fog. The doctor in Madrid had been very thorough in his examination. Tuberculosis was diagnosed, and he was told clearly that he would be no longer welcome at the hospital or anywhere else in the vicinity. He’d had no option but to go home, take to his bed, and hope for the best, as the last thing they needed in Madrid was an outbreak of TB, the doctor had added.
Ernesto slept fitfully on the home stretch and woke to his co-driver’s soft whistling tunes. Ernesto reached into his pocket and took out an envelope given to him by another ambulance driver just before he left Madrid.
“A lovely little Spanish thing gave me this for the London mail. Spoke good English, she did. See that it gets there. I might be in with a chance if I see her again,” he had told Ernesto with a cheeky grin.
Ernesto had absently slipped the letter into his pocket without even looking at the address, but now, out of curiosity, he took it out and looked at it. Mr Ernesto Martinéz and Mrs Celia Merrill, c/o Spanish Medical Aid, London was written in the centre of the envelope in bold black letters. He looked closer, reading the names aloud, to confirm what he saw. He felt the heat of excitement rise in his face, and without waiting a second longer, he ripped open the envelope and read the letter.
Chapter 66
Although thin and exhausted, Ernest remained in a stable condition. The doctor who had visited him at the Mayfair house had told him that he must sleep alone. He must also have his own crockery, cups, sheets, blankets, washbasin, and towels, for if he shared such items, he could contaminate the rest of the family. Celia arranged this, but against Ernesto’s and the doctor’s objections, she refused to be parted from her husband in bed for even a single night. Since Christmas, she’d spent less time at the committee offices. Her priorities had changed, and Ernesto was now her main concern. She surmised that he wasn’t entirely happy with his enforced redundancy, so it was decided that he would work from home, translating news bulletins.
Once again, Aunt Marie had become invaluable and had taken over the new situation just as she took over everything. Ernesto’s condition meant that he could not have the same contact with the circle of politicians and journalists that he’d met before he’d gone to Spain, but nonetheless, Marie made sure that he had plenty to talk about and plenty to listen to. She had become his eyes and ears in London, and Celia suspected that without her aunt, Ernesto would have slumped into an irreversible depression in the same way his father had.
María had written to the London household often since December,
and almost every week they received some form of communication from her. Pedro had also written late in December, telling them that he was well and that he was involved in a big battle that could decide the outcome of the war. Ernesto told the rest of the family that he was in no doubt that Madrid was the battle he spoke of. After receiving Pedro’s letter, Celia walked around with a wide grin. She could write to Pedro now through Spanish Medical Aid and the British branch of the International Brigades for Spain, knowing that there was an excellent chance of the letters reaching him. Miguel was the only member of the family who still eluded them, and as the weeks passed into months, Celia braced herself for bad news.
Chapter 67
Miguel’s loss of ambition within the Phalanx had now been replaced by a lethargic desire to survive the war and an even greater desire to see his wife. The fighting had been heavy in November, but since then, life had become little more than a boring routine, apart from the odd skirmish on the front lines.
In the first week of January, he travelled to Valladolid to see Mónica. The fighting in Madrid had slowed to the point that weekend leave was being granted, and he had been away from her for far too long. Of course, he had written to her almost every day since November, but he worried that maybe his letters hadn’t reached her, as he had not received a single reply.
On the journey home, he thought about their last conversation. Mónica had been angry at his suggestion that the Phalanx members were turning into nothing more than squads of executioners and that their fundamental ideals had been tarnished and twisted by ambitious aristocrats. She had demanded that he leave, such was her disgust.
