by Betty Burton
Haskell was a tireless worker. Her previously full-bosomed figure had become almost slim, and she walked as though every step she took pained her. Big veins showed on one leg, and the other was laced up in a crepe bandage. Haskell was not young, but God help anyone who might think that she was past it.
‘There’s a rumour that there are hundreds of wounded on the other side of the river who can’t be brought across.’
‘Can’t stop rumours. But it’s probably the truth.’
‘Why won’t they let us go over and fetch them?’
‘They’re going to have to. We’ve already seen the chief. I dare say you’ll get your marching orders any time.’
The ambulances, autochirs (virtually operating theatres on wheels) and trucks rolled across the newly repaired bridge just as dawn was breaking. Soon after, when they were toiling along a rough road, there came the increasingly familiar warning shout: ‘¡Aviacion!’ Ambulances pulled into the shelter of the cliffs and the medics and drivers lay under cover in hollows and ditches, but only a single plane flew over.
‘Bloody observation planes, I hate them,’ Haskell said bitterly. ‘They’re just like a bloody herald-symptom of some rotten bloody disease. Twenty minutes and the bombers will be here.’
It was twenty-five minutes.
Twelve huge bombers came into sight. The new autochirs and ambulances had already been drawn into the shelter of an olive grove and hastily camouflaged. All that they could do was lie and wait under the trees and bushes.
The planes bombed up and down the riverbanks and along the roads. Anti-aircraft guns fired constantly. This was the closest Eve had ever been to the fighting.
As she lay in the ditch, she thought of Kenny. The last she had heard on the grapevine, which worked pretty well, was that the British Battalion were in the rearguard of the Aragon retreat and had fought fiercely every inch of the way.
Then she went on to wonder where David was, and felt sorry that she had rounded on him for having been born with a silver spoon in his mouth, and guilty that he had gone away before she had explained. Not that there was an explanation, just excuses. They were both the products of their class, each of them pretending that they were not.
And Ozz. It wasn’t unusual for her not to see Ozz for weeks at a time, but he usually left a message of some sort scrawled on any bit of paper he could find. The last message had been written just before he set out in a supplies convoy for the Belchite sector, but Belchite had fallen to the other side.
Suddenly a machine-gun opened up, strafing anything in sight. Then six tiny fighter aircraft attacked the huge bombers. In spite of herself, Eve was thrilled by the dramatic dog-fight that went on for an hour. One bomber was shot down, and the rest soared upwards and disappeared. The raid was over and they could continue to push on to Santa Magdalena, a hermitage where they were to set up a hospital.
‘Ah, splendid,’ said Haskell wryly, when they saw Santa Magdalena from a distance. It was a landmark visible for miles around. Set high on the hills, its white walls caught in the afternoon sun, the place was lit up like a beacon. ‘Nobody will ever know we’re here.’ It had been Hobson’s choice, for there was no other building available that could be turned into a hospital.
Haskell went off to help set up another operating theatre. Eve got stuck in with scrubbing and cleaning. By eleven that same day the hospital was ready to receive the steady stream of ambulances bringing in the more severely wounded men.
The days that followed were very difficult. Eve’s truck, parked after unloading, received a direct hit and was totally destroyed. Several ambulances were lost. There was little food. With no truck to drive Eve scuttled around helping the dedicated Spanish nurses and medical auxiliaries. Many of the latter had never had a day’s schooling and were fast learning every skill the trained nurses could teach them. Eve fetched and carried, wrote up details and washed away blood; sometimes she held feeding-cups and blood-transfusion lines. Hard as she worked, with few breaks, she did not seem to be able to keep up with the auxiliaries. If she had grown up tough and poor, many of them had had a worse start. And if, as the outside world had been told, Spain was fast becoming a godless state, it wasn’t evident from the blessings and quick pleas to ‘Holy-Mary-Mother-of-God’ the Spanish nurses and auxiliaries made.
At some time during the second night, Eve went outside the walls of the hermitage to try to rest. She longed to write, for her mind was full of what she wanted people back home to know, but it was too dark to see and too dangerous to risk a light. But she knew what she would write about when she got out of there.
A Front-line Hospital in Spain
This is a most extraordinary place. High up, overlooking a jagged terrain is a hospital that could be a model for the League of Nations.
The senior surgeon is Dr J. who is a Christian Socialist from New Zealand. Of the many nurses, there are Lillian from Yorkshire, Patience and Ada from the Australia, Nuala from Belfast, Consuella and Maria who escaped from Santander, Aurora from Barcelona.
Then there is Sister H. I first met her months ago when I was newly arrived, naive, and expected the invaders to be quickly expelled with the support of the League of Nations. Nurses such as Sister H. put on a hard-bitten act, which I have taken to copying. And no wonder. How on earth can these nurses and doctors live so close to extreme fear and unendurable pain? Do Lillian and Patience and Ada and Aurora and Sister H. ever give way to tears? Perhaps they fear that they might not stop, as I too might not.
My vehicle has been destroyed, so here I will stay until something happens to move me. It is far into the night, this is my second one here. I, with two or three nurses, have come into the open to try and get some sleep where it is quieter and cooler. Except for the faint glow of the white walls of this makeshift hospital, the darkness is complete. I am fatigued, but too tired for sleep, I can only lie and look up at the restful night sky.
If she went to sleep, she was not aware of it, her thoughts drifting back and forth, from missing eyes and shattered arms and legs to the cool green water of the Swallitt Pool where she had spent her twelfth birthday; from jagged bone and stretchers carrying bodies that didn’t even make it to the operating table, to the meadow with poppies where the first photograph of herself had been taken.
There must be hundreds of trucks passing somewhere below – our men going to the front.
If today had been bad, they were all aware that tomorrow would be worse. This might be her last night on earth.
She didn’t want it to be, she was only twenty and there was more to do now than she had ever supposed. Her writing case contained dozens of scraps of paper, each with a scribbled home address:
Come and stay when this is all over.
I’d love you to see my children/my wife/my hometown.
You’d like my Mom and Pop.
We could have a whale of a time.
I’d take you to see the Great Lakes/the West Coast of Scotland/the Empire State Building/Ayers Rock/Mount Tanganaua/the Yorkshire Moors.
Every time she had been given that assurance that there would be a future, she had said, yes she would love to. Every time she was sincere. Australia, America, New Zealand, Canada, South Africa, France, Germany, Italy, and of course this beautiful, terrible country that she felt owned her, but owed her nothing. Having no home address except care of her aunt’s strawberry farm where all her close family except Kenny now lived, she cherished those names. She had daydreams of herself crossing and re-crossing the world in the way all those audacious Victorian and Edwardian women had done. On horseback, too, as they had. Or in a flying-boat or a car like David used to have, low and sleek and powerful.
From far below the crest on which the Santa Magdalena hospital had been set up, she heard singing. Soldiers’ voices as the trucks took them to the front. The song was the Internationale, the one she had heard sung in a hundred places, in a dozen languages. She might have cried, but didn’t, couldn’t. It was too tragic for tears. She knew
that although those men, and the others who would keep coming, would hang on to the bitter end, there was little hope left for the Republic.
It was becoming more evident to Eve that there had perhaps never been hope. It was known that anarchists had different views about women’s education and freedom from those of the communists. She had worked with nurses who had laughed when they told how the anarchists, in an area where they were in charge, had said that the sight of women swimming in the river, even well away from the villages, even when dressed in swimsuits, would frighten the mules.
The communists, on the other hand, were generally believed to be controlled by the USSR. And, as Eve was already aware – not only from what she knew of Dimitri’s increasing concern – Soviet intervention was not altruistic. She could not yet decide whether Dimitri was naive, which she doubted, or having seen the true situation was disturbed that he was a part of it.
The fractures in the left-wing parties that, in the early days of her involvement and in her youthful idealism, Eve had not even suspected, she now saw were opening up. She had gradually become aware that the differences between extremist left factions – the anarchist FAI, the Marxist POUM and what Ozz had called general-purpose reds, the PSUC – led them to fight for something other than the maintenance of the Republic.
Feelings between the factions ran high. Assassinations, revenge, punishment and retribution now split families and villages in a way that they had earlier split more simply between left and right, Republicans and Nationalists. To the world outside Spain, it seemed muddle enough for anyone who wished to wash their hands of the whole civil war.
But to Eve, it was no longer a muddle, and the clearer the situation became to her, a fascist takeover, in her view, seemed to be inevitable. The greater enemy of the Republic, though, was still a chronic shortage of both food and raw materials.
She missed Ozz. Of all the people she now knew in Spain, Ozz Lavender was the only one with whom she could have discussed her growing disillusion. She wanted to know how he felt, what he had seen and heard. Was hers simply the view from the cab of her own truck, or had he observed a similar breakdown. Where was he?
It was an odd place to hear a cock crow and then a dog bark. Soon after that a bird started a song she didn’t recognize. If it wasn’t for the rumbling lorries and the soldiers’ voices, she might have been awake under her aunt’s roof, thinking of the day that lay ahead, driving a vanload of strawberries to catch the London train.
Sleep wouldn’t come. One cigarette and then she would go back inside. She could see something light on the horizon – the river Ebro. Perhaps the next time she crossed it, if she ever did, it would be…? She had lost track of time. Was it August? Good Lord, I suppose I must be twenty-one. Coming of Age. That meant something, she didn’t know what. She’d had the key of the door since she was fourteen. The vote! Yes, she had become one of the great British electorate. She laughed aloud. It was quite funny. She didn’t know why.
* * *
Captain Wilmott’s companies were among some of the first of the 15th Brigade to cross the mighty Ebro. In small boats, rowed by local men who knew the river’s currents and landing places, the first men crossed six at a time. The boats were small and each man carried a good weight of equipment, so that the surface of the water was close to the gunwales. Great care was needed to keep from shipping water in such strong currents. Six at a time, hundreds of them crossed to the south bank. A few at a time, thousands made a perilous crossing on the pontoon bridge.
They were taking the war to the enemy this time. Their route was westward, towards Cobera, and their objective was to sever the enemy’s main route between Aragon and the front. Troubled only by minor skirmishes with Moorish troops and other enemy units used to delay their advance, the Republican army and the International Brigade surged on.
One of the singing voices Eve had heard in the darkness might have been her brother’s, but they would never know. That same night Captain Wilmott and his men were part of the British Battalion on its way to fight for possession of a strategic hill, fortified with concrete bunkers.
Ken and Lieutenant Harry Pope were still, somehow, together. At Gandesa the lieutenant’s scalp had been scraped by a rifle bullet. The wound had bled profusely and left a scar like a parting in the wrong place. Near miss didn’t say the half of it. Indicating their objective, Harry said, ‘Look familiar to you, Ken old man?’
‘God above, Harry, there can’t be two of them.’
But there were. As at Brunete, they were again confronted by bare, rocky, exposed terrain with the enemy at the top within a concrete bunker. Again there was blazing heat, the problem of drinking water, and the same sweat, flies and excrement.
‘If you couldn’t laugh, old man, you’d have to fucking cry.’
For two days they tried to inch forward over the few acres of rocky ground, while bullets constantly rained down upon them. When the time came for Ken Wilmott’s company to lead an ascent, they were all exhausted and weak from the heat and lack of sleep. Some of his men had been wounded, but it was impossible to move them except under cover of night when they had to be dragged off by stretcher-bearers to ambulances waiting to carry them to the hospital. Many did not make it.
Just before dawn the company started its cautious ascent, keeping low, crawling from rock to rock, but they had not moved far when they were pinned down by a fusillade of machine-gun fire. Ken could not move his men either forward or back.
Harry’s voice came from behind a bit of craggy rock. ‘Fancy our chances, old man?’
Well aware that their only water was what each man carried in his flask, and with scarcely any food, the captain could only give the order to lay low till darkness fell. There was no option but to lie in the shallow trenches in the full heat of the day.
At about midday, Ken Wilmott called to Harry Pope, ‘Harry. Try to keep me covered. I’m going to see how scattered our blokes are.’
When his lieutenant gave the signal that he was ready, the captain cautiously raised his head. When nothing happened he slithered to a new position to look for his men. Before he could move further he felt a blow in his neck that laid him flat on his back. Beautiful shooting! Two of his men dragged him back into their cover. ‘Only a flesh wound, passed right through,’ a corporal said cheerfully, as blood poured from the wound. ‘A lot of blood cleans out the germs.’ He unwrapped a sterile field-dressing and applied it to the wound.
It was a minute or so before he realized that, although the bleeding was stopping, he could not move his head; it was immobile as was his company, and neither they nor he could move until dark.
He handed over command to Harry Pope and waited. The day seemed endless.
At last, those who, like the captain, could walk began to make their way to a dressing-station and after that back to the river Ebro. A pontoon bridge over which supplies and men had crossed had been under constant attack and was no longer safe until engineers could again work on it under cover of darkness. When he began to wade into the water, he heard the shouts and warnings, but there was only one way to get to the north bank and that was hand to hand along the line of boats that composed the pontoon bridge.
In a little room in what had once been a small convent, Ken Wilmott saw how desperate the situation had become. Little food, few medical supplies. The wound in his neck was not bad enough to warrant using even that small amount of material to make stitches. He could have cried for Spain. But he had healed quickly before and he would heal again.
News came by way of a mail-lorry driver. The hill had never been taken. They had been forced to withdraw. The battalion was now in a reserve position. ‘Want to come with us? We can hide you in the back.’
In his pyjamas, with the driver carrying his nicely laundered uniform, Ken Wilmott was hidden under some sacks and driven back to take command of his men once again.
* * *
For four days work carried on at the Santa Magdalena hospital while enemy planes d
roned overhead. Roads were bombed and more ambulances destroyed or disabled.
Haskell flopped down on a chair opposite Eve. ‘What’s this, still that bloody roasted wheat stuff? I’d sell myself for a decent cup of coffee.’
‘Dr J. says it’s better for your health than coffee – no caffeine.’
‘Caffeine’s the only bit I need. Strewth, here they come again.’
It never stopped: the drone of the planes, the banging of anti-aircraft guns, the crunch of high explosives. There was a constant bombardment of the roads and bridges and crossing points all along the Ebro. Haskell quickly ate a small dish of white beans and tomato, and drank her roasted grain beverage. ‘Actually it’s not all that bad. Old Grandma Haskell would never drink anything except her American Postum, which is the same as this.’
There was a whistle and an explosion, quickly followed by others. Eve jumped up. ‘They’re shelling us!’
‘The buggers! If they start on us with their heavy guns we’ll have to move out.’
The hospital evacuated at two a.m. Eve took over the truck of a driver who had received a shell splinter and was now himself a casualty. Going ahead of the ambulances and the autochirs, she drove in a small convoy of supplies trucks which composed the vanguard of non-medical people, the wonderful hard-working auxiliaries who had rushed back and forth collecting anything and everything to clean up the new place before the wounded arrived. The road to a safer place was along ten kilometres of shell-potted roads, driving without lights. Someone had the idea of taking over a disused railway tunnel at Flix.
The tunnel, which was near the river, was reached just as dawn was breaking. It was a mass of ruins, the grime of years hanging from its walls. Tired and hungry they stumbled along in the dark. But for all its drawbacks, it was ideal as far as safety from shelling was concerned.
