The Guardian of Secrets: And Her Deathly Pact (60 page)

Chapter 62

F
ranco’s army stood poised and ready at the gates of the city. Madrid was the ultimate prize and one that would virtually end the war after only six months. However, the arrival of the rebel forces had been delayed by Franco’s decision to liberate the alcázar in Toledo, which had been bravely occupied by rebels, and this proved to be vital for the republicans and costly for the rebel nationalists’ plans. They had been busy organising food convoys and medical teams to feed and treat civilians for when they gained control; however, three days after the government’s departure, they had to be content with a position close, but not close enough, to the centre. The rebel army, now known as the nationalist army, backed by arms and aircraft far superior to anything that the republicans had, waited impatiently for their bloodbath to begin. The Moors, whose reputation preceded them, were a terrifying force and one that the ordinary civilians of the city feared the most. With the Phalanx, their task was to mop up and shoot the surviving important republican figures, like vultures waiting to pick the bones of the dead and dying.

In the city, republican Militia units fell back exhausted and demoralised. Some fled openly, seizing any means of transport to get away from the Moors, whilst others did fight back, and this helped to slow the nationalist advance considerably.

On the nationalist front lines were the overseas units of German and Italian forces. Unlike the republican volunteers, they were mostly disciplined and trained professional soldiers who had been offered executive pay for their services to the nationalist cause. However, there were also some genuine volunteers waiting for their first taste of battle, and they included a few Englishmen and a unit consisting of the several hundred blue shirts of the Irish Battalion under General Eoin O’Duffy. His Catholic volunteers were inflamed with the desire to fight in Spain because of the terrible and gory press releases about the republican atrocities committed against the Catholic clergy in republican zones.

In the south-western suburbs of Madrid, Miguel stood guard, waiting impatiently to be relieved so that he could get some sleep. He was sick to death of the incessant praying and chanting of the Irish and felt as though every bone in his body had been broken and every blister on his feet had burst, making his socks stick to his torn skin. He’d been in hell since his arrival only two days earlier and was now wondering whether his decision to fight with the Phalanx units at the front had been the right one. Before leaving Valladolid, he’d had another fight with Mónica, who made it clear that she would not suffer any more embarrassment at his hands. She’d also told him that his reputation as a softie, as she called him, was ruining her own reputation.

“I think it’s time for a break. You should go to Madrid and fight. Maybe you’ll find the courage you used to have, because you certainly don’t have it now! You’re no use to us here,” she had added without any emotion in her voice.

Well, here he was. He’d done as she asked, although there was nothing wrong with his courage as far as he could tell. On his first day, he’d been ordered to carry out probing attacks from the west along with fifty or so Phalanx and a battalion of Moors. Miguel had been optimistic at the significant advances that they were making, but at the end of four days, exhausted and in need of medical attention for a head injury, he had retreated back to his lines just outside the royal hunting grounds to await new orders.

As he lay in the medical tent, he felt vulnerable, scared, and alone. He was now in one of the biggest fights of his life and had no emotional support from any quarter. He also believed that nobody would really care if he lived or died, for his attempts to contact his family had been stalled by Mónica. She had said that writing to a zone that was not only republican but which also housed the enemy headquarters would be foolish and irresponsible. He had bowed to her wishes, as always, but his family were never far from his thoughts nowadays. They were his kin, and he needed them to know what he was doing and, more importantly, needed news of them.

Miguel left the medical tent for the front lines in the early hours of the morning, slightly more refreshed and with a lot more clarity. As he fought, at times in hand-to-hand combat, he thought about Pedro and wondered where he was. Was he too was somewhere in Madrid with Franco’s African Army? He was struck by the thought that his desire to see his brother was overshadowed by a fear of what the circumstances would be if he did, and for the rest of the day, he neither looked nor listened to dying screams.

Miguel entered the working-class suburb of Carabanchel. The republican militias, fighting on their own territory, not only held them back but inflicted heavy casualties. For three days and nights, Miguel killed and maimed and watched his comrades die. The Moors covered the ground like snakes, refusing to give back what they had taken, and they finally made some progress in their attempt to thrust through to the Valencia road. Miguel saw the sign for Valencia just as he turned the corner leading up to the hill of Cerro de Los Ángeles. Valencia called to him as it never had before. He would get back there somehow, and at some point in this campaign, he would see his family and tell them that he loved them.

Chapter 63

T
his was like no battle Pedro had ever been in. It was nothing like Seville or Tetuán, where they’d had some respite, sleep, and food in between combat. This was never ending, he thought, dead on his feet. He would have to fight until he dropped or was dying, and they would be forced to carry him back to the medical station. He covered his face with his hands and pushed his fingers through his hair. He remembered and saw, with absolute clarity, the dead bodies he had fallen over earlier, men with their bellies and throats cut with knives and swords. Voices were screaming and praying amid the colour of bright red blood flowing freely like river arteries.

As he heard the order to attack, he rose to his feet again and tried to clear his mind of the gruesome images, but there were so many voices shouting and screaming in different languages that he couldn’t distinguish a word or a proper order. There was a Russian voice in his ear, then German, then Italian, all shouting at each other, forgetting any English, which was agreed would be the common command language for them all. Men were going at it alone, and from his position at the centre, he could see that nobody knew what they were supposed to do or even where they were supposed to be. My God, he was thinking, it was a shambles!

The shambles in Pedro’s mind turned out to be a chaotic and reckless defeat for the republicans at the hands of the nationalists. He, along with other survivors, retreated at dawn just as Miguel forged forward with his unit, looking for live republicans to kill.

Chapter 64

M
aría, Lucia, and Carlos entered the city of Madrid at dawn. Carlos had repeatedly forbidden María to come, but eventually he had agreed, with the condition that he accompany the two women to the hospital in Madrid.

The journey through Valencia, the suburbs, and inland to Madrid had been long but uneventful. They had stayed north of the nationalist lines, which had added some hours to the journey but had also ensured a safer passage. On reaching Madrid, they had been forced to drive through battle-scarred areas strewn with dead bodies and fleeing refugees. It was a miracle, both women had stated, that they had even made it into the republican zone and to the designated station after a stray bullet shattered the truck’s back window and barely missed Lucia’s head.

The two women were to be based in Madrid’s general hospital but had been designated as front-line nurses and would therefore spend a great deal of time going backwards and forwards to help treat the wounded that were unable to get to the main medical facility. María’s first impression of the battle zone had been muted by her shock at seeing the number of dead bodies lying unburied and looted of all dignity. Houses and public buildings still smouldered after they’d been destroyed, and survivors walked aimlessly around the streets with barrows laden with their worldly possessions.

Half a kilometre from the hospital, they came to a complete standstill in a traffic jam, unlike anything she’d ever seen. The walking wounded, some with crude bandages around their heads, arms, and legs, staggered like drunken men, slowly winding their way in and out of the gridlock of medical aid trucks carrying supplies. Ambulances bulging at the seams with the wounded and medical staff, whose mission it was to keep their patients alive until they reached the hospital, did not seem to be able to find a clear path to their destination. With this in mind, Carlos dropped them off at that point, telling them that he could go no further.

María looked into his eyes and kissed him with a fiery passion that would comfort her in the weeks to come. They kissed in the grey light, oblivious to their surroundings. It was bitterly cold, and their misty breath hovered in the air, disappearing into a sky lit up sporadically by silver streaks of ongoing artillery fire and mortar shells. As she pulled away from Carlos, María determined that there would be no blue skies today. Only dark funnels of smoke would be visible, so much smoke and its foggy aftermath that the sun would not be able to show itself. She held Carlos one last time and prayed that he would not be punished for allowing her to come to this place of death. She could tell by the painful expression on his face that he now regretted the decision to bring her, and when they kissed again, she felt an overwhelming desire to run with him, run as fast and for as long as they could out of the madness to a place where their love could blossom uninterrupted and in peace.

Carlos cupped her face in his hands. “I have to go, but I know where to find you. I’ll be back soon, I promise you. One day you’ll look up and I’ll be there. So look after yourself until then. Keep safe and don’t try to be a heroine, promise me. And promise that you’ll not leave Madrid. I have to know where you are. I have to dream that I’ll find you here and kiss you and love you. My love for you is more important than any of this, and all the bullets, mortar fire, and tanks won’t kill it.”

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 to 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.