by Walter Ellis
It was one hour later that Sir Samuel Hoare in Madrid received a telephone call from Laval, in Vichy, routed via Lisbon. The two men had once been close and each could easily gauge the other’s thoughts.
“You should know,” Laval said, “that your message, as well as the letter to Pétain from your Prime Minister, has been received loud and clear and that the appropriate steps will be taken in the months ahead. France will always defend its interests. However, it is with regret that I must inform you that your principle messenger in this affair has been shot during a most unfortunate altercation involving one of my subordinates whose existing anti-English fixation was reinforced by what took place recently in Mers-el-Kébir. He is not expected to last the night.”
“That is most unfortunate,” Hoare said. “As were the events in Mers to which you have just referred. The young man to whom you refer is a friend to France as well as Spain and regarded the information of which you are now in possession to be of the utmost importance. What, may I ask, of his companion?”
“The Spanish girl? She is unharmed, but grieving for her companion.”
“Of course. Please convey to her my best wishes. In the meantime, I shall inform Mr Churchill that you and Marshal Pétain will do whatever is necessary to safeguard the integrity of its empire.”
“On that you may depend.”
In fact, Laval was wrong about Bramall, but only just. Four hours went by following the shooting during which he twice died on the operating table, only to be brought to life again by the team of French surgeons assembled for the purpose. The lead surgeon, a neat, spare figure, was studiously polite, yet clinical in his explanation. One bullet had been removed from the patient’s shoulder, he told Isaballa. A second had passed clean through his body, collapsing his left lung and inducing an immediate cardiac arrest. Fortunately, medical staff stationed in the building had managed to re-start the heart. The damaged lung had since been reinflated and was functioning almost normally. The third bullet had snapped the patient’s left clavicle before lodging in the muscle between his neck and shoulder, narrowly missing an artery. With luck, the surgeon said, the wounds would heal within a year, but for the next month at least he would require lots of bed rest and regular medication.
“May I talk to him?” Isabella asked.
The doctor frowned. He looked exhausted. “Your friend has undergone a most traumatic afternoon, mademoiselle. You must be careful not to tire him.”
“I understand,” Isabella said, offering the Frenchman an equally exhausted smile. “ Thank you for everything you have done. I am extremely grateful to you, and to your team.”
The doctor patted her hand. “De rien,” he said. “À votre service.”
Bramall was asleep in the intensive care ward when Isabella appeared at his side. He was dreaming about Manuela Valdés. Once more, he stood with the Catalan fighter on the bank of the River Ebro, her left arm hooked around his neck, his right hand raised a little above her head so that the lighter he held there could illuminate her face. As he gazed into her eyes, she told him she had to go to rejoin her unit. “Te amo – I love you – he told her, which for that split second was true. In reply, she had smiled at him and told him she loved him, too.
What happened next changed everything. As her arm slid from round his neck, the low roar of the incoming Messerschmitt switched to a high-pitched whine. Bramall looked up. The aircraft, silhouetted in grey against the old moon, was approaching low and fast across the waterway, targeting the assault boats pulling away from the river’s eastern bank. The moment it came into effective range, the guns on its wings opened up, their muzzles flaring yellow and orange. On the boats, the effect was instantaneous. The Republican troops, packed tightly together, rifles by their sides, fell in serried ranks, their screams unheard. Bramall tried to get out of the raider’s path. But his legs wouldn’t respond. All he could do was look on as if he and the German pilot were bound together in a single destiny.
That was when Manuela re-appeared. What happened next happened very fast. Placing her hands squarely on his shoulders, she swung her right leg into the backs of his knees, causing him to topple over and tumble down the incline into the safety of a group of trees. He didn’t see the bullets from the 109 that cut into her back, but he did hear her scream. Her body ended up next to the water, one hand pointing across to the Ebro’s eastern flank.
For the first time since the night she died, he remembered everything. For the first time, he saw her sacrifice for what it was, a selfless act of providence that had given him a second chance at life. An intense sense of grief, and gratitude, flooded over him.
His eyes opened. At first, there were only shapes and shades of grey. But then colours began to break through and he was able to focus. Where was he? Something had happened to him. What was it? Then he remembered. He remembered charging at Delacroix and the Frenchman’s machine pistol going off. He remembered thrusting the sergeant who had boasted of arranging a firing party in front of Isabella so that any bullets that came her way would have to go through him first. There had been a rattle of automatic fire, muzzle flash and someone screaming. After that … nothing.
He felt a hand on his face. He looked up.
Isabella.
He tried to speak, but his voice only came out in a whisper. “Is it really you?”
“Yes,” she said. “It’s me.” And then she bent down and kissed him lightly on the lips.
“Thank God! What happened? Are you all right? Are you safe?”
He was sweating and she dipped a flannel into a bowl of cold water placed on the table beside the bed before gently mopping his brow.
“I’m fine,” she said. “ You saved my life.”
The relief that coursed through him when she said this was like no feeling he had experienced before. He raised one hand off the bed, wanting to reach out to her. “I was so frightened that he was going to shoot you. I couldn’t let that happen.”
“Hush now,” she said.
His mind raced. “But how are you here? Where am I, anyway? And why aren’t you in jail?”
“They let me go. You’re in a hospital in Vichy. The doctors have removed bullets from your chest and shoulder and you’re going to be fine. It will take time, that’s all – but it turns out we have plenty of that.”
“How?” he mouthed.
“Churchill’s letter,” she replied, smiling. “It called on Pétain, on a point of honour, not to ‘shoot the messenger,’ and begged him to ensure our safe return to England. He personally guaranteed the genuineness of the tapes. There was more, apparently, but for Pétain alone. Laval took him the letter soon after you were shot – Delacroix had left it sitting on his desk – and asked if he thought it was a forgery. Pétain said no. He had seen Churchill’s writing before, after the evacuation from Dunkirk. No one else, he felt sure, wrote in such execrable French.”
She paused. “Anyway, the point is that we are to be kept hidden and sent back to London as soon as you are strong enough to travel.”
Bramall nodded. “What about Delacroix?”
“Under arrest. He was going to kill you, Charlie, but Dominique stopped him. It was she who found the Churchill letter. She arrived from Spain and went straight to his office, and there it was. She took it to Laval, who opened it – well, he is that sort of man – and that was when the shooting broke out in the corridor. He ordered that you be given emergency medical treatment while he went to see Pétain.”
“The citoyenne is an extraordinary woman.”
“Yes, she is.”
“I owe her my life.”
“I know. And I owe you mine.”
“I couldn’t let that madman kill you. I love you too much. You know that, don’t you?”
Isabella continued to mop his brow. “I still like to hear it,” she said.
Bramall closed his eyes. For a moment he thought he saw Manuela and Romero looking down at him nodding their approval. But then the image faded. The anaesthetic was continuing to dull the pain, but his breathing remained shallow. “It looks like I warned you of the dangers, when I should have been warning myself.”
“We both knew the risks,” she said.
“How will they get us back to England?”
“By way of Lisbon.”
“Ah! Croft will be thrilled.
“He sends his best wishes and hopes to see us soon. He says that Mr Churchill is delighted.”
“That’s something, I suppose.”
Isabella pulled a chair up against the bed and sat down, bending her face towards him so that he did not have to strain to make himself understood. “Braithwaite spoke to your mother,” she said. “He told her you’d been shot but that you were recovering and would be home before too long. She didn’t ask any questions, apparently, but Braithwaite thinks he heard a catch in her voice. She may have been crying.”
“But what about your family? Your parents. Were you able to contact them?”
“Yes. I telephoned my mother in Madrid. I didn’t tell her what happened to me. You never know who is listening in. I just said I was well and would be living in England until the end of the war. She understood completely. I am sure of it. She said my father has gone back to the Army and they will be stationed in Irún.”
“Irún? Then if the Germans enter Spain, he will be the first to salute.”
“I doubt that very much. I believe he has learned his lesson. Besides, after all that’s happened, the Germans will not be coming.” She brushed his hair away from his eyes. “Franco will soon discover that the French know all about his schemes and have moved to block them.”
“So Gibraltar stays British?”
“For now,” she said.
“And the Duke?”
“In Nassau. Mr Braithwaite plans to visit him there and explain the reality of his situation.”
“Really? I’d like to be there for that.”
She took his hand. “Charlie. I know you have no faith, but when you are better I want you to come to church with me ? I should like to arrange a mass for Eddy.”
Bramall thought for a moment. “We should do it in Ireland. There must be a priest somewhere who isn’t a Fascist. And I can show you where he and I began. The pair of us came out of the same earth, neither of us entirely belonging.”
“I’d like that.”
A nurse put her head round the curtains. Isabella nodded. “I have to go now,” she said. “You need to rest.”
“Will you be here when I wake up?”
She laid a hand on his brow. “Always,” she said.
HISTORICAL NOTE
Spain, in spite of continuing pressure from Berlin, did not join the Axis. On October 22, 1940, the day before his summit with Franco in the French border town of Hendaye, Hitler met with Pierre Laval in Montoire sur-le-Loir, north of Tours. Laval warned that if Spain was rewarded with French colonial assets, most obviously Morocco and Oran, in return for joining the Axis, then the French empire and fleet, already tempted by De Gaulle, would rise against Germany. The Führer, aware of the prospect but shocked by its emphatic nature, took the message to heart. At Hendaye, he informed Franco that, in spite of assurances to the contrary given by Ribbentrop to Serrano Suñer just six weeks before, Spain would have to await the defeat of Britain and the re-allocation of its colonies before there could be any additions to its imperial map. The Caudillo was outraged and demanded what he had been promised. Though he yearned to recover Gibraltar and win for himself a seat at the New Order’s high table, he refused to give in to Hitler’s bullying and maintained his neutrality, confirming the German leader in his view that his next big campaign should be the invasion of Russia.
Göring, who had come to realise the impossibility of invading England, considered Hitler’s failure to go for the Mediterranean option the worst strategic mistake of the war.
Gibraltar remained in British hands. Vichy attacks petered out in the summer of 1940, though the Italian air force and navy staged a number of attacks between 1940 and 1943, sinking several ships and forcing the British to remain on constant alert. It was the ships and aircraft of the Gibraltar squadron that destroyed the Regia Marina at the Battle of Tarranto and afterwards supplied Montgomery’s Eighth Army in its long, ultimately triumphant struggle with Rommel’s Afrika Korps. The Rock also served as a base for anti-submarine warfare in the Battle of the Atlantic and, in 1942, as the key staging post in the Anglo-American occupation of French North Africa during Operation Torch.
Churchill’s view of Franco’s contribution to the War was surprisingly tolerant (“in victory, magnanimity”). In his History of the Second World War, he wrote: “Spain held the key to all British enterprises in the Mediterranean, and never in the darkest hours did she turn the lock against us.”
Yet for more than two years, the Royal Navy, at Churchill’s insistence, maintained a permanent expeditionary force, comprising 24 naval vessels, ready to invade the Canaries should Gibraltar be attacked. In October 1940, in advance of the Hendaye summit, fearing that Franco was about to throw in his lot with Hitler, the Prime Minister spoke somewhat desperately in the House of Commons of his Government’s readiness to assist Spain and to see her “take her rightful place as a great Mediterranean Power.” Churchill’s true view of Franco, once he knew that victory in Europe was in the bag, is better echoed in a letter, delivered to the Pardo Palace in January, 1945, in which he reminded Franco that he had on many occasions declared the defeat of the allies by Hitler to be both “desirable and unavoidable,” and in which the British leader unequivocally ruled out the admission of Fascist Spain into any future world body.
The United States was convinced in 1940-41 that Spain was ready to join the Axis and urged London to do something about it. Washington did not appreciate the extent of the imperial wrangling between Vichy France and Fascist Spain, but was persuaded in the end that Britain had the situation in hand.
In 1942, in the lead-up to Operation Torch, Churchill gave General Dwight D. Eisenhower command of Allied forces on the Rock. The future US President wrote later that conditions in Gibraltar, which by now was home to an entire invasion force, were appalling.
“But the reality was that Gibraltar was vital to the operation’s success. It is not often enough remembered that Gibraltar was the only spot of land in the whole of continental Europe that remained in Allied hands throughout the War… Gibraltar made possible the invasion of North-West Africa. Without it the vital air cover would not have been quickly established on the North African airfields”.
The British official naval historian of the war, Captain S W Roskill, wrote:
“It is no exaggeration to say that the Rock fortress itself, its airfield, its dockyard, its storage and communication facilities, and the anchorage available for the great assembly of ships in the adjacent Bay, formed the hub around which the wheel of the whole enterprise revolved.”
A note on the major (real life) players:
• Francisco Franco lived on as Caudillo of Spain until 1975, dying of natural causes just short of his 83rd birthday. He continued to hunt and shoot almost to the end, but as death approached he was often to be found in tears.
• Marshal Philippe Pétain was sentenced to death as a traitor after the war, but had his sentence commuted to solitary confinement for life and died in 1951, at the age of 95.
• Sir Winston Churchill ended his days a hero in 1965, aged 91. He refused a dukedom and remained a member of the House of Commons until 1964.
• Ramón Serrano Suñer was dismissed from the Spanish Government in September, 1941 after Franco came to believe his brother-in-law was after his job. Trading on the fact that he and Hitler had fallen out at the end of 1940,
Serrano successfully rehabilitated himself as an international lawyer and wrote a famous political memoir, Between Hendaye and Gibraltar, in which he was the star performer. But his true voice reasserted itself from time to time. In 1961, he boasted to a group of German journalists visiting Madrid that the press during his time as Minister for Information was unreservedly pro-Nazi. A lifelong hypochondriac, he died in September 2003, eleven days before his 102nd birthday.
• Joachim von Ribbentrop was convicted of war crimes at Nuremberg and hanged on October 16, 1946. “I always did what I thought was right,” he wrote to his wife two days before he was due to die, “although Adolf Hitler would not accept much advice about foreign policy.” His execution was bungled and he took ten minutes to die.
• Pierre Laval, revived after attempting suicide, was shot in the courtyard of Fresnes prison in October, 1945, strapped to a chair, without shoes, screaming his defiance. “All France,” including many judges and Public Prosecutors whom he had appointed, had demanded his blood. De Gaulle, who had denied him clemency, noted in his diary that the arch-collaborator had died well.
• Sir Samuel Hoare, tango and ice dancer extraordinaire, served as Ambassador in Spain until 1944, when he was raised to the peerage as Viscount Templewood. His memoirs, Nine Troubled Years and Ambassador on Special Mission, sold well. During World War One, Hoare served as a British Intelligence agent in Moscow and, some say, shot dead the debauched mystic, Rasputin. He died in 1959, aged 79.
• Eberhard von Stohrer was removed as German Ambassador to Madrid in December, 1942 amid suggestions that he had always opposed the false prospectus of Hitler and Fascism. Proceedings against him, charging him with treason, were mooted in Berlin, but he survived the war and lived on in retirement until 1953.