see’.
When Guernica was bombed from the air by the German Condor Legion in 1937, they realised that, instead of being part of a great crusade, they too were merely bit-actors in a tragic farce. As Patrick later recorded:
Every hour more news of the devastation reaches our ears; I think of the howls and screeches of agony, of limbs flying in the air, of everything broken up; of all that was fertile rendered barren. No longer can it be claimed that the war is a Catholic crusade against communism as the clips from the Irish Independent, which M sends me, are so fond of reiterating: the bombing was sanctioned by F against the Basque people who are the most Catholic of all the Spaniards.
***
O’Duffy’s Brigade marched home, as Patrick records, ‘disunited and in disarray, their blue shirts soiled by Spanish mud’.
As regards the republicans, long days and nights spent in trenches, and cold and hunger, tended to diffuse some of their ideologies also. Divisions occurred between socialists and anarchists. There were squabbles and interpersonal differences. ‘Vision became blurred in the smokescreen of war.’
In the meantime, Patrick and my mother had only one vision, and that was the road ahead as they motored with all haste towards the Pyrenees. (‘Pristine worlds faded into dream as the hysteria of war gripped the country.’).
My mother, perhaps because of her training in Cumann na mBan, showed great courage and even found time to crack a joke about ‘a dwarf general with a toy gun coming out to play’.
There are two passes on the Pyrenees known to shepherds and resistance fighters. Patrick followed his map carefully – he had a good directional sense (unlike me), but even then there were queues before him in the frenzy to escape.
***
He worried about my mother:
M is so beautiful, I cannot help noticing other men eyeing her. At a garage in O, a guardia civil lifted up her dress with his rifle, while two of his companions circled around her, leering and laughing. They have no shame. I have this dreadful fear that something will happen, and that I will not be able to defend her. In a world such as ours, beauty is a handicap.
From France, my mother returned to Ireland where, as Patrick said, she would be safe ‘until the danger passed’.
***
Perched on the French side of the Pyrenees, ‘like an eagle on a high cliff,’ Patrick Foley observed the progress of the war: he smelled the plume of smoke rising from burnt-out cities; he counted shots fired; he observed the gaunt, frozen faces of the refugees crossing the mountains; he saw the black circles around their sunken eyes; he watched, as stooped and hungry, they embraced them selves to keep out the cold; he saw people and animals struggling to move forward and upwards as mountain and snow allied together to oppose them; he saw them driving their beasts of burden, as if time or progress did not exist, as if there were no history, as if the world were returning to a nomadic state.
News of the burning of churches and convents distressed him. He wrote:
Such action is complicating ideology. It is having the effect of winning more converts back home for the fascist cause, as there are many Irish families with relations in religious orders here. And yet, that is what we want externally. I feel I am being rent in two.
Although republican at heart, Patrick campaigned for an early recognition of Franco. The victory of the latter was seen as inevitable with his professionally trained troops and German and Italian assistance. Patrick paraphrased de Valera’s own words, which were to the effect that in the world of diplomacy one does not have to agree with the politics of a regime in order to recognise it.
I learned from the diaries that in the early years of its independence, Ireland, as a distinct entity, simply did not exist in the eyes of British diplomats abroad. Patrick argued that if Ireland could give formal recognition to the Franco government before
When Guernica was bombed from the air by the German Condor Legion in 1937, they realised that, instead of being part of a great crusade, they too were merely bit-actors in a tragic farce. As Patrick later recorded:
Every hour more news of the devastation reaches our ears; I think of the howls and screeches of agony, of limbs flying in the air, of everything broken up; of all that was fertile rendered barren. No longer can it be claimed that the war is a Catholic crusade against communism as the clips from the Irish Independent, which M sends me, are so fond of reiterating: the bombing was sanctioned by F against the Basque people who are the most Catholic of all the Spaniards.
***
O’Duffy’s Brigade marched home, as Patrick records, ‘disunited and in disarray, their blue shirts soiled by Spanish mud’.
As regards the republicans, long days and nights spent in trenches, and cold and hunger, tended to diffuse some of their ideologies also. Divisions occurred between socialists and anarchists. There were squabbles and interpersonal differences. ‘Vision became blurred in the smokescreen of war.’
In the meantime, Patrick and my mother had only one vision, and that was the road ahead as they motored with all haste towards the Pyrenees. (‘Pristine worlds faded into dream as the hysteria of war gripped the country.’).
My mother, perhaps because of her training in Cumann na mBan, showed great courage and even found time to crack a joke about ‘a dwarf general with a toy gun coming out to play’.
There are two passes on the Pyrenees known to shepherds and resistance fighters. Patrick followed his map carefully – he had a good directional sense (unlike me), but even then there were queues before him in the frenzy to escape.
***
He worried about my mother:
M is so beautiful, I cannot help noticing other men eyeing her. At a garage in O, a guardia civil lifted up her dress with his rifle, while two of his companions circled around her, leering and laughing. They have no shame. I have this dreadful fear that something will happen, and that I will not be able to defend her. In a world such as ours, beauty is a handicap.
From France, my mother returned to Ireland where, as Patrick said, she would be safe ‘until the danger passed’.
***
Perched on the French side of the Pyrenees, ‘like an eagle on a high cliff,’ Patrick Foley observed the progress of the war: he smelled the plume of smoke rising from burnt-out cities; he counted shots fired; he observed the gaunt, frozen faces of the refugees crossing the mountains; he saw the black circles around their sunken eyes; he watched, as stooped and hungry, they embraced them selves to keep out the cold; he saw people and animals struggling to move forward and upwards as mountain and snow allied together to oppose them; he saw them driving their beasts of burden, as if time or progress did not exist, as if there were no history, as if the world were returning to a nomadic state.
News of the burning of churches and convents distressed him. He wrote:
Such action is complicating ideology. It is having the effect of winning more converts back home for the fascist cause, as there are many Irish families with relations in religious orders here. And yet, that is what we want externally. I feel I am being rent in two.
Although republican at heart, Patrick campaigned for an early recognition of Franco. The victory of the latter was seen as inevitable with his professionally trained troops and German and Italian assistance. Patrick paraphrased de Valera’s own words, which were to the effect that in the world of diplomacy one does not have to agree with the politics of a regime in order to recognise it.
I learned from the diaries that in the early years of its independence, Ireland, as a distinct entity, simply did not exist in the eyes of British diplomats abroad. Patrick argued that if Ireland could give formal recognition to the Franco government before
Similar Books
