The Face of War

Martha Gellhorn

• Publisher: Atlantic Monthly Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780802191168
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria

A collection of "first-rate frontline journalism" from the Spanish Civil War to US actions in Central America "by a woman singularly unafraid of guns" ( Vanity Fair ). For nearly sixty years, Martha Gellhorn's fearless war correspondence made her a leading journalistic voice of her generation. From the Spanish Civil War in 1937 through the Central American wars of the mid-eighties, Gellhorn's candid reporting reflected her deep empathy for people regardless of their political ideology. Collecting the best of Gellhorn's writing on foreign conflicts, and now with a new introduction by Lauren Elkin, The Face of War is a classic of frontline journalism by "the premier war correspondent of the twentieth century" (Ward Just, The New York Times Magazine ). Whether in Java, Finland, the Middle East, or Vietnam, she used the same vigorous approach. "I wrote very fast, as I had to, " she says, "afraid that I would forget the exact sound, smell, words, gestures, which were special to this moment and this place." As Merle Rubin noted in his review of this volume for The Christian Science Monitor, "Martha Gellhorn's courageous, independent-minded reportage breaks through geopolitical abstractions and ideological propaganda to take the reader straight to the scene of the event."

THE SECOND WORLD WAR

We were drinking daiquiris in a mingy little bar on the Mexican border and talking about cattle-raising in Arizona. A tattered Indian child came in, with some clutched newspapers, and said "Con la guerra, la guerra" mildly. No one noticed him the first time round. Then the word caught, we called to the boy, he sold us a Mexican paper, damp with his own sweat. Smeary type announced Pearl Harbor and America's declaration of war. It seemed a dreadful way for a great nation to get into a war—blown in, with its fleet down.

Between that time and November 1943, when I finally reached England (filled with joy to be there, to be home in the world again), I was paralyzed by conflicting emotions: private duty, public disgust and a longing to forget both and join those who were suffering the war. It is too hard to sit on the outside and watch what you can neither help nor change; it is far easier to close your eyes and your mind and jump into the general misery, where you have almost no choices left, but a lot of splendid company.

England was a new country, the home of a new people. The English are an amazing nation and I think it is true that nothing becomes them like catastrophe. When they are really up against it, their negative qualities turn positive, in a glorious somersault. Slowness, understatement, complacency change into endurance, a refusal to panic, and pride, the begetter of self-discipline. What is “not done” is to be a crook or a coward; and they are able to laugh, no matter what. In an earlier and more innocent age, Edmund Wilson invented a phrase about Russia: “The moral top of the world, where the light never quite goes out.” England was that, during the war.

From November 1943, with one unavoidable break in the spring of 1944, I followed the war wherever I could reach it. The U.S. Army public relations officers, the bosses of the American press, were a doctrinaire bunch who objected to a woman being a correspondent with combat troops. I felt like a veteran of the Crimean War by then, and I had been sent to Europe to do my job, which was not to report the rear areas or the woman's angle. The P.R.O.s in London became definitely hostile when I stowed away on a hospital ship in order to see something of the invasion of Normandy. After that, I could only report the war on secondary fronts, in the company of admirable foreigners who were not fussy about official travel orders and accreditation. By stealth and chicanery I managed to sneak to Holland and watch the superb U.S. 82nd Airborne Division at work. But it was only during the Battle of the Bulge, and from then on, that I dared attach myself to American fighting units. The war may have softened the P.R.O.s, or they no longer cared what anyone did, with the end so near.

These articles are in no way adequate descriptions of the indescribable misery of war. War was always worse than I knew how to say—always. And probably from an instinct of self-preservation, one tried to write most often of what was brave and decent. Perhaps now my articles on Germany and on the behavior of the Gestapo, the S.S. and other sections of the German Army will seem untimely paeans of hate. I reported what I saw, and hate was the only reaction such sights could produce.

Nazi doctrine extolled “frightfulness” as a weapon, as a means to the end of victory. The human race is still sickened by the poison of that doctrine, by crimes committed everywhere and answered with other crimes. We have before us the memory and the lesson: let us not imagine that anyone can use frightfulness in a good cause.

The Bomber Boys

November 1943

They were very quiet. There was enough noise going on around them, but they had no part in it. A truck clanked past with a string of bomb trolleys behind it. The ground crew was still loading the thousand-pound high-explosive bombs that look like huge rust-colored sausages. A WAAF's clear high English voice, relaying orders, mixed with the metal noises. A light on the open bomb bay made the darkness around the plane even darker. The moon was skimmed over with cloud, and around the field the great black Lancasters waited, and men finished the final job of getting them ready. But the crews who were going to fly seemed to have nothing to do with this action and haste. Enormous and top-heavy in their Mae Wests or their electrically heated flying suits, these men seemed over-life-size statues. They stood together near their planes.

The Group Captain had been driving fast around the perimeter track of the field in a beetle of a car, checking up. He appeared the way people seem to, suddenly out of the flat black emptiness of the airdrome, and said, “Come and meet the boys.” The pilot of this crew was twenty-one and tall and thin, with a face far too sensitive for this business. He said, “I was in Texas for nine months. Smashing place.” This would mean that Texas was wonderful. The others said how do you do. They were polite and kind and far away. Talk was nonsense now. Every man went tight and concentrated into himself, waiting and ready for the job ahead, and the seven of them who were going together made a solid unit, and anyone who had not done what they did and would never go where they were going could not understand and had no right to intrude. One could only stand in the cold darkness and feel how hard we were all waiting.

We drove to the control station, which looks like a trailer painted in yellow and black checks, and though there was no wind the cold ate into you. The motors were warming up, humming and heavy. Now the big black planes wheeled out and one by one rolled around the perimeter and got into position on the runway. A green light blinked and there was a roar of four motors that beat back in an echo from the sky. Then the first plane was gone into the blackness, not seeming to move very fast, and we saw the tail-light lifting, and presently the thirteen planes that were taking off from this field floated against the sky as if the sky were water. Then they changed into distant, slow-moving stars. That was that. The chaps were off. They would be gone all this night. They were going to fly over France, over known and loved cities, cities they would not see and that did not now concern them. They were going south to bomb marshaling yards, to destroy if possible and however briefly one of the two rail connections between France and Italy. If they succeeded, the infantry in southern Italy would have an easier job for a little while.

Several hundreds of planes, thousands of bomber boys, were taking off into the wavering moon from different fields all over this part of England. They were out for the night with the defended coast of France ahead, and the mountain ranges where the peaks go up to ten thousand feet and the winter weather is never a gift; and then of course there would be the target. This trip, however, came under the heading of “a piece of cake,” which means in the wonderful RAF language a pushover. If you were taking a pessimistic view of this raid you might have called it “a long stooge,” which means simply a dreary, unsatisfactory bore. No one would have given the mission more importance than that. Still they were very quiet and the airdrome felt bleak when they were gone and the waiting had simply changed its shape. First you wait for them to go and then you wait for them to get back.

Perhaps this is a typical bomber station; I do not know. Perhaps every station is different as every man is different. This was an RAF station and the crews flying tonight were English and Canadian, except for one South African and two Australians and an American pilot from Chicago. The youngest pilot was twenty-one and the oldest thirty-two and before the war they had been various things: a commercial artist, a schoolteacher, a detective, a civil servant, a contractor. None of this tells you anything about them. They look tired, and they look older than they are. They fly by night and sleep somewhat during the day and when they are not flying there is work to do and probably it is exhausting to wait to fly, knowing what the flying is. So they look tired and do not speak of this and if you mention it they say they get plenty of rest and everyone feels very well.

The land where they live is as flat as Kansas and cold now and dun-colored. The land seems unused and almost not lived in, but the air is always busy. At sunset you see a squadron of Spitfires flying back to their station against a tan evening sky, looking like little rowboats and flying home, neat and close. In the thin morning, the day bombers roar over toward the Channel. The air is loud and occupied and the airdrome is noisy too. But the home life of the men is quiet.

They say that if you find all the chaps in the mess reading at teatime, you know there are operations scheduled for that night. This afternoon they sat in the big living room of the country house that has become their mess, and they looked like good tidy children doing their homework. If you read hard enough you can get away from yourself and everyone else and from thinking about the night ahead. That morning they would have made a night flying test, taking the planes up to see that everything was okay. Between the test and the afternoon briefing is the rumor period, during which someone finds out how much gasoline is being loaded on the planes and everyone starts guessing about the target, basing guesses on miles per gallon. The briefing (the instructions about the trip and the target) would normally be finished by late afternoon and then there is an operational meal and then the few bad hours to kill before take-off time. It is a routine they all know and have learned to handle; they have taken on this orderly unshaken quietness as a way of living.

Of course there is relaxation in the nearest village on free nights—the village dance hall and the local girls to dance with, the pubs where you can drink weak war beer, and the movies where you can see the old films. At eleven o'clock all such gaieties stop and the village shuts firmly. No one could say this is a flashing romantic existence; it is somewhere between a boarding school and a monastery. They have their job to do and they take this sort of life as it comes and do not think too much about it or about anything. There is only one clear universal thought and that is: finish it. Win the war and get it over with. There's been enough; there's been too much. The thing to do is win now soon, as fast as possible.

The old life that perhaps seemed flat when they had it becomes beautiful and rare when they remember it. No one who flies could make any detailed plans; there is no sense in counting your bridges as well and safely crossed when you know how many tough bridges are ahead. But vaguely each man thinks of that not-so-distant almost incredible past, when no one did anything much, nothing spectacular, nothing fatal, when a day was quite long and there was an amazing number of agreeable ways to spend it. They want that again, though they want a life that has grown lovelier in their memories. They want a future that is as good as they now imagine the past to have been.

It is a long night when you are waiting for the planes from Europe to come back, and it is cold, but it has to end. At four o'clock or around then, the duty officers go to the control tower. The operations officers walk about a certain amount and smoke pipes and say casual things to each other and the waiting gets to be a thing you can touch. Then the first plane calls in to the control tower switchboard. Two WAAFs, who have been up all night and are still looking wide-awake, wonderfully pink-cheeked, perfectly collected and not frozen stiff, begin to direct the planes in. The girls’ voices that sound so remarkable to us (it is hard to decide why, perhaps because they seem so poised, so neat) begin: “Hello George pancake over.” In the glassed-in room you hear the pilots answer. Then the girl again: “Hello Queen airdrome one thousand over.” The night suddenly becomes weird, with the moon still up and the bright stars and the great searchlights like leaning trees over the runway and the wing lights of the plane far off and then nearer, the noise of the motors circling the field, the ambulances rolling out, and the girls’ voices going on and on, cool, efficient, unchanging. “Hello Uncle airdrome twelve fifty over.” This means that a plane, U for Uncle, is to circle the field at twelve hundred and fifty feet until told to “pancake” or land. The planes come in slowly at first and then there will be four of them circling and landing. The more planes that come in and are marked up on the blackboard, the worse the waiting gets. None of this shows. No voice changes, no one makes a movement that is in any way unusual, the routine proceeds as normally as if people were waiting in line to buy theater tickets. Nothing shows and nothing is said and it is all there.

Finally all the planes were in except P for Peter and J for Jig. They were late. The job was a piece of cake. They should be in. They would of course be in. Obviously. Any minute now. No one mentioned the delay. We started to go down to the interrogation room and the Group Captain remarked without emphasis that he would stay up here for a bit until the chaps got in.

The crews of the eleven planes that had returned were coming into the basement operations room for questioning. They all had mugs of tea, white china shaving mugs filled with a sweetish ghastly lukewarm drink that seems to mean something to them. They looked tireder around their eyelids and mouths, and slanting lines under their eyes were deeply marked. The interrogation again gives the curious impression of being in school. The crews sit on a wooden bench in front of a wooden table, and the intelligence officer, behind the table, asks questions. Both questions and answers are made in such low ordinary voices that the group seems to be discussing something dull and insignificant. No one liked this trip much. It was very long and the weather was terrible; the target was small; there was a lot of smoke; they couldn't see the results well.

The Group Captain in command sat on a table and spoke to the crew members by name, saying, “Have a good trip?” “Fairly good, sir.” “Have a good trip?” “Not bad, sir.” “Have a good trip?” “Quite good, sir.” That was all there was to that. Then he said, “Anyone get angry with you?” “No sir,” they said, smiling, “didn't see a thing.” This is the way they talk and behave and this is the way it is. When it was known that all the planes were back, and all undamaged and no one hurt, there was a visible added jovialness. But everyone was tired, anxious to get through the questioning and back to the mess, back to the famous operational fried egg, and fried potatoes, the margarine and the marmalade and the bread that seems to be partially made of sand, and then to sleep.

The bomber crews were standing at the mess bar, which is a closet in the wall, drinking beer and waiting for breakfast. They were talking a little now, making private jokes and laughing easily at them. It was after seven in the morning, a dark cold unfriendly hour. Some of the men had saved their raid rations, a can of American orange juice and a chocolate bar, to eat now. They value them highly. The orange juice is fine, the chocolate bar is a treat. There are those who drink the orange juice and eat the chocolate early on, not wanting to be done out of them at least, no matter what happens.

The Lancasters looked like enormous deadly black birds going off into the night; somehow they looked different when they came back. The planes carried from this field 117,000 pounds of high explosive and the crews flew all night to drop the load as ordered. Now the trains would not run between France and Italy for a while, not on those bombed tracks anyhow. Here are the men who did it, with mussed hair and weary faces, dirty sweaters under their flying suits, sleep-bright eyes, making humble comradely little jokes, and eating their saved-up chocolate bars.

Three Poles

March 1944

“In my village,” the man said, “the people stood in front of the church and cried, ‘Is there a God? If there is, He would not allow these things to be.’” That was when the Germans came for the men and boys to send them away as slave labor. They took also what women they wanted; it was known that from these they would pick the girls to use in brothels on the Eastern Front. The other women would become work animals. In a nearby village, when the Germans made the Jews dig their own graves, and afterward shot them, the peasants ran away because they were too frightened to watch. Then the Germans confiscated all farms and gave them to German colonists; some Poles were allowed to remain as servants in their own houses, as serfs on their own land. The man went on speaking of these things slowly, in an ordinary voice.

The man had a good face, with a wide sensible mouth and gray eyes that, before, must have been laughing and kind. He could have been thirty-eight or forty-eight or more or less; his hair was brownish gray and he wore a new badly fitting suit. He had just come to London and he was ill, with his skin very yellow about the eyes. He had been four months en route from Poland, which is a quick journey these days. In life, that is before the German occupation, he was a farmer who owned some few acres in Silesia and he had stayed to slave for the Germans in his own fields. He became the chief of the underground in his district and now after four years, he had been sent from Poland as a representative to the Polish National Committee in London.

The Germans are very kind to animals, the man went on. They sent commissions to Poland to verify that the dogs and horses were living under good conditions. These same committees then arranged to send our old people to concentration camps, since the old are useless. The old die in these camps, the man said, as no one thinks it worthwhile to look after them. The Germans of course took all the young. There were 300,000 people deported from this part of Silesia. The land is not especially good, he said, though the coal mines are very valuable. The Germans sent their own colonists because they intended this part of Poland to remain German.

It is very interesting, the man said in his quiet unchanging voice, to see that the exploitation of our coal mines, under German rule, is greater than before the war; in the same way the forests are four times more productive. This is because the Germans conserve nothing; they cut down all the trees, mine all the veins. It is not their own property they are destroying. Then it is so easy with labor, he added, if workers are slaves and all you have to do is give them barely enough food to keep them alive. If a farm laborer is late for work, if a miner is sick a few days, his German boss can always report him to the Gestapo as a saboteur and the penalty for sabotage is death. The Germans do not tolerate labor problems, the man said, and looked up to make sure that he was understood.

In the morning we began work on the farms at four o'clock in the frozen dark and we finished when the Germans decided we had worked enough. They gave us whatever food we had; each Pole depended entirely on the German colonist who owned him. There was not much food. For breakfast we had potatoes and salt, for lunch vegetable soup, potatoes and vegetables, for supper potatoes. The Germans gave us three slices of bread a day and sometimes curran...