The Face of War

"Gellhorn was absolutely extraordinary. She never, never stopped. She died at the age of 90, and for the last few years of her life she wasn’t well, but for about sixty years she was travelling the battlefields of Europe. She started at age 22—talked herself onto a boat to Europe from America. She wound up in Paris with absolutely no money, and she didn’t make it. This is perhaps the most extraordinary thing about her: she was sent back to America, then, after writing a couple of really well-received books about the Great Depression, she managed to talk her way back there as a war correspondent and arrived in Madrid at 1936. She was already married to Ernest Hemingway ; they met in America and went to Europe together. It’s interesting to note that the applause her reporting received in America really irritated Hemingway. He was, frankly, jealous of her growing fame. I think one of the most remarkable episodes in her career was when she was refused accreditation to cross with the troops into Normandy for the D-Day landings in 1944—the British authority refused all women accreditation—so she disguised herself as a Red Cross nurse, smuggled herself onto a hospital ship, and crossed the Channel with the troops. She was the only woman to set foot on the Normandy beaches that first day. Her account of that day, and indeed what followed, is just remarkable. You can’t begin to describe it. If I can, I’d like to read one small extract from this book. This is during the Italian campaign, while she was with American troops. After battle, she describes what she saw in the field: This field grew huge dead cattle. They lay with their legs pointing up, and their open eyes were milky and enormous, and the air stank of their swollen bodies. We could not tell what had killed them because we were driving too fast through a long tunnel of dust which was the road. Aside from the hideous dead animals everything looked lovely, with the Adriatic a flat turquoise blue and the sky a flat china blue and the neat green hilly country of the Marche ahead. The major drove as usual like mad. There was plenty of dust in Italy all the time, but when he drove a roaring surf of dust beat out behind us. We were going to have a look at the front before lunch. What strikes me as wonderful about that is that she counterpoints the dead cattle in the field—we don’t see actual violence, but we don’t need to—with the glory of the sea and the sky and the scenery, before finally the “going to have a look at the front before lunch.” The casual idea that you could do that. And she did it, Martha Gellhorn. All the time. She wasn’t afraid. It was extraordinary that she went through so many different conflicts without a wound. She wrote beautifully. I can’t recommend The Face of War , which takes in all her war reporting, enough. It’s still in print, and it’s just an amazing read."