Reporting Under Fire (12 page)

Martha and Bertrand traveled in France and Germany, and what Martha saw of Germany's Nazis disgusted her. Bertrand got a divorce and wanted Martha to marry him, but she balked at the idea of living with and rearing his small son. In 1931 she
returned to the United States to look for a publisher for her first book, later to dismiss it as the forgettable effort of a raw beginner. All her life, it would frustrate Martha that she was far better at writing nonfiction, though she went on to write many more novels and short stories, always striving to write something better.

Like many gifted young adults during the Depression, Martha took a job with the Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA). Harry Hopkins, Franklin D. Roosevelt's trusted overseer of the FERA, handpicked Martha and 15 others to travel across the country to interview America's poor and file reports on what they saw. Martha, the youngest of the group, was dispatched to the textile mill towns of New England and the South whose malnourished poor lived in squalor. Martha's limited wardrobe, a Schiaparelli designer suit she'd bought in Europe, contrasted sharply with the rags others wore; in one home, father and son had to share a pair of good pants and shoes. The poverty and complete lack of dignity among the people she interviewed outraged her.

In due course, Martha went west to work and caused a riot in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho. Thinking that publicity would shed light on the poverty in town, she urged some down-and-out working men to break windows at the FERA office. The US government, of course, couldn't have one of its own behaving like an anarchist, and Hopkins fired her.

Martha had held onto the notes she had made as she wrote up her findings for Washington, and she used them to write a book,
The Trouble I've Seen,
published in 1936. Its four novellas, rooted in her experiences on the road, follow the lives of five people, young and old, caught in the desperation of poverty— Mrs. Maddison for one, dressing up to go to the welfare office, and 11-year-old Ruby, turning tricks for grown men “so that she
can buy herself candy and a pair of roller skates.” Martha was angry that people had to live that way, and her fury drove her development as a writer. Some people wrote for money, some for fame, and some to create magical worlds or to work out deep psychological problems. Martha Gellhorn wrote because she was mad about social injustice.

That December Martha, her mother, and her brother vacationed in the Florida Keys. They stopped at a bar for drinks one afternoon, and in walked Ernest Hemingway, author of two sensational books. Never one to shy away from a pretty girl—Martha's blond hair and long legs certainly qualified her— Ernest chatted her up. The charming Ernest, whose wife and dinner guests were waiting at home, was charmed by Martha as well. Not only was she a looker, she had interesting things to say. Ernest missed dinner.

Ernest Hemingway left for Spain that fall to report on the Spanish Civil War. The young Republic of Spain, championed by a mix of urban and rural workers and educated middle-class people, faced a revolt by Fascist rebels backed by Spain's big landowners, its military, and elements of the Catholic Church. The war-loving Ernest couldn't resist the lure of writing about the gallant defenders of the Spanish Republic, even if naysayers said the republicans were communist sympathizers. Off he went, with plans to report on the Spanish war for the North American News Agency and to make a film about it too.

Martha armed herself with a letter from
Collier's,
a national magazine, which promised that if she found a good war story and wrote it well,
Collier's
would buy it. For Martha Gellhorn, “Marty” to her family and friends, that letter of introduction was all she needed. She boarded a ship and sailed to Europe in search of war stories—and Ernest Hemingway. Ernest, on the skids with his wife, took Marty both as his literary protégé and his lover.

However, when it came to writing, Martha Gellhorn was a natural.
The Trouble I've Seen
had been well received, and when Martha sent her first story, “High Explosive for Everyone,” to
Collier's,
editors changed the title and published it immediately. Martha was on hand in Madrid, living in a hotel, when the armies of rebel commander General Francisco Franco, backed by bombers supplied by Nazi Germany, bombarded Spain's capital. Her words, clear and direct, pulled readers into the hours of quiet fear as Madrid's beleaguered people tried to live normally between attacks. One moment, she observed, a group of housewives could be standing in line for food, the next, running for their lives:

After all, they have been waiting there for three hours and the children expect food at home. In the Plaza Major, the shoeblacks stand around the edges of the square, with their little boxes of creams and brushes, and passers-by stop and have their shoes polished as they read a paper or gossip together. When the shells fall too heavily, the shoeblacks pick up their boxes and retreat a little way into a side street.

Then for a moment it stops. An old woman, with a shawl over her shoulders, holding a terrified thin little boy by the hand, runs out into the square. You know what she is thinking: she is thinking she must get the child home, you are always safer in your own place, with the things you know. Somehow you do not believe you can get killed when you are sitting in your own parlor, you never think that. She is in the middle of the square when the next one comes.

A small piece of twisted steel, hot and very sharp, sprays off from the shell; it takes the little boy in the throat. The old woman stands there, holding the hand of
the dead child, looking at him stupidly, not saying anything, and men run out toward her to carry the child. At their left, at the side of the square, is a huge, brilliant sign which says:
GET OUT OF
M
ADRID.

Twenty-first century readers are comfortable with first person, present tense. But Martha's writing reflected new trends in the 1920s and '30s. Gone were the flowery sentences favored by Victorians. During World War I, Bessie Beatty's and Louise Bryant's articles showed remnants of Victorian style, but Martha's straightforward prose fit with writers of her generation, among them Ernest Hemingway, John dos Passos, Dorothy Parker, and F. Scott Fitzgerald, who wrote in a terse, realistic style.

Martha was tough and outdoorsy, easily keeping up with Hemingway as he mingled at the front with American volunteers, the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, fighting for the Spanish Republic. She wrote about them too, these good-natured kids who had morphed into a fine group of soldiers.

Martha and Ernest traced the path of that summer's offensive at Brunete, Spain, riding in a camouflaged army staff car and a Ford roadster trailing a tattered American flag. They drove across an open plain, stopping first at the town of Villanueva de la Cañada. Just as they entered the bombed-out village, rebels shelled them from the hills above the plain. As she took cover, Martha marveled how small purple flowers had sprung up from ground burned dark by firebombs. She went to an American hospital where she met more volunteers, a young American nurse whose husband was fighting, and a badly injured soldier who apparently had created a job for himself:

The boy was shy, with young brown cheeks and brown eyes and a crew haircut. He said he was the hospital
publicity agent and would be delighted to show me around or tell me anything I wanted to know. He said, on the other hand, it was a new job, and he didn't actually know much about it. It came out slowly that he was a graduate student at Harvard and had been in Spain since last spring. He had come in time for Brunete. It seemed he was now the hospital publicity agent because he couldn't walk very fast. He didn't want to go home, and he had been “a guest in this hospital” for a long time (and he said it with such style, such modesty), so they gave him a job.

What happened was that he was on the road to Brunete, with seven men from his company, when a bomber and some pursuit planes flew over, and that was the story. He had 38 stitches across his stomach where a fragment of a bomb had torn it open. He said they just lay there and watched the bombers coming over, and heard the pursuit planes dive on them and there was nothing much to do except lie there and pray. He told it as plainly as that, when at last he talked.

Martha's war coverage shaped both her worldview and her writing. She cared little for politics, diplomacy, military strategy, or the stuff of presidents, kings, and dictators. She had a full-blown hatred of governments. What moved her was the plight of ordinary folks whom she met, regular soldiers at the front, and innocent civilians whose lives were turned upside down by war. Liberal though she was in her politics, Martha Gellhorn despised the Communist totalitarians of the Soviet Union and Communist China as much as the Fascists, Nazis, and overzealous nationalists on the far right.

Martha Gellhorn and Ernest Hemingway were together for five years when Ernest got a divorce from his second wife.
They were married by a justice of the peace in a railroad office in Wyoming on November 21, 1940, and ate moose for dinner. Soon thereafter,
Collier's
asked Martha for a series of articles on Asia, where Japan and China had fought a war since the early 1930s. Martha's
Collier's
editor assumed it was a matter of time until Japan “would soon start destroying the East as its Axis partners Germany and Italy were destroying the West.”

At the time the United States held an official policy of neutrality, but Martha believed that Americans would be sucked into the war and that the world she knew would change forever. “Hurry, hurry, before it's too late,” she said to herself. She wanted to see the China she had read about in books.

Martha dragged her new husband along, though Ernest would have preferred to stay put in Cuba. He was taking life easy after long months of hard writing and looking forward to the publication of
For Whom the Bell Tolls,
his classic tale about the Spanish Civil War. (His dedication said, “This book is for Martha Gellhorn.”)

The first leg of their journey, by ship from the West Coast to Hawaii, was a rough crossing of sliding furniture, crashing meal trays, and spilled liquor bottles, topped off by a traditional aloha welcome with piles of leis and a swarm of paparazzi. Hemingway, who detested such puffery, had “a face of black hate,” and Martha nicknamed her husband U.C.—Unwilling Companion—in letters home.

Matters improved when they boarded a Pan Am clipper for Hong Kong—the elegant flying boat followed an island-hopping route across the South Pacific, splashing down in harbors each night to refuel and provide a hotel bed for its well-dressed passengers. When they arrived in the British colony of Hong Kong, from where they'd stage their travels into China, Martha made plans to fly inland to Lashio, at the start of the Burma Road, the
700-mile trail that wound north to Kunming, China. With the Japanese army in Manchuria to the north and the surrounding Hong Kong in the south, could the Burma Road survive as the sole supply line into China?

As Martha did her reporter's work getting the feel of exotic Hong Kong, Hemingway set up shop in their hotel bar, gathering a fan club of reporters, diplomats, businessmen, and crooks. They swapped stories as they shared in long bouts of drinking, and Hemingway adored it. He sent Martha off on her own, kindly enough, she supposed, with the comment that “M. is going off to take the pulse of the nation.”

Martha's forays into China took her across vast amounts of territory, but there was little actual action for her to cover. One of her best pieces from her trip was her first: an article about her flight from Hong Kong inland to the Burma Road with China National Aviation Corporation (CNAC), whose two DC-3s and three DC-2s were both uncomfortable and dangerous. The five “small tatty planes” captained by American pilots, sometimes had a copilot on board, sometimes not.

Four days after her arrival in Hong Kong, Martha left for Lashio. She took off at 4:30
AM
on a CNAC DC-2, with seven other passengers and a lone crewman, pilot Roy Leonard. “The passengers,” she wrote, “were given a rough brown blanket and a brown paper bag for throwing up.” The airplane climbed out of the harbor basin that was Hong Kong and over the mountains into Japanese-controlled territory. In effect, the CNAC flight was a second Burma Road into free China, a lifeline carrying $55 million in wads of Chinese currency and 5,000 kilos of mail inland and returning with tin and wolfram, a mineral used in steelmaking.

Their first stop, Chungking (now spelled Chonqing), sat on a cliff overlooking the Yangtze River, where Leonard landed on
an island airstrip. They flew on to Kunming, Leonard dipping and bobbing to make sure the air was clear of Japanese planes. Their last leg took them into Lashio after 10
PM
that night. Roy Leonard had flown for 16 hours—nearly 1,500 miles—a weekly routine for him. He amazed Martha, whose legs were stiff with cold and whose brain felt befuddled and oxygen deprived.

Up early the next morning, Martha wandered through a village bazaar, waiting to start the flight home after the Japanese daily air raid over Kunming, its first stop. Radio reports said the Japanese were late in bombing Kunming that day, so the CNAC flight was delayed. When they landed in Kunming at 5:30
PM
the bombing had left “a city shrouded in smoke and lit by fires.”

Martha had seen war in Spain, Czechoslovakia, and Finland, but nothing looked as blown away as Kunming, destruction “in a class by itself.” But even as the Japanese tried to bomb away the city every day, its residents repaired the damage. They worked silently, even small kids, no sound but hammers as people tried to fix their bombed-out homes. “Endurance,” Martha learned, “was the Chinese secret weapon. The Japanese should have understood that, and everybody else had better remember it.”

Martha liked to hang out with the CNAC pilots and their wives, finding them much more to her taste than either Ernest's crowd of admirers or the stuffy Western expatriates who lived large in Hong Kong. As soon as she moved beyond the Western enclave along the Hong Kong harbor and into Chinese neighborhoods, she began to see how desperate and degraded the lives of everyday Chinese were. She wandered the stinking streets of the Chinese quarter, with its brothels, gambling parlors, firecrackers, sleeping cubicles, and drug dens. There, for a few cents, a “coolie” could buy a pipeful of opium pills that cost less than food, cut the appetite, and relaxed skinny, starving men who labored 12 hours per day.