The Women who Wrote the War Read online

  During the spring of 1937 three American women writers arrived in Madrid. Martha Gellhorn and Josephine Herbst, both deeply political, went as much out of sympathy for the Republican cause as for journalistic reasons. For them it was a gesture of solidarity. If not technically a member of the Communist Party, Herbst was close enough to be called “comrade” by those who were, and in Russia and abroad the Communists were powerful supporters of the Republican “popular front” in Spain. Josie identified with them; she was active in strikers’ marches, in the struggle against exploitation. Virginia Cowles had no such identification, coming as she did from the “exploiter class,” but if she had been unsure of her career before, Spain settled her mind once and for all.

  Virginia Cowles, Hearst Publications, London Sunday Times

  It was the professional aspect of the reporter’s life that attracted Virginia Cowles. A young, privately educated Boston socialite, she had moved beyond the conventions of her class to take a job on the staff of a New York fashion magazine, then rebelled against what she viewed as trivial assignments. Resigning her post, she set off on a twelve-month trip from London to Tokyo, regularly forwarding articles to the “March of Events” section of the Hearst papers (another entry into international journalism available only to a woman with a private income). Virginia spoke excellent French and Italian, and her social connections provided her with entree far beyond that of the average correspondent. When at a party in Rome she dropped a hint to the Italian minister of propaganda that she would like to interview his boss, she was catapulted over a dozen others for a session at the great marble palazzo the next day. She expected a solemn black-uniformed dictator, and was at first nonplussed by the short, stocky, dapper man who shot questions at her like grapeshot, banged on the table in his anger at the League of Nations for opposing his takeover of Ethiopia, then abruptly concluded the interview by suggesting she go home and tell the American people that Italy was a great power and feared no one.

  After war broke out in Spain, Cowles saw a chance for what she referred to as “more vigorous” reporting. She persuaded a Hearst editor that covering both sides and writing a series of articles contrasting the two would make a good story. Having no experience of war, she had no real idea what her suggestion would entail. Her plan was indicative of how, over the next few years, she would cover the larger war — by leaping blindly into one trouble spot after another.

  Virginia Cowles broadcasting on the BBC, London, 1943.

  AP/WIDE WORLD PHOTOS.

  The Loyalists, with whom Cowles sympathized even while insisting on her professional impartiality, were losing battle after battle. They held central Madrid, but only ten blocks away, in the University City area, the Nationalists were already entrenched. Virginia stayed with the other correspondents at the Hotel Florida, and it was there that Josephine Herbst, dragging a knapsack and coated with white dust residue from exploded shells, was greeted with a bear hug by her old friend Ernest Hemingway, dividing his time between NANA and work with John Dos Passos on a documentary film of the war.

  Martha Gellhorn’s arrival was less auspicious. She had traveled from the border on a train fall of young, enthusiastic, and admiring Republican soldiers. From that heady experience, she entered the basement restaurant of the Gran Via Hotel in Madrid, where the correspondents ate together at a long communal table, to find a far different Hemingway from the attentive semisuitor she had known in Key West. Under the daily flattery of his companions in Madrid, he had reverted to his condescending Papa role. He knew she would get there, he said, because he had arranged it so. That, of course, was nonsense. In addition, Martha felt she had proved herself as a novelist and reporter, and believed herself more committed to anti-Fascism than he was. When she arrived, cold, dusty, and tired, to find herself patronized instead of appreciated, she was furious. Right then she was ready to declare that it was only by chance that she and this insufferable man had both landed in Madrid in the middle of a war.

  Gellhorn, Herbst, and Cowles all had rooms at the Florida. In Madrid the normal city and the city at war existed side by side. “The shellholes, the camouflaged trucks and the stone barricades seemed as unreal as stage props,” Virginia reported. Martha wrote that “the sun was too warm, the people too nonchalant for war.” After a shelling “you could see people around Madrid examining the new shell holes with curiosity and wonder. Otherwise they went on with the routine of their lives, as if they had been interrupted by a heavy rainstorm but nothing more.”

  Josephine Herbst noted that it was like living in a tropical climate where it rained every day at about the same time:

  The heavy shelling usually came in the afternoon and if you got caught in it the only thing to do was to duck into some cafe. No one anywhere was well dressed, not even the tarts. There were no mantillas or black lace or shrinking girls with duennas. In the evening on the way to the restaurant the pavement was likely to be all hummocks and busted-up rubble. You picked your way with a flashlight. In the morning all this stuff would be swept up and new patches of cement would cover the holes. This went on, day by day, with the regularity of washing up the supper dishes.

  Herbst and Cowles waited out a shelling together with Hemingway at the Gran Via one afternoon. Josie liked Virginia, whom she described as “young and pretty, dressed in black with heavy gold bracelets on her slender wrists, and tiny black shoes with incredibly high heels.” Herbst herself was no longer young, had never been pretty, and could not afford gold bracelets. Still, Cowles was a serious reporter, and Herbst respected that, even when wondering how Virginia managed to walk through the rubble-filled streets in such shoes. Both women remembered the afternoon at the Gran Via vividly because of the man who joined them, whom Hemingway referred to as “the chief executioner of Madrid.” Pepe Quintanilla knew all about how people in Madrid had died, including the “mistakes,” as he called them — innocent townspeople who had been in the wrong place at the wrong time — as well as men who responded crazily to the war and charged the enemy with a butcher knife. Throughout the conversation he counted each shell as it landed and then resumed talking. Listening to his stories, tensed for the next shell, no one else said anything. Hemingway kept standing up to leave, but Quintanilla always pushed him back in his seat. “No one goes,” he said, ordering more cognac, and then another shell would fall nearby, proving him right. When at last he allowed them to return to the Florida, they found it had received a direct hit.

  Later Gellhorn, who had been caught in the Florida during the raid, described the shelling in an article in Colliers:

  Looking out the door, I saw people standing in doorways all around the square, just standing there patiently, and then suddenly a shell landed, and there was a fountain of granite cobblestones flying up into the air, and the silver lyddite smoke floated off softly.... Another shell hit, halfway across the street, and a window broke gently and airily, making a lovely tinkling musical sound.

  I went back to my room, and again suddenly there came that whistle-whine-scream-roar and the noise was in your throat and you couldn’t feel or hear or think and the building shook and seemed to settle. Outside in the hall, the maids were calling to one another like birds, in high excited voices. The concierge ran upstairs looking concerned and shaking his head. On the floor above, we went into a room in which the lyddite smoke still hung mistily. There was nothing left in that room, the furniture was kindling wood, the walls were stripped and in places torn open, a great hole led into the next room and the bed was twisted iron and stood upright and silly against the wall.

  For reasons of her own, Gellhorn did not immediately settle down to reporting. She later described how she had tagged along behind the other correspondents for weeks until “a journalist friend” remarked that it was time she began to write. Considering her experience, her ambition, and her natural work ethic, this would have been most uncharacteristic, unless her creativity was somehow blocked by living in close proximity to that same “journalist friend.” Ern
est and Martha had apparently reconciled. Their cohabitation became clear very early one morning when a rebel shell exploded in the hot water tank of the Florida. The corridors filled with steam, and all the guests rushed from their rooms in various stages of panic. Sefton Delmer of the London Daily Express, noting who burst out of which door, observed it was then that Hemingway’s affair with Gellhorn became public knowledge. Josephine Herbst remembered how the correspondents flocked together into a front room, one with a coffeepot in his hand, another with a toaster and a little stale bread. She was most impressed by a French reporter in a blue satin robe (Saint-Exupery?) “carrying an armful of grapefruit, which he passed out to each of us, bowing to us in turn.”

  Herbst was not happy about Hemingway’s liaison with Gellhorn. Perhaps she saw something of herself in this young unattached woman having an affair with a famous writer, not himself unattached. Maxwell Anderson, whom she had loved as a young woman in New York, had been a husband and father; Hemingway was the same twice over. Josie had known his first wife, Hadley, in Paris, and his second, Pauline, in Key West. Now here was Martha, blue-eyed like herself but with silky blond hair where her own was nondescript and frizzled — not that she was competing. If anyone, it was Hemingway she measured herself against. As young writers in Paris they had been equals, but now he was more famous, much richer, with better press credentials, two cars at his disposal, and a mistress. Herbst chose to think of it that way, although Gellhorn, of course, did not. Josie, while condoning Cowles’s high heels, thought Martha’s “beautiful Saks Fifth Avenue pants with a green chiffon scarf wound around her head” inappropriate to a battle zone. Envy can work havoc with consistency.

  For a journalist, the raison d’etre in Madrid was to go to the front. Most convenient was the Casa de Campo and University City front, a bare two miles from the main shopping area. A car was unnecessary — the tram went halfway, and you walked the rest. You knew you were there when a stone barricade blocked your way and a Republican guard, attired in corduroys and a sweater, asked to see your pass. He carefully studied whatever you produced, raised a clenched fist in salute, and let you pass.

  This front provided the baptism of trench warfare for many, including Virginia Cowles, invited to accompany the English scientist and Loyalist sympathizer J. B. S. Haldane there one afternoon. They dodged shells and crawled along the narrow communication trench with mud slopping into their shoes and bullets ringing over their heads. When Virginia questioned their position, the professor pompously noted that in the last war women were prohibited from the front lines and she should be grateful for this privilege. Further along he abandoned her entirely to have a look on the other side of the hill, just as the enemy started throwing trench mortars. Fortunately, a young officer came along to guide her through dark tunnels to a shack full of soldiers, where he explained that she was an American writer who had lost her way, and said they were to take care of her until he could locate her missing professor. Welcomed with exuberance, Virginia was installed by the tiny fire, her shoes (those little high heels?) cleaned, and stale bread offered as refreshment. It was a typical introduction to the troops of the Popular Front; in contrast to the cerebral scientist, they were all heart, and for that Virginia was grateful.

  Such camaraderie with the fighting men, preferably the soldiers of the International Brigades, was what Josephine Herbst had come for. Her chance came one morning when she encountered a friend of Hemingway’s about to take off for the village of Murata, near the front lines. He offered to take her along, and she leaped at the opportunity. The first rule a woman learned reporting a war was to seize any chance for a ride to the front.

  Murata had been the scene of fierce fighting. During the winter Nationalist troops had made a concerted push against the Loyalists, including four hundred Americans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade — many of them raw volunteers who had never held a rifle. A few battles later, only a hundred Americans remained. A Loyalist general arranged safe-conduct for Herbst to the front lines. She could stay a few days if she chose, he said; there was a cafe in the village where she could sleep. This was her break, and she was euphoric.

  The route to the front began up an old donkey road by car, proceeded by foot across a stretch of open ground, then dipped down into an open dugout. Young American soldiers sitting around a table, bare except for a telephone, were astonished by her sudden appearance. They had been in the line for sixty days, and were expecting an attack. “The nucleus of Americans left from the big offensive was holding tight together,” Herbst wrote, “but they must have felt during the prolonged stalemate, where men died one by one, that the real war was going on elsewhere. Or that only the enemy would remember them and on some dark night swoop down and take them by surprise.”

  When she returned to Madrid from her days at the front, Herbst found life tiresomely superficial. It was a readjustment problem women correspondents would have throughout the war — the same in 1940 when they returned to the United States from bombed-out London, or in 1945 to Paris from the ruins of Aachen or Cologne. In Madrid in 1937, Josie tried to hold on to the core of her experience. At night she would lie in bed and recall her room in Murata with its stone floor so cold that “the chill shot up your leg like a toothache if you put your bare foot down.” Mornings she sat in the lobby of the Florida so that soldiers on leave could drop in to talk. With tea and a little dry bread saved from dinner the night before, they would sit munching and talking. Dos Passos was often there, too. Before long, odors of ham and coffee would drift downward from the fourth floor, and Hemingway would lean over the rail and invite them to breakfast. There was no such thing as ham anywhere except in his own private store, and Josie, always hungry, would be terribly tempted, but as she said, “You couldn’t run off from your visitors. Tomorrow they might be dead.”

  Martha Gellhorn visited the Abraham Lincoln Brigade with Hemingway, and he took her on a ten-day inspection tour, on horseback, of the Guadarrama front, a series of Republican strongholds scattered over a wooded mountain range. Virginia Cowles went along for part of the trip. Back in Madrid, the two women visited hospitals and prisons together, interviewing personnel and recording their impressions. In one article for Colliers, Gellhorn described a visit to the Palace Hotel, now a military hospital, where the reading room had become an operating room. Hypodermic needles, surgical instruments, and bandages filled the old Empire bookcases, and surgeons performed their delicate work by the light of cut-glass chandeliers. Sun poured in the windows. The world seemed properly ordered until one visited the patients. The spectacle of a young blond aviator who had been shot down in his plane, his eyes saved by his goggles but his face a thick brown scab, would not leave her.

  That women reporters might be doubling as spies was a concept as rife among the Republicans that spring as Frances Davis had found it with the Nationalist forces. Josephine Herbst noted that whenever she left: Madrid and the car was stopped, the only papers the guards were interested in were hers.

  Virginia Cowles became embroiled in a situation so serious that she had to leave the country. One afternoon in May she and Jerome Willis of the Agence d’Espagne, driving on the Murata road in search of the International Brigade headquarters, stumbled by accident on the Soviet divisional headquarters. Although some two thousand Soviet officers and technicians were in Spain to help train the Republican army, reporters were not allowed contact with them. The general who confronted them was curt and hostile — but afterward he had a change of heart. He sent Cowles an invitation to lunch, and as it seemed her only chance to see the Brigade lines, she accepted. A car was dispatched for her, and after a sumptuous meal the general personally escorted her through trenches ankle deep in mud. Most of the troops were idealists of various nationalities; Cowles thought them ill suited for soldiering. When she and the general reached the American sector, he encouraged her to converse at length with the soldiers there. Their faces were tired and worn, and she wondered how many of them would ever see America again. />
  Virginia might perhaps have wondered the same of herself when, on her return to headquarters, she discovered that she was not exactly free to leave. The general said he wished to convert her to Communism, and detained her for three days; each evening, over champagne, he instructed her in Marxism. He had sworn “eternal enmity to the privileged classes of the world,” he told her, and convinced that the Revolution would reach America soon, he was preparing her to be on the right side. At the end of her stay he said, somewhat wistfully, that she would be welcome to return whenever she wished, but then concluded: “You won’t return, but you will boast to your friends that a Red Army general took a fancy to you.”

  Back in Madrid Cowles learned that any such boast would be unwise. The Soviet ban on journalists was well known; already her visit to their headquarters had placed her in a dubious position. Friends warned her not to ride in a car by herself, as road accidents were a favorite way of dealing with suspected spies. It was time, Virginia concluded, to leave Spain. She drove to Valencia, where a German Communist who worked for the secret police insisted on taking her out for a drink. Why was she leaving Spain so soon after her trips to various army headquarters? he asked. Perhaps she could just as well write her stories from the “nice new jail at Albacete.” But he did not arrest her, and the next morning she flew to France.