Caroline Moorehead: Paris in the '30s

The following excerpt is from Caroline Moorehead's Martha Gellhorn: A Life

Caroline Moorehead (28 October 1944 - )

In the spring of 1930, when Martha arrived in Paris with two suitcases, a typewriter and $75, France was much envied by the rest of the world. The leading economic power in Europe, second only to Britain for the size and wealth of its colonies, its army was strong, its franc solid and French industry was said to be growing faster than any other. 

... On Friday and Saturday nights, the young Americans went dancing at the bals musette around the Luxembourg, or dropped in on the new nightclubs to listen to jazz or practice the charleston or the shimmy. Theatres kept their foyer floors highly polished, and provided orchestras, so that audiences could fox trot in the intervals. Musical reviews were more lavish than they had ever been, the dancing girls wearing great sheaths of feathers and plumes; at the Casino, Josephine Baker, and 'unforgettable female ebony statue', had already made her first appearance naked but for a single pink flamingo feather, in a show that included a live cheetah, a flight of trained pigeons, some roller skaters and an aerial ballet of stout Italian dancers. ... So essential were the fashions dictated by Chanel and Molyneux, that the New Yorker ran a regular column on what smart Parisians were wearing: lipstick, even by day, brightly coloured silk stockings, nail varnish, and perms that rippled the hair like a beach at low tide. Life was glamorous, full of experiments and agreeably cheap. It was a very long way from St Louis.

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Martha Gellhorn: The Carpathian Lancers (Italy, July 1944)

Martha Gellhorn (8 November, 1908 - 15 February, 1998)

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 up to have a look at the front before lunch.

We came to a village where the armored cars of the Third Squadron were stationed. They stood in the narrow side streets and were covered with leafy branches, had a pair of German steel helmets over each set of headlights, and flew the small red and blue pennant of the Carpathian Lancers from their radio antennae. Poppi, who commanded this squadron, leaned out the window of a house by the road and invited us in. The infantry was moving forward very slowly in trucks. All the infantry had dusty white faces, as if they had decided on some new sort of masquerade, using flour for make-up. They looked hot and unenthusiastic.

Poppi is more than six feet tall, exaggeratedly blond, about twenty-five years old, with bright-blue eyes and a funny husky voice. I wouldn't have thought that he was a Pole but I have now given up thinking that people look like Poles or don't look like Poles. The Poles cannot be classified, which is one of their chief charms. ...

... The Germans were beyond a ruined medieval tower which was our farthest advance position. They held somewhere in the hills and in whatever farmhouses they thought useful. The tower was being shelled. The Germans had anti-tank guns placed in farm-houses where they dominated the roads. The Lancers' armored cars were intended for was in the Western Desert; they could not operate across country, so they had to stick to the roads. The Germans waited and shot at them point blank. It was like roulette; you either won or you got burned inside your car or maybe you crawled out in time. This went on during the daytime, and the infantry pushed ahead a little, and our artillery shelled the German positions, and at night usually the germans retreated a few kilometers further north. It was a tiny war at the moments, though people got killed in tiny wars also. ...

... the Carpathian Lancers had been the spearhead of the Polish Cores in a spectacular advance of two hundred miles up the Adriaticcoast; and nobody was feeling violently energetic now, a few days after the capture of the port of Ancona. It was too soon for another big Polish drive, and the Lancers and the Germans were only prodding each other, while the Polish Corps reorganized for the next push.

We roared away in our private dust storm. The major was disappointed in the tour. "Nossing," he said, "Tres ennuyeux pour vous. Sie haben nichts gesehen."  The use of three scrambled languages was our regular communication system. Everyone understood everyone else perfectly.

Since the war had so delightfully stopped and since it was beautiful weather and since Second Squadron was in reserve near us and doing nothing in particular, we decided to go swimming. There was a slight snag because no one had had time to investigate the beach and the approaches to the beach for mines; but as the Poles said, if you spent your life always considering mines it would be quite impossible. So we climbed over a German-destroyed railway bridge, climbing as delicately as if we were Balinese dancers, stepped softly on the torn-up wooden ties and jumped prudently down the embankment and then walked very very lightly along a dusty road to the shore. Andrew, who is a second lieutenant and commands a platoon of armored cars, and I did this noble work of reconnaissance. We decided to walk side by side or closely following each other, on the grounds that it would not be fair for just one of us to explode. There were no mines, at least we did not step on any and there was the warm pale sea and a beach of smooth white pebbles.

Martha Gellhorn: Counting Arab casaulties

(8 November 1908 - 15 February 1998)

Letter to The Times, June 23 1982

Sir, After the Six Day war, Jordan claimed that Israel had bombed hospitals and refugee camps on the West Bank and in Gaza, and 25,000 soldiers and civilians were dead. The figure was later reduced to 15,000. For three weeks at the end of the war, I retraced the course of the combat, looking for proof of these grave allegations. All hospitals and refugee camps were unharmed, untouched; No refugee anywhere was hurt or forced to flee from danger. There was fighting in only three inhabited on the West Bank and in the southern section of Gaza town; villages were not destroyed. I accepted Arab statements on the spot, wherever the Israeli army had passed, even though these statements denied visible evidence. The final civilian death toll was 127 Arabs and 23 Israelis. I wrote then that all death were to be mourned but none should be exploited for propaganda. Now the media are asserting that up to half a million people in Lebanon have been made homeless, or killed or wounded. The latest article I have seen in the Times states that 'almost 10,000 people' have been killed. Who has queried the sources of this information? Who has searched for proof of this appalling casualty count? It cannot be presumed that the half million or the 10,000 dead are all in Beirut where verification is impossible. Such numbers of people, dead or alive, cannot vanish. Detailed fact-finding is essential to serious journalism. I suggest that Israel again stands condemned on the basis of gross propaganda. I suggest also that a nation's frontier is unarguably sovereign territory and no nation will suffer indefinite attacks across its frontier. Why is it right for Britain but base and wrong for Israel to safeguard its sovereign territory?
Yours,
Martha Gellhorn

Martha Gellhorn: from DAS DEUTSCHES VOLK

Martha Ellis Gellhorn (8 November 1908 – 15 February 1998)

From DAS DEUTSCHES VOLK 

April 1945

“No one is a Nazi. No one ever was. There may have been some Nazis in the next village, and as a matter of fact, that town about twenty kilometres away was a veritable hotbed of Nazidom. To tell you the truth, confidentially there were a lot of Communists here. We were always known as very red. Oh, the Jews? Well, there weren’t really any Jews in this neighbourhood. Two maybe, maybe six. They were taken away. I hid a Jew for six weeks. I hid a Jew for eight weeks. (I hid a Jew, he hid a Jew, all God’s chillum hid Jews.) We have nothing against the Jews; we always got on well with them. We have waited for the Americans a long time. You came and liberated us. The Nazis are Schweinhünde. The Wehrmacht wants to give up but they do not know how. No, I have no relatives in the Army. Nor I. No, I was never in the Army. I worked on the land. I worked in the factory. That boy wasn’t in the Army either; he was sick. We have had enough of this government. Ah, how we have suffered. The bombs. We lived in the cellars for weeks. We refused to be driven across the Rhine when the SS came to evacuate us. Why should we go? We welcome the Americans. We do not fear them; we have no reason to fear them. We have done nothing wrong; we are not Nazis. …”

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