Martha Gellhorn, War Correspondent

Damn, Martha Gellhorn was an amazing writer. I think that I've fallen in love with her sentences.

A trailblazing, apparently fearless American war correspondent stationed in Europe during the Second World War, Gellhorn seems to have been everywhere important during the war, filing a stream of brilliant dispatches for the American magazine Collier's.

I'm currently reading the Library of America's two-volume collection Reporting World War II  and thank God Martha Gellhorn's writing is well represented. In each of her pieces, she writes with a startling clarity and purpose. Take, for example, this exasperated column written a few weeks after the surrender of Germany:


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, in that town about twenty kilometers away it was a veritable hotbed of Nazidom. To tell you the truth confidentially, there were a lot of Communists here. Oh, the Jews? Well, there weren't really many Jews in this neighborhood. I hid a Jew for six weeks. I hid a Jew for eight weeks. All God's chillun' hid a Jew.

We have been waiting for the Americans. You came to befriend us. The Nazis are Schweinhunde. The Wehrmacht wants to give up but they do not know how. No, I have no relatives in the army. I worked on the land. I worked in a factory. That boy wasn't in the army, either; he was sick. Ach! How we have suffered! The bombs. We lived in the cellars for weeks. We have done nothing wrong. We were never Nazis!


It would sound better if it were set to music. Then the Germans could sing this refrain. They all talk like this. One asks oneself how the Nazi government to which no one paid allegiance managed to carry on this war for five and a half years. Obviously not a man, woman or child in Germany ever approved of the war.

Collier's,  May 26, 1945 [VE Day was May 8th]

Was there a better way to sum up the mood in Europe at that moment? I don't know how people learn to write like that, nor do I understand how they can continue to write when experiencing things beyond comprehension.

After covering the blitz in London, night bombings over Germany, D-Day and the Battle of the Bulge, Gellhorn was with the American army in Dachau when Germany finally surrendered. Somehow she found words to describe that experience as well:

We have all seen the dead like bundles lying on all the roads of half the earth, but nowhere was there anything like this. Nothing about war was ever as insanely wicked as these starved and outraged naked, nameless dead. Behind one pile of dead lay the clothed healthy bodies of the German guards who had been found in this camp. They were killed at once by the prisoners when the American Army entered. And for the first time anywhere, one could look at a dead man with gladness.

Collier's, June 23, 1945 

Gellhorn was, of course, more than just a war correspondent. She lived a long and amazing life across several continents, and was 89 when she died in London in 1998. 

She had been, for several years, effectively blind.