Quest of the Spirit: From Suffering to Acceptance

Inner Strength: Martha Gellhorn's The Face of War: Then and Today

          In the initial phase of Gellhorn's coming of age, she believes "in the perfectability of man, and in progress, and thought of journalism as a guiding light" (1). By the end of her experiences in Spain, however, her views dramatically change. The war in Spain had a purpose, but the war in Finland and England against Hitler was what she calls"a great war of greed" instigated by a madman . . . a criminal lunatic and his followers" (52). In December 1939, Helsinki suffered its first bomb attack (53). Gellhorn tells the story of a woman "pinned under the wreckage of her home" only "waiting to die" while "her child [already] dead . . .  and  her husband  in another ward staring in front of him with fixed mad eyes."  While this tragedy occurs,  Russian planes overhead are dropping bombs  upon every part of the city (55). In her introduction to the section called "THE SECOND WORLD WAR," the author admonishes one to beware of any doctrine which uses "frightfulness" as a tool to achieve its end, in her case the Nazi ideology (87). Gellhorn emphasizes that the challenge of war can bring out the best in people, as in the case of the British flyers who flew by night  "to go south to bomb marshaling yards, to destroy  . . . rail connections between France and Italy" (90). These soldier were friendly yet intense in their purpose. On the other hand, war can also bring out the worst in men.  In a section called "Three Poles," Gellhorn describes a man who says "'In my village, the people stood in front of the church and cried, 'Is there a God? If there is, He would not allow these things to be.'That was when the Germans came for the men and the boys to send them away as slave labor. They took also what women they wanted; it was known that from these they would pick the girls to use in brothels on the Eastern Front. The other women would become work animals. In a nearby village, when the Germans made the Jews dig their own graves, and afterward shot them, the peasants ran away because they were too frightened to watch'" (95). Gellhorn says that the Nazis killed more than two and a half million Jews were killed in Poland, and "tried to make a cemetery of it," but the resilience of the people and their indomitable spirit could not, and would not, be silenced (101). In Italy, she witnessed the courage and honor of the French soldiers as well. "The French are earning their way home and they do not complain," she says."The are fighting for the honor of France," and "doing it superbly" (105). In another passage Gellhorn says,  "You hear a lot of rot traveling around the world. You hear people say France is finished, the French are no good, look at their politics, look at the collapse of France, they will never be a great people again. So I lay in my cot and thought that anyone who speaks or thinks like that is a fool, and if he wants to know how foolish he is, he'd better visit Italy" (108).         

               In the next section, Gellhorn talks about the first hospital ship which was a converted pleasure ship that now carried medical supplies, four doctors, six nurses, and about fourteen medical orderlies to care for four hundred wounded soldiers, the first of which, ironically, was a young German 112).  The crew was English and the medical personnel American, with nurses from Michigan, Wisconsin, and Texas (109). The first of its kind, this  ship traveled "through the mine-swept lanes of the Channel" with "destroyers and battleships, a floating city of huge vessels anchored before the green cliffs of Normandy" (110). Gellhorn also talked to a group of courageous freedom-fighters  who escaped persecution and imprisonment in Poland, their home, to fight for their country's independence. Organized in Syria, these soldiers had spent as much as five years away from their families, often in Russian or German prisons, yet managed to escape   by going over the Carpathian Mountains and return to fight again. Often their family members had been tortured and killed. Their Major had served as "a servant in  a German prison farm" where he fortunately escaped with the help of the Jewish Underground who took him from Poland" by way of Czechoslovakia and Hungary  (124-128). In another section, the author talks about the Canadian forces breaking through the Gothic Line in the Apennines (130-131), the demolished villagers decimated by German bombs to clear the way for them to see the Allied Forces approach,  the deadly mines everywhere and the bulldozers busily clearing  the land for the soldiers to move onward, and the "concealed concrete machine-gun pillboxes" which  dominated  and destroyed all opposition in sight.  She mentioned a padre who lost both legs assisting other wounded soldiers, and the bodies of soldiers covered with paper along the roadside (130-133). Finally, Gellhorn talked about how many nationalities came together to fight Nazi aggression, how Polish, Canadian, South African, Indian, New Zealanders, English, Scottish, and Irish combined  in the Eighth Army to create that unified march over the mountains in their quest for freedom (133). Shecelebrated Christmas  with soldiers at Bastogne and Warnach near the site of the Battle of the Bulge, about which she says, ""You have seen Bastogne and a thousand other Bastognes in the  newsreels. These dead towns are villages spread over Europe and one forgets the human misery and fear and despair that the cracked and caved-in buildings represent. Bastogne was a German job of death and destruction"  (145-146). She also visited a little Dutch town named Nijmegen in Holland that had been virtually destroyed by the Germans. Nearby twelve hundred Jews were kept in a concentration camp then ordered to to gas chambers (142). Gellhorn described a little girl of four who "had both of her arms broken by shell fragments, and a shell fragment had been cut out of her side and another from her head." The author says "All you could see was a tiny soft face with enormous dark eyes looking at you"(143-144). Her thin body was like that of most of the children there who suffered from starvation (144). Gellhorn talked about the Battle of the Bulge (145-152), a discussion with the Russians  near Elbe in 1945 who by this time were fighting for an Allied victory (171-178), and  Dachau, where a guide showed her the places the Germans performed unconscionable experiments on Jews, torturing  "aviators to see how long they could go without oxygen" (180-181) and others on pilots to "see how long they could survive when they were shot down over water, injected Jews with malaria, sterilized them, injected them with streptococci germs, subjected them to solitary confinement  in boxes, beat them, starved them, and sent them to the crematorium (182-183).  According to Gellhorn, "We sat there in that room, in that accursed cemetery prison, and no one had anything more to say. Still Dachau seemed to me the most suitable place in Europe to hear the news of victory. For surely this war was made to abolish Dachau, and all other places like Dachau, and everything that Dachau stood for, and to abolish it forever" (185). In essence, after spending a lifetime reporting the horrors of war, Martha Gellhorn reached the following conclusion: "I hold to the relay race theory of history: progress in human affairs depends on accepting, generation after generation, the individual duty to oppose the evils of the time. The evils of the time change but are never in short supply and would go unchallenged unless there were conscientious people to say: not if I can help it" (337). 

                                                                        Works Cited

Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Harcourt, Brace & Company,                        1979.

Gellhorn, Martha. The Face of War. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1988.