Martha Gellhorn — Portrait of a Writer
By: Steve Newman Writer
Tags: History, Books, Biography, Writers Life, Literature

Martha Gellhorn — Portrait of a Writer

Martha. Image: theheroincollective.com

On August 25th 1944, Martha Gellhorn was sitting on a beach overlooking the Adriatic reading Lawrence’s Women In Love, drinking rum and watching a young Allied airman float down to Earth hanging from the tentacles of his parachute.

She wondered how many more young men must die before this bloody war was over.

As Martha flicked over the page, unable to concentrate as the airman came ever closer to earth, she came across this passage:

Whatever life might be, it could not take away death, the inhuman transcendent death. Oh, let us ask no question of it, what it is or is not. To know is human, and in death we do not know, we are not human. And the joy of this compensates for all the bitterness of knowledge and the sordidness of our humanity. In death we shall not be human, and we shall not know. The promise of this is our heritage, we look forward like heirs to their majority…

Martha was struck by the very correctness of it, by the way it went right to her very soul, and illuminated all she had been feeling ever since she knew she had to break away from Ernest, even though she also knew that would leave a huge hole in her life in her very heart. But there was nothing she could do, not any more. If she didn’t move on, move away, he’d kill her, oh, not physically, as if he’d put a knife into her throat, but bit by steady bit, as if he were to cut a portion away from her each day until she was gone. Lawrence knew a thing or two, she reasoned. The only writer who was both a giver of freedom, and a taker away, as Frieda soon realised when he gave her the freedom to love as she wished to be loved — by him of course — and not in the stuffy Nottingham way of her stuffy Nottingham university lecturer husband. But then, having given Frieda her freedom, her sexual freedom to be loved by a young man so bound up with himself as to be almost inhuman in his demands, he also, once they had run away from Nottingham to her mother in Germany, forbade her ever to communicate with her children, children he’d grown to love. That was the price of Lawrence’s love for Frieda, a complete and utter commitment to him. Frieda didn’t obey of course , not ever, not once, but kept in touch with her children, the odd half an hour here, a brief embrace there; and had Lawrence known he might, in his tubercular frenzy, have lashed out. But Martha felt, as she read that passage again and again, that he probably would have, that the anger within him, the anger put there by the bitterness his coal mining father breathed every day of his bitter black coal dust life, a bitterness aimed at his wife, who, as a teacher, thought herself better than her husband, and something she instilled into her son: the hatred of his father that stayed with him all his life, culminating in a fear of women, not least Jessie his first love which turned itself into a dreadful outrageous anger, and a dreadful outrageous sexual energy that was almost unbearable, which made him so compelling, especially to readers who had never, ever, come across such seeming empathy in a writer before, without realising it was an empathy built out of bitterness, and that fear, and the denial of love, and the accumulation of an unconsummated love that his father had denied him, and his mother who constantly reminded him of her love.

Martha felt all this as the Allied airman, a young American by his uniform fell with a slow silence just a few yards behind her at the edge of the beach as if it was the most ordinary occurrence of any day of the week, which it was. Martha did not move, just looked out to sea, and cried like she had never, in her entire life apart from the time when she had her first abortion, cried before, her sobs shaking the very sand beneath her like the explosions of artillery shells she had come so used to hearing in the last few months and years. It could not go on this life she was leading, somehow she had to find something, someone. Martha flicked through the book and found another passage, this time a reflection, literally, by Gerald, but it could as easily have been by Ernest:

But now he had succeeded — he had finally succeeded. And once or twice lately, when he was alone in the evening and had nothing to do, he had suddenly stood up in terror, not knowing what he was. And he went to the mirror and looked long and closely at his own face, at his own eyes, seeking for something. He was afraid, in mortal dry fear, but he knew not what of. He looked at his own face. There it was, shapely and healthy, and the same as ever, yet somehow it was not real, it was a mask. He dared not touch it…

Martha screamed at the almost empty beach and the almost empty sky apart from a couple of specks of aircraft in the distance heading back to somewhere, she no longer cared where. She screamed again, this time screaming the name of Ernest. A solitary seagull, standing at the water’s edge, turned and looked at her, then loftily and slowly took off, also in search of something: a mate, or food, or a seagull war.

As Martha sat on that Adriatic beach, with the young American airman dead behind her, and as General Leclerc and Hemingway were liberating Paris Martha decided, as if Lawrence had suddenly freed her, or pinned her down, to head back to Paris.

But before she did she covered the airman in sand, and placed a marker, the Lawrence book, at his head, under a large stone and headed back toward an American airfield just over the rise of the sand dunes.

She soon hitched a ride on a military plane heading for Lyon where she befriended a couple of American intelligence officers heading for Paris in a Jeep. Half way there the Jeep careered off the road to avoid a stray dog, ending up in a ditch. Martha broke a rib, and was badly bruised, But after righting the Jeep they continued, and finally arrived in Paris in the early hours of the morning. She found Hemingway in the long chrome bar of the Ritz Hotel.

“ How are you, Ernest?

“ Fine, as you can see, as if you cared.”

“ If I said I do care you would not believe me.”

“ No.”

“ How are you anyway?”

“ Tired.”

“ Me too.”

“ Martha?”

“ Don’t say it.”

“ No.”

Martha booked herself into the Lincoln Hotel just a short distance from the Ritz, undressed painfully, got into bed and fell asleep.

Ernest Hemingway made his way back to his room and Mary Welsh.

Although Martha Gellhorn walked past the same tanks as Hemingway, and the same artillery pieces, trucks and soldiers, in that late summer Paris of 1944, she also noticed one or two other things, things that always make her reports refreshingly, humanly, disarmingly, different: the beautiful women, and their beautiful clothes, and their beautiful hair and make-up, as if the war were in some other place, on another planet. She also noticed an old lady, wearing a lace cap, sitting on a pavement, not far from the Ritz hotel, eating breadcrumbs off a cloth spread across her knees as, just a few metres away those beautiful women bought even more beautiful clothes and make-up from the shops that still, somehow, managed to find stock. New clothes, lipstick and mascara there may have been, but because of the shortage of leather there were no new shoes, and Martha noted that those same beautiful women “clattered about the streets” on platform soles made from wood.

Caroline Moorehead, Gellhorn’s biographer, describes how:

“…there had been hunger, and drabness and cold, but no starvation, and no severe bombing, but there was hunger now, and cold, the black market having largely disappeared with the Germans, and there was little coal or gas about. In restaurants, you could see Parisians in their overcoats dining on carrot and turnip soup.” Unless of course, like Hemingway, you were staying at the Ritz, where supplies were still plentiful, at a price.”

But Martha stayed away from such places as the Ritz, if she could, which was not easy if you were looking for a good story, or the low down on the next offensive, or whatever. She also tried to stay away from Hemingway, but he was not a man used to being ignored by his women, and it soon became obvious to Martha, from the stories and rumours that filtered back to her, that he was making it clear he had left her, that he was the one who had had enough, and that he hated, as he wrote to his son Patrick, “…to lose anyone who can look so lovely and who we taught to shoot and write so well.”

Hemingway as ever took the credit for making Gellhorn whatever Hemingway thought Gellhorn had become in professional terms, but was absolutely taking no credit for the failure of their marriage. In the same letter to his son, who was in a private school in the States, Hemingway goes on to write, in his peculiarly clunky letter writing style, that he has “…torn up my tickets on her and would be glad never to see her again.”

Martha walked the streets of Paris she remembered from the 1930s, trying to find some of the French writers she had known in those heady years before war came, only to discover that most of them had favoured an alliance between France and Germany in the 1930s, most especially the actor and playwright, Sacha Guitry, the journalist, Jean Luchaire, and Robert Brasillach the editor of the pro-Nazi paper, Je Suis Partout, who was the only one of those three to eventually be executed, with the others about to be put on trial, in fact they were already being found guilty by many leading French intellectuals of the time, including the poet Paul Valary (who died less than a year later), and the novelist Francois Mauriac, who both seemed to take an enormous pleasure in persecuting his fellow writers, as if they themselves had not wavered and wobbled just ever so slightly in the nervous 1930s. Martha also discovered that other, better known writers, such as Gide, and Henri de Montherlant, who were considered to be “passive” collaborators, were either in hiding abroad, or lying low somewhere in the French countryside waiting for things to get back to normal. Their fame too, as with Hemingway’s and Joyce’s old friend Ezra Pound, also helped ensure they were not brought to trial.

But Martha also discovered that fame, or notoriety, did not shield all of her old friends. Even the novelist Collette, who had unwisely written for the collaborationist paper, Le Petit Parisien, and whose husband was Jewish, was briefly arrested and given a rough interrogation by a police force that had itself been collaborationist. The singer Arletty was also arrested, as was the designer and cosmetic house creator, Coco Chanel, who lived at the Ritz Hotel throughout the war taking many German lovers. Martha was appalled at the double standards being shown by many Frenchmen and women who were now saying they had been fully signed-up members of the French Resistance.

For a while Martha kicked around the bookstalls above the Seine, buying two copies of Hemingway’s work, translated into a French that was almost unreadable, which she then ceremoniously threw into the river. She found no copies of her own work.

She wandered the streets of the Latin Quarter, eventually finding a small cafe where she sat outside and sipped from a large glass of red wine that was beautifully gentle on the tongue and the throat, and ate strong cheese, which seemed to be the only food available, and read again from a copy of Lawrence’s Women In Love she’d bought at the same book stall, and marvelled how that most unlikely of writers was so able to bring such characters as Gudrun and Ursula, Gerald and Birkin, to life, creating such feelings of despair, and of something just out of reach, yet still mockingly visible:

She saw a shadow moving by the water. It would be Birkin. He had come back then, unaware. She accepted it without remark, nothing mattered to her. She sat down among the roots of the alder tree, dim and veiled, hearing the sound of the sluice like dew distilling audibly into the night. The islands were dark and half revealed, the reeds were dark also, only some of them had a little frail fire reflection. A fish leaped secretly, revealing the light in the pond. This fire of the chill night breaking constantly on the pure darkness, repelled her. She wished it was perfectly dark, perfectly, and noiseless and without emotion. Birkin, small and dark also, his hair ringed with moonlight, wandered nearer. He was quite near, and yet he did not exist in her. He did not know she was there…

Martha, feeling a presence, looked up to see the waiter standing in front of her.

“ Plus vine, madam?”

“ Hmm? Oui, merci.”

The waiter poured more wine, refilled the little dish with more cheese, bowed and retreated, and as he did so Martha heard some distant machine-gun fire, and then all was silent, except for a radio, somewhere inside the cafe, playing Sidney Bechet: a mournful, growly piece on the soprano saxophone which Martha found hard to recognise, until Bechet suddenly, almost like a conjuror, slipped back into the familiar melody of George Gershwin’s ‘Summertime’. Martha smiled at the man’s playing, at his ability to take something so familiar as a tune like ‘Summertime’, which everyone felt they knew, almost owned, and turn it into something else entirely. It was what Lawrence was doing in Women In Love, Martha thought, taking the familiar, and by the use of words, and repetition, disguise it, mix it up, and mix up the readers emotions. It’s what Hemingway had done when he met Martha.

In 1935 Martha Gellhorn had published, to great acclaim, her book about unemployment in America, The Trouble I’ve Seen, a book that was to make her name. Martha’s style was described by the columnist Lewis Gannett — whose column was syndicated across the US — as writing that “…burns. Hemingway does not write more authentic American speech. Nor can Ernest Hemingway teach Martha Gellhorn anything about economy of language.”

Image: modernfirsteditions.com

It was a best seller in the making, and after a hectic round of book promotions across the States Martha suggested to her mother and her brother Alfred that they all go on a Christmas vacation to Key West. This they did, and after a tiring bus ride from Miami, and feeling rather stranded in a quiet backwater that was Key West back in the ’30s (which smelled of fish, and not much else), Martha’s mother suggested they all take a drink in a bar across the road from the bus stop called Sloppy Joe’s.

The now famous watering hole wasn’t particularly busy that day, and after ordering three beers, Edna Gellhorn asked Martha if the large rather scruffy and rather dirty man sitting at the end of the wooden bar reading his mail was Ernest Hemingway? Martha said she didn’t know. But she couldn’t take her eyes of the man she knew was the famous novelist.

Martha drank her wine and finished the cheese, thanked the waiter and quietly nodded her thanks to Sidney Bechet on the radio who was still living in New York, gigging and running his dry cleaning business, who’d soon be living in Paris where he’d spend the rest of his life.

She lit a cigarette and walked back toward the river. And was it only a couple of months since D-Day she thought?

Early on the 6th of June, 1944, D-Day, the thirty-six year old Martha, who was still an unaccredited war correspondent had managed to get aboard the first hospital ship to sail with the invasion fleet. It was to be two exhausting and bloody days where she nevertheless used her medical experience disguised as a nurse to tend wounded US and German troops, and bag one of the greatest stories of D-Day. When she got back to the UK she was arrested and locked up in a detention centre, from which she escaped and blagged a lift with an airman she knew to Italy, where she joined a rather peculiar outfit called the Carpathian Lancers.

In 1959 Martha’s collection of wartime dispatches were published:

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.

The Carpathian Lancers were a Polish Corps nominally with the British Eighth Army but, in many ways, were their own men. All had escaped Poland via the Carpathian Mountains and by circuitous and dangerous routes to England, eager to become part of the British Army. They were as eagerly accepted. Martha continues:

They had come a long way from Poland…they had been gone from their country for almost five years. For three and a half years this cavalry regiment, which was formed in Syria, fought in the Middle East and the Western Desert. They changed from horses to armoured cars in Egypt and they fought wonderfully at Tobruk and El Alamein. They had sweltered in Iraq, and it was the Polish Corps, with this armored regiment fighting in it as infantry, that finally took Cassino in May. In June they started their great drive up the Adriatic, and the prize, Ancona…

Martha goes on to write that those Polish soldiers fought every mile of the way just to get home, but as realists they knew that home was either going to be under the heel of either the Germans, but more likely the Russians, with Martha arguing that Russia might be as great in peace and they were being in war. She was right to hope for that, but how wrong she proved to be.

After leaving the Carpathian Lancers in September 1944, Martha embedded herself with a Canadian regiment (she had her correspondents papers now) and followed their progress north toward the so-called Gothic Line that separated Italy from Nazi territory. It was a hard won fight, but she reminds us that the allies, in just one year, cleared Italy of a well dug in German Army.

Then, after sitting on that beach overlooking the Adriatic, Martha headed west to Paris, and by October of 1944 found herself in the little Dutch town of Nijmegen at the height of Operation Market Garden, one of the bloodiest campaigns of WWII, during which she would meet, and fall in love with, Major General James Gavin, the commander of the 82nd Airborne.

It was to be an intense relationship during a period of some of the most intense fighting of the war.

They talked of marriage and children.

In early 1945 Martha bought a small house in South Eaton Place, London. But no sooner had she moved in than she found herself heading back to Germany after the news that the Soviet Army had discovered, in Poland, on the 27th of January 1945, the Nazi concentration camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau.

As Martha travelled further and further into Germany she met thousands of refugees heading out, many of whom had themselves been inmates of concentration camps. They began to tell Martha of the horrors.

The US 7th Army reached Dachau on April 29th, 1945, finding over 3,000 prisoners murdered by the Germans before they fled, with some 33,000 prisoners remaining, some of whom had been in the camp for nearly twelve years. Dachau had been Hitler’s model SS camp, which had been set-up in 1933. In the words of Caroline Moorehead, Martha’s biographer, it was a camp…

“…to hold people in ‘protective custody’, [Hitler’s] euphemism for political prisoners. Leon Blum, the former French President, had been in Dachau, and Stalin’s son Jacob, and the Protestant priest, Martin Niemeller. Dachau was where Martha’s German friends in the International Brigade in Spain had been tortured. In her [Martha’s] wanderings around Germany, seeing for herself the legacy and the victims of Nazi rule, Dachau had become, for her, its symbol, something to hate with a ‘single-hearted passion.’’

When allied troops first encountered the ordinary German civilian they were surprised how very much like themselves they were: clean, hard working, and outwardly civilised. Only when the Allied Armies penetrated deeper into Germany did their attitudes change.

A couple of weeks before the US 7th liberated Dachau the US 3rd Armoured Division arrived in Nordhausen in central Germany. Captain Belton Cooper was at the head of the advance guard of the Division as they worked their way into the town when suddenly:

“…a strange apparition emerged from the side of one of the buildings. A tall frail-looking creature with striped pants and naked from the waist up. It appeared to be a human skeleton with little signs of flesh, if any. The skin appeared to be like a translucent plastic stretched over the rib cage and sucked with a powerful vacuum until it impinged to the backbone in the rear. I could not tell whether it was male or female. There was no face, merely a gaunt human skull staring out. The teeth were exposed in a broad grin and in place of eyes were merely dark sockets. I did not see how it was humanly possible for this pathetic creature to have enough strength to walk. As we proceeded down the road, we encountered more and more of these gaunt figures standing or sitting but most of them were sprawled on the road where they had collapsed. In their last struggle to survive, they had attempted to walk as far away from their tormentors as possible.”

I have quoted from Captain Cooper’s account — used by Stephen E. Ambrose in his splendid book, Citizen Soldiers — because it encapsulates so simply the utter shock of those first encounters with concentration camp survivors that were, by the spring of 1945, taking place all over Germany, Poland, and beyond.

A couple of days after the above description the British liberated Belsen (a young officer, the British actor Dirk Bogarde was there), and the American broadcaster and journalist, Ed Murrow, went into Buchenwald, ironically just north of Weimar, the town that gave Germany its culture, and its first democratic government after the First World War. A few days later Murrow gave a radio broadcast on CBS, where he said:

“ I pray you to believe what I have said about Buchenwald. I have reported what I saw, but only part of it. For most of it I have no words. If I have offended you by this rather mild account of Buchenwald, I’m not in the least sorry. I was there.”

When Martha returned to France on a C-47 (Dakota) with French POWs rescued from Dachau, all they could say to her was that no one would believe them, “ but we’ve got to talk about it.”

Marguerite Higgins, of the New York Herald Tribune, wrote that:

“…the liberation [of Dachau] was a frenzied scene. Inmates of the camp hugged and embraced the American troops, kissed the ground before them and [unbelievably] carried them shoulder high around the place.”

The liberation of the concentration camps was a defining moment in world history. Never before had anyone in modern times been witness to such horrors on such a huge scale. Once confronted by these horrors those allied troops involved would never again believe that the ordinary German civilian was a civilised human being. From the moment the concentration camp gates were thrown open the liberators began to realise that huge numbers of the German civil population were complicit in the murder of millions of Jews, gypsies, homosexuals, and God alone knows how many others.

Martha Gellhorn — who was part Jewish — knew, and responded to this complicity with an anger she retained for the rest of her life.

Martha’s own account of the time she spent at Dachau is harrowing, and precise and I would like, with her posthumous permission, to quote from her article for Collier’s Weekly:

“ Behind the barbed wire and electric fence, the skeletons sat in the sun and searched themselves for lice. They have no age and no faces; they all look alike and like nothing you will ever see if you are lucky. We crossed the wide, crowded, dusty compound between the prison barracks and went to the hospital. In the hall sat more of the skeletons, and from them came the smell of disease and death. They watched us but did not move; no expression shows on a face that is only yellowish, stubbly skin, stretched across bone. What had been a man dragged himself into the doctor’s office; he was a Pole and he was about six feet tall and he weighed less than a hundred pounds and he wore a striped prison shirt, a pair of unlaced boots, and a blanket which he tried to hold around his legs. His eyes were large and strange and stood out from his face, and his jawbone seemed to be cutting through his skin. He had come to Dachau from Buchenwald on the last death transport. There were fifty boxcars of his dead travelling companions still on the siding outside the camp, and for the last three days the American Army had forced Dachau civilians to bury these dead.”

There is a silent yet terrible anger in Martha’s article and the only way she can cope with what she is seeing is to try and describe the inmates of Dachau as if they were another species, which in many ways they had become, instead of fellow human beings who have had their humanity taken away from them. To have taken their broken humanity on board would have meant total emotional breakdown, which would not have helped the survivors at all, in fact it would have done them a huge disservice. These people had been through a Hell on Earth and the last thing they wanted was a tearful soldier, or reporter saying how awful it must have been. These survivors wanted to see strength and compassion where they had only seen death, hatred, and brutality. They were in no state to comfort their liberators, they had barely enough strength to retain what little dignity they possessed, especially when they saw the thousands who didn’t survive bulldozed into mass graves. The German guards may have gone but the dreadful indignities still went on. If anyone had the right to shed tears it was them, no one else. How could it be otherwise? Martha’s article is a powerful, heart-rending description made even more so by her surface detachment. It told the folks back home what they had feared might be happening, and hoped was not. It told the tale in a brutal, straightforward way as if she were witnessing a political rally. Martha’s article goes on:

“This man had survived; he was found under a pile of dead. Now he stood on the bones that were his legs and talked and suddenly he wept. ‘Everyone is dead’, he said, and the face that was not a face twisted with pain or sorrow or horror. ‘No one is left. Everyone is dead. I cannot help myself. Here I am and I am finished and cannot help myself. Everyone is dead.’”

Martha goes on to describe how the Polish doctor, who had himself been a prisoner at the camp for nearly five years, told the man that he would be okay, that in three or four weeks he would be a young man again. Martha also describes how the doctor had had to stand by and watch what was happening in the camp knowing he could do nothing about it. The Polish doctor also explained to Martha that German doctors and scientists had experimented on the inmates. One experiment was to find out how high a flyer could go without oxygen. So, having put an inmate into a closed car they gradually withdrew all the oxygen. The Polish doctor explained to Martha that it was a slow death, about fifteen minutes, and a ‘hard death’ and proved that no one could live above 36,000 feet without oxygen. Martha writes that the Polish doctor explained that the Germans did not kill too many inmates in this experiment, only about eight hundred or so.

Martha’s article is long and unforgiving in its detail, and at no point does she make judgements, or comment upon man’s brutality to man. It is a simple laying out of the facts. But as I’ve said there is an underlying anger that must have twisted Martha’s insides into a million knots, and like those POWs returning on that C-47 she needed to talk to someone about it, to shed tears in private. There could only be one person for her to talk to, General James Gavin. But it would be another couple of months before she found him again.

In the meantime, as if addicted, Martha visited Belsen and watched as the Allied troops buried tens of thousands of bodies, occasionally finding someone alive but too far gone to help. She saw the first women prisoners come back from Ravensbruck, “ shrunken and dressed like scarecrows, with grey-green skin and the sorrowing eyes of people who had almost died.”

She visited over fifty German cities, all of them in ruins, and she talked to people who had no gas or electric or jobs or medicines or food but who had not been in the concentration camps and she felt no pity for them, not then, not ever.

Martha spent VE day in Paris wandering the streets looking for Gavin, but she didn’t find him. Instead she bumped into an old friend and went back to his hotel and lay in his arms and cried her heart out and told him about Dachau and that nothing would ever wipe that cruelty from her mind. And as she cried and those survivors of the camps slowly recovered their strength, the French couture houses were already planning their new collections with over three million French men and women still missing.

In August 1945 Gavin was given command of the American forces in Berlin, and in early September Martha joined him. If only he’d been in Paris on VE day so they could have talked more about marriage, about the future.

After the war, and after a third marriage which, like her marriage to Hemingway, also ended in divorce, Martha eventually, in 1970, settled in a flat in Cadogan Square, London, with her adopted son, George Alexander.

In the preceding years she had covered more wars, including Vietnam.

Some time later she also bought a small cottage in Wales where she’d spend a good deal of time, but sadly poor eyesight put an end to her writing, but not her drinking and smoking (and a little eating)and the many gatherings of friends at Cadogan Square, and as Caroline Moorehead has written:

“ Martha liked people who shaped their own lives, who, like her, travelled to look and ask and carry back what they had seen…[and] relied on the ‘chaps’ to bring her the news she had once gathered herself, to report from the war fronts, both real and emotional…”

Martha Gellhorn was born in St Louis in 1908, to a family of ‘talkers’, with the children expected to recount their day during the evening meal. Martha’s father George was a doctor specialising in gynaecology, and a man who would pay his children a penny if they could make him laugh. Martha’s mother, Edna Gellhorn, was a suffragette and social reformer. From her father Martha gleaned a good deal of medical knowledge, plus a grounding in the German language, which came in very handy during her European travels in the 1930s. Both of Martha’s parents were half-Jewish. Martha’s later education was at Bryn Mawr.

Martha died in London in 1998.

Read about Martha’s experiences during the Spanish Civil War

Read: Martha Gellhorn — The Hospital Ship

Read: Martha Gellhorn & Major General James Gavin — A Love Story of WWII

Image: newsouthbooks.com.au

Although based on fact I have used some creative licence. I must also acknowledge Caroline Moorehead’s 2003 biography, Martha Gellhorn — A Life, plus many volumes about Paris during WWII, not least Andrew Roberts’ The Storm of War, published in 2009 by Allen Lane, and Carlos Baker’s definitive biography of Ernest Hemingway, and the works of D.H. Lawrence, and, not least Bernice Kert’s — The Hemingway Women (W.W. Norton & Company, New York and London, 1983)