The Bitter Taste of Victory (5 page)

While Hemingway and his ‘Kraut’ were swapping war stories, Gellhorn returned to London, ‘to eat and sleep’. She was feeling frighteningly lonely as she took stock of the end of her marriage. The relationship with Hemingway had lasted seven years and Gellhorn had admired him for some time before that. In 1931 she had told a childhood sweetheart that she took her code from Hemingway’s
A Farewell to Arms
, where the hero tells his lover ‘You’re brave. Nothing ever happens to the brave.’ This was enough for her: ‘A whole philosophy – a banner – a song – and a love.’ Meeting Hemingway in 1936 and accompanying
him to Spain the following year brought just the shared bravery, the love and the song that she had longed for. But their hopes in Spain for a better world had been shattered and their years in Cuba had blunted the passion. Hemingway’s competitive anger and jealousy had exhausted her; marriage itself seemed fundamentally incompatible with spontaneous happiness.
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‘I can resign myself to anything on earth except dullness, and I do not want to be good,’ Gellhorn had told her friend Hortense Flexner in 1941; ‘Good is my idea of what very measly people are, since they cannot be anything better. I wish to be hell on wheels, or dead. And the only serious complaint I have about matrimony is that it brings out the faint goodness in me, and has a tendency to soften and quiet the hell on wheels aspect, and finally I become bored with myself. Only a fool would prefer to be actively achingly dangerously unhappy, rather than bored: and I am that class of fool.’

Gellhorn had always felt compelled to run away from the people she loved, restlessly seeking out new people and places or disappearing alone to write. In the same letter she told Flexner that she wanted ‘a life with people that is almost explosive in its excitement, fierce and hard and laughing and loud and gay as all hell let loose’ and the rest of the time she wanted to be alone to work and think ‘and let them kindly not come to call’. Marriage was not conducive to this kind of balance; she was now on her way to freeing herself from its snare.
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But if she was pleased to escape marriage, Gellhorn could still mourn those early, heady days of love, which she had looked back on nostalgically in a letter to Hemingway the previous June. Longing to be young and irresponsible together again, she begged her husband to give up the prestige and the possessions and return to Milan, with Hemingway brash in his motorcycle sidecar and Gellhorn ‘badly dressed, fierce, loving’. This was when they were intense, reckless and noisy, before marriage had polished off the edges and left their voices low and quiet. It was too late to return to Milan; both their love and the city itself had been smashed up by war. All that remained was for Gellhorn to regain her freedom and to seek out reckless intensity alone. And there was a danger that too much freedom would lead to a desolate rootlessness.
‘I am so free that the atom cannot be freer,’ she wrote to her friend Allen Grover; ‘I am free like nothing quite bearable, like sound waves and light.’
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In London, Gellhorn wrote a report of the battles she had witnessed in Italy. Published in
Collier’s
in October, it undermined the heroic accounts in Hemingway’s articles, suggesting that war, even when victorious, was too chaotic to be strategic and too costly to be triumphant: ‘A battle is a jigsaw puzzle of fighting men, bewildered, terrified civilians, noise, smells, jokes, pain, fear, unfinished conversations and high explosive.’ Gellhorn mocked later historians who would neatly catalogue the campaign, noting that in 365 days of fighting the Allied armies advanced 315 miles. They would be able to explain without sadness what it meant to break through three fortified lines, they would describe impassively how Italy had become a giant mine, but they would fail to capture the essence of the battle. She ended the piece on a caustic note. ‘The weather is lovely and no one wants to think of what men must still die and what men must still be wounded in the fighting before peace comes.’
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London had provided Gellhorn with the food and rest she sought but she was soon anxious to return to the jigsaw of fighting men and to follow Hemingway into Germany. The relative ordinariness of London life made her aware of her own homelessness. She told her mother that she wanted to return home but aged thirty-six she still had no home to go to. ‘Home is something you make yourself and I have not made one.’ Still lonely, Gellhorn made her way back to France where she informed readers of
Collier’s
that the wounds of Paris (prisons, torture chambers, unmarked graves) would never heal. Published in the same issue as an article by Hemingway extolling the friendliness of the American GIs, Gellhorn’s piece describes the red-hot hooks in the prison at Romainville and the cemetery where Germans brought in the bodies of dead prisoners in trucks. ‘It is impossible to write properly of such monstrous and incredible and bestial cruelty: you will find it impossible to believe such things exist.’ Before the war started Gellhorn had told a friend that she felt her role in life was to ‘make an angry sound against injustice’, paying back for her own good luck by defending the
unlucky. The unlucky were now proliferating and Gellhorn’s anger was becoming uncontainable.
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She left Paris and wandered to the Ardennes, installing herself in a farmhouse in Sissonne where part of the US army was based, training and regrouping between attacks. One day a group of soldiers came across her and demanded to see her papers. Finding that she was not officially accredited to be in a war zone, they led her to the tent of General James M. Gavin, who was the leader of the elite 82nd Airborne Division.

At thirty-seven, Gavin was the youngest divisional commander in the US army. He was tall, boyish and charming, with the looks of a Hollywood hero. He carried a rifle instead of a pistol, wanting to shoot accurately and far, and was renowned for always fighting on the front line beside his men. He also exuded the confidence of swift youthful success. At the start of the war the 82nd had been under Bradley’s command and Gavin (then a colonel) was assigned as the commanding officer of its new Parachute Infantry Regiment, as part of a general move towards airborne warfare. He was so successful in aiding the Allied encroachment into Sicily that he was entrusted with three airborne regiments for the Normandy landings. In August, Gavin had been promoted to general and put in charge of the entire 82nd Airborne Division, who were chosen to capture two bridges in Holland in September to enable Allied troops to cross the Lower Rhine and encircle German forces defending the frontier.

Now, Gavin and his division were waiting for their next instructions in the relative safety of Sissonne. He was inclined to behave leniently toward this beautiful intruder. He told Gellhorn that he would let her go unnoticed and asked her for the name of her hotel in Paris, planning to look her up when next on leave. Shortly afterwards, he tracked her down at the Hôtel Lincoln. More used to commanding troops than seducing women, Gavin was peremptory. Gellhorn disliked being summoned ‘like a package and pushed into bed’, but she succumbed none the less and the results were electrifying. Afterwards she wrote that he had taught her ‘what I had guessed, read about, been told about; but did not believe; that bodies are something terrific’.
This was the first sexually satisfying relationship of her life. She later described sex with Hemingway as ‘wham bam thank you maam’ without the ‘thank you’.
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Gavin, like Gellhorn, was married, with a wife and child waiting for him in America, but he too was determined to live riskily and intensely in the continuous present of war. Later in November he was posted to the liberated area of Holland, instructed to retain order in the towns he had helped to destroy, and he invited Gellhorn to accompany him. The consequence was a triumphant paean to the 82nd Airborne Division, published in
Collier’s
in December. Regular readers may have wondered what had changed since Gellhorn’s report on the Italian front a month earlier; war was no longer quite as miserable as it had looked then. The article begins with Gellhorn informing her readers that the troops of the 82nd ‘look like tough boys and they are’. They are good at their trade and they walk as if they know it and it is a pleasure to watch them: ‘You are always happy with fine combat troops because in a way no people are as intensely alive as they are . . . You do not think much about what war costs because you are too busy being alive for the day, too busy laughing and listening and looking.’
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Gellhorn and Gavin quickly began to fight about the methods of war. She could not forget the costs of conflict for long and she complained in
Collier’s
later in December about the death of the Dutch town of Nijmegen, ravaged in part by Gavin’s division. Although she announced dutifully at the start of the article that the moral of the story was that ‘it would be a fine thing if the Germans did not make war’, she described the destruction in too much detail for the reader to remain oblivious of the perpetrators of this particular carnage. The piece ends with a portrait of a little girl of four, her arms both broken by shell fragments and her head gashed: ‘All you could see was a tiny soft face, with enormous dark eyes, utterly silent eyes looking at you.’
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By December 1944 Gellhorn was back in Paris, where she once again crossed paths with Hemingway, who returned from his second sojourn in Germany on 5 December. For three weeks he had been reporting on the experiences of Lanham’s division in the savage battle of Hürtgen Forest. This campaign in the dense conifer woodland between Bonn
and Aachen had begun in mid-September and was initially expected to last a few weeks. The Allies intended to clear a wide pathway through fifty square miles of forest to provide entry into Germany. However, the terrain was ferociously inhospitable; the Germans had prepared the forest with mines and barbed wire which were now hidden by the mud and snow. The battle was already two months in by the time Hemingway arrived on 15 November and showed no sign of coming to a close. In three days in mid-November, Lanham’s 22nd Infantry Regiment incurred more than 300 casualties, including all three battalion commanders and about half the company commanders. By the time that this stage of the battle ended in mid-December, 24,000 Americans had been killed, wounded, captured or were missing.

This was a much bleaker experience than Hemingway’s summer campaigns. He was in Germany once again but without the excitement of being the first to break through the Siegfried Line. His overwhelming experience was of mud, rain and shells. The consolations were the camaraderie of army life – Hemingway entertained Lanham in the evenings with impressions of the mating antics of African lions – and the possibilities for hunting. He might now be forbidden to bear arms against the Germans but it did not stop him shooting deer and cows.

Hemingway returned to Paris with pneumonia, but after a couple of weeks in bed he followed Lanham’s division to Rodenbourg (ten miles north-east of Luxembourg City) where they invited Gellhorn to spend Christmas with them. Her visit was a disaster. Lanham instantly disliked Hemingway’s wife, finding her distant and ungrateful. Gellhorn felt embarrassed and powerless surrounded by her husband’s war cronies, though she fared better at dinner with General Bradley, who was ‘much smitten’ with this enticing war correspondent whom his aide described in his diary that night as ‘a reddish blonde woman with a cover girl figure, a bouncing manner and a brilliant studied wit where each comment seems to come out perfectly tailored and smartly cut to fit the occasion, yet losing none of the spontaneity that makes it good’.

Meeting Gellhorn for the first time at a party on New Year’s Eve, Hemingway’s friend Bill Walton was impressed by ‘her elegant hair, the tawny-gold colour’ and by her bearing – ‘like that of a fine race
horse’ – and was horrified by Hemingway’s rudeness to her. Chided by his friend for his boorish behaviour, Hemingway retorted that ‘you can’t hunt an elephant with a bow and arrow’.
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For both Gellhorn and Hemingway, this trip signified the end of the marriage. ‘I wasn’t meant for every day consumption,’ Gellhorn had told a lover twelve years earlier, ‘you’ll have to think of me as oysters – you wouldn’t want oysters everyday for breakfast?’ Hemingway was not meant for daily consumption either; shared everyday life had become impossible for them. Afterwards he told his son that they were going to divorce and he was planning to take Mary Welsh home to Cuba: ‘We want some straight work, not be alone and not have to go to war to see one’s wife . . . Going to get me somebody who wants to stick around with me and let me be the writer of the family.’ Ernest Hemingway wanted no more part in the war and had lost interest in following the army into Germany; he would leave Martha Gellhorn to see the ruined cities without him.
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2

‘Nazi Germany is doomed’

Advance into Germany: January–April 1945

Nineteen forty-five began depressingly for the Allies. The European war, which had looked as if it might be coming to an end the previous summer, threatened to drag on for several months. On 16 December 1944 the Germans had launched a counterattack in the Ardennes that was initially surprisingly successful. Two days into the battle General James Gavin’s 82nd Airborne Division was summoned to help stop the German advance to the River Meuse. By Christmas the 82nd was on the attack, but many of the surrounding troops were still fighting defensively and it took until 25 January to force the Germans back to their starting point.

Throughout Europe, German casualties were multiplying staggeringly. In the East, the Soviet army had launched the greatest offensive of the war in Poland, gaining the ground from the Vistula to the Oder in only a couple of weeks. By the end of the month they were forty miles from Berlin. During the course of January, 450,000 German soldiers were killed; this was more than the total number of British or American soldiers killed in all theatres during the entire war. At this stage, about 250,000 Germans from East Prussia fled the advancing Red Army, beginning to trek toward the Oder and into central Germany. But none of this deterred Hitler, who insisted that the country continue to commit itself to the fight, sending in seventeen-year-old recruits with barely any training.
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