The Women who Wrote the War

by Nancy Cladwell Sorel

  French had been a staple at both the John Burroughs School and Bryn Mawr, and in Paris all Gellhorn’s friends were French. With a delegation of male students from the Sorbonne, she went to Germany at the invitation of the young National Socialists, but found she could not take them seriously. Intellectually they were ridiculous, and she could imagine her father’s scorn. When she returned the following year with a new friend, the titled (and married) French journalist Bertrand de Jouvenel, she revised this assessment. Stepson (and once lover) of the novelist Colette, Jouvenel left his wife to travel about with Gellhorn, two idealists united in struggle for the pacifist cause. But it was no longer possible not to take the young Nazis seriously. The situation in Germany had become alarming.

  Jouvenel was strongly attracted to Gellhorn. Unlike the carefully sheltered young Frenchwomen of his station, she was as independent and opinionated as his stepmother, and at the same time young and beautiful. Both were cosmopolitan in outlook, had Jewish grandfathers on the mother’s side, and shared an active devotion to peace and international community. But before long their politics were diverging. Martha had a gift for outrage; in their travels about Germany, she found herself much more incensed over the anti-Semitism they witnessed than Jouvenel was. He worried about young Germans feeling rejected by their contemporaries, a concern she thought naive. It was not long before her lack of commitment to his version of the world extended to himself. Her plan that they move to Paris and bring up his little son together was put on hold, and when she returned home in the fall of 1934, she went alone. She was twenty-six, she had completed her first novel, and now with the backing of Eleanor Roosevelt, a longtime friend of her mother’s, she took a job as a field investigator with the Federal Emergency Relief Administration. The country was mired in the Depression; everywhere she found conditions appalling. The following year, at the invitation of both Roosevelts, she moved into the White House (austerely furnished then and lacking any security) and wrote a series of stories based on her field experience. The Trouble Tve Seen was published in 1936 to rave reviews. By then Gellhorn was back in Germany, acquiring background material for a new novel and observing the strutting storm troopers and frightened people with despair.

  After Christmas in Saint Louis that year, Martha, her mother, and a brother took a trip to Key West. They were sitting in a bar one afternoon when the town’s most notable resident, Ernest Hemingway, walked in. In her simple black dress, with her tawny blond hair and long legs, her easy, knowledgeable conversation sprinkled with expletives and punctuated by puffs on a cigarette, Martha was more interesting than anyone Hemingway had seen for a long while. During the ensuing days Ernest devoted much of his time to her, and she spent hours at the Hemingway home. The subject of Spain came up often. The war there was six months old and attracting writers supportive of the Loyalist cause. Gellhorn was determined to go, and in opposition to the wishes of his wife, Pauline, Hemingway decided to go as well. He signed a contract with the North American Newspaper Alliance (NANA) and sailed in February. For Martha, obtaining proper credentials was less easily managed, but a sympathetic editor at Collier’s dashed off a letter indicating her as a special correspondent for the magazine. Early in March 1937 she too set off for Spain.

  3

  Apprentices in Spain

  Spain was where they gave a war and everybody came. The Spanish Civil War served as an apprenticeship for several young American female journalists who thought that world war looked likely. It offered them opportunity to hone their skills, earn their credentials, test their nerve. Older women went too, for ideological reasons. For both the press and the military, the conflict served as a preliminary to the main event to come. Spain was where Italy tested her troops, Germany her arms, and Russia her technicians; where Britain and France experimented with indecision, and America with isolation.

  The war was especially irresistible to writers. W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender, George Orwell, and Rebecca West trooped down from England, Andre Malraux, Antoine de Saint-Exupery, and Simone Weil crossed the border from France, and from America came Ernest Hemingway and John Dos Passos. They believed that the fate of the Spanish Republic was fused with the fate not only of democracy but of art, literature, all that mattered most in life. To awake the world to that danger they were doubling as correspondents. But there were other reporters too, unknown to the world at large, sent by their home offices to cover the war. Reynolds and Eleanor Packard were among the latter.

  Eleanor Packard, United Press

  In fact, Eleanor Packard was catapulted into the thick of the war from its start. In the summer of 1936 General Franco, hiding out in the Canary Islands, was whisked back to Spain to lead his Nationalist army in a series of carefully coordinated uprisings. His success cut reporters in the capital off from the action. New reporters had to be sent at once to the areas of conflict, and UP turned to its trusty team, known to their friends as Pack and Peebee.

  Elean or Packard board ing an Italian observation plane in Ethi opia, 1936.

  UPI/CORBIS-BETTMANN

  Although in most husband-wife teams the man was dominant, no one ever thought of Eleanor as playing a subordinate role. She had grown up on a ranch in Yakima, Washington, and there was always a rough frontierswoman quality about her. After attending the Columbia School of Journalism, she embarked for Paris and began reporting for UP. At home UP banned women from its staff, but Stateside rules did not always prevail abroad. Eleanor met her husband in a bar when, it was said, he got into a fight and she floored his adversary. They were a big, lusty couple.

  After their marriage the Packards were posted to China, where the area to be covered was so vast that they worked independently, separated for weeks at a time. China was the testing ground of their marriage; it was in Peking that Reynolds became enamored of a Mongolian woman and, in a moment of passion, bit off her left nipple. The diplomatic consequences could be serious. Since the couple used the UP wires for private as well as business purposes, the scenario went public in daily communiques between Peking and Shanghai, with relays to New York and other locations that expressed interest. Eleanor charged up to Peking to save her husband and both their careers. Reparations of some sort were made, and the matter settled. The experience was a defining one, but far from damaging their marriage, it seemed to cement it. If a bargain was struck, they kept that, at least, to themselves.

  The Packards had been drawn together by lack of inhibition on both sides and a shared passion for the reporter’s life. Transferred to Egypt, they worked out of a station wagon in the desert. In the fall of 1935 they were on their way to Ethiopia when the Italian army invaded. By spring, with Emperor Haile Selassie’s army annihilated, the corps of reporters began an arduous five-day journey to General Pietro Badoglio’s new headquarters along a road literally being carved out of the mountainside. In time, the hardships would fade from her mind, but Eleanor always remembered the gallantries of the simple Italian soldiers. She was the only woman present and the only white woman they had seen in months, and never mind that she was bigger than any of them. They crowded around the car at any opportunity, ignoring Reynolds and offering her everything from wine to Ethiopian castrating knives. At night, when they camped, the soldiers would request permission to serenade la donna bianca, and then would come choruses of popular Italian songs and, when they ran out of those, regimental songs. One evening, their tent pitched beside a shallow river, the couple headed for what they thought was a secluded spot to cool off with a swim. “Coming out of a thicket,” Eleanor wrote later, “we suddenly found ourselves on the riverbank in front of some two hundred naked soldiers, standing knee-deep in the river, soaping themselves under the command of an Italian captain in uniform who stood on the opposite bank. More cries of donna bianca broke out. The captain quickly took charge of the situation and bellowed out a series of orders. ‘About face. March to shore. Don drawers. Return to your bathing.’ He then called to us, ‘I hope la signora now finds everything satisfactory and wil
l enjoy the water.’” After that Eleanor found the drive to Addis Ababa with General Badoglio in his Studebaker, meant to be a privilege, a real letdown.

  Now, only two months later, the hot copy had moved to Spain. Deplaning in Paris from a vacation in New York, the Packards found a cable instructing them to go directly to the French border town of Hendaye, on the far side of which was Nationalist-held Spain. Within three days they had crossed over, into the middle of a war.

  Frances Davis, London Daily Mail, Chicago Daily News

  Frances Davis also made the trip from Paris down to Hendaye. Davis was Packard’s physical opposite — small, slight of build, fine-featured— with few credentials but enormous verve. Reared in a Utopian community outside Boston, she was intent on taking on the “real” world. Catherine Coyne, who later reported the larger war, remembered her at Boston University in 1926-27 as “a pretty little journalism student bursting with enthusiasm.” Upon graduation she located an ex-foreign correspondent (unnamed), persuaded him to teach her all he knew, then applied to various papers and wire services for a European post. That effort failed. By chance one day in New York in the early 1930s, Davis met Dorothy Thompson, and over tea Thompson suggested she make up her own syndicate. Go out into the country and sell yourself to the little papers, Thompson told her. Although that was not easy in mid-Depression America, Davis managed to round up a dozen clients. With the last of her savings she bought a ticket for Paris where she could write her little columns and be available should any of the established papers need assistance.

  Davis’s entrance to the world of journalism, as a mail columnist for papers that could not afford to pay for cables, was a classic way for a clever woman to slip into a man’s world. Edgar Ansel Mowrer, now at the Paris office of the Chicago Daily News, introduced her around, and after the Spanish story broke, he advised her to pack her clothes, take the next train to Hendaye, and stay at the Imatz Hotel with the rest of the press. The Imatz was glutted with reporters, most of whom seemed to know each other. But Edmond Taylor of the Chicago Tribune, whom she had met in Paris, introduced her to John Elliott of the New York Herald Tribune, and when the two men shared information, they included her. Davis had no information to trade, but she proved her worth a few days later when, having crossed into Spain together, they were attempting to get passes to Madrid, and the local commandante would deal only with her. The safe-conduct was made out in her name with the others listed as appendages. Davis was on her way.

  After that, Elliott, Taylor, Major Cardozo of the London Daily Mail, and Bertrand de Jouvenel of Paris-Soir made room for her in their hired car. Every morning they drove out seeking the war. On their first day of real action, they drove south through sad, deserted towns where Franco’s army had recently passed. After the city of Zaragoza nobody sat at the cafe tables in the sun or waved from doorways. At Medinaceli, a mountaintop Nationalist stronghold, they sighted Republican planes. Reporters, villagers, and a milk cow were shooed down a narrow stairwell into a deep wine cellar where Davis and her colleagues leaned against the walls and listened to the bombs. Afterward, back in the sunshine and happy at having found a piece of the war, they could set up their typewriters on the green baize surface of a pool table and write their stories.

  But the articles could not be sent from Spain. Someone would have to take them back to France. Promising to return the following day, Davis collected the stories with a thousand-franc note each for transmittal costs and got back into the car with the driver. Night was approaching, a dense fog had descended. She suggested they take a different route, which appeared shorter on the map. Hearing artillery fire in the mountains, and feeling uneasy as they neared the frontier, she unzipped the side of her dress and secreted the stories inside her girdle. The extra money, four thousand more francs than the six hundred recorded on her border pass, posed another problem, so she unzipped her dress again and stuffed the money alongside the stories. As they reached the border town, Frances noticed that the flag on the guardhouse was not the red and gold Nationalist flag but the red, yellow, and purple of the Republic. Without knowing it, she had crossed the lines. Here the signatures on her pass were enemy signatures; the information burning against her skin was military information. But her youth and her American passport were in her favor. Through the car window an official questioned her courteously, cautioning her against returning to Spain. Davis nodded agreement. Her experience had been a frightening one, she said, and she had no intention of repeating it. The car was waved on to France.

  Exhausted as she was, she had still to send out the stories. In Biarritz she rang the night bell of a darkened hotel, and within minutes was resting against down pillows under a warm comforter, the phone at her side. Carefully sorting the stories into four piles on the bedcovers, she picked up the receiver. “Elysees 1287. Oui. C’est 9a. Herald Trib? I have a story from John Elliott. Are you ready? Dateline Medinaceli...”

  Within hours the border closed. Davis could not return to Spain, and it was three days before it reopened and her colleagues made it back to Hendaye. But the Daily Mail was impressed by her resourcefulness. A call came through from London. Perhaps a permanent arrangement? Would she be free to assist Cardozo? Would ten pounds a week plus expenses do?

  It would do very well. A woman with credentials need not fear being excess baggage in a car. A reporter for the Mail could hold her own at the Imatz. Frances had been made legitimate; she felt transformed.

  In an early dispatch Davis described the tension in Hendaye:

  Reinforcements have been sent from the north. The atmosphere in the town is changing. Antagonism is growing between those who are for one side and those who are for the other. Violence flares up at a taunt, at the mimicking of a salute, at the whistling of a song.

  A half-dozen wild young workingmen take infinite pleasure in eluding the police and appearing upon the river road opposite the White army emplacements, to stand in the sunlight waving their clenched fists and singing the “Internationale.”

  There are spies everywhere. They lie in the long grasses by the river bank.... At night they swim the river to report. Some have been shot. The farming fields on the French side of the river are pitted with shell holes. . . .

  Now the sound of the big guns ceases only at nightfall and, lying on the beach at St.-Jean-de-Luz, you can feel the impact as the shells hit the earth in Spain.

  The press moved to Burgos, and Davis continued her role as courier. Shuttling over mountain roads, she ate, slept, and typed her own stories in the car. The tension of the steep mountain ascent and descent, of the guards monitoring her movements, was increasingly wearing. The official stories she carried openly, but sometimes she also carried an uncensored version tucked inside her girdle. Who knew when the guards might decide to search her.

  By late September, when Toledo fell to the Nationalists, Davis’s pleasure at her connection with the Daily Mail had begun to pale. She had come to resent the Mail’s slanted terminology and cozy relations with Franco; she had seen too much of the war by now to refer to his soldiers as “patriots.” Frances weighed her options. She had worked for two months behind Franco’s lines; to switch to the other side might brand her a double agent. Better try to move to a publication that would allow her a more skeptical approach. She caught the train to Paris, where she persuaded Edgar Mowrer to take her on for the Chicago Daily News.

  The action moved to Madrid. From the town of Avila, Eleanor Packard covered Franco’s attacks on the capital. She later recalled it as “a grim journalistic picnic.” With other reporters she drove daily the ninety miles to the front lines, seeking eyewitness copy from the “top of windmills or behind chimneys, in deserted suburban villas surrounded by once-beautiful gardens now filled with the rubble of war, dead bodies, shrapnel-broken furniture and torn clothing. Every time we poked our heads out too far, the Madrid sharpshooters’ bullets buzzed over us like wasps.”

  That fall the American contingent swelled as more young reporters arrived. Fran
ces Davis ran into John Whitaker of the International News Service, black curls spilling out from under his beret, cape swinging back from his shoulders. He and a friend urged her to abandon the “older men” she had been associating with and join them. Ready for the companionship of her own kind, Frances concurred. Together they conspired to have a Thanksgiving and broached the subject to Eleanor Packard: a woman who grew up on a ranch was sure to know how to cook a turkey, even the tough, skinny Spanish variety. As it happened, Eleanor also made pumpkin pies. They borrowed the hotel kitchen and invited the press. There was a lull in the war, and the day was a huge success.

  The weather turned cold, and fighting resumed. During most of her journalistic adventure with her new friends, Davis could barely talk: a bitter wind from the mountains had brought on a throat infection that steadily worsened. A shell sliver wound under her knee would not heal. In mid-December she and Whitaker set out for France. Their car ran the gaundet between the armies, the two young reporters on the floor and the chauffeur slumped down as far as he could get and still see the road. In Paris, partially recovered, she was sent by the Chicago Daily News to bask in the warm sun of Majorca and learn what was going on there. Alone and often frightened, Frances discovered that the island was no longer a tourist paradise but a training ground for Italian conscripts bound for Spain, a storehouse of slave labor, a secret bomber base with underground hangars, and a concentration camp complete with torture chamber. She was thoroughly searched on leaving, and it was only by luck that her little black notebook, secreted in a lining pocket of the man’s coat she wore, was not discovered. She had proved her status as a reporter and her value to the News, but back in Paris, her wound suppurated; she was hospitalized with septicemia and nearly died. Her recovery would be longer and more arduous than she could then imagine, but there were two bright spots. The senior intern confided to her that Edgar Mowrer, her boss and mentor, had paced the hospital corridors the night of her gravest danger. And on another day long-stemmed roses arrived with the cabled message FROM ONE NEWSPAPER WOMAN TO ANOTHER WHO ENORMOUSLY ADMIRES YOUR COURAGE AND GALLANTRY. DOROTHY THOMPSON.