There had never been anything like it, nor would there ever be.
It turned out that the vessel I’d stowed away on was the first hospital ship to make it over. The wounded began to arrive almost immediately, and I found that it didn’t really matter how I’d come to that place; now my hands were needed. Every hand was. I became a stretcher-bearer and bandage-bearer. I lit cigarettes, made beds, poured coffee, took messages from one man to another. They were each of them incredible to me. But I couldn’t stop long enough to admire them; there was too much to do.
Late that night, when I already had thick blisters on my hands and feet, I loaded into a cement ambulance barge with a handful of doctors and medics, crashing through the surf around floating mines lit up by a flashing strobe. Soon I would know we’d landed on the American sector of Omaha Beach, but for the moment there was only horror and chaos. We bumped through severed limbs and the bloated forms of the drowned. Artillery fire shattered the air in every direction. Planes roared over us, so close my skull vibrated, but there wasn’t even time to wonder whose side they were on.
Near the beach, we flung ourselves out into the icy water and waded to shore. The surf came to my waist and tugged at my clothes. I stumbled, feeling chilled to my core, but I couldn’t be dragged down. I had to hold up my end of the stretcher and stay between the white-taped lines that marked the places that had been cleared of mines.
Seeing those lines, and knowing what they meant, was terrifying. But everything was. The gunfire was deafening. Flares whistled and exploded blindingly, rinsing the scene with red light, and showing me things I would never forget. Terrified waves of men running headlong into death. Bodies wrenched apart. Eyes filled with an almost animal agony. Hands clutching my pant leg, desperate to be saved.
High above on the cliffs, shells slammed into German positions. There were POW cages for the captured, and haunted faces there, too. We picked up everyone, anyone, even Germans, and assembled them all on the beach for triage. They were young and scared and cold and hurt, and it didn’t really matter how they’d been wounded, or who they were before this precise moment of need. Every last one of them made me feel gutted, and there were hours of this. Blood-soaked bandages, flares sailing like red silk over the beach with a pop, tanks, and bodies. Men and more men. Men with boys’ faces. Boys spilling their lives into the tide, and the tide taking each drop and churning, changing, crashing out and back again.
The more exhausted and helpless and raw I grew, the more the faces blurred and transformed. I might have been delirious, but there on the wet strand, just past the smoke and the screaming, I recognized the blown-apart Frenchman who’d shown me his branch of mimosa long ago in Madrid. And there, just beyond him, falling to his knees, was Laurence Gardet with his blue tin of Gauloises. The soldier from Belchite, who’d dreamed of St. Louis with me, was in a transport boat, his neck wrapped in red gauze, while the Russian pilot in the Viipuri prison who’d wept and trembled for his wife and child gripped his hand tightly. They were all here, and I didn’t question it—nor how, as I bent to lift bodies, one young man after another became the boy from the square at Santo Domingo, his face, every face. And each time, I wanted to scream and weep, to tell him I loved him, that I needed his forgiveness. That he’d been with me for years. That he always would be.
* * *
—
It was the strangest and longest night of my life. Later I would learn that there were a hundred thousand men on that beach and only one woman, me. I was also the first journalist, male or female, to make it there and report back. Ernest had been stranded offshore along with so many others—but that sort of accounting felt petty now, and inconsequential, particularly since I’d lost so very much to get there. My life was a ruin just then—there was no other way to see it—and much more suffering lay ahead, whether or not I thought I could survive it.
And yet no one could take away anything I’d seen, or the blisters on my hands, or what it meant to be here, feeling myself cracking further and further open as the tide churned and the sky rattled.
I looked into the eyes of the man on the stretcher before me. We were loading him into the water ambulance.
“You’re awfully pretty to be a nurse,” he said. “Maybe you’re an angel.”
“Actually I’m a writer if you can believe it.”
“Really?”
“Yes, that’s right.”
“Are you going to write about me, then?”
I nodded and felt stronger suddenly. His story would be mine, and mine would be his. We would remember through each other, for each other. We weren’t strangers, and we weren’t lost. We weren’t alone. “Yes,” I told him. “That’s something I’m going to do.”
And then we laid him down and I held his hand tightly as we plunged back, wave after wave, toward the white boat.
EPILOGUE
The morning after Omaha Beach, I was discovered and arrested for crossing into a war zone without any authority or permission. The military police took away my travel papers and packed me back to London. On the way, I started writing the pieces I’d send on to Collier’s, but also couldn’t stop fuming. I’d been a war correspondent for seven years, in Spain and China, Finland and Italy and Czechoslovakia. I was as qualified as nearly anyone, and now couldn’t do my work or even stay in Europe unless I went AWOL. But I would stay, somehow. I had to. What other choice was there?
Aiming to get back to France, I charmed a ride with a Canadian regiment, which didn’t seem to mind having a woman around as long as I flirted with the right officers and could tolerate camping in fields or throwing myself into the occasional ditch when German planes dove from above. Later I would find that lies and tears worked, too, an invented fiancé at this or that front I had to see one last time or die trying. It made me livid that I had to cajole and sweet-talk my way forward, when no man with my experience would ever have to lower himself to do anything of the kind. But when the latest issue of Collier’s found me, finally, it was something to see my name and Ernest’s on the masthead as “invasion correspondents,” side by side. They’d published my D-day story and would go on printing what I sent, I knew, if I could find a way through.
* * *
—
D-day had been the beginning of the end, and now we’d come to the middle, and there was still so much tragedy to see. In Florence, the Ponte Vecchio sagged in ruins while German and British soldiers battled it out, one burning street at a time. The Pitti Palace was overrun with refugees, and the dead filled the parks, unburied, since all the cemeteries still belonged to the Germans.
By mid-August, I’d fallen in with a Canadian regiment that was sweeping north along the Adriatic coast. I wrote as I went, posting stories back, and asking everyone I met about their lives and how they thought the future looked now, when the war was finally going our way. Sometimes I got blank stares back or flat incredulity, but more often I saw worry about those still fighting, because what would be worse than dying now, when the end was so near and home was a palpable thing?
I didn’t ever think of going home myself, because I was all but certain I no longer had one. I hadn’t heard anything from Ernest since London, months before, not a letter, not even an angry cable challenging me. My marriage was surely over, but neither of us had spoken the words. When I finally reached Paris, I heard almost immediately that he was dug in fast at the Ritz, claiming he’d liberated it. He wasn’t alone, either, apparently. Just next door was an exceptionally pretty journalist named Mary Welsh, who’d had bylines in Time and Life. I didn’t know her, and didn’t want to think that Ernest could become involved with someone so quickly, and exactly the way we’d been at the Florida, when we first fell in love. It was too much, and threatened to topple me, so I found a room as far away as possible in another hotel, and tried to stay busy, and breathing, and upright.
Some parts of Paris were so unchanged you wouldn?
??t know anything had happened. You could walk along the Seine, where the booksellers had never shuttered their little kiosks, and count every lovely intact bridge, feeling the sun on your face, and telling yourself the occupation had only been a terrible dream. Or you could turn and look for the hungry, who were never very far away, or the lost, who were everywhere. Women wandered through the cemeteries, searching for the names of their vanished husbands on tombstones. Tens of thousands had disappeared during the occupation, likely tortured or shot or abandoned at the edges of the city. In one barely standing shack in Montmartre I crouched to see the words REVENGE ME scratched into the wooden slats of the door, and walked away, my eyes swimming with tears, hoping there was a way to do just that.
Fall was coming, and there was no coal anywhere, and very little food. Good coffee could still be found at press headquarters in the Hôtel Scribe near the Paris Opera. Any stories I posted had to be brought there for censoring, and though at first I feared I’d be turned away or worse with no proper credentials, everyone had so much more to worry about. I slunk in and out, and sometimes caught an earful about Ernest. Apparently he’d recently left the city with the Twenty-second Regiment in a convoy headed to Belgium, through minefields, past roadblocks and entrenched Germans. Some said he was not only carrying weapons but using them, too. Others suggested he might be court-martialed and stripped of his credentials if found out.
It was hard not to worry about him, even though his behavior seemed foolhardy. If he was bent on getting into Germany, even being a civilian would be dangerous, but it seemed he didn’t care about that at all but only wanted to play soldier and run patrols, and risk his neck. It was surprising to see him so driven to boldness when all he’d done for years was insist on staying in Cuba and minding his own damned business. Something was pushing him now, and I couldn’t stop thinking of that, and wondering how his head was, and if he was sleeping. He was still rooted in me, I realized. My mind knew it was all finished, but the heart never knows, or if it does, it does only at the very last possible moment.
A few months later, a dashed-off note from Ernest appeared at my hotel, inviting me to dinner. I was hesitant about going, but thought it was more than time we finally talked, and I’d never fully stopped thinking and fretting about him. I accepted reluctantly and worked to bolster myself by walking to the restaurant near his hotel with my coat open to the wind, hoping to feel stronger by the time I arrived. But I needn’t have bothered. When I saw him, all the same impossible feelings flooded back, starting in my knees and climbing me rung by rung until I heard a buzzing in my ears. I shouldn’t be here, I thought immediately. I wasn’t tougher yet at all, if I ever would be.
He was sitting in a snug rounded banquette with a group of people I didn’t know, and didn’t stand when I approached. I wanted to run and keep running and not face any of it, but a waiter came around, urging me to squeeze in, and then handed me a glass of champagne. I tried to compose myself and behave normally, but could barely focus on the conversation. Ernest was regaling the men around him with his scrape in the Hürtgen Forest, a bloody battle that had left more than seventy men in his battalion dead. As he talked, at first I saw only bluster and bravado, but there was something else just beneath, too. A small flash of the old light in his eyes. Aliveness was waking up in him. He’d gotten something back with all that risk, something pure and cleansing that reminded me of how he’d been in Spain. And it made me feel relieved for him, no matter what else had happened.
“Any news of Bumby?” I asked later, once the hangers-on had finally left us alone. He’d been missing in action for months, and I’d never stopped thinking of him or praying he’d come through.
“Yes, I just heard. He’s safe, or at least alive. He took a hit or two, and grenade fire. He’s in Nuremberg, at a POW camp.”
“Oh, God. Will he be released soon?”
“I think so. Try not to worry.”
“Easier said than done,” I told him. My eyes found his and landed there, and I felt rocked. Every emotion woke at once, love and hate, hope and despair, sorrow and more sorrow. “I hear you have a new girl,” I said. “I hope she’ll be good to you. I wish you so much luck, Rabbit.”
His face softened at our nickname for just a moment, but then he was far away again, his gaze flinching and racing away, his heart closing with a click. “Yes. I’m going to marry her.”
“Oh,” I said. I’d gone utterly numb. “I suppose you should divorce me, then.”
“You left me, you know. Over and over. I guess you thought I’d wait around like a sap.”
“We left each other, didn’t we? It was either that or burn to bits.”
“Maybe that would have been better.”
“Maybe. I don’t know. We’ll never know now.”
There was a long moment when I couldn’t feel my body enough to make it move. But finally I was able to put my glass down with stiff fingers and stood, somehow, and straightened my face, and walked away very carefully, trying not to fall to pieces or scream or rage or cry. I felt as alone as I had ever been. Scorched, and almost weightless, and so terribly free I wondered how I could even stay in my body.
For seven years I’d known exactly who I was and what mattered. Now I had nothing. No husband and no home, and no idea what to cling to, and no future at all but this one, broken as it was. Ernest would return to Cuba soon; of course, he would. And he would take Mary Welsh with him. I imagined her sweeping through my house as if she were turning over a nest, one I’d made with great care, with my own hands and heart, for Ernest and me. She would empty my office, rename the cats, pluck the blossoms from my ceiba tree, and put them in a brand-new vase. She would go room to room erasing me, and she wouldn’t stop until there wasn’t a trace or a wisp anywhere, anywhere.
* * *
—
Ill and strange and hollow, I stayed in Europe, going to Belgium and Norway, and then to London, and finally to Germany, where the Allied troops had just discovered Bergen-Belsen. All through the summer and fall, I’d been hearing whispers about the concentration camps, but couldn’t believe any such thing might actually exist. Then I met a Frenchman, a refugee, who’d managed to escape from Treblinka and had witnessed thousands being gassed. He told me everything, how he’d smelled bodies burning in incinerators, and had seen the dignified and incredibly brave faces of those marching into death chambers. As he spoke, I shook with rage and disgust, and I knew I would never again feel the same about the world.
For twelve years, hundreds and hundreds of thousands had suffered unspeakably, had been degraded and tortured and murdered, and worse, while the Allies had waited, hiding their eyes and deluding themselves that it would all be over soon. There could be no words for this sort of evil and horror, but I would have to find them. That would be a kind of revenge, however inadequate.
I left Dachau for Belsen, and then returned to a Paris I barely recognized. It was VE Day and every church was tolling its bells. The streets swam with people cheering, kissing, weeping, pouring wine down their shirtfronts. I pushed my way through the bodies until I reached the Hôtel Scribe and found the first correspondent I knew and cried in his arms until I was spent. We stayed up late talking of what we’d seen, and then he went off to sleep and I took out my notebook and pencils and began to work.
It was harder than I imagined to read my notes, and harder still to look back at the last months of my life and feel what had happened and know it fully. When Ernest crossed my mind, I tried to dive back into the sentences in front of me. And when I thought of all the other things I’d lost—the boys, my desk in the sunlight, the Finca, happiness, and the dream of happiness—I knew I had to find some way to sever myself from all of it, everything, even if I had to break my own heart to do it.
At least I’ll get my name back, I thought, grasping at straws, and found I felt a little stronger. Outside, the cheering went on, and the dancing, and
the terrible bells. I felt separate from all of it, and past all hope, but this was something solid, and mine. A very small place to begin, and all I knew to do.
Gellhorn. It was what I had now. I would take it.
Author’s Note
Martha Gellhorn went on to become one of the twentieth century’s most significant and celebrated war correspondents, reporting on virtually every major conflict for sixty years—from the Spanish Civil War to the Bay of Pigs, from Vietnam to El Salvador to Panama, where she covered the invasion at the age of eighty-one. She also published a total of five novels, fourteen novellas, two collections of stories, and three volumes of essays along the way, and never stopped traveling avidly and passionately, exploring more than fifty countries, and setting up house in half-a-dozen exotic locales, including Africa, Wales, and Cuernavaca, Mexico.
By all accounts, Hemingway never forgave her for leaving him—the only one of his wives to ever do so. Famously, she spent the rest of her days avoiding not just the man himself but even the mention of his name. Though she was a fiercely private person, and determined not to be waylaid by gossip, most of all she refused to be seen as “a footnote” in his life—or anyone else’s—and hated the way her writing style was continually compared to his.
And yet if there is tragedy in the devolving of their love story—once so ardent and intense—into professional rivalry, acrimony, and betrayal, it’s more tragic to me that neither knew happiness with another for long. Hemingway remained married to Mary Welsh until his suicide in 1961, though most of his biographers characterize the marriage as less than nurturing for both, and Gellhorn (quipping in a letter that the role of “Countess Tolstoy” wasn’t “a becoming one”) found her mercenary and a fool. In 1954, Gellhorn married Time magazine editor Tom Matthews, but the union ended badly after nine years. Publicly she claimed to find marriage “boring,” but in letters to her closest confidants, she confessed to feeling enraged when she discovered Tom had been having a longtime affair. When she left him, she swore she would “never try it again,” meaning marriage. But I don’t think she knew how to be fully herself when she was with a man or could feel anything but baffled by the competing demands of career and domesticity. Her struggles are poignant and real to me, and all too familiar.