Martha Gellhorn, one of the twentieth century's most fearless war correspondents, delivers a searing indictment of militarism, the global arms trade, and the myth of the "good war" in this archival recording from the Toronto International Festival of Authors, captured in October 1992.
In this electrifying episode of Writers Off the Page: From the TIFA Archives, travel back to October 1992 to hear Martha Gellhorn — novelist, journalist, and witness to nearly every major conflict of the twentieth century — read from the newly revised conclusion to her landmark book The Face of War, first published in 1959 and updated across five editions as Gellhorn found herself, again and again, unable to look away.
At 84, in what would prove to be one of her final public appearances, Gellhorn arrives at the Harbourfront stage not to reminisce but to provoke. She takes phrases we have heard so often they have lost their edges — we love our boys, better dead than red, we won the Cold War — and holds them up to the light until the rot shows through. What emerges is something rare: a moral reckoning delivered with the authority of someone who was actually there, on the ground, in Spain, in Finland, in China, across Europe, in Vietnam, in Central America, watching ordinary people absorb the violence that leaders and slogans set in motion from a safe distance.
Listen as she traces the evolution of The Face of War through five decades and five editions — each expansion driven not by ambition but by outrage she could not suppress. She describes going to Vietnam in 1966 because the reporting she was reading bore no resemblance to what she knew war actually looked like for the people living inside it. She recounts her time in El Salvador and Nicaragua, where she came to believe that American foreign policy had decided, simply, that the poor were dangerous. And she reflects on the lesson she believes governments drew from Vietnam: that the real threat to a war effort is not the enemy, but a free press.
The reading itself — Gellhorn's newly written conclusion for the 1992 edition — crackles with the same controlled fury. She takes on the arms trade with particular ferocity, arguing that governments which prosecute the drug trade while freely selling weapons to anyone who can pay are guilty of a hypocrisy that dwarfs anything crack or heroin has ever produced. She calls out the Cold War as a forty-year waste that bankrupted both superpowers while the world's poorest people paid in blood. She offers a rare note of genuine admiration for Mikhail Gorbachev — the one world leader in her experience who chose to step back from catastrophe rather than toward it. And she closes, as she always did, not with hope exactly, but with the refusal to pretend that silence is acceptable.
This recording has a great deal to say to us now. The wars Gellhorn names have changed; the logic she describes has not. Embedded journalism, managed media access, government-approved narratives of conflict — the tools she identified in 1992 have only grown more sophisticated. The gap between military spending and spending on citizens has only widened. The arms trade she called more destructive than the drug trade continues to dwarf it. And the civilians who pay the price — nameless, numerous, dying in conflicts they did not choose — remain, as she put it, out of sight.
What Gellhorn offers, in the end, is not a political programme but something more demanding: the insistence that if you believe something is evil, silence is itself a sin. She called her own contribution a squeak. It still carries.
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The audio recording of Martha Gellhorn was recorded on stage at Harbourfront in Toronto in October 1992 and is used with the permission of the Toronto International Festival of Authors. Learn more about Canada's largest book festival, and its many year-round events and programs, at FestivalOfAuthors.ca.
[music fade-in]
Randy Boyagoda: Welcome to Writers Off the Page: From the TIFA Archives, produced by the Toronto Public Library and in association with the Toronto International Festival of Authors. I’m Randy Boyagoda. In this episode, Martha Gellhorn takes phrases that we’ve heard many times – better red than dead, we love our boys – and points to the terror and destruction that can loom behind them.
Teaser: And then I noticed something extremely interesting, which was that our governments learned from Vietnam only one thing, which is that it's extremely dangerous to allow the press to roam around the war, because you can't tell, in due course they may start to report the downside and this will upset the home folks and give a very bad idea of the war. So since Vietnam, beginning with the Falklands and then going through that ludicrous whatever it was in Grenada and then the invasion of Panama and finally the Gulf War, there is no war reporting.
Randy: When you hear her, you’ll immediately sense that Martha Gellhorn is a voice from a very different time. This is the case, insofar as the very timbre of her voice – clipped, slightly British, elegant, the kind of voice you might associate with an old movie – is at odds with the up-talking, questioning tendencies that tend to character most writers’ voices today. There’s little in the way of questioning, on Martha Gellhorn’s part. There never was. Her experiences of war, from the 1930s onward, showed her, and her readers, the waste and destruction that came from broad, organized State aggression. But, in her eighties, and in what proved to be one of her final public appearances, in Toronto in 1992, Gellhorn doesn’t go into anecdote mode. She doesn’t charm the crowd with stories of staying in the White House as Eleanor Roosevelt’s guest; of reporting from the beaches at Normandy on D-Day, after going there disguised as a nurse; of her famous five-year marriage to Ernest Hemingway, the only one of his wives to have left him, not the reverse. But going over those things would have gone exactly against Gellhorn’s sense of herself and her work: despite her stature for many writers and journalists, she was never one for being feted. She was, until no longer physically able, always working, always looking for the next conflict to visit and try to make sense of it in person and on the page. In this case, ostensibly she’s introducing and then reading from a re-release of a book about war from 1959, but in fact, after a sharp-toned tour of 20th century military conflicts, many of which she witnessed and wrote about firsthand, she more or less delivers a sarcastic sermon against nuclear weaponry and Cold War militarism. From there, she goes into a withering tirade against the worldwide market for more and more dangerous weapons. She even goes so far as to say that crack and heroin aren’t as bad as the global appetite for lethal weapons, the kind of bold and cutting claim that, as with claims critical of the U.S. government that she made elsewhere in her career, would make her both the object of scorn and admiration. I don’t think she cared much about either. She just wanted to make sure people read things that showed what war was really like, beyond the slogans and symbols.
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MG: Ladies and gentlemen, I'm dazzled, I'm blinded. And we're doing this on purpose so that I can see. You had been treated to lyric poetry and really spiffing jokes from Brazil. And now I'm going to darken everybody's spirit with something quite different. And I'd better explain it. What I'm going to read, haltingly, to the best of my ability, is the conclusion to the fifth version of a book of mine called The Face of War. This book appeared for the first time in 1959 with reports from the war in Spain, the war in Finland, the war in China, and the Second World War in Europe, all over the lot. And I wasn't really putting this book together in order to preserve my war reports for that nebulous [cut out noise] entity. [I'm going to go and join you.] I wasn't really thinking about saving everything for posterity. I had the idea that this was the only possible way that I could make a protest. And the protest was about nuclear weapons, the amount of which were increasing enormously, and loose and terrible talk about nuclear war as if it was a possibility. People saying, talking about limited nuclear war, tactical nuclear war and, you know, "better dead than red, so let's just destroy the world."
And as a solitary voice, I thought if I put together a record of all these years of war, of how war is really for people who have to live it. Nobody grand, nobody important, just the people on the ground who live it and who fight it, that it might remind people, anybody, two or three, four, whoever read it, what war was like. And really, wasn't it enough? And wasn't memory and imagination a better deterrent than trying to wipe out the world over a quarrel which is a temporary quarrel between temporary men, temporary men at the top, that if the generations lived, will someday seem as weird and unimaginable as the wars of the Roses, about which none of us have the faintest idea? So that's what I did in 1959. And I thought, good, I have done my bit. It isn't much. It's a kind of squeak. But if you can't do anything except squeak, then do it. Because silence, if you really think something is evil, is in itself a sin. And I would never have gone near war again and that would have been the first and only version of this book. Until, in 1965, I was in the US on a visit from the Rift Valley where I then lived.
And I began to see and read the reporting on the war in Vietnam. And I couldn't believe it. It didn't have anything to do with what could possibly be happening because bombing raids were apparently just, you drop bombs and it just hits exactly that Viet Cong that you're after. Whereas all of us know that bombs are simply a mass killer. And nobody ever spoke about the South Vietnamese, our allies, the South Vietnamese people, poor peasants, our allies, whom we were saving from communist aggression and whom we were obviously killing. And I couldn't find anything that made any sense to me as reporting. And in order to know what was happening, the only way that I could think of to do it was to go there myself and plod around and look, just look and listen to the people who were taking the brunt of this war, which was them: the Vietnamese poor herded by now into cities, into terrible shanty towns because we had uprooted them by bombing everywhere. And their condition was unbelievable to me. It was so much worse than I could have imagined. And I regarded the war simply as a war crime, a crime against humanity, including against a generation of young Americans drafted into it who were spoiled and ruined by this war because it was a wrong war, an evil war, a pointless war, a needless war, as proved by the fact that having lost it didn't make the slightest bit of difference to anybody.
So I came back and I wrote about it. I wrote about what it was like for the Vietnamese people. And I toned down, self-censored what I wrote because if I'd written it truly as bad as it was, it would have been branded as communist propaganda. Because then in 1966, the US government official line of what we were doing, this noble crusade, et cetera, was believed. And then after that, the next year there was the Six Day War, and from the sound of it, with all the Arab states at last in agreement and organized and surrounding Israel and saying perfectly openly that they intended to drive the Israelis into the sea, kill the lot. And I thought I had to be there on the grounds that twice in one's lifetime one didn't wish to be an observer of a second obscenity. So I got to that, although it was very quick and nearly over, and as wars go, it's the only one I've ever seen that was technically and militarily brilliant, and also brilliant in the fact that it was immensely careful about not killing civilians. And then somebody said that they would like to bring this book out again.
And I was glad of that because the first time I brought it out, the 1959 edition came with a passionate introduction and conclusion about nuclear weapons. And now I was glad to have that again, as I had no other platform, no place to write anything like that. But also I was glad to put the Vietnamese article someplace on record. And I began to think that the only purpose of this book was that it was a record and of no importance. I mean, it wasn't about to change the world or anybody, maybe five or six people who read it, but it was there. And at some time, who knows, people might want to look things up. And there was another voice, and there were these perfectly specific and actual and small reports of what war is like. So then again, I thought I wrote again about nuclear weapons and my loathing of the very idea that anybody could dream of unleashing these things for any cause whatsoever upon the world.
But that was the condition that we were in. The protests against nuclear weapons and against the idea of nuclear war spread throughout the world and did great honor to the concept of citizenship that there were so many private citizens who did not keep silent and the squeaks grew and there were many, many squeaks. And our governments paid not the slightest attention. As for the Vietnam War, all of us who emerged, as it were, were both against the war in Vietnam and against nuclear weapons, we were peace people. And this was subversive and practically the next best thing to being communist, which was the next best thing to being an active leper. So that was the second version. And that came out in England, not in America. And then it came out again. I thought I was through with war. And then in the '80s, the American government, which it was by now the Reagan presidency, and the phobia about communism was rocketing away at double speed. And the form it then took was pouring money into the hands of the military and the oligarchy in El Salvador in order to massacre poor people who were branded as communists simply because they wished for some social justice after forever having none.
And I decided that the US government simply thought the poor were dangerous, that the poor were automatically dangerous. And if they were also brown-skinned and poor and were trying to do something against bad government, that obviously necessitated putting them down. So then I went to Nicaragua as well. And again I thought, well, that's enough, I have had it. And again that went. Then this book, which was growing by accretion all the time, taking some out and adding some on. So that came out in 1984 in England, with Central America added and always going on about nuclear weapons. And then I noticed something extremely interesting, which was that our governments learned from Vietnam only one thing, which is that it's extremely dangerous to allow the press to roam around the war, because you can't tell, in due course they may start to report the downside and this will upset the home folks and give a very bad idea of the war. So since Vietnam, beginning with the Falklands and then going through that ludicrous whatever it was in Grenada and then the invasion of Panama and finally the Gulf War, there is no war reporting. Either nobody's allowed, or if they are there, they are completely controlled as to what they can see and when. They are minders.
What has now come out from these events to the extent that anything has come out is really the official view. And I believe that this will always be the case. If our government's vanity is involved or prestige or status, but all right, if it's a small war that doesn't concern anybody, then you'll get decent reporting. So my theory is that the only good reporting is going to be post-war reporting that you go in after the event and there are the people who remember it very, very well. And there's nobody looking at you or hounding you or trying to keep you away from them. And then you make up a picture of what it was from the words, the acts, the memories of those who were there. I did that with the invasion of Panama's post-war reporting. And thus finally the fifth and last version of this book comes out next winter in England. And the main thing was that the 88 edition which came out in America, I forgot that one had a long, a very long conclusion which was going on and on about the utter madness and danger of continuing to make nuclear weapons.
And we were still, always, we had these things and nobody ever said we're not going to use them. And then now there really is a change. There is a change. And so this is a new conclusion which I'm now about to read you in case I must see it.
The appearance in history of Mikhail Gorbachev is some kind of miracle. We have never lacked leaders to make war. But where and when has there ever been a leader who made a peace that prevented war and ended 40 years of world poisoning hostility? Yet Mikhail Gorbachev called off the Cold War and its twin threat of nuclear war. His common sense and moral and political courage rescued us. Us means all living things, for until then we continued to exist by permission of two men, one in the Kremlin, one in the White House. It sounds too demented to be true, but it was true. There was no doubt or secret about what nuclear war would do to the planet. Both men had always near them the Doomsday Book, the signal to wipe out life. Canceling nuclear war was Gorbachev's greatest service. But everything he did led away from insanity towards sanity.
The removal of Soviet forces from Afghanistan, the refusal to use them in Eastern Europe, the Soviet Constitution altered to permit a multi-party state and glasnost, openness, the freedom to talk without fear. A human right previously unknown in the empire of tsars or commissars that amounted to giving 300 million people the right to breathe. And that was the real second Russian Revolution. Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God, which is good to know. But it would have been better to thank and honor the short, pleasant-faced Russian, unique peacemaker here and now. Naturally that didn't happen. History will attend to it. The boastful American line is that we won the Cold War presumably by bankrupting the Soviet Union in the arms race. This is odd considering that the US bankrupted itself with a national debt that climbed every year of the Cold War, tripling during the Reagan presidency, in direct relation to military spending. The Soviet debt, now inherited by Russia, is $70 billion. The US debt was 3,599 billion in 1991 and rising. Nobody can think of money in such amounts except to think that it can never be repaid.
But there are ways to get a grip on impossible figures. The US debt is well over twice the total combined Third World debt. The Soviet debt is less than a quarter of the annual interest Americans have to pay on their debt. The annual interest of the US debt now uses up more than 30% of all federal outlay of money. In the simplest terms, this makes it impossible to provide universal free health care. The interest mounts yearly. Huge US military spending continues. The Soviet people paid to be the second greatest nuclear power, with 40 years of harsh daily life. Americans now and for generations stretching into the mists of time, will go on paying for their first place, losing each year billions of their tax money needed to repair a damaged society. Is it a comfort to Americans to have the most and best weapons of war and violent urban ghettos, dangerous streets, a growing underclass of ill-educated, jobless, angry poor? Britain held the unenviable position of the third largest military spender after the USSR and the USA. With the collapse of the USSR, Britain is promoted to second place as spender and nuclear power. Sacrificing economic growth and public services for an illusion of military grandeur is vainglory, nostalgia for the past.
But Britons were brainwashed so long that a majority believed their minor nuclear arsenal gave them protection as well as standing in the world. This Cold War folly lingers on. The British Prime Minister has announced the construction of a fourth Trident nuclear submarine. The third unfinished Trident is estimated to cost 10.5 billion pounds. Weapons costs always increase before delivery. The fourth Trident will cost more, plus the expense of running the pointless things. It is throwaway money in a country where half a million people are homeless for want of low-priced public housing. In Britain, the worst and lasting effect of the Cold War is an inbuilt money-sucking military-industrial complex, a copy of the giant American model with tentacles clamped on the economy, the media, politics as usual. The poorest people suffered most. East-West paranoia helped to sustain Third World wars during every year since World War II. And we have barely noticed that between 25 and 35 million people died in them, out of sight. Those wars, now mainly civil wars, have not stopped. And in fact today a new one has started. Turkey has invaded Northern Iraq with 50,000 soldiers to attack the Kurds.
It does never stops. Third World leaders lust for weapons. Judging by what they spend on them, they can't get enough. You never know when they'll come in handy at home or abroad. Never mind running up debt to pay for them, debt that is a stranglehold on the present and the future. That doesn't leave much money for the well-being of their people. No statistics show more clearly the misconduct of governments than these. Averaging the expenditure of all the world nations, the world spent $36,000 per year per soldier and $1,100 per year per student. That was in 1986, the latest figures and a marked rise from 1984 when it cost $29,000 per year per soldier. We can be absolutely sure that the price is higher now and the contrast as obscene. Nobody won the Cold War. It was a 40-year waste. The Holocaust is in a class apart, unequal in all human experience, but not due to war, though viable because of war. The Second World War is also in a distinct category. It became essential, the war that had to be won because the leaders of the great democracies had failed to acknowledge in time the menace of Hitlerian Germany and Imperial Japan before that colossal war,
since the '30s, from the Sino-Japanese War onwards to this day, civilians have been the major victims of war. Nameless millions. But they had their own names, one by one and their own place on the earth until the war swept over them, killing them, uprooting them. Real people with feelings common to everyone. Grief and pain and fear and the despair for loss of home are emotions that have no nationality. How is it, after the terrible lesson of the Second World War, that we go on accepting this vastness of anguish as if it were a natural disaster not to be foreseen or controlled? Maybe hate has no nationality either. But I believe that hate comes from killing. The first deaths strengthen and feed it. Until the killing starts, hate is an ugly idea, ugly words. War gives hate power and deforms the killers. Kill or be killed. Kill your own people, kill strangers. Hate and killing become a habit and the needless wars prolong themselves. We may be noticing this at last, because a needless small war is happening close by in Europe. We can see its madness and its effects. Leaders make wars. People cannot and do not rush off in an unruly mob to fight enemies.
They must first be inflamed with fear and hate, the usual ingredients, then organized and directed. There are always aggressor leaders in civil wars as well. The leaders are recognizable. Vain, ambitious men hungry for power are nothing new. But their followers remain an enigma. Why is it always so easy to rouse men to kill each other? We are left near the end of this century with a stockpile of 51,000 nuclear weapons, horrific overkill which has to be securely stored and ultimately dismantled, though no one knows how. They remain as an unpredictable danger and a certain expense. We live with 12 explosive states instead of the USSR, Czechoslovakia split in two, Eastern Europe far from steady, the familiar disaster zones in Africa and Asia and the Middle East, Latin America foundering under mass poverty, recession chewing away at the industrialized West and the whole wide world awash in weapons, a global shambles. The joyous news is that this awful century is not going to be the last. We have time to improve if we want to. The United States as sole military superpower is bad for Americans and everyone else. We need a balancing not rival superpower and need it fast.
The EC nations must stop niggling over their vanities and interests and merge in a unified force with a unified foreign policy. The record of US Presidents since the US became a superpower is not reassuring. They have been too quick to meddle in the affairs of other nations and perilously quick to use military force. It is safer to be led by 13 fallible men, the EC and the US, rather than by one. Though the war record of this century is the worst in history, there have always been wars. Think of the repeated smiting in the Bible. Peace on earth requires universally wise and humane leaders and rational, enlightened followers. So we can forget it. But there is no reason and no excuse for continuing to wallow in wars. And as we have, two superpowers working together in the UN Security Council could do a responsible job of prevention. Wars cannot be fought without weapons. The lavish supply of weapons has made these endless wars possible. Governments are in the merchant of death business. As exporters or importers, they set up stylish arms bazaars where reps from all over the world choose the newest style in tanks, artillery, planes.
Every government pursues and punishes the drug trade, but fosters the arms trade. This is monumental hypocrisy. Heroin, cocaine, crack are healthy compared to the proven destructiveness of our always updated weaponry. The cynicism of our arms trade is more shameful because we know beyond reasonable doubt that where we live, Western Europe, Canada, the US, is safe. We are not going to attack each other and nobody else is going to try. We sell freely, no questions asked of the buyer. For instance, Saddam Hussein. If it is too embarrassing to arm a leader like Pol Pot, that is managed by transhipping through a middleman state. Until the arms trade is outlawed, like the drug trade, wars will multiply. Why not, when any leader can get all the weapons he wants? Leaders who inflame their followers into war or oppress their people into rebellion must know in advance that the entire area of conflict will be quarantined, isolated as typhus or cholera is quarantined. War refugees will be cared for outside of the quarantine zone. But the combatants must realize that they will receive no foreign help of any kind and will be automatically blacklisted from international forums. Doubtless they would still fight, but sooner rather than later, they would run out of the means to fight and be forced to negotiate.
We have seen this work in a pitiful country like Angola, where a meaningless civil war that savaged the people for over a decade is halted. Since the USA and the USSR withdrew aid from their favored sides, will any war prevention measures be agreed and enforced by our rulers? No. Not now, anyway. Not yet. The arms trade is big business, much bigger than the drug trade, with its own juicy frauds and corruption. The profit motive is stronger than sanity. War can be enriching in many ways to those who don't pay for it in anguish. At the top level, commanders in chief, presidents, prime ministers, kings, dictators, making strategic decisions and poring over maps must be quite fun. A great sense of excitement and power. And all nations glorify heroism in war. We love our brave boys until war makes us sick in our souls. I have little hope for war prevention. Perhaps in the 25th century people will look back at this century in amazed disgust. Perhaps they will be sane. Perhaps they will think it more important to preserve the planet than to destroy life. Perhaps they will get their priorities right. Perhaps.
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Randy: Martha Gellhorn was born in St. Louis, in 1908. Her mother was a suffragist and her father was a progressive-minded doctor who pulled his daughter out of convent school after learning that she was being taught the female anatomy out of a book that covered parts of the female anatomy. Gellhorn graduated from Bryn Mawr College in 1927 and pursued a writing career thereafter that was distinctive and news-making. Popularly known for having been married to Ernest Hemingway for five years in the 1940s, to her lifelong annoyance, she was an accomplished novelist in her own right and a fearless war correspondent admired by generations of journalists and often feared by people in power. She covered the Spanish Civil War, World War II, and a host of other conflicts across more than fifty years before eventually settling in England, where she died, at the age of 89, in 1998.
The audio recording of Martha Gellhorn was recorded on stage at Harbourfront Reading Series in October 1992 and is used with the permission of the Toronto International Festival of Authors. Learn more about Canada's largest book festival, and its many year-round events and programs, at FestivalOfAuthors.ca.
Writers Off the Page: From the TIFA Archives is produced by Toronto Public Library. The Executive Producer is Gregory McCormick. This episode was produced by Gregory McCormick and me, Randy Boyagoda, with technical support from George Panayotou, marketing support from Tanya Oleksuik, and graphic design by Amy Haakmat.
For more about Writers Off the Page: From the TIFA Archives, visit writersoffthepage.ca where you will find the show notes which lists the books mentioned in each episode and links to other relevant materials in TPL’s collections. You can also listen to all 26 episodes of season one as well with interviews and readings by Susan Sontag, Grace Paley, Nikki Giovanni, Larry Kramer, Lee Maracle and much, much more. For all of Toronto Public Library’s podcast series, check out tpl.ca/podcasts.
Music is by YUKA.
I'm Randy Boyagoda and we'll be back soon with another episode of Writers Off the Page: From the TIFA Archives.