The Idea of Home by Geraldine Brooks Read Free Book Online

terrified thin little boy by the hand, runs out into the square. You know what she is thinking: she is thinking she must get the child home; you are always safer in your own place, with the things you know. Somehow you do not believe you can get killed when you are sitting in your own parlor, you never think that. She is in the middle of the square when the next one comes. A small piece of twisted steel, hot and very sharp, sprays off from the shell; it takes the little boy in the throat.
    Gellhorn’s eyes are usually on the civilians, not the soldiers. The editors did not always appreciate herfocus on the ordinary human costs of war. ‘Not bad for tear jerker sort of stuff,’ is scrawled across one of her pieces on the suffering of refugees from the Spanish war.
    It was in Spain that she began a relationship with Ernest Hemingway, whom she married in 1940. Apparently jealous of his wife’s reporting abilities, he became her competitor at Collier’s . It was Hemingway, therefore, who was given US military credentials to travel with the troops to the D-day invasion. Gellhorn did it the hard way. She talked her way on board a hospital ship docked in England on the pretext of doing a human-interest piece on the nurses. Once aboard, she went straight to the bathroom and locked herself in until the ship was under way. It was the third hospital ship to attempt the crossing; the first two had hit mines. The report she filed was a remarkable piece of journalism. It focused on the cost of the invasion, full of vivid accounts of the wounded. Though she actually went on the beach as a stretcher-bearer, she barely mentions herself in the piece.
    Hemingway’s dispatch is very different. Collier’s ran it as its cover story. The six-page spread begins with a half-page photo of Hemingway with the troops. He never went ashore, although you wouldn’t know that from his dispatch, which is a self-aggrandising account of how he virtually directed the landing and saved the day. He finds the right beach for the bewildered young officer, who has lost his map overboard. Luckily, Hemingway tells us, he has memorised the complete geography of the Normandy coast.
    Gellhorn’s story gets just one page, buried in the back of the magazine behind a story on how to swallow a sword. The short piece, headlined ‘Over and Back’, gives no sense that she left Britain, much less went ashore under fire. It was six weeks before Collier’s finally printed the longer account of her experiences. I wondered if Collier’s had considered a hairy-chested account of boys in battle more gripping than Gellhorn’s humanistic account of suffering. Or whether the editors had been worried about upstaging Hemingway. Or if they feared angering the US military, which had arrestedGellhorn when her ship docked back in Britain. They ordered her confined to a nurses’ barracks. (She rolled out under the barbed wire, headed for a nearby airfield, hitched a ride to the Italian front and carried on reporting the war.) But the reason her story was published so late turned out to be none of the above. It was discovered only in recent years by Sandra Whipple Spanier, an academic researcher from Penn State University. She ferreted out the original cables sent by Gellhorn and Hemingway. Hemingway’s piece and Gellhorn’s short article were cabled from London, and stamped received on 13 June. Gellhorn’s longer, substantive piece, ‘The Wounded Come Home’, was not cabled, but mailed back to Collier’s . When Spanier asked an ageing Gellhorn about this, Gellhorn was astonished. She recalled giving the cable to Hemingway to send and had always assumed he wired it. The marriage did not survive the war.
    That Gellhorn’s piece is much anthologised today points to the value of her focus on the human cost of war. And yet I must confess to some ambivalenceabout the current place of women, as equals with their male