Safe in the United States, Nicholas Gage was tormented by the injustice of it all. Out of fear for themselves, some in Lia had denounced Eleni and some had borne false witness. Communist ideology shut out morality. With a bit of luck and a lot of detective work he tracked down the Communist judge, one Achilleas Lykas, who had presided over Eleni’s judicial murder. Nicholas had a handgun tucked in his waistband and knew “absolutely” that he wanted to kill Lykas because, he says, it would give him relief from the pain that had filled him for so many years. When the opportunity at last came, “I couldn’t do it.” So complex is human fate that retribution repeats and extends the evil it was supposed to redress. All Nicholas can do in the face of this reality is spit all over Lykas. The murderer pays a small price, the victim is not freed from suffering. Eleni has as much insight into tragedy as the ancient Greek classics.
Postscript. In 1980 the trial took place in Cologne of the so-called Paris Gestapo, three SS officers guilty of deporting Jews from France during the German occupation. Day after day, I found myself sitting next to Michel Goldberg, a Frenchman. His father had been arrested in Lyon, tortured, deported and finally murdered in Auschwitz. The head of the Lyon Gestapo was the infamous Klaus Barbie, and Michel held him responsible for his father’s death. He told me (and repeats in his memoir Namesake, published in 1982) how posing as a journalist he had traced Barbie, a fugitive in Bolivia, and contrived to have a rendezvous with him. “All I need is the will,” he observed, but in the event, like Nicholas Gage, he too could not bring himself to press the trigger of the revolver he had brought.
MARTHA GELLHORN
The Honeyed Peace
A Collection of Stories
PENGUIN, 1983
THE SIX DAY WAR IN 1967 began on a Monday. The very next day, the Arab Legion was already pulling out of the West Bank. A rumor went round that King Hussein of Jordan had ordered these troops to take up positions defending his palace in Amman. An Israeli officer with a jeep offered to drive me to the rapidly changing front line. It was about nine o’clock in the morning, and the famous correspondent James Cameron was already in the jeep swigging whisky out of the bottle. Quite soon, he passed out and the empty bottled rattled on the floor. A shell had smashed through the roof of the Church of the Holy Nativity in Bethlehem. A Greek Orthodox Archbishop and some Israeli paratroopers stood about in swirling smoke and dust.
King Solomon’s Pool is near Bethlehem, and across an expanse of grass there strolled the even more famous war correspondent Martha Gellhorn. An apparition, she was in a khaki outfit, tailored and immaculate, for all I know fitted out by Balmain or Givenchy. She might have come straight from the hairdresser. Among other places, she had reported from the Spanish civil war, Hitler’s Germany, Chiang Kai-shek’s China and Ho Chi Minh’s Vietnam. My impression was that war served an imperative psychological purpose of providing more evidence of mankind’s persistent folly, and by extension, evidence of her superiority. (That day she did not file, I believe, unlike James Cameron, who made up what he’d failed to see. “Not one of your best pieces, Mr. Cameron,” was the memorable comment of the military censor, a thoughtful young lieutenant.)
On the way to Pentwyn, our house in Breconshire, we used to drive past, and once or twice stop at Catscradle, Martha’s bolt-hole at Kilgwrrwg, a village near Chepstow. Her inscription of The Honeyed Peace reads, “For David, splendid lunch company.” A tour manager by occupation, Clarissa took me to China in 1982. Martha wrote, “I cannot wait to hear your China report. Note (for me) flies, spitting, overall smell of human manure. If now gone, I’d say huge success. Also water (at all safe?), visible disease like lepers. I think China may be the rare improved state.”
Early in 1983, the Tatler commissioned a profile of her. I would understand, wouldn’t I, that she refused to speak about Hemingway and her time as his wife. She seemed not to notice how in fact she did tell stories about him. At the beginning of the war, he took delivery at La Finca Vigia of a new-model Lincoln, so new that it was the only one in Cuba. Showing it off, he drove Martha to his favorite bar in Havana. He wanted to stay there but she had had enough of his cronies and their talk. At the wheel on the way home, he made a gesture of annoyance that she had obliged him to leave. The back of his hand caught her cheek. Grabbing the wheel, she steered the car into a roadside tree and wrecked it. “I told him, Ernest, if you ever hit me again I’ll shoot you.” The marriage was finally over when Hemingway was refused permission to cover the landing on D-Day but Martha disguised herself as a nurse, slipped on to a hospital ship and reported the invasion from Omaha Beach.
MARTIN GILBERT
The Second World War
A Complete History
1989
MARTIN AND I ARRIVED on the same day in the autumn of 1956 at Magdalen College, Oxford, where we were to read history. Two years of national service was obligatory at the time. Martin had been in the Intelligence Service, learning Russian, a junior conscript in the Cold War. Knowledge of the language and the geopolitical background were undoubted assets. My grandfather Harry Pryce-Jones, a career soldier, saw to it that I did my service in his old regiment, the Coldstream Guards. Stationed in Germany, at least I practiced my German.
The Oxford history syllabus began with the Anglo-Saxons and stopped well short of the present. In charge of taking us through the first thousand or so years, K. B. McFarlane (Bruce, not that any undergraduate would dare to call him by a first name) was one of the country’s most formidable medievalists. He looked the part, a large ungainly man with a crabby expression, wearing a brown tweed suit and sitting almost sideways in an uncomfortable chair, stroking the tabby cat in his lap. Whether out of perfectionism or sterility, he could hardly bring himself to publish anything. A few days after arriving, I was writing about the Romano-British system of communication. He’d given me some thirty sources and wanted to know why I hadn’t used them. In the time available I had been able to read only one book and half of another. My method was faulty, he explained; the right way to read was to turn to the book’s index and look up anything you needed.
Another historian and Fellow of Magdalen College was John Stoye, of Yugoslav origins, author of a lively book about the 1683 Ottoman siege of Vienna. On the same staircase as mine in college were the rooms of Karl Leyser. A refugee from Germany, in spirit he was still gripped by emperors and bishops in the Dark Ages of the German past. So good-natured was he that he didn’t mind my exploiting Brahms’s song for a pun on his name, “Immer leiser wird mein Schlummer.”
By the beginning of our second year, it was obvious that Martin was a born historian. Wasting no time, he already showed that he could find his way through archives and primary sources. A. J. P. Taylor was also a fellow of Magdalen. He was then a national figure on account of his television lectures on modern history. Delivering them apparently impromptu and without hesitation, he had in fact written out and learned by heart what he would say. He consented to have as pupils only the eight handpicked undergraduates who were thought to have the best prospects for a good degree and success in their careers, preferably in the academy or the media. For Taylor, the objective of historiography was to get your point across even if this was only prejudice dressed up in assertive prose. He expected Martin to be his protégé, but Martin instead came to the McFarlaneite view that the historian owes it to his subject to be completely knowledgeable and impersonal.
After graduating, I soon found myself literary editor of Time and Tide, a weekly magazine. The editor, John Thompson, hoped I’d discover new talent. The reviews Martin wrote for Time and Tide were his first appearances in print. In one of them, dated July 27, 1961, he laid out the ground rules as he had learnt them at Oxford, with a split infinitive thrown in too: “It is necessary for the historian to continuously cross known ground, sift published materials, and search out new evidence.” The Appeasers (1965), his first book, co-authored with Richard Gott, established what has become received opinion that the background of Prime Minister Ne
ville Chamberlain and his supporters left them unfit to understand anyone from a background as different as Hitler’s. (Gott had a similarly privileged background, with a Field Marshal in the family. The Soviet defector Oleg Gordievsky exposed the fact that Gott had accepted money from the KGB, which put him in the same bind as the pre-war appeasers, unable to understand the real nature of those with whom he was dealing.) Martin then wrote biographies of Lord Allen of Hurtwood and Sir Horace Rumbold, two very different characters who nonetheless typify on the one hand the willing dupe of the period and on the other hand the realist.
In Oxford days, Martin was not the proud Jew he later became. Nobody could know, he once said confidentially, that behind the name Pryce-Jones were Jewish origins. Three years old at the outbreak of war, he had been sent on his own to Canada. Though not Jewish, the woman who had him in charge took the trouble to learn to cook kosher for him, and wrote a weekly letter that she pretended came from his mother, who did not communicate. In the family background was his uncle Leo Trepper. Born in Poland, he emigrated to Mandated Palestine and became a Communist, only to return to Brussels at the outbreak of war in order to run the outstanding Soviet spy network known as Rote Kapelle. Stalin trusted his pact with Hitler and disbelieved the network’s warning in June 1941 that the German army was about to invade. Many of Trepper’s agents were liquidated either by the Gestapo or the NKVD, then the acronym of the Soviet secret police, but Trepper himself was to survive years in the Lubyanka. He returned to Israel and is buried there.
Marriage to Susie Sacher brought Martin’s Jewish identity out into the open. She was as thorough a researcher in the archives as he, and was to write a book about the English National Opera. Members of the Sacher family were major shareholders and directors of the Marks and Spencer chain of supermarkets and also lifelong Zionists. Susie’s parents, Audrey and Michael, owned a house in Jerusalem. Martin was to take every opportunity to travel to Israel and stay there for long periods of research. There’s a tight circle of Israeli academics, writers and diplomats with the historical knowledge, the intellect and the will to defend Zionism in times of peace as well as war, and Martin took his place in it.
The preface of Exile and Return (1978) opens with a statement that he is answering questions frequently asked about “the nature, the evolution, and the aims of Zionism.” Martin particularly documented the persecution of Jews by Germans turned Nazi and Russians turned Soviet, all making Zionism a default ideology for survival assembled from the mass of evidence left by victims and victimizers. Published in 1978, Auschwitz and the Allies shows that the Allies were fully informed of the program of mass murder but bureaucratic indifference and obstruction put paid to plans to bomb the railheads from which Jews were deported to their death. When I was in Vienna in 1984 writing a book for the Time-Life series “The Great Cities,” out of the blue Martin sent me a summary of the deportation of 50,000 Viennese Jews between March 1938 and the end of 1943.
In an unusual concession, Soviet Jews in principle during the 1970s had permission to emigrate to Israel. In practice, the Soviet authorities withheld exit visas for a number of handpicked Jews, refuseniks as they were known. Here was a cause readymade for Martin, the Zionist and Russian speaker. The Jews of Hope (1984) is a journalistic account of the cat-and-mouse game the KGB was obliging some Jews to play. A couple of years later, Shcharansky. Hero of Our Time was the biography of someone internationally celebrated for refusing to compromise even during his years in the Gulag. At some point, in a familiar tactic, the KGB detained Martin at Moscow airport, stripped him to his underwear, and photographed him.
Martin was in the habit of sending postcards to his friends from forsaken Russian towns where he was pursuing refuseniks. Here is one, half covered with colorful postage stamps. “I bought you this card in Tbilisi but as the Georgian government had only just decided on its new currency (the Lada) there were as yet no stamps. So I flew to Moscow and bought these – in Communist days £2,300 worth – but now not 50p – about a quarter of a cup of coffee. I am in St Petersburg now, having visited Jews greeting me today in remote villages where the temperature was minus 29 – and my face is burnt, lips cracked, and fingers being thawed by the radiator they specially brought into my room in the Asturia Hotel. Hope to see you soon – much to tell!”
The American president, Ronald Reagan himself, wanted Martin to brief him on the subject of refuseniks. The president’s Boeing flew Martin by himself to Washington and an aide conveyed him to the White House. A session of thirty minutes was due to start at half past twelve. At five minutes to one, Reagan entered the room, complaining loudly about dissatisfied Congressmen who were making trouble for him. Martin had not got a word in before another aide hurried Reagan away to greet his lunch guests. Once again the sole passenger, Martin was then flown home.
Winston Churchill’s son, Randolph, had been under contract to write his father’s official biography. Finding that the necessary research was beyond his capacity, he advertised for a qualified assistant. A fledgling Oxford don at the time, Martin responded, and Randolph had the sense or the good fortune to take him on. Randolph’s name is given as the author of the first two of the eight volumes of the official biography, but rumor was already putting it about that Martin was his ghost. The remaining six volumes are anyhow exclusively his. Each is between a thousand and fifteen hundred pages long, weighing so many pounds that they are awkward to handle. All have two and sometimes three companion volumes of similar bulk containing supporting documentation from all possible sources. Martin must have felt unqualified admiration for Churchill and unqualified hostility for Communism and Nazism, but he is the only historian I can think of who accumulated facts for their own sake, not for commentary or the formation of opinion. Martin’s eighty-odd books are free from value judgments. The man himself is missing from the monument.
PHILIP GLAZEBROOK
Byzantine Honeymoon
A Tale of the Bosphorus
1979
AT ETON IN the early 1950s, Philip Glazebrook already appeared to be an onlooker, not a participant. Thanks to his red hair, pale eyes and a certain gravity, I knew who he was but we never exchanged a word. A joker in the Eton pack at that moment was David Winn, who could be seen slipping away with Philip to play golf, the opposite of team sport. Both were writers in the making. In 1963, David drowned in a sailing accident. In one of his letters to me, Philip observes that one has to overcome self-esteem and accept writing something less good than the writing of one’s most brilliant contemporary. “Not to have grown out of that dilemma is the real tragedy. I often wonder if David W. would have progressed beyond that point.” Thanks to other Glazebrooks successful in their fields, a conventional education and some private money, Philip was often dismissed as a dilettante, an oddball who was either too serious or not serious enough. The opening sentence of the obituary that the Times published in 2007 is an impressive example of the sneering he was up against. “Philip Glazebrook was one of the last of a near-extinct breed, the genteel man of letters.”
Four years as an honorary attaché at the British Embassy in Rome provided material for fiction, especially Try Pleasure, Philip’s sophisticated first novel. Here he makes fun of a dislikeable true-to-type member of the Foreign Office, clearly a personal enemy. I believe Philip and I met more or less by chance in Florence when I was staying with my grandmother. “All that may be said for identifying Italy so inextricably with Youth is that I am conscious of no regret for lost youth, but only for lost Italy.… Instead of a pensione in Vallombrosa I clocked in at the Reigate House of Correction for my autumn shot at getting a novel off the ground. Do you know about Mount Pleasant at Reigate, a glum mansion put at the disposal of ‘artists’ by the munificence of a starch millionaire.”
The Eye of the Beholder moves easily from Cheshire and Scotland to Mexico City and Antigua. In a review I wrote, “If it had been free of the structure of a novel this would have been a wonderful travel book.” Philip picked up t
his recommendation, telling me, “Ever obedient, I did at last write a kind of book of travels (a mixture of my own outing to Kars with my interest in nineteenth-century travellers to those parts).” Revealing the inner self, he also noted, “I was more pleased to have my Travels accepted as publishable than any novel since my first. Perhaps because of my admiration for real travellers, perhaps because of the sensation of peeling off the green spectacles and false nose of novel-writing (where you masquerade your own views as the views of your characters) I have more the feeling of ’being published’ in this case than in others. Also, consequently, more the feeling of being a fraud whose pretensions will be uncovered by merciless pens.”
Journey to Khiva was published in 1992, and I think my comment on it prompted Philip to return the compliment, “accepting as gospel truth the favorable line taken by so elegant and perspicacious a pen as your own … twenty-five years of rather intermittent production has taught me that all but a tiny pinch of reviews are nothing but further irritation. I cannot help looking in the papers in hopes of one of those reviews that (whether favourable or not) comes from an intelligence which has twigged what you are up to and why you wrote the book.”
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