The View from the Ground

by Martha Gellhorn

  Edouard Benes went to Lany to Masaryk's tomb. You drive through slender pine woods, past carefully cultivated fields. The last line of defense, the black steel spools with barbed wire on them, has been pushed back to leave the road clear, but the barbed wire stretches over the hills until it is lost against the sky. He drove through the small square town to the cemetery on the hill. It is just a country cemetery like others in Czechoslovakia. There is the tombstone with two doves on it, the tombstone with an urn. On all the tombstones are pictures of the dead, as is the custom in this country. The peasants and the little shopkeepers of the district are buried here.

  And in a corner of the cemetery is the grave of Masaryk. You would know all about the Czechs from Masaryk's grave. A low wooden fence shuts it off from the others. There is a wide green mound of grass. And at the head of this stands a plain short granite block with a storm lantern on it. The light burns always in the storm lantern and simple people have come and placed on the grave bunches of flowers for the founder of their state. There is no name on this grave, no mark, no noble works. There is grass and a lantern that always burns and the flowers of peasants who loved Masaryk.

  Edouard Benes knelt at this grave and prayed for his people. It was the last thing he did before he went into exile. Kneeling there, he knew surely what his people know now: that this is no peace, there is no safety and no justice and no permanence in it. The Czechs believe that they were not only betrayed, but betrayed in vain. Perhaps Benes felt that it was more than the liberty of his people that had been lost, or the life of his state. The founder of Czechoslovakia's democracy was buried here: perhaps Benes prayed in mourning for the democracy of all Europe.

  1Sudeten Nazis

  The Thirties

  The Thirties were a doom decade.

  The New York stock market crashed in October 1929 and suddenly, mysteriously, the economic system in America and western Europe fell apart. Banks, industries and businesses collapsed. People who thought they had a lot of money or comfortable money lost it in an international panic. The enduring effect of the Great Depression, fully underway by January 1930, was unemployment. Millions of men and women were thrown on a giant rubbish heap of the unwanted. No government had foreseen this catastrophe, no help had been planned.

  By 1933 Hitler ruled Germany. In 1936 the Spanish Civil War started, the shape of things to come, a Republic attacked by united Fascism. Fascist Italy completed its conquest of Ethiopia in 1937. The League of Nations, once a hope for sanity, was by now meaningless. In 1938 the British and French governments allowed Hitler to dismember Czechoslovakia. Russia, far-off, hardly known, was locked in domestic agonies, millions dead from Stalin's hand-made disasters. In the Far East, Japan was fiercely on the move, occupying Manchuria, then invading China in 1937. Having liquidated his top generals, Stalin signed a non-aggression pact with Hitler in August 1939.

  As long predicted, the Second World War finally began on September 1, 1939, though it started slowly with the defeat and division of Poland between Germany and Russia. At the end of the decade, the Finns alone were still fighting off the attack of their overpowering Soviet neighbor. In the last months of 1939 and the winter months of 1940, people who had never understood Nazi Germany and never thought about Japan were calling it the phony war.

  My life began in February 1930. I got ready in the summer of 1929, by leaving college at the end of my junior year, against my father's will, and running through two jobs, proof that I could make my way and pay for it if I didn't mind a diet of doughnuts and pawning my typewriter to tide me over weekends. 1930 was the real thing. I persuaded the Holland America Line to give me free passage in steerage, then described as Student Third Class, in return for a glowing article to use in their trade magazine. Aged twenty-one, with a suitcase and about $75, I set off for Paris where I knew nobody—a joyful confident grain of sand in a vast rising sandstorm. I had visited Paris twice before and it was not my dream city but I intended to become a foreign correspondent, within a few weeks, and Paris was the obvious place to launch my career.

  The launch lacked a certain savoir faire. The flower stalls at the Place de la Madeleine suited my liking for a pretty neighborhood. On a nearby sidestreet I found a hotel, no more than a doorway, a desk and dark stairs, and was gratified by the price of the room. The room was smelly and squalid and I thought it impractical to have a mirror on the ceiling but perhaps that was a French custom. There was an amazing amount of noise in the corridors and other rooms but perhaps the French did a lot of roaming in hotels. I could not understand why the man at the desk grew more unfriendly each time he saw me, when I was probably the friendliest person in Paris.

  Having checked the telephone directory, I presented myself at the office of the New York Times and informed the bureau chief, a lovely elderly Englishman aged maybe forty, that I was prepared to start work as a foreign correspondent on his staff. He had been smiling hugely at my opening remarks and mopped up tears of laughter when he learned where I lived. He took me to lundi— and my enthusiasm for free meals was unbounded—and explained that I was staying in a maison de passe, where rooms were rented by the hour to erotic couples. My new English friend insisted that I change my address, and bribed me with an invitation to report next week again at lunch. He suggested the Left Bank; I would be safer in the students’ milieu.

  The private life of the French was their own business and no inconvenience to me, but I was offended by the unfriendliness of the man at the hotel desk. I got off the metro at St. Germain des Prés, thinking it would be nice to live in fields if not near flowers and was sorry to find no fields but did find a charming little hotel on the Rue de l'Université, which no doubt meant a street for students. This hotel was also cheap and a grand piano, with a big vase of flowers on it, filled the tiny foyer. My windowless room had a glass door opening onto an iron runway. The bath, at extra cost, was four flights down in the courtyard. I thought it remarkable that young men, the other residents, cried so much and quarreled in such screeching voices but I liked the way they played Chopin on the grand piano and kept fresh flowers in the big vase.

  An ex-Princetonian, studying at the Beaux Arts, a throw-back to my college days, came to collect me for dinner one night and was ardently approached by a Chopin pianist, and scandalized. He explained homosexuality, since I had never heard of it. I pointed out that I could hardly be safer than in a homosexual hotel and besides I was sick of people butting in on my living arrangements. I won and lost jobs without surprise and saved up, from my nothing earnings, so that I could eat the least expensive dish at a Russian restaurant where I mooned with silent love for a glorious White Russian balalaika player.

  The years in France and adjacent countries were never easy, never dull and an education at last. Unlike the gifted Americans and British who settled in Paris in the twenties and lived among each other in what seems to me a cozy literary world, I soon lived entirely among the French, not a cozy world. The men were politicians and political journalists, the students of my generation were just as fervently political. Money depended on age; the old had it, some of them had lashings of it; the young did not.

  I was astonished, a few years later in England, to meet young men who neither worked nor intended to work and were apparently rich. A combination of the English eldest son syndrome and the time-honored method of living on debts, charm, and hospitality. They were much more fun than the French but I thought them half-witted; they knew nothing about real life. Real life was the terrible English mill towns, the terrible mining towns in northern France, slums, strikes, protest marches broken up by the mounted Garde Republicaine, frantic underpaid workers and frantic half-starved unemployed. Real life was the Have-nots.

  The Haves were sometimes enjoyable, generally ornamental and a valued source of free meals and country visits. I did not recognize the power of the Haves. Because of my own poverty, fretting over centimes, make-do or do-without, keeping up my appearance on half a shoe string, I absorbed a sense of what t
rue poverty means, the kind you never chose and cannot escape, the prison of it. Maybe that was the most useful part of my education. It was a very high class education, all in all, standing room at ground level to watch history as it happened.

  During the French years, I returned to America once in 1931. This period is lost in the mists of time. I know that I traveled a lot and began the stumbling interminable work on my first novel. (When it finally appeared, in 1934, my father read it and said, rightly, that he could not understand why anyone had published it. I have, also rightly, obliterated it ever since.) With a French companion in the autumn of 1931, I made a long hardship journey across the continent from the east to the west coast. It was all new and exotic to him, not to me, and I remember very little. I remembered “Justice at Night” suddenly; it emerged intact, from its burial in my brain, and wrote itself as if by Ouija board one sunny morning in London in the summer of 1936. I don't know that it belongs here since it is not direct reporting; recollection in tranquility four and a half years late. Recollection is not infallible.

  I was cadging bed and breakfast from H. G. Wells; cadging room from those who had it was a major occupation of the moneyless young in those days. Wells nagged steadily about my writing habits; a professional writer had to work every morning for a fixed number of hours, as he did. Not me. I dug in solitude like a feverish mole until I had dug through to the end, then emerged into daylight, carefree, ready for anything except my typewriter; until the next time. I had just finished my book on the unemployed, The Trouble I've Seen, and spent the London nights dancing with young gentlemen of my acquaintance and was not about to adopt Wells’ 9:30 A.M. to 12:30 P.M. regime. Not then or ever. That morning, to show him I could write if I felt like it, I sat in his garden and let “Justice at Night” produce itself. Wells sent it to the Spectator. I had already moved on to Germany where I ceased being a pacifist and became an ardent anti-Fascist.

  Late in 1934, in Paris, it dawned on me that my own country was in trouble. I thought that trouble was a European specialty. America was safe, rich and quiet, separate from the life around me. Upon finally realizing my mistake, I decided to return and offer my services to the nation. Which I did on a miserable little tub of the Bernstein Line, price of passage $85; arriving in New York on October 10. By October 16 I was enrolled in the service of the nation.

  In Washington, a reporter friend introduced me to Harry Hopkins, who was then the Director of the Federal Emergency Relief Administration, the FERA, the first national American dole. Mr. Hopkins was hiring a few people to travel around the country and report back to him on how FERA worked in practice. I told Mr. Hopkins that I knew a lot about unemployment and was a seasoned reporter; the first was true enough, the second not. I had been writing anything I could for any money I could earn, and the childish first novel; scarcely star rating. I think I remember a smiling blue gleam in Mr. Hopkins’ eyes at that interview.

  I wore the only clothes I had, a Schiaparelli suit in nubbly brown tweed fastened up to its Chinese collar with large brown leather clips, and Schiap's version of an Anzac hat in brown crochet work adorned by a spike of cock pheasant feathers. I could not afford to buy clothes in the ordinary way and dressed myself in soldes, the bargain discarded outfits that the models of the great couturiers had worn in their last collections. Also I painted my face like Parisian ladies, lots of eyeshadow, mascara and lipstick, which was not at all the style for American ladies then and certainly not for social workers in Federal employment. Mr. Hopkins may have been entertaining himself. He could sack me at any moment and was not delving deep into the public purse, though to me the job meant untold riches: $75 a week, train vouchers and $5 per diem travel allowance for food and hotels.

  For three weeks short of a year, as closely as I can figure, I crossed the country, south, north, east, midwest, far west, wrote innumerable reports and kept no copies, the chronic worst habit of my professional life. A few years ago, someone found six of my early reports in Mrs. Roosevelt's papers at the Hyde Park Roosevelt Library. I have cut and stuck three together in “My Dear Mr. Hopkins” because I think they are a small but vital record of a period in American history. They were not written for publication, they can hardly be called written; banged out in haste as information.

  After a few months, I was so outraged by the wretched treatment of the unemployed that I stormed back to Washington and announced to Mr. Hopkins that I was resigning to write a bitter exposé of the misery I had seen. I did not pause to reflect that I had no newspaper or magazine contacts and was unlikely to create a nation-wide outcry of moral indignation. Instead of telling me not to waste his time, Mr. Hopkins urged me to talk to Mrs. Roosevelt before resigning; he had sent her my reports. I walked over to the White House, feeling grumpy and grudging. Mrs. Roosevelt, who listened to everyone with care, listened to my tirade and said, “You should talk to Franklin.”

  That night I was invited to dinner at the White House, seated next to the President in my black sweater and skirt (for by then I was rich enough to buy ordinary clothes) and observed in glum silence the white and gold china and the copious though not gourmet food, hating this table full of cheerful well-fed guests in evening clothes. Didn't they know that better people were barefoot and in rags and half-starved; didn't they know anything about America?

  Mrs. Roosevelt, being somewhat deaf, had a high sharp voice when talking loudly. She rose at the far end of the table and shouted, “Franklin, talk to that girl. She says all the unemployed have pellagra and syphilis.” This silenced the table for an instant, followed by an explosion of laughter; I was ready to get up and go. The President hid his amusement, listened to the little I was willing to say—not much, suffocated by anger—and asked me to come and see him again. In that quaint way, my friendship with the Roosevelts began and lasted the rest of their lives. Mrs. Roosevelt persuaded me that I could help the unemployed more by sticking to the job, so I went back to work until I was fired, courtesy of the FBI.

  I think I know what happened now, though I had a more grandiose explanation at the time. In a little town on a lake in Idaho called Coeur d'Alene, pronounced Cur Daleen, I found the unemployed victimized as often before by a crooked contractor. These men, who had all been small farmers or ranchers on their own land, shoveled dirt from here to there until the contractor collected the shovels, threw them in the lake, and pocketed a tidy commission on an order for new shovels. Meantime the men were idle, unpaid and had to endure a humiliating means test for direct dole money to see them through.

  I had never understood the frequent queries from Washington about “protest groups.” I thought Washington was idiotic—they didn't realize that these people suffered from despair, not anger. But I was angry. By buying them beer and haranguing them, I convinced a few hesitant men to break the windows of the FERA office at night. Afterwards someone would surely come and look into their grievances. Then I moved on to the next stop, Seattle, while the FBI showed up at speed in Coeur d'Alene, alarmed by that first puny act of violence. Naturally the men told the FBI that the Relief lady had suggested this good idea; the contractor was arrested for fraud, they got their shovels for keeps, and I was recalled to Washington.

  I wrote to my parents jubilantly and conceitedly: “I'm out of this man's government because I'm a ‘dangerous Communist’ and the Department of Justice believes me to be subversive and a menace. Isn't it flattering? I shrieked with laughter when Aubrey1 told me; seems the unemployed go about quoting me and refuse— after my visits—to take things lying down.”

  While I was collecting bits and pieces from my seldom-used desk in the Washington FERA office, the President's secretary rang with a message from the President. He and Mrs. Roosevelt, who was out of town, had heard that I was dismissed and were worried about my finances because I would not find another government job with the FBI scowling, so they felt it would be best if I lived at the White House until I sorted myself out. I thought this was kind and helpful but did not see it as extraordi
nary, a cameo example of the way the Roosevelts serenely made their own choices and judgments.

  Everyone in the FERA office was outdone with the stupid interfering FBI cops; I treated the whole thing as a joke. Naturally, the Roosevelts, the most intelligent people in the country, knew it was all nonsense though, being the older generation, they considered the practical side. I had saved enough money for time to write a book, but had not planned where to work and the White House would be a good quiet place to start. It was too, but I needed the complete mole existence for writing and departed from the White House with thanks and kisses as soon as a friend offered me his empty remote house in Connecticut. Being fired was an honorable discharge in my view, not like quitting; and I was very happy to work on fiction again. When I finished the book, I went back to Europe, having done my duty by my country.

  That was the time when I really loved my compatriots, “the insulted and injured,” Americans I had never known before. It was the only time that I have fully trusted and respected the American Presidency, and its influence on the government and the people. Now it is accepted that Franklin Roosevelt was one of the rare great Presidents. While he was in office, until America entered the war, both the Roosevelts were daily vilified and mocked in the Republican press, and both were indifferent to these attacks. Mrs. Roosevelt was in herself a moral true north. I think the President's own affliction, crippled by polio at the age of thirty-nine, taught him sympathy for misfortune. They were wise. They had natural dignity and no need or liking for the panoply of power. I miss above all their private and public fearlessness.