By-Line Ernest Hemingway

by Ernest Hemingway

“Why do you do it?”

  “God knows. I suppose because he would think I was yellow if I stopped.”

  “Why don’t you knock him out?”

  “How am I going to knock him out if I can’t hit him?”

  “Force the pace, corner him, make him slug and knock him out.”

  “Force the pace! I can’t even step along with him a minute before my wind is gone.”

  “Train,” said Ryall. “We’ll train you.”

  Training consisted of running between the lakeside press conferences and those in the hotel up in the steep town (if your correspondent got there too late the trainers would cover him on the news), in drinking nothing after dinner, and in the practice of celibacy. On the fifth day of this regime when your correspondent protested that he would rather have his head pushed off by Ward the rest of his life than run up those ungodly stairs once more Ryall looked your correspondent over in the manner of a man appraising a fifth prize hog and said, “All right. I suppose you’re as fit as we’ll ever get you. Fight him tomorrow.”

  For any details of what happened when we put the gloves on that next morning you will have to consult Mr. Ward Price. He could fight as well as box and your correspondent is no reliable witness on how it went nor any man to give you a blow-by-blow account. I do know that afterwards I felt much worse than I had felt every other morning when he had only hit me with his left. When he stopped to fight you could hit him all right. But brother he could hit you right back.

  At noon that day I was back down at the Beau-Rivage bar in Ouchy waiting for the British press conference to be called. Ryall came in.

  “You see,” he said.

  “I guess I can see,” I said. “I haven’t really tried yet. I’m going to try later in the day.”

  “Now you see.”

  “What?”

  “What training will do. The value of roadwork, of celibacy and abstinence from brandy.”

  “Do I look like an advertisement for all those things?”

  “Ward’s got two broken ribs,” he said, in the manner he always had of imparting a mystery. “He showed me the X-ray plates. He’s just come from the doctor’s.”

  “Honest to God?”

  “If you want to put it that way,” he said. “Now you see what training will do? You need never box him again. Come and have a drink you big oaf. There’s Hamilton and Lawrence.”

  That was the conference where Ismet Pasha was guarded by a bodyguard who always went around with pistols showing and the leader of the bodyguard was a very tough looking citizen with four pistols plainly visible through his too tight fitting clothes and I was selected by lot in the Palace bar one night to present him with an explosive cigar. He took it very graciously and offered me a cigarette in exchange the while I was trying to fade away and when the cigar went off he pulled all four pistols at once.

  That too was the conference at which a young Foreign Office secretary put through a call to the Beau-Rivage Palace to speak with Lord Curzon and said, “I say, is the Imperial Buggah in?”

  And lived through hearing those clear cool tones answer, “This is the Imperial Buggah speaking.”

  That was the conference, too, that Curzon wrecked when everything was settled by a manifestation of that strange malady that Ryall claimed afflicts men in power. Everything had been settled and the Turks were ready to sign when they asked Curzon, in charge of British negotiations, to a dinner. Curzon refused, and the language of his refusal got back to the Turkish delegation. He had said, it was reported, “My duty compels me to treat with them at this conference. But there is nothing in my duty that compels me to sit at table with ignorant Anatolian peasants.” His malady of greatness compelled him to say that when he was bringing to a successful termination an arduous task; and the saying of it upset all he had done, so that his work had to be finished by another man, and England never got as good terms from the Turks again.

  It was one night when Hamilton and Ryall and I were dining together that Ryall brought out this theory that power affected all men holding it in a certain definite way. Ryall said that you could see the symptoms of this effect on any man, sooner or later, and he gave us many examples of it.

  In Wilson, of course, he could trace it very clearly and he said that it followed a course almost like a disease and that you could chart it.

  I remember saying, “What about Clemenceau?” for Clemenceau was one of my great heroes then and Ryall said you could not trace it as clearly in him because he had led an extremely active life physically and that oftentimes that kept a man from showing the usual effects of the malady of power. But he said that if I had known Clemenceau better I would never have admired him as I did. That Clemenceau had abused his power when he was a middle aged man and that then he was a great bully and had killed men unnecessarily in duels; that later, when he came in power as an old man during the war, he had all his old political opponents jailed, shot or banished; branding them all as traitors. It was this that made so many politicians hate him, so that when they went out to Versailles to elect a President of France after the war and Clemenceau was sure he would be elected for his services to France they elected Deschanel in order to humiliate the man they all had feared as the Tiger.

  It was Ryall’s theory that a politician or a patriot as soon as given a supreme position in a state, unless he was without ambition and had not sought the office, always began to show the symptoms of what power was doing to him. He said you could see it very clearly in all the men of the French Revolution, too, and it was because our forefathers in America knew how power affected men that they had limited the term of the executive.

  Ryall said one of the first symptoms of the malady of power was suspicion of the man’s associates, then came great touchiness on all matters, inability to receive criticism, belief that he was indispensable, and that nothing had ever been done rightly until he came into power and that nothing would ever be done rightly again unless he stayed in power. He said that the better and more disinterested the man, the quicker this attacked him. He said that a man who was dishonest would last much longer because his dishonesty made him either cynical or humble in a way, and that protected him.

  That night I remember him quoting the example of a Lord of the British Admiralty who had been getting steadily more advanced in the malady of power. It had become impossible for almost anyone to work with him and the final smash came at a meeting at which they were discussing how to get a better class of cadets for the navy. This admiral had hammered on a table with his fist and said, “Gentlemen if you do not know where to get them, by God I will make them for you!”

  Since that evening your correspondent has studied various politicians, statesmen and patriots in the light of Bill Ryall’s theory and he believes that the fate of our country for the next hundred years or so depends on the extent of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s ambition. If he is ambitious only to serve his country, as Cleveland was, we, and our children, and their children will be very fortunate. If he is ambitious personally, to leave a great name, or to eclipse the luster of the name he bears, which was made famous by another man, we will be out of luck because the sensational improvements that can be made legally in the country in time of peace are being rapidly exhausted.

  War is coming in Europe as surely as winter follows fall. If we want to stay out now is the time to decide to stay out. Now, before the propaganda starts. Now is the time to make it impossible for any one man, or any hundred men, or any thousand men, to put us in a war in ten days—in a war they will not have to fight.

  In the next ten years there will be much fighting, there will be opportunities for the United States to again swing the balance of power in Europe; she will again have a chance to save civilization; she will have a chance to fight another war to end war.

  Whoever heads the nation will have a chance to be the greatest man in the world for a short time—and the nation can hold the sack once the excitement is over. For the next ten years we need a man without ambition, a
man who hates war and knows that no good ever comes of it, and a man who has proved his beliefs by adhering to them. All candidates will need to be measured against these requirements.

  Wings Always over Africa: An Ornithological Letter

  Esquire • JANUARY, 1936

  A RECENT dispatch from Port Said reported the passing in one week of six ships with 9,476 wounded and sick Italian soldiers returning through the Suez Canal from the field of honor in Ethiopia. The dispatch did not give the names of any of these soldiers nor the names of the cities or villages that they left to go fight in Africa. Nor did it state that they were being sent to one of the Italian island hospital concentration camps where the sick and wounded are being delivered in order that their return to Italy shall not depress the morale of their relatives who sent them off. Italian morale is as easily depressed as it is elevated and any one who has ever seen an Italian laborer threatening or attempting to kill a physician who attends his dying child in the event of the child’s death will appreciate the wisdom of Mussolini in not allowing the citizens of his corporate state to see the eggs broken in the making of his imperial omelet.

  The principal expression that one recalls as hearing from the lips, mouths, or throats of wounded Italians was the words, “Mamma mia! Oh mamma mia!” and this admirable filial devotion in times of physical suffering could be counted on to receive reciprocation if the mother of the wounded or sick soldier were allowed to see him. There can only be a certain amount of mamma mia-ing in an army and have that army hold together and Mussolini is to be congratulated on keeping it one sided.

  An Italian soldier can be so fired by propaganda that he will go to battle wanting only to die for II Duce and convinced that it is better to live one day as a lion than a hundred years as a sheep and, hit in the buttocks, the fleshy part of the thigh, or the calf of the leg, all comparatively painless wounds, he is capable of uttering the most noble sentiments and of saying, “Duce! I salute you Duce! I am happy to die for you, Oh Duce!”

  But hit in the belly, or if the bullet breaks bone, or if it happens to hit a nerve he will say, “Oh Mamma mia!” and the Duce will be far from his thoughts. Malaria and dysentery are even less capable of arousing patriotic fervor and jaundice, as I recall it, which gives a man the sensation of having been kicked in the vicinity of the interstitial glands, produces almost no patriotic fervor at all.

  There is an aspect of war in Africa which Il Duce will do well to keep censored out of his newspapers and that is the part played in it by birds. In all of the territory of Ethiopia where the Italians are fighting there are five birds which prey upon the dead and wounded. These are the black and white crow which flies near to the ground and probably depends on its sense of smell to find a wounded man or a body; the ordinary buzzard which is never far from the ground and may hunt by both sight and smell; the red faced small vulture looking rather like our turkey buzzard, which flies fairly high and hunts by sight; the huge, obscene looking bare necked vulture which circles almost out of sight and falls like a whishing feathered projectile when a carcass or a fallen man is sighted and comes hopping and waddling forward to peck at anything that is alive or dead provided it is defenceless; and the great, ugly, marabou stork that wheels out of sight, high above the highest vultures, and wheels down when he sees the vultures dropping. There are only five main varieties of these birds but five hundred of them will come to a single wounded man when he lies in the open.

  What happens to a man, once he is dead, is of little matter, but the carrion birds of Africa will hit a wounded man, lying in the open, as quickly as they will a dead man. I have seen them leave nothing of a zebra but the bones and a greasy black circle covered with feathers twenty minutes from the time the animal was killed provided the belly skin was slit open so they could get an opening. That same night the hyenas would so crack and devour the bones that in the morning you could not see where the zebra had been except for a black, oily looking blotch on the plain. Since a dead man is smaller and has no thick hide to protect him they will deal with him much quicker. There is no need in Africa to bury your dead for sanitary reasons.

  But it is not the fact that a dead soldier may end up in a vulture’s stomach that Il Duce needs to conceal from his troops, but the way that the vultures and the marabous have with the wounded. The first thing an Italian soldier should be told is to roll over on his face if he is hit and cannot keep moving. There is a man alive today who did not know that rule during the fighting of the last war in German East Africa. While he was unconscious the vultures got his eyes and he woke in the stabbing blinding pain with the stinking, feathered shuffle over him and, beating at them, rolled onto his face in time to save half of it. They were pecking his clothing away to get at his kidneys when the stretcher bearers came up and drove them off. If you ever want to see how long it takes them to come to a live man lie down under a tree, perfectly still, and watch them, first circling so high they look as small as specks, then coming, dropping in concentric circles, then plummeting down in a whish of rushing wings to deal with you. You sit up and the ring jumps back raising their wings. But what about if you could not sit up?

  So far the Ethiopians have not fought. They have retreated and let the Italians advance. Because Ethiopia has always been a country of strong, rival feudal chieftains the Italians have been able to buy over certain of these chiefs who have ambitions of their own or feuds with the Negus. In all the reports it reads as though Italy were occupying the country almost without a struggle. But Italy needs to win a battle to be in a position to negotiate with the powers for an approval of her retaining her captured territory and, perhaps, being given a protectorate over all Ethiopia. And the Ethiopians, as this is written, have steadily refused battle.

  Each day the Italian lines of communication become longer, each day it costs her no one knows how many million of lira to keep her army in the field, and each day there are the sick being taken down to the ships for evacuation. Once Ethiopia has retreated far enough so that they can wage a guerrilla warfare on the Italian lines of communication, and never fight a battle at all, Italy is beaten. The Ethiopians may be too proud, or too conceited to do this and they may risk everything in a big battle and lose. There is always a possibility that they can win although everything is against them there.

  Once they become used to planes and learn to scatter and fire on the planes as the Riffians did in North Africa one of Italy’s greatest assets will be nullified. Bombing planes must have towns for targets, machine gunning planes must have a concentration of troops. Scattered troops are more dangerous to the plane than the plane is to them. If the Ethiopians can hold on until the next rainy season comes Italian tanks and motorized transport will be useless. It seems doubtful that Italy can get enough money to fight through until the next rains are over. Remember the Ethiopians live in Ethiopia and eat only one meal a day, while every Italian in the field needs a gigantic and expensive transport organization to keep him there and feed him the food he is used to. If Italy wins one battle she will negotiate for peace.

  Mussolini’s generals have wisely employed Somali and Danakil troops as the spear head of the Italian advance and a great part of the regularity of their advance must be credited to their wise mistrust of European infantry in Africa and their sound appreciation of the lesson learnt from the last war, that to fight that close to the equator, and win, you must use black troops. If, once they have advanced far enough, a great battle is precipitated they will have to use Italian troops in the fighting since they have not enough trained askaris to fight on any large scale. This is what they are evidently seeking to avoid and what the Ethiopians hope for. They whipped the Italians once and they are confident that they can whip them again. Italy is hoping for a fool proof battle to be fought with black infantry, tanks, machine guns, modern artillery and planes. Ethiopia is hoping to get an Italian army into such a trap as Adowa was in 1896. In the meantime the Ethiopians are retreating and stalling and the Italians are advancing, using up th
eir askaris, gaining many untrustworthy allies, and spending all their available money to keep their army in the field.

  As I see it now the next move will be for Italy to come to a confidential agreement with the powers to let her alone and remove the sanctions because of the danger of what she will present as “bolshevism” in Italy if she loses. Countries with a democratic regime of government may sometimes unite to prevent a dictator carrying out an imperialistic scheme of conquest, once those countries have consolidated their own imperialistic holdings, but let the dictator squeal that bolshevism is coming if he is allowed to be defeated or go broke and this dictator will receive the same consideration that he once had when he was a hero to the Rothermere press in England because of the myth that Mussolini saved Italy from going red. Italy was kept from going red when the workers took over the factories in Turin and not one radical group would co-operate with any other radical group. It was kept from going red by the accident that the workers seized the artificially built up war-baby metallurgical industries at the moment when they were about to go broke. Mussolini, the cleverest opportunist in modern history, rode in on the wave of disgust that followed the farcical failure of the Italian radicals to co-operate or to use their great asset, Italy’s defeat at Caporetto, intelligently.

  I can remember in the old days how the mothers and fathers used to lean out of windows, or from the front of wine shops, blacksmith shops or the door of a cobbler’s when soldiers passed and shout, “Abasso gli ufficiali!” “Down with the officers!” because they saw the officers as those who kept the foot soldiers fighting when they had come to know the war would bring them no good. Then those who were officers and believed that war could only be ended by fighting that war through and winning it were bitter at the hatred that all working people bore them. Many officers hated war then as since you can hate nothing; not tyranny, not injustice, not murder, not brutality, not the corruption of the human soul; for war has the essence of all of these blended together and is strengthened by its various parts until it is stronger than any of the evils it is composed of can ever be. The only people who ever loved war for long were profiteers, generals, staff officers and whores. They all had the best and finest times of their lives and most of them made the most money they had ever made. Of course there are exceptions; there are and were generals who hated war and there are whores who did not do well out of the last war. But these excellent and generous people are exceptions.