What an incredible book. 65 years after its first publication, and it is still relevant to current events.

I became familiar with Martha Gellhorn because of Marie Colvin's work. I was intrigued to learn about her inspiration to become a war correspondent, and I was not disappointed.

Like Marie Colvin, Martha Gellhorn focuses on the average person and how war affects them. This view of great wars is very raw and very hard to hear, but it is the truest view of war. Gellhorn walks the fine line between telling the truth and not letting the reader drown in sorrow.

"As one of the millions of the lead, I will not be herded any further along this imbecile road to nothingness without raising my voice in protest. My NO will be as effective as one cricket chirp. My NO is this book"
Page 23

Must give this book another chance... Must read it again calmly and enjoy the richness of the experiences portrayed in this book by the author.

"Our government belongs to us. We are not little mice anymore." - The Face of War is a masterpiece and Martha Gellhorn is a real live SUPERHERO. She taught me that as a writer I should always use my skill for good. And that sometimes the most important writing is born out of fear and a hysteric need to be of use when the world is falling apart. Take your time reading this. Read sentences again. Reread the chapters if it feels right.

What a book. How incredibly brave this woman was, and at a time when women just weren't this sort of thing... a war correspondent...during the Spanish CIvil War, WW2 and Vietnam. Her writing is so simple and precise and she hits the nail on the head over and over. THIS is what war is like, THIS is what is really going on and THIS is why it's so incomprehensibly stupid. It's not easy to read, I had to do it in small doses because it's often quite intense, but this is something everyone should read. In schools for sure. And every time you start thinking that going to war with anyone is a good idea, get this out and read it again.

This is an astonishingly brave book, as it would need be, covering conflicts from the Spanish Civil War through the nuclear arms race in the 1980s. Gellhorn unerringly finds the underdog in any conflict and suspects power, propaganda, and privilege; in other words, her enemies are the right enemies. Unfailingly wry, by turns nonplussed and angry, Gellhorn never mitigates her outrage and says, oh so reasonably in 1959, "For we are led and must follow whether we want to or not; there is no place to secede to. But we need not follow in silence; we still have the right and duty, as private citizens, to keep our own records straight." She finds the human face in war, as her title asserts, chronicling the Nazi POW's tears as faithfully as the skeletal survivors in Dachau, which she was among the first to report.
By the time she writes about the American War in Vietnam, Gellhorn no longer has to stow away in bathrooms on outbound hospital ships to be allowed access to the battlefields, but she focuses rather on refugee camps and villages, deserted town squares in El Salvador, and town meetings in Nicaragua. Her outrage has ripened into a compassion so abiding that one almost weeps to read her documentation of suffering, combining facts ("We left behind in South Vietnam six and a half million destitute refugees ...") and examples ("A girl of six had received a new arm, ending in a small steel hook to replace her left hand"). Having steeled oneself to read about the internment camps in Poland in WWII, it is nonetheless shattering to be made witness to the "small" wars waged between superpowers from the Cold War forward.
Everyone should read at least some of this book, divided as it is into short articles reported live from each horror.She ends in her conclusion, written in 1986, "We all pay for this Defense, this greatest single industry on earth. We, who do not profit from it, support it. And what do we get for our money? Security? Who feels secure?"
As upsetting and moving as this book is, I felt braced by the courage and resolution of not only Gellhorn, but the victims of war on whom she reports. And we are all victims. May we at least acknowledge what other people must endure. Thereby a hard peace might eventually be achieved.

an incredibly well written and relevant collection spanning from the Spanish Civil War to the mid 1980s.