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A review by danadalloway
The Face of War by Martha Gellhorn
5.0
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.
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.