The Press: Fair-Haired Boys

“As I write this dispatch 21 bombers are raining heavy bombs on the oil and alcohol refineries. The table under my hand is shaking like something alive. In this infernal din set up by screaming sirens, barking anti-aircraft guns and the roar of bursting bombs I can’t take my mind off the shivering of the wall of this ancient hotel. If it holds together until I can get this off, then I will believe in miracles. . . .”

That might have been written by Ernest Hemingway in 1936, sitting in the Hotel Florida in Madrid while Franco’s planes droned above the city. Or it could have been written by Floyd Gibbons in Shanghai the day the Palace Hotel had its front blown off, in 1937. Actually neither- Hemingway nor Gibbons wrote it, nor any of the war correspondents whose names were sometimes bigger than the news in Ethiopia, Spain and China, but a 28-year-old reporter named Daniel De Luce, who went to Europe for the first time last April.

Five years out of the University of California, married but childless, Daniel De Luce was typical of the young newspapermen who last week had the first big news of a great war all to themselves. Attached to the Associated Press bureau in Budapest, he set out northward as Polish resistance dissolved into rout before Germany’s mechanized might, passed lines of stolid peasants straggling into Hungary, sullen groups of soldiers retreating across the border, and reached LwÓw as it was crashing into ruins after 14 days of steady bombing by German planes.

No famed U. S. newspaper correspondent was in Poland when the War began. Some of them had stayed in London and Paris, waiting for another Munich. Some who had thought that Poland would hold out for weeks or months were caught napping. Others had looked for a big battle on the Western Front when Polish fighting bogged down in mud that never came. One & all, they cooled their heels last week, copied official hand-outs from the Ministry of Information in London, drank pernods at the bar of the Hotel Lancaster in Paris, while youngsters who had never seen a war before kept cables quivering with stories of a nation’s despair and death.

Veterans. Of the free-lance journalists who had written most passionately of war and the power politics back of it, not one had seen action on any front last week. Ernest Hemingway was at his ranch in Montana, working on a new book. Vincent Sheean was in Manhattan, awaiting the birth of a child to his English wife. Pierre van Paassen, onetime Toronto Star correspondent in Spain, author of the bestseller, Days of Our Years, was on board the U. S. liner Manhattan, bound for New York.

Negley Parson, lately in South Africa for the London Daily Mail, was recuperating from an operation in a Copenhagen hospital. Eventually he planned to go to Moscow. Walter Duranty was in Rome. John Gunther had sailed from London, bound for Manhattan to be with his ailing wife. All three had signed to write for the North American Newspaper Alliance; and Duranty hoped he would be among the ten U. S. correspondents to be picked by the British Army Council for front-line service in France.

Dean of a select group of newsmen who had covered World War I was 62-year-old Sir Philip Gibbs, chosen with four others in 1914 to represent the newspapers of Great Britain on the Western Front. Sir Philip had applied for a place at the front again; meanwhile he reported World War II for the McNaught Syndicate from London. Another veteran signed as a war commentator by McNaught was Hendrik Willem Van Loon, 57, who was an Associated Press correspondent in Belgium when the German Army swept through on its way to Paris in 1914. Now writing for Wythe Williams’ Greenwich (Conn.) Time, he did not plan to go abroad again.

Nor did Wythe Williams himself, who worked for the New York Times in Paris during World War I; but he will comment on World War II for the Watkins Syndicate. Westbrook Pegler, United Press correspondent in France until he joined the U. S. Navy in 1918, was busy writing scornful columns for the New York World-Telegram. Floyd Gibbons, who was torpedoed on his way to London on the S. S. Laconia in 1917, then lost an eye at Cháteau Thierry, saw Italy’s war in Ethiopia, Japan’s war in China. But last week in Pennsylvania, as it must to every man, Death came to Floyd Gibbons.

Still active was U. P.’s Webb Miller. After covering every major war since 1918, he was in London waiting for permission to join the British forces in France. So was Karl von Wiegand of Hearst Newspapers, who in 1914 was reproved by U. P. (TIME, Sept. 4) for wasting cable charges when he sent a 138-word message on Austria-Hungary’s ultimatum to Serbia.

Other notable correspondents marking time in London last week until British press officials would let them join the Army at the front were the New York Times’s George Eric Rowe 0edye, the Herald Tribune’s Ralph Barnes, H. R. Knickerbocker of I. N. S.

Legman. Besides its ten U. S. correspondents, the War Council had decided there was room in France for 39 representatives of London and provincial papers, British news agencies, broadcasting companies, Empire and foreign journals. But it had not yet made up its mind how to look after such a body of newsmen. It had been planned to put them all in British Army uniforms. But that raised a delicate question: would the Americans then be technically in the service of a belligerent power, thus violating U.S. neutrality. In any case, the British had no wish to send correspondents to the front until troops could be seen actually in battle.

Meanwhile, to still a chorus of indignant catcalls from editors who felt the War’s coverage was absurdly inadequate, the Council agreed to let one legman represent the entire world’s press on the Western Front. Chosen was Alexander Graeme Clifford, 30-year-old correspondent for Renter’s (British) News Service. No ace reporter, Clifford was picked to avoid jealousy among great-name newswriters.

Unassuming, dark, bespectacled Legman Clifford is an Oxford graduate. In eight years with Reuter’s he has seen fighting in Spain, worked in Berlin until the War closed Reuter’s office there. A bachelor, for diversion he plays the recorder, an archaic flute. In France he will look for colorful stories of camp life, report no military action because there is none yet to report.

‘Leggers. But Clifford will not be the first correspondent to see the Western Front war zone. One morning before dawn last week four newspapermen drove out of Paris in a private car and headed east toward the front. Past sentries with fixed bayonets, anti-aircraft batteries, military airports, machine-gun nests they rolled strangely unchallenged, until they crossed the Maginot Line and stood on German soil, just behind the French advance lines.

The four were Paul William Ward of the Baltimore Sun, Kenneth Downs of I. N. S., the Chicago Tribune’s Edward Taylor and Edgar Ansel Mowrer, 47-year-old Paris correspondent for the Chicago Daily News. They talked with soldiers, interviewed a German officer who had been taken prisoner, enjoyed a six-course luncheon with Beaujolais and Riesling wines. Wrote the Sun’s Ward later: “Except for brief bursts of artillery fire it was as quiet as Vermont and as peaceful in appearance as the Green Spring Valley.” Later, when French military authorities learned of their junket, the newsmen apologized.

For Edgar Ansel Mowrer it was familiar soil: he too is a news veteran of World War I. Member of a newspaper family (his brother is Paul Scott Mowrer, editor of the Chicago Daily News, who gave him his job), Edgar Mowrer reported War I from France and Belgium in 1914, later witnessed the Italian rout at Caporetto. He was head of the Daily News bureau in Berlin in 1932 when he published a book about the Nazis: Germany Puts the Clock Back. After Hitler became Chancellor, he was forced to leave Germany. From Berlin he moved on to Japan and China, last spring took up his post in Paris.

Lucky Youngsters. Enterprising as Uncle Edgar was another Mowrer: Editor Paul Scott’s son Richard. When the War began Richard Mowrer, 27, was one of those lucky young men who were stationed in Warsaw. (He had been expelled from Rome in April for reporting what Fascist authorities called “false information.”) Last week another Daily Newsgatherer in Budapest cabled anxiously that Mowrer was lost somewhere beyond the Polish border in territory occupied by Soviet troops.

Two days later Richard Mowrer turned up safe and well in Czernowitz, Rumania, to send the Daily News his story of the Soviet occupation. He had been held in the frontier town of Zaleszczyki to await the arrival of a commissar from Moscow. When two days went by and no commissar appeared, after nightfall Richard Mowrer stripped, waded across the River Dniester, climbed a steep bluff onto Rumanian soil, and headed for the nearest telegraph office.

In Bucharest at week’s end was many another correspondent like Richard Mowrer, virtually unknown until German troops moved into Poland less than a month ago, now honored with a by-line on the front page of every great U. S. newspaper. There was Robert Parker Jr., 33, transferred to Warsaw by the A. P. last March. There was the U. P.’s Edward Beattie Jr., 30, who escaped from Warsaw with nothing but the clothes on his back. The luck of war’s draw had given all these youngsters the chance that every newsman covets, few achieve.