The Women who Wrote the War by Nancy Cladwell Sorel

Author:Nancy Cladwell Sorel
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing, Inc.
Published: 1990-03-20T16:00:00+00:00

21

Trekking North from Rome

But not all women correspondents that summer of 1944 were primed to go to Normandy. When Martha Gellhorn, confined to a nurses’ training camp in England as punishment for her hospital ship jaunt, farther disobeyed orders by bagging a lift to Naples without papers, travel orders, or PX card, it was because she saw no other course open to her. Italy offered more options. There the war slogged along on several fronts; she could avoid American jurisdiction by attaching herself to the French, Poles, Brits, or Canadians. Besides, women correspondents in Italy were batde-sawy. No wave of novices had been sent there, for whose sake veterans like herself had been handed a list of dos and don’ts that straitjacketed their talents, Gellhorn huffed. In Italy she could get on with her job.

Eleanor Packard would no doubt have agreed had her opinion been asked. She and Reynolds were back in Italy, in charge of the UP office in Naples. Anzio and Cassino were old news now, and just before D Day, as the last German troops fled through the northern gates of the capital, the U.S. Fifth Army had entered Rome from the south. The Packards rode with them, past throngs of Italians heading toward the capital on foot, their voices a joyous roar. The Piazza Venezia, when they at last reached it, was jammed. Through a deluge of white flowers Eleanor looked up at the balcony where Mussolini had so often stood. Reminded of that December day in 1941 when he had declared war against the United States, she half expected his short, bull-like figure to reappear.

The figure that did appear on a balcony that day was Pope Pius XII. From the great square in front of Saint Peter’s, Eleanor heard him offer thanks for the sparing of Rome; she was part of the sea of humanity that fell to their knees in a single great rippling motion. As a Catholic, she had always defended the pontiff against the charge that he was sympathetic to Fascism. Now, learning that he had harbored dozens of escaped Allied fliers and prisoners of war at the Vatican, she felt vindicated.

After the ceremony, at an audience especially for journalists, Pius XII glimpsed what facing the media in the postwar world would be like. Gone was the decorum of the past. As he spoke in his excellent English from the dais, photographers scrambled about in mad gyrations to get the best angles for their pictures, jumping up beside him, popping their flashes almost in his face. A newsreel camera ground away. Old-timers in the press stood red-faced with embarrassment, Eleanor doubly so because she was already breaking protocol by appearing in army garb, meaning pants. Circling the long room afterward to speak with those present, the pontiff drew up short when he reached her, and she felt obliged to explain how when you move with a fighting army a skirt is not useful. She had not anticipated the present occasion. His holiness forgave her with a smile.

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