The Great War for Civilisation Read Free Page A

primarily not about victory or defeat but about death and the infliction of death. It represents the total failure of the human spirit. I know an editor who has wearied of hearing me say this, but how many editors have first-hand experience of war?
    Ironically, it was a movie that propelled me into journalism. I was twelve years old when I saw Alfred Hitchcock’s
Foreign Correspondent
, a black and white 1940 creaky of patriotism and equally black humour in which Joel McCrea played an American reporter called John Jones—renamed Huntley Haverstock by his New York editor—who is sent in 1939 to cover the approaching war in Europe. He witnesses an assassination, chases Nazi spies in Holland, uncovers Germany’s top agent in London, is shot down in an airliner by a German pocket battleship and survives to scoop the world. He also wins the most gorgeous woman in the movie, clearly an added bonus for such an exciting profession. The film ends in the London Blitz with a radio announcer introducing Haverstock on the air. “We have as a guest tonight one of the soldiers of the press,” he says, “. . . one of the little army of historians who are writing history from beside the cannon’s mouth . . .”
    I never looked back. I read my father’s conservative
Daily Telegraph
from cover to cover, always the foreign reports, lying on the floor beside the fire as my mother pleaded with me to drink my cocoa and go to bed. At school I studied
The
Times
each afternoon. I ploughed through Khrushchev’s entire speech denouncing Stalin’s reign of terror. I won the school Current Affairs prize and never—ever— could anyone shake me from my determination to be a foreign correspondent. When my father suggested I should study law or medicine, I walked from the room. When he asked a family friend what I should do, the friend asked me to imagine I was in a courtroom. Would I want to be the lawyer or the reporter on the press bench, he asked me. I said I would be the reporter and he told my father: “Robert is going to be a journalist.” I wanted to be one of the “soldiers of the press.”
    I joined the
Newcastle Evening Chronicle
, then the
Sunday Express
diary column, where I chased vicars who had run off with starlets. After three years, I begged
The Times
to hire me and they sent me to Northern Ireland to cover the vicious little conflict that had broken out in that legacy of British colonial rule. Five years later, I became one of those “soldiers” of journalism, a foreign correspondent. I was on a beach at Porto Covo in Portugal in April of 1976—on holiday from Lisbon where I was covering the aftermath of the Portuguese revolution— when the local postmistress shouted down the cliff that I had a letter to collect. It was from the paper’s deputy editor, Louis Heren. “I have some good news for you,” he wrote. “Paul Martin has requested to be moved from the Middle East. His wife has had more than enough, and I don’t blame her. I am offering him the number two job in Paris, Richard Wigg Lisbon—and to you I offer the Middle East. Let me know if you want it . . . It would be a splendid opportunity for you, with good stories, lots of travel and sunshine . . .” In Hitchcock’s thriller, Haverstock’s editor calls him to his office before sending him to the European war and asks him: “How would you like to cover the biggest story in the world today?” Heren’s letter was less dramatic but it meant the same thing.
    I was twenty-nine and I was being offered the Middle East—I wondered how King Feisal felt when he was “offered” Iraq or how his brother Abdullah reacted to Winston Churchill’s “offer” of Transjordan. Louis Heren was in the Churchillian mode himself, stubborn, eloquent, and an enjoyer of fine wines as well as himself a former Middle East correspondent. If the stories were