Done with war

When a 27-year-old New York debutante and fashion writer whose father was a society doctor ended up at Croydon Aerodrome on a cold morning in 1937, she was boarding a private plane to begin an eight-year adventure. It was the start of a journey that has produced one of the most fascinating, accessible historical biographies of the Spanish Civil War and the lead-up to the Second World War.

Initially published in 1941 – before the US entered the war – it has rightly been reissued. Virginia Cowles’ memoir is a mixture of fascinating historical detail and Tatler gossip about how the journalists and aristocrats of her war lived through it. The Cowles who walked many miles to the front line and climbed into the trenches with the International Brigade in mud, where nearly half of them would die, was also the woman who dined with Chamberlain and took lunch with Lloyd George.

Then, after eight years of risking her life and sliding skilfully across the perilous landscape of civil war Spain and blacked-out Europe, she stopped and became a prolific biographer of English aristocrats and their kind, wife to a journalist, an MP (Labour, then Tory) and a mother of three. There are no interviews with Cowles to be found online, but as Christina Lamb, one of her successors as a woman “roving war correspondent”, writes in her addition to the new edition, she “deserves a much higher profile for the fascinating work”.

Cowles got everywhere – and met almost everyone. Her eye was one of dispassionate and illuminating detail.

Unlike many famous journalists and writers who covered the Spanish Civil War (Hemingway, Gellhorn, Dorothy Parker and Lillian Hellman), she appears to have been apolitical – switching easily from the leftist republicans and the International Brigades to the more dour nationalists, who at one stage were planning to lock her up as a spy.

One of the most poignant scenes in her book is her description of Franco’s press officers spreading a hotel picnic out on the lawn for the journalists to watch the last stand of 1,000 Republican volunteers who were under fire: “As I sat there in the sunshine, I felt revulsion…I counted 25 shells hitting their positions. Their ammunition had run out days ago and it was only a matter of time.”

It was then that she simply decided: “I was done with Spain.” After Spain, “I abandoned any plans to return to New York and joined The Sunday Times as a roving foreign correspondent” (as one does). She used her web of international high society contacts (and their private planes) to go where she wanted. She has dinner with Neville Chamberlain just three weeks after the British PM had done his doomed deal with Hitler to abandon Czechoslovakia, but paints him as a man desperate to avoid another war in Europe. She then travels to Berlin to hang out with Unity Mitford, the Fuhrer’s British aristocratic fan girl.

In this memoir, Cowles only once admits to fear. It came when she first heard Hitler addressing a rally in the stadium in Berlin in 1938. “Then Hitler began to speak…his voice rasped into the night and then the multitude broke into the roar of ‘Sieg Heil’ over and over again in a frenzy of delirium. I looked at the faces round me and felt tears streaming down my cheeks. The drums had grown louder and I suddenly felt frightened.”

She learns at a gossipy dinner with Unity that Hitler refers to Chamberlain as the “old man” and that Chamberlain had to fly to Berlin three times to secure the Munich agreement – dishing up parts of Czechoslovakia for a short-lived peace in Europe. She is poignant too on Chamberlain when invited to a small private dinner after he signed the Munich agreement.

She paints Downing Street’s great appeaser, so damned by history in a different light, as a man who, having lived through the First World War, was ready to risk anything – humiliation, failure and the wrath of posterity – to believe Hitler when he told him: “I have no further territorial ambitions in Europe.” Just months before Hitler’s invasion of Poland precipitated the showdown, Cowles recalls one of those small dinner parties: “Chamberlain then said to me that ‘I think Hitler is beginning to lose his power’…that indicated to me a deep misunderstanding of Hitler.”

During her time in London, Winston Churchill’s wayward son Randolph seems to have been a constant companion. It is not clear if they were lovers, but certainly they seemed to hang out a lot. He takes her to Churchill’s house at Chartwell for tea, where Winston tells her that things are not yet bad enough for him to join Chamberlain’s pre-war cabinet.

From her Eaton Mews base (where Mrs Pickles “brought my tray in the morning”), she travels across the Soviet Union at a time when there were only six people left on the train when it pulls into Moscow. No foreigners were allowed, but “Randolph Churchill had taken me down to lunch with Mr Maisky, the Soviet ambassador to London, to arrange my visa”.

She travelled on the empty train with a copy of Shaw’s The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism, Capitalism, Sovietism and Fascism. Cowles hated Russia: “The people were rough-looking peasants: women with broad red hands and kerchiefs tied around their heads, men with leathery faces and short square bodies…they looked like they had preserved every bit of cloth from childhood and tied them around their bodies, and also smelled as if they had.”

“The only contact foreigners had with Russians was through their servants,” she writes, and then captures the darkness and fear of life there in the image of a swarm of birds blocking out the glittering sun on the golden rooftops of the Kremlin: “Then I looked up and saw the sky grow black with crows. To me, that black cloud seemed symbolic of the terrible cloud hanging over Soviet Russia.” In the same paragraph, she writes of the secretary of The New York Times correspondent being picked up by the secret police and never being seen again, and a footman at another embassy being discovered to be studying French at night and sent to Siberia. As soon as she could discharge her reporter’s duties to her employers, by now The Sunday Times, Cowles abandoned the “Soviet Union, where the industrial and manufacturing base had collapsed under communist bureaucracy and the Soviet Union was struggling to stay alive”.

Mussolini is next: “A small stocky man in a light suit and a pair of brown and white sports shoes bounced forward to meet me. He walked with a peculiar strutting step – his head back and his chest out as though half his body was too large for him.” For the next two years, she travels across a darkened Europe as war spreads. On the Finnish front line during the Russo-Finnish Winter War (1939-40), she walks for miles in below-zero temperatures to report on what she saw. “The Russians were huddled together like sheep, five hundred of them refusing to surrender, and had been mowed down in a single heap.”

She retains an invaluable, detailed and piercing clarity in what and how she reports. How the young Finnish captain who had overseen the massacre said: “We don’t mind shooting them with rifles, but what is so horrible is when they won’t surrender and you have to mow the whole lot of them down with machine guns.”

In the summer of 1940, Cowles arrives in Paris two weeks before its fall to the Nazis – as the last trains are leaving the city – and escapes through the Bois de Boulogne on the outskirts as the Nazis arrive. It takes three weeks to make it back to London. By 1945, after eight years on the road, Virginia meets and marries Aidan Crawley, former first-class cricketer and German POW, newly elected Labour MP, and future TV executive. She was 35 and spent the rest of her life writing books on aristocracy – from the Romanovs to the Astors – as well as journalism and one play, a comedy Love Goes To Press (1947) which she wrote with her friend Martha Gellhorn.

Given the comparative tranquillity of her later life, it was ironic that Cowles died violently. She was killed in a car accident in Biarritz in 1983 when she was 73. Crawley, the driver, was also badly injured. Reporting got eight years of her life – it is a real pity there isn’t more from Virginia Cowles.