Ernest Hemingway – The Battle of The Bulge, Martha Gellhorn & Christmas, 1944

On the morning of 22nd December – with the hard fighting coming to an end, and with the 101st Airborne plugging the gap at Bastogne – Hemingway left his sick bed and headed back to Barton’s headquarters to find out what had been happening. Back at HQ he was invited by Colonel Luckett (commander of the 12th Infantry Regiment) to a hill top to observe General “Red” Irwin’s 5th Infantry attack the German positions. The attack, for all its power, ended as much in confusion as it did in partial victory. It was also the last military action Hemingway saw.

It was an attack that also saw the 54 year old Barton relieved of his command, officially on the grounds of ill health, although, as Whiting reminds us, many of his fellow officers thought it was because of the poor way he’d handled his division during the Battle of Hurtgen Forest. If bad soldiering was the case, and there’s no proof there was, he was not alone.

Around noon on Christmas Eve Martha Gellhorn arrived in Luxembourg City, sensing a good story, and hoping somehow to get into Bastogne and report on the siege. After booking into one of the two hotels reserved for correspondents she reported to the 4th’s Divisonal Headquarters, where a Colonel Ruggles invited her to join her husband and spend Christmas Eve and Christmas Day as the guests of the 4th at their command post. As Ruggles stated later – and he didn’t know about the Hemingways divorce plans – it had been his “…intention to surprise Ernest pleasantly.” Sadly it didn’t work out quite that way.

Hemingway spent part of Christmas Eve at a leaving party for Barton, where he held court most of the evening. Toward the end – having been told of Martha’s arrival – he made his way to her hotel and invited her over for a drink. Either because she was lonely, or perhaps wanted to talk divorce terms, she accepted, and, while thousands of GIs were shivering in their foxholes, they sat around Tubby Barton’s Christmas Tree drinking Cognac.

Afterwards, instead of going back to Martha’s hotel, the couple drove the two kilometres to Lanham’s HQ (he’d not been at the party due to a falling out with Barton) where – as many soldiers were given the last rites on the frosty ground outside – they slept together in Lanham’s bed while the colonel slept in his freezing caravan.

On Christmas Day, Ernest and Martha, in the company of Colonel Lanham, made a jeep tour of battalion command posts. Ernest sat in front with the driver, Lanham and Martha in the back. Almost from the first an argument arose between the two correspondents, with Hemingway pontificating about the recent fight with Franz Sensfuss’s 212th, and that Martha had never seen any real fighting. Martha retaliated, often in French, that she had seen more real fighting than he – which was true. And as Charles Whiting writes in his superb, Hemingway Goes To War:

” Hemingway waited until the tour of the command posts was over, then he turned on Martha and told her that she had just been as close to the frontline as she ever would be. He claimed that she had made a lot of money writing about the war, but she had never seen a man killed in action. As Martha Gellhorn had been reporting the war since 1939 on three different continents, the accusation wounded her, and it was made even more hurtful by the fact that her husband publicly used his private nickname for her in front of Lanham. “

There was to be a similar argument between them at a New Year’s Eve party, after which Hemingway headed back to Paris, and Martha to London.