Virginia Cowles was an American war correspondent during the Second World War, and this book is her memoir of that period. She covered Republican and Nationalist Spain just before the war and Czechoslovakia and Germany just before Hitler’s annexation of the Sudetenland. She is then in Russia and Ukraine, on the Finnish front near the Arctic Circle, in Paris and finishes in London and southern England. These memoirs are impressive. Not only did I read about all those “little” wars in the bigger war, learning from every page, but what she did was incredible as a journalist and as a woman, especially 60 years ago. I didn’t even know it was possible. A very dense but informative book, written in an incredibly pleasant style.
“When I first came to London that curious detachment known as “English insularity” used to bewilder and alarm me. Now I found something strangely comforting in the placid, unruffled atmosphere. You felt that no matter what happened, London would always stand. Everything about it was so slow, methodical and deliberate. The routine of life seemed as determined as the regulated moves of nature. Even the ponderous houses and the heavy buses had an air of stability about them. I remembered Martha’s remark: ‘If the world ever comes to an end and if there is only one person left, it’s bound to be an Englishman. I had a feeling she was right.”
Read and listened to as an audiobook