Ernest Hemingway: The Greco Turkish War
1922
“What Hemingway was writing was the blue print of all future war reporting...”
On hearing of the further escalation of the Greco-Turkish War, The Toronto Star instructed Hemingway to get down there and follow the action, and he did, leaving Hadley behind in Paris. It was a bloody and vicious war and Hemingway described what he saw simply:
“ Minarets stuck up in the rain out of Andrianople across the mud flats. The carts were jammed for thirty miles along the Karagatch road. Water buffalo and cattle were hauling carts through the mud. No end and no beginning. Just carts with everything they owned. The old men and women, soaked through, walking along, keeping the cattle moving. The Maritza river was running yellow almost up to the bridge. It rained all through the evacuation.”
This was writing of a different kind. Never had there been war reporting like this where the writer simply observed and told what he saw. It was a revelation. It was like the new cinema, it was black and white and etched in tragedy. It is what Hemingway saw when his grandfather took him to see D.W. Griffiths’ The Birth of a Nation.
What Hemingway was writing was the blue-print of all future war reporting. He was setting a style that is still with us today. He was setting a style that his fellow…
