History: These two books share some subject- matter and political sympathies, but they are worlds apart in style and substance. Nicholas Rankin, in Telegram from Guernica, takes a footnote in history and reveals a fascinating and significant world behind it in fresh and illuminating prose. Russell Martin, in Picasso's War, blandly rehashes the story of the 20th century's best-known painting with an airy disregard for factual accuracy or for the meaning of words, writes Paddy Woodworth.
Rankin's book is likely to make the reader wonder why no-one has mined the marvellous riches of George Steer's "extraordinary life" - for once the publicity hyperbole is fully justified - before now. Reading Martin, however, may make one wonder why he bothered to walk again along such a well-worn path, and make one marvel only at the small but infuriatingly numerous howlers he makes en route. Enough said on that score.
George Steer gets an honourable mention in histories of the Spanish Civil War for being the first reporter to file a comprehensive report about the bombing of Guernica to the outside world. Rankin, however, vividly reminds us that Steer reported with distinction from three continents, was the author of eight books, enjoyed good (successive) marriages with two strong, remarkable women, and was an effective soldier and one of the fathers of modern military propaganda at the battlefront. All this before dying under almost absurd circumstances at the age of 35.
Steer was not an eye-witness to the attack on Guernica which made his name. He had spent most of that terrible April afternoon in 1937 pinned down in a huge bomb crater a few kilometres away, as German Heinkel fighters attempted to shoot him to pieces. He was unaware that a much bigger air-raid was beginning just beyond the hilly Basque horizon.
"It was difficult to think at all," Steer wrote of this predicament in his subsequent book, The Tree of Gernika 9 (sic). "As soon as the very material process known as collecting one's thoughts was nearly complete, another bloody little fighter was roaring down at us, and we were spread-eagled and passive again. Of course it's all noise. The shooting was wild, and after a quarter of an hour of it we could not find a bullet in the bomb-hole . . . Terror and noise were their weapons, not death."
This is typical of Steer's style. Rankin bluntly acknowledges that he appeared to have actively enjoyed life under fire, in a humorously self-deprecating kind of way, but he always supplies an analysis, a context which gives the incident wider significance. The use of terror in modern warfare, and especially terror from the air, became his passionate obsessions.
That night, he was blithely having dinner in Bilbao when he was told that the whole of Guernica was in flames. He drove straight back out there with four colleagues. As they approached the town, the sky "looked flushed, pink, fat; the fatness was bellying clouds of smoke and the pinkness the pulsing reflection of a great fire below". Walking around the edges of the inferno, Steer had the presence of mind to gather incendiary casings whose insignia proved that the town had been bombed by the Nazi Condor Legion. His interviews with distraught survivors confirmed the same story, which was met by a classic "big lie" from Franco, who long claimed that Guernica had been mined and burned by retreating Basque "reds".
Born into a liberal South African media family, Steer had had a public school and Oxford education in England, and was both brilliant and tough enough to get foreign assignments for the Times. His first big job was to cover Mussolini's attempt to reinvent the Italian empire by destroying Haile Selassie's independent Abyssinia (now Ethiopia). This was a particularly ugly war. The Italians used chemical weapons and mass terror as a matter of course; Selassie's men had a nasty habit of castrating prisoners. Steer's sympathies were clearly with the beleaguered Abyssinians. He made many indigenous friends, and became as intimate with the emperor himself as any foreigner was likely to be. Steer was also fiercely opposed to fascism, though he never, unlike many of his like-minded contemporaries, fell under the influence of Marxism.
Steer's egalitarian relations with Ethiopians earned him the contempt of English right-wingers like Evelyn Waugh, whose Scoop is based on this conflict. Waugh revealed more about his own values than his colleague's when he wrote contemptuously of Steer's "affinity with nimble-witted \ upstarts, like himself African-born, who had memorised so many of the facts of European education without ever participating in European culture".
On another occasion, the devoutly Catholic Waugh wrote to a friend: "I have got to hate the Ethiopians more each day; goodness they are lousy and I hope the organ-men gas them to buggery." Winston Churchill had expressed similar views 15 years earlier, when the British were using chemical weapons against, of all places, the country we now call Iraq. He said he was "strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes".
Steer, on the other hand, recognised very early on that while fascism might test its theories in the colonies, they would soon be used on "civilised" cities. He saw clearly that Rome and Berlin would seek to dominate the world through a new strategy of terror and total war, in which the main target was the civilian, and the key weapon the bomber. And he understood also that Soviet Russia would not hesitate to use the same terror tactics, as he witnessed later while covering the invasion of Finland. His early work could be summed up in Selassie's warning to the ineffective League of Nations, after his homeland had been reduced to ruin by superior Italian weaponry: "It is us today. It will be you tomorrow."
General Franco's terrorist campaign against Spain's democratic Republic offered fascism a chance to test out this strategy in a European theatre, and the contest obviously attracted Steer. He was drawn to the Basque Country and to Basque nationalism, which he rather idealised. He stayed in Bilbao to the bitter end. It seems he may have given something more than moral support to the Basque nationalists' heroic last stand, which he eulogised.
It is no surprise that he chose full engagement in the second World War. He took a front line role, in every sense, in the inspired campaign to put Haile Selassie back in power in Ethiopia. There, and later in Burma, he pioneered propaganda techniques for demoralising enemy troops, which sound ludicrous but apparently worked.
Rankin's account does not hide Steer's failings, but his admiration for his subject is obvious and infectious. His historical research is impressive, but he wears it lightly, though he occasionally assumes too much knowledge on the reader's part. His own style shifts gears smoothly between the laconic, the lyrical and the polemical. Like Steer, with whom he shares an African colonial background, he can pause to appreciate "white swallow-tailed butterflies flouncing through the bush like torn-up paper" while taking us on a journey from one man-made hell to another. And though he does not labour the point, his book is a timely warning against those, whoever and wherever they may be, who are prepared to unleash weapons of mass destruction on civilians.
Paddy Woodworth is the author of Dirty War, Clean Hands: ETA, the GAL and Spanish Democracy, which has just been published in the US by Yale.
Telegram from Guernica: The Extraordinary Life of George Steer, War Correspondent. By Nicholas Rankin, Faber and Faber, 288pp. £14.99.
Picasso's War: The Extraordinary Story of an Artist, an Atrocity, and a Painting that Shook the World. By Russell Martin, Scribner, 274pp. £15.99.