We could be heroes... on women writing war

Thoughts on women war reporters

Apr 21, 2025

It was September 2023, and I was sitting in the Georgian restaurant in the heart of Kharkiv’s Shevchenko Gardens, reading Virginia Cowles’ memoir Looking for Trouble. She was describing life in Madrid during the Spains’s civil war, and her first experience of shelling. Reading it, drinking a beer and eating pork and potato stew, served with aubergines stuffed with walnut paste, I highlighted the following passage:

“I had never before felt the sort of fear that sends the blood racing through your veins. As intense an emotion as it was, I was surprised to find with the passing of danger it disappeared so completely. More curious still, it left no hangover of apprehension. In between bombardments, you literally forgot about them.”

A few days later, stood outside Makers cafe after five bombs landed just over a mile away, my hands shaking as I wolfed down two chocolate cigar wafer biscuits, her words came back to me, watching the streets come back to life with people on bikes, pushing buggies, crossing the road under the crisp autumn blue sky, split open by the coils of grey smoke from the burning infrastructure smashed by Russian shells. We all went back to normal, so quickly. Me and my fixer Anna got into Vitaliy’s bright yellow car and got on with our day. So did the wedding party, at the next place we drove to.

Cowles is less well known than her friend Martha Gellhorn, but her 1941 memoir is full of daring tales, hilarious anecdotes, and searing commentary on the wars she saw. A socialite who fell on hard times, she came to Europe and immediately began writing about war. She reported from both Republican and fascist Spain, getting a soldier to go on the record saying they bombed Guernica - something Franco’s army denied. She interviewed Mussolini, explained to her tour guide in Stalinist Russia that the USA did, in fact, have public libraries, reported from the bloody frontlines of Russia’s invasion of Finland (in a remarkable moment, she reported saying goodbye to a German journalist, who reflected that when they got home they would go back to being enemies), the refugee crisis in Romania, and fled Paris as the Germans invaded: her depiction of the rush to escape France is harrowing, unforgettable, and has the rare comic moment that gets to the heart of the absurdity of war. Cowles seems to have an endless little black book of aristocrats and politicians who turn up with cars, planes and boats to rescue her from danger. She saw everything and knew everyone.

The timing of her book is important. Cowles uses her memoir to demand the US joins the war in Europe, writing from the blitz and describing in stunning detail the planes fighting over the English Channel. These later chapters, with their clear demand for global solidarity against fascism, indulge in some propagandist material about the British spirit and culture, but it’s forgivable with the urgency of the situation.

I’ve been drawn back to Cowles’ and Gellhorn’s writing these past few months. Eighty-four years on from her passionate plea to the US to stand with Europe against fascism, we seem to be in a similar place: looking across the pond to a fascist President who seems willing to let Europe face another fascist President alone. The last few months I’ve spent crying, raging, screaming at the news, as Trump insults Zelenskiy, praises Putin, and refuses to see that abandoning Ukraine means abandoning freedom and democracy for all of us. We aren’t in 1941, but I fear we are in 1937, with appeasement the policy du jour and a terrifying willingness by the US leadership to surrender people’s lives, futures, hopes, dreams and safety to a murderous dictator.

Gellhorn despised appeasement. She threw herself into opposition against the policy, warning of what was sure to come if Hitler was given what he wanted. She was proven right, of course.

One report that I go back to over and over again is Gellhorn’s Obituary for a Democracy, which she wrote after she returned from Prague after Hitler occupied the Sudetenland, and France and Britain abandoned Czechoslovakia to its fate. The opening line is a stunning piece of reportage, in its simplicity and power:

“On all the roads in Czechoslovakia, the army was going home.”

I read it again when I was in Prague in February, at a gathering of progressive, anti-fascist campaigners and journalists, and thought about the parallels with then and now. Her report describes refugees who had fled Germany, now facing the terrifying realisation they must flee again. Of borders suddenly erected by flimsy bits of fencing, and people trudging down roads, laden with their belongings, of old men who no longer know which country they live in, of women being bullied and beaten. While men in Munich signed flimsy bits of paper that proved meaningless, real lives were destroyed, homes were occupied, children lost parents and schools and their identity.

Now, Trump and Rubio and their toothless envoys are threatening to give Putin the power to invade, occupy and destroy. They want to tell people living in the occupied territories that their freedom, their safety, their human rights, are expendable – can all be signed away on a flimsy piece of paper that promises peace and delivers war. To live in the occupied territories in Ukraine is to live with torture, homelessness, false imprisonment, summary executions, child abduction, indoctrination, the forced removal of one’s identity. To sign over the occupied territories to Putin is not to end the war, but to hold millions of people in a permanent state of war. And, just as with Appeasement 1.0, it simply gives Putin permission to try again.

Appeasement is not peace. It is a continuation of war in the occupied territories, an agreement that murderous imperialist expansion is permissable, and a short-term limbo before the next invasion.

Gellhorn and Cowles understood the price of appeasing fascism. They had reported from Republican Spain, after all, with Cowles listening as the Falangist soldier boasted of Guernica, telling her it was “good” they had bombed it, and Gellhorn reaching her conclusion that when it comes to the fight against fascism, “objectivity is bullshit”. Gellhorn not only saw the refugee crisis prompted by Hitler’s invasion of the Sudetenland and then the whole of Czechoslovkia, but she was one of the first reporters into the concentration camps after they were liberated, reporting from Dachau in May 1945 where she wrote, “Behind the barbed wire and the electric fence, the skeletons sat in the sun and searched themselves for lice. They have no age and no faces; they all look alike and like nothing you will ever see if you are lucky.” Like her fellow war reporter Lee Miller, Gellhorn never recovered, not really, from what she saw in those final days of war. How could anyone?

That same week I read Cowles in a Georgian restaurant, I visited Izium, which was occupied for around six months before it was liberated in September 2022. I was there a year on from the liberation, and saw the mass graves outside the city, the dug holes where hundreds of bodies – including the murdered, the executed, and those who died because there were no medicines, no heating or fuel, to keep them alive. I spoke to a man who was tortured, and when his torturers offered him water, he said yes and so they chucked it on the ground beside him. I saw the road where there were fewer bombed houses, because that was the road where the Russians carried out the torture. I spoke to babushkas who had seen the Nazis invade in 1941, only to spend their final few years freezing, cooking outside on braziers, terrified that a second fascist war would kill them. The cruelty they described to me is not over: it continues in every place where Russia has invaded and occupied Ukraine, and it will continue if Trump’s White House appeases Putin at the cost of Ukraine’s freedom.

I thought, when I started writing this newsletter, I was going to write about Cowles and Gellhorn, about reading Judith Mackrell’s Going with the Boys group biography of the 1930s/40s women war reporters, of reading Lindsey Hilsum’s book of poetry and war reporting, and the importance of having a lineage of female war reporters who have inspired my own writing and dreams of being a journalist. I wanted to say how when I opened Hilsum’s book and it described the same building outside Izium that I had visited, and her decision to include James Fenton’s poem A German Requiem, it meant so much to me, because I felt like it reflected my own experience of being at that site, and I felt understood, which is not a common feeling when it comes to war.

“It is not your memories which haunt you.

It is not what you have written down,

It is what you have forgotten, what you must forget,

What you must go on forgetting all your life.”

But I guess I needed to write this instead. I needed to write about the dangers of appeasement, through the eyes of the women who saw what it meant. And to write that Trump and Putin cannot hash out a deal that rewards fascism and imperialist aggression. That ignores Europe and excludes Zelenskiy. That abandons Ukraine.

Because if they do that, as the chief of police in Kharkiv told me the day of the shelling, all of Europe will burn.

Obligatory book plug

My book came out in Japan! So that was pretty cool. Now available in three languages!

If you want it in English, you know what to do. Hopefully I’ll have an update on the paperback publication soon.

Buy it now

What I’m loving

Sarah Stillman’s remarkable report on starvation deaths in prison in the New Yorker is horrifying and a true testament to the power of investigative journalism.

What I’m writing

Before I share the latest links, I was thrilled to learn this week that I was longlisted for the Paul Foot Award, run by Private Eye, for my report on rapes in the military.

Harsh UK visa schemes leave Ukrainian families in limbo and torn apart

Jaysley Beck is not alone. We’ve found systemic sexual abuse in UK military (with Ethan Shone)

‘They wanted help, we gave them a prison boat’

10,000 angry white men and me: my night with Reform UK

What I’m reading

Too many to mention…

Butter, by Asako Yuzuki, trans. Polly Barton

Mongrel, by Hanako Footman

Universality by Natasha Brown

Bright young women by Jessica Knoll

Ripe, by Sarah Rose Etter

Wellness, by Nathan Hill

The other black girl, by Zakiya Dalila Harris

My name is Maame, Jessica George

River east, river west, Aube Rey Lescure

Mrs Mcginty’s dead, Agatha Christie

Hello Beautiful, Ann Napolitano (unfinished)

The Inalienable Right, Adam Macqueen

Best Enemy, Sergio Olguin, trans Miranda France

The inheritance, Trisha Sakhlecha

The collaborators, Michael Idov

Dream count, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Fundamentally, Nussaibah Younis

Notes on a drowning, Anna Sharpe

The foreign girls, Sergio Olguin, trans Miranda France

The Persians, Sanam Mahloudji (reading now)

Transcript, Kate Atkinson (re read)

What I’m watching

Finally watched all of White Lotus, and I’m loving Hacks. I watched the adapt of The Other Black Girl. Films, I watched Glorious 39 and From Here to Eternity, and went to the cinema to see Flow.

That’s it! Thank you for reading this, despite it changing as I wrote it. As I say, apparently this was the newsletter I needed to write, even if it was not the one I planned to write.

Ciao ciao

Sianushka Writes

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