The Correspondents: Six Women Writers on the Front Lines of World War II

by Judith Mackrell Narrated by Julie Teal

Overview

The riveting, untold history of a group of heroic women reporters who revolutionized the narrative of World War II-from Martha Gellhorn, who out-scooped her husband, Ernest Hemingway, to Lee Miller, a Vogue cover model turned war correspondent.

"Thrilling from the first page to the last." -Mary Gabriel, author of Ninth Street Women
"Just as women are so often written out of war, so it seems are the female correspondents. Mackrell corrects this omission admirably with stories of six of the best...Mackrell has done us all a great service by assembling their own fascinating stories." -New York Times Book Review

On the front lines of the Second World War, a contingent of female journalists were bravely waging their own battle. Barred from combat zones and faced with entrenched prejudice and bureaucratic restrictions, these women were forced to fight for the right to work on equal terms with men.

The Correspondents follows six remarkable women as their lives and careers intertwined: Martha Gellhorn, who got the scoop on Ernest Hemingway on D-Day by traveling to Normandy as a stowaway on a Red Cross ship; Lee Miller, who went from being a Vogue cover model to the magazine's official war correspondent; Sigrid Schultz, who hid her Jewish identity and risked her life by reporting on the Nazi regime; Virginia Cowles, a “society girl columnist” turned combat reporter; Clare Hollingworth, the first English journalist to break the news of World War II; and Helen Kirkpatrick, the first woman to report from an Allied war zone with equal privileges to men.

From chasing down sources and narrowly dodging gunfire to conducting tumultuous love affairs and socializing with luminaries like Eleanor Roosevelt, Picasso, and Man Ray, these six women are captured in all their complexity. With her gripping, intimate, and nuanced portrait, Judith Mackrell celebrates these courageous reporters who risked their lives for the scoop.

Editorial Reviews

NOVEMBER 2021 - AudioFile

Julie Teal’s narration of this audiobook about six female news correspondents during WWII is most effective when she narrates in her British accent. She speaks dramatically at a good pace and steady cadence. But the decision to voice the American women (and five out of the six are Yanks) in a kind of flattened monotone distracts from the stories of overarching courage, valor, and ingenuity. The two best known are Martha Gellhorn, who stowed away to cross over to Normandy on D-Day and out reported her then-husband Ernest Hemingway, and Lee Miller, the gifted photographer who was a model and muse for surrealist Man Ray before the war. Miller and Gellhorn, Virginia Cowles, Helen Kirkpatrick, Clare Hollingsworth, and Sigrid Schultz set the stage for female war correspondents. A.D.M. © AudioFile 2021, Portland, Maine

Publishers Weekly

★ 09/13/2021

WWII was “the defining opportunity for female correspondents,” according to this immersive and revealing group biography. Guardian journalist Mackrell (Flappers: Six Women of a Dangerous Generation) follows correspondents Sigrid Schultz, Helen Kirkpatrick, Martha Gellhorn, Virginia Cowles, Clare Hollingworth, and photographer Lee Miller from Berlin in the 1930s, where Chicago Tribune bureau chief Schultz cultivated Nazi leader Hermann Göring as a source, to the 1947 Paris Peace Conference, where Gellhorn and Kirkpatrick feared that the same mistakes that failed to resolve the tensions of WWI were being made. Sparkling quotations from the reportage are woven throughout (Gellhorn once wrote that British prime minister Neville Chamberlain had a “face like a nutcracker and a soul like a weasel”), and colorful biographical details shed light on the correspondents’ defiance of conventions and “basic hunger for action.” Miller was a Vogue model before she picked up the camera, Mackrell notes, while Gellhorn stowed away in the bathroom of a hospital ship to be the first woman reporter to cover the Normandy landings. Secondary characters including Ernest Hemingway, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Clare Boothe Luce make entertaining appearances, and Mackrell lucidly sketches military and political matters. The result is a rousing portrait of women who not only reported on history, but made it themselves. (Nov.)

From the Publisher

*Finalist for the 2022 Sperber Book Prize*

“Not only did female journalists face the challenges and dangers of actually reporting the war, but first they had to battle even to be allowed to cover it. Barred from combat zones, they had to hitchhike to the front line and struggled to get assignments from editors, some of whom fielded complaints from readers who did not want their news to come from women correspondents…Just as women are so often written out of war, so it seems are the female correspondents. Mackrell corrects this omission admirably with stories of six of the best…Mackrell has done us all a great service by assembling their own fascinating stories.”
—New York Times Book Review

"The six women who form the focus of Judith Mackrell’s The Correspondents...were a formidable bunch....A powerful and convincing picture of the overwhelming struggle these women—and others like them—were forced to endure to make themselves heard."
—Wall Street Journal

"Gripping...It is no easy feat to weave six lives into a narrative that compels the reader all the way through, but like a big-canvas painting that brings together personal dramas and machinations of state, The Correspondents is full of intriguing detail."
—The Los Angeles Review of Books

"Judith Mackrell’s The Correspondents is a brilliant, gripping account of six journalists covering World War Two from deep inside the danger zone. Mackrell’s writing so captures the drama of the period that you can almost hear her characters’ typewriter keys tapping out their reports amid the rumble of tanks. But more than just a writers-at-war story, Mackrell’s account succeeds because it describes the internal conflict individuals experienced—the women at the center of her stories and the people they encountered—during a moment when the world truly appeared to have gone insane. I found The Correspondents to be one of the best books I have read in years. It is thrilling from the first page to the last."
—Mary Gabriel, author of Ninth Street Women

“A vivid portrait of the women whose clear-eyed reporting brought home the tragedy and heroism of one of history’s most pivotal conflicts. We owe these journalists a great debt.”
—Liza Mundy, New York Times bestselling author of Code Girls

"Definitive, deeply researched, and beautifully told, The Correspondents tells the story of women at war—and reminds us how a few brave souls can blaze a trail and change the world."
—Keith O'Brien, New York Times bestselling author of Fly Girls

"Important and insightful...In telling the interwoven stories of how six bold, ambitious, fearless women reported on the Second World War and its aftermath, Mackrell tells the story of the war itself but in a radical new way."
—Anne Sebba, author of Les Parisiennes

"Judith Mackrell’s bravura group portrait of six English and American women journalists who confronted entrenched professional prejudice while risking their lives to cover World War II is as engaging as their own richly varied reportage. Fast-paced and informative, it puts these women’s trail-blazing accomplishments in the social, military, and historical contexts we need to grasp how remarkable they were—at a time when the authorities saw them as a novelty and their mission, to report only about civilian life under war conditions. The period before, during, and after the war is illuminated by Mackrell’s impressively researched account of their creative ways around official constraints, like being barred from combat zones, their bravery under fire, and their intense wartime affairs and sometimes complicated friendships."
—Carolyn Burke, author of Foursome and Lee Miller: A Life

"These six remarkable women writers shared courage, intelligence, competitiveness and a determination not be sidelined into the woman's angle; more than that, they left a legacy for war reporting that has shaped all those who have followed in their steps."
—Caroline Moorehead, author of Gellhorn and A Train in Winter

"Bold newswomen such as Clare Hollingworth and Martha Gellhorn wrote the first draft of World War II, now Judith Mackrell gives us a chance to learn about the lives behind the headlines."
—Sarah Rose, author of D-Day Girls

"A powerful narrative of WWII news, journalistic ethics, and women’s achievements in the face of daunting odds...This is an important book."
—New York Journal of Books

"Wonderful...Judith Mackrell’s biography of six female journalists during World War II feels almost like a novel with its rich details."
—BookPage

"[An] immersive and revealing group biography...Sparkling quotations from the reportage are woven throughout, and colorful biographical details shed light on the correspondents’ defiance of conventions...A rousing portrait of women who not only reported on history, but made it themselves." 
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"An exhilarating read packed with emotion and genuine humanity. A vivid portrayal of six remarkable women who made history reporting on World War II."
—Kirkus (starred review)

"In this dazzling, insightful, engrossing, and multifaceted group biography, Mackrell reveals the enormous physical, emotional, and professional obstacles each woman encountered and the astonishing ingenuity each employed to confront and overcome those challenges."
—Booklist

"Thrilling...The six journalists profiled in The Correspondents deserve credit for their pioneering work. Fortunately for us, their life stories make for vivid and fascinating reading, too."
—Christian Science Monitor

“The Correspondents skilfully interweaves the narratives of six remarkable women war correspondents who fought against sexism, misogyny and circumstance in determined pursuit of their story...With the narrative drive of a well-paced thriller, Mackrell’s essential work will have you reaching for more about the words and lives of these trailblazing six."
—Toronto Star

"Powerful and engaging...The history of the second world war has largely been told by, for and about men. The story of these six correspondents covering the battle zones of Europe and North Africa stands as an important corrective...They were not just reporters; they were also pioneers, and Judith Mackrell has done them proud."
—Clare Mulley, The Spectator (UK)

"Beautifully researched, deeply sympathetic, and particularly insightful about Martha Gellhorn and Clare Hollingworth. They and the other women who went to war were pioneers in a dangerous profession who overcame fear and discrimination with grace and skill."
—John Simpson, BBC foreign correspondent

"In this hugely entertaining and informative book, Judith Mackrell tells the stories of six intrepid women who demanded the right to risk their lives reporting from the front line...Both thoughtful and edge-of-your-seat thrilling."
—The Mail on Sunday (UK)

"One of the most fascinating and engrossing books I’ve read in years."
—Historical Novel Society

Library Journal

★ 10/01/2021

In this rich and evocative history, journalist Mackrell (The Unfinished Palazzo) profiles six women who reported on World War II: Sigrid Schultz, Virginia Cowles, Martha Gellhorn, Helen Kirkpatrick, Lee Miller, and Clare Hollingworth (all white, all American, save for one Briton). Often denied official accreditation and hampered by sexist assumptions about their abilities to handle the rigors of the frontline, these women journalists were present at every stage of the war on the fronts in the Balkans, Greece, North Africa, and Italy. They firmly established their reputations wherever they reported. Hollingworth wrote perhaps the first report of the outbreak of the war, having learned that German forces were about to invade Poland. Schultz witnessed the Nazi rise to power from Berlin and in the process became the first woman bureau chief for the Chicago Tribune. Gellhorn braved bombings, shelling, and rifle fire to report from the front lines of the Spanish Republicans, while Cowles managed to sneak into Nationalist Spain to get stories that many reporters considered impossible to get. Kirkpatrick was the first woman to report from an Allied war zone, and Miller covered the liberation and horror of concentration camps soon after the first troops arrived. Based on diaries, journals, and private papers, this title complements works such as The Women with Silver Wings, by Katherine Sharp Landdeck. VERDICT A must-read for those interested in women's history and the Second World War.—Chad E. Statler, Westlake Porter P.L., Westlake, OH

NOVEMBER 2021 - AudioFile

Julie Teal’s narration of this audiobook about six female news correspondents during WWII is most effective when she narrates in her British accent. She speaks dramatically at a good pace and steady cadence. But the decision to voice the American women (and five out of the six are Yanks) in a kind of flattened monotone distracts from the stories of overarching courage, valor, and ingenuity. The two best known are Martha Gellhorn, who stowed away to cross over to Normandy on D-Day and out reported her then-husband Ernest Hemingway, and Lee Miller, the gifted photographer who was a model and muse for surrealist Man Ray before the war. Miller and Gellhorn, Virginia Cowles, Helen Kirkpatrick, Clare Hollingsworth, and Sigrid Schultz set the stage for female war correspondents. A.D.M. © AudioFile 2021, Portland, Maine

Kirkus Reviews

★ 2021-09-07
An account of six pioneering women who worked as war journalists in World War II.

Mackrell’s chosen six came from different backgrounds though they all ended up writing for British or American news outlets. Some, like Martha Gellhorn, who was married to Ernest Hemingway; or Lee Miller, a popular fashion photographer and Vogue cover model, were already public figures. The others—Virginia Cowles, Clare Hollingworth, Helen Kirkpatrick, and Sigrid Schultz—made their marks with their intrepid reporting. All had barriers to overcome, many the result of outright misogyny (they constantly battled “sexually predatory officers or over-entitled male journalists”), and none of them backed away from dangerous assignments. Mackrell gives enough background on each to show how they became journalists—for most of them, well before the war—and how their initial beats were traditionally “feminine” subjects—e.g., society columns, fashion, or the “woman’s angle” on a topic of broader interest. Nonetheless, the persistence, determination, and daring led them to cover the Spanish Civil War (Gellhorn and Cowles), Berlin during Hitler’s rise to power (Schultz), or the experiences of frontline troops in Europe or North Africa (Hollingsworth and Kirkpatrick). Schultz, writes the author, “could not yet take Hitler seriously as a politician: he seemed to her a crude ‘fascist bugbear,’ a ‘demagogue drunk on his own word.’ ” This is incredibly rich material, and Mackrell makes the most of it, showing Gellhorn stowing away on a hospital ship to cover the D-Day landings or Miller taking a bath in Hitler’s tub, an incident immortalized in a famous photograph. The author also describes the reporters’ outraged responses to the concentration camps, which several of them saw shortly after the liberation. Mackrell concludes with a brief summary of the women’s postwar careers, capping off an exhilarating read packed with emotion and genuine humanity.

A vivid portrayal of six remarkable women who made history reporting on World War II.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940177115276
Publisher:	Penguin Random House
Publication date:	11/02/2021
Edition description:	Unabridged
Sales rank:	1,067,501

Read an Excerpt

Chapter One

Berlin, 1936

“I want to give readers all the dope there is” Sigrid Schultz

In the autumn of 1936, Sigrid Schultz was starting to feel like a stranger in her own city. Less than a decade ago, the Berlin she’d known and loved had been crackling with wit, colour, deviance and dissent. Painted boys with nipped-in waists had sauntered through the stylish crowds along Kurfürstendamm; girls in suits and monocles had drunk cocktails at the Eldorado ballroom. Satire—the city’s native genius—had flourished in cabarets and bars, and, as a very dazzled young William Shirer had noted, Weimar Berlin had felt like “a wild open city full of crazy poets and homosexuals,” a place for adventure and self-reinvention.2 It had been a city of violence, too—scarred by Germany’s recent defeat in the 1914–18 war, rocked by political battles within the newly democratic Reichstag and growling with a savage underbelly of poverty, drugs and prostitution. Yet, to an ambitious young journalist like Sigrid, it was the darkness in the glitter of Berlin that made it the most engrossing city in the world in which to make her career.

Then, in 1933, Hitler and the National Socialists had seized power, and the Nazification of Berlin began. The brown-shirted muscle of the Sturmabteilung (SA) and the black-uniformed elite of the Schutzstaffel (SS) had bullied most of the satirists into silence and forced the radical artists to skip town. Formerly emancipated women had been told to wipe off their lipstick and produce babies for the Fatherland, while the children were dragooned into the Hitler Youth or the League of German Girls. As fledgling Nazis paraded through Berlin in their crisp little shirts and neckerchiefs, it seemed to Sigrid as though the city itself was in uniform. Scarlet and black swastikas rippled from every public building and the streets were loud with Party messages, broadcast daily over public loudspeakers.

The harsh metallic tones of Adolf Hitler and the hectoring bark of his Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels had become almost as familiar to Berliners as the voices of their family and friends. And, to all those who’d become principal targets of the regime—the trade unionists, the communists, the homosexuals and, above all, the city’s Jews—these voices were also a daily reminder of the threats they faced, whether of violence or arrest.

As bureau chief of the Chicago Tribune, Sigrid had made it her mission to keep America informed about Germany’s decline into totalitarianism, to expose every stage of its draconian dismantling of democracy and the rule of law. According to Gregor Ziemer, her former assistant and fellow journalist, she was “one of the most talented foreign correspondents” of her generation, publishing more damning information about the Nazis than any of her colleagues, facing off Gestapo spies and interrogation until she was finally forced to leave.3 Hitler’s Berlin had been her personal war zone, and if it had made her as expert as any combat journalist in arming herself against danger, it had also forced her to keep very close the fact that, by Nazi reckoning, she was a Jew.

Sigrid Lilian Schultz had settled in Berlin late in 1913. She’d been a pretty, intellectually pugnacious twenty-one-year-old, with a command of several foreign languages and a headful of ambitions to sing in opera or practise law. She also considered herself a cosmopolitan, for, despite her Germanic-sounding name, her father had been born in Norway and she herself had been born in Chicago, where Herman Schultz, a society portrait painter, had moved in 1891 to advance his career. His plan had been to put down “deep roots in prairie soil” to create his version of the American dream, and, after his eighteen-year-old wife, Hedwig, had given birth to Sigrid, on 5 January 1893, he’d settled his family in a spacious house in the suburb of Summerdale, with a garden overlooking miles of open ground.4

Sigrid was a tiny blonde scrap of a child for whom Herman had high ambitions. She was to be raised in the modern American way, encouraged to run freely around the countryside with the family’s huge St. Bernard dog. But she was also to be raised as a European, to speak German and French as well as English, and, until she was eight, she lived in the centre of a charmed little world, petted by her parents, admired by the busy stream of friends who came to the house. Then, in 1901, that world broke apart as a sharp downturn in the Chicago economy coincided with a temporary decline in Herman’s own health, and the Schultz family felt they had to pack up their home and return to Europe, where a commission awaited Herman in the royal court of Stuttgart.

The two years Sigrid spent in Germany were, for her, a period of angry exile. While her father was painting in Stuttgart, she and her mother were sent to Hedwig’s family in Wiesbaden, where, for the first time in her life, Sigrid encountered disapproval. Her Jaskewitz relatives might have descended from a vivid ancestral mix of Spanish, Polish, Balkan, Russian, Central European and Jewish stock, but they’d adopted the mindset of snobbish, provincial Germans. They’d never cared for Herman and they greatly disliked the “fresh” American ways which he’d allowed his daughter to develop. Sigrid was thus sent away to Munich, “to a school for little princesses,” and, missing her parents, mocked for her “Yankee” accent, she turned from petted child to aggressive little waif.5

Years later, she recalled that she’d never hated that school more deeply than when news filtered through of her father’s favoured position at court, and “suddenly the teacher became so nice and all the little girls wanted to carry my books home.”6 But, once Herman had fulfilled his commission, he was able to move his family to Paris, and there Sigrid flourished. She attended an excellent lycée, she had teachers to develop the sweetly melodious voice that she’d inherited from her great-grandfather Joseph Jaskewitz, a former director of the Wiesbaden Opera, and she finally got to meet her father’s Norwegian family. They were ebullient, “crazy”—and she adored them, just as she adored Herman himself. But the most charmed hours of her life were the weekly lunches with her father, when he introduced her to Parisian restaurants, taught her about good food and wine, and recounted the stories of when he’d been a nineteen-year-old dreamer and had bicycled all the way from Norway to Paris to become an artist.

To Sigrid, Herman seemed marvellous; he was funny, flamboyant, gallant, and he could light up a room with his anecdotes. “He never lost the faith that life was thrilling,” she wrote, “and always knew how to make others share his joy.” It was only as she reached puberty that she realized how promiscuously Herman was spreading that joy; and while she would loyally excuse his philandering—“Poor man, he couldn’t help it the way women were running after him”7—she could see the pain it caused her mother. Later, she would admit how badly she was affected by these dark sexual ructions—“I was really scared of marriage”—and in her troubled, confused state, the teenage Sigrid was also starting to worry about her parents’ finances.8

Herman’s career had remained volatile, boomeranging between celebrity and penury, and it had become apparent to Sigrid that neither of her parents had any talent for managing money. Hedwig, girlishly pretty and guileless, had never mastered the art of the household budget, while Herman, a man always hoping for better times, could squander lavish sums in a restaurant, even when there were only scraps in the larder at home. At one point, they were living in a studio on the Place Pigalle, a “ramshackle, terrible and colourful district,” and, noting the squalor of other failed artistic careers, Sigrid studied to become the watchful adult of the family, teaching herself to cook and attempting to practise small domestic economies.9

“I probably missed out on a lot of fun,” she acknowledged. But she had no intention of sacrificing her own ambitions and, having graduated from the lycée with high honours, she not only began professional singing lessons, but was enrolled at the Sorbonne for courses in history and international law. Already, she was displaying the stubborn application that would drive her reporting career, and, even though she’d inherited Herman’s weak chest and had to be admitted to a Lucerne sanatorium with possible TB, she remained open to new horizons. When her parents wrote with news that they were temporarily setting up a home and studio in Berlin for Herman’s work, she was eager to join them as soon as she was well.

Berlin seemed full of possibilities when Sigrid arrived: it had a fine university and “it was the place” to study singing, if she could only scrape together the funds.10 Yet it didn’t take her long to become aware of an unsettling edge to the city. The newspapers she read were strident with xenophobic editorials, calling for the Kaiser to defend Germany against the expansionist greed of its European rivals; meanwhile, her parents’ Jewish friends spoke of an alarming surge of anti-Semitic feeling in the city, their businesses boycotted and hate mail sent to their homes. Even though the Schultzes themselves had made little of Hedwig’s ancestry (it’s not even clear when Sigrid was told that she herself was half-Jewish), the family could not ignore these signs and could not but feel that Berlin in early 1914 was a potentially hostile city.

Sigrid’s own response to these uncertain times was typically self-denying and typically practical. It was obvious that she and her parents needed a reliable source of income, so, abandoning her own studies, she gained a rudimentary teaching certificate and advertised for work as a private language tutor. Herman, who’d had such fine plans for his daughter, was grandly and unreasonably disappointed in her, yet, by 3 August, he had to acknowledge Sigrid’s prescience. The Serbian bullet that assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand had sparked a dramatic unravelling of the already fragile European peace, and the Central Powers of Germany, Austro-Hungary, Bulgaria and the Ottoman Empire were now at war with Russia, France and Britain.

Initially, the war made little impact on the Schultzes. They trusted that their dual American and Norwegian citizenship would keep them safe (both countries were still neutral at this point); Herman was earning unexpectedly good money from high-ranking Germans who wanted to be painted in their uniforms; and Sigrid was particularly buoyant because a Norwegian-American naval officer, whom she’d known for several years, had proposed to her while on leave in Berlin. Guarded as she later was about the details of her private life, she didn’t identify her fiancé by name, but she did imply that he’d been the love of her young life, that he’d helped to overcome her fears of marriage and that she’d hoped to become his wife as soon as the war was over.

Two and a half years and several million casualties later, however, the war showed no signs of ending, and, in April 1917, when America joined forces with Allied powers, Sigrid’s own situation became extremely grave.

Like all American citizens, she and her parents had been encouraged to leave Germany, yet their departure had been delayed because Herman had been offered a last-minute and very lucrative commission in Hamburg. His decision to accept would then prove fateful for the whole family because, once there, he was diagnosed with TB and placed under strict quarantine, which left Sigrid and Hedwig stranded in Berlin, not only scared about Herman’s health, but, even more frighteningly, re-categorized as enemy aliens, required to report twice a day to the police and to remain confined to their immediate neighbourhood.

Life for Sigrid now shrank to a series of small survival strategies, as she dodged the military police to teach her few remaining pupils and bred rabbits on the apartment balcony, bartering them for flour at a local bakery. Then, in the summer of 1917, she heard that her fiancé had been lost at sea, his ship almost certainly torpedoed by German U-boats. At that moment, she all but buckled under the weight of despair. “I thought [it] was the end of my emotional life,” she recalled.11 Yet her parents still needed her support, and, in the autumn of 1917, when she learned that the mayor of Baghdad was in Berlin and was looking for an interpreter who was fluent in English, German and French, Sigrid forced herself to rise above her misery and apply for the post.

Her new job was to have a transformative effect on her world. Réouf Bey Chadirchi was rich, aristocratic and clever, and while he’d come to Berlin on diplomatic business, he was planning to supplement his own private law studies at the city’s university, and was expecting Sigrid to assist him in lectures as well as in meetings. After three years of anxious, menial work, it was thrilling to feel her brain re-engaged: “Can you imagine,” she wrote, “the joy of continuing studies that seemed all important to me, and being paid for that privilege.” But so intimately did Réouf come to depend on Sigrid, for her intelligence as well as her interpreting skills, that he began to entrust her with some of his more politically tricky affairs.12

If there was a moment when Sigrid first got her taste for investigative journalism, it may have been the confrontation she engineered with Réouf’s most formidable adversary, the right-wing nationalist and anti-Semite, General Ludendorff. Ludendorff had come up with a plan to scapegoat the nation’s Jewish community for Germany’s failing performance in the war and he was pressuring Réouf to drum up support for his scheme among the Arab states. Réouf had been repelled by the idea, but his position in Berlin was delicate and he was ready to accept Sigrid’s proposal that she interrogate Ludendorff further, on his behalf.

Later she would admit that her strategy for questioning the general was intrepid, but naive; for, while she’d provided herself with cigarettes and canned sardines to bribe her way up to Ludendorff’s hotel suite, she had no way of compelling him to listen and, as she recalled, “an onlooker would have been amused to see me firing questions at the stony faced general while he tried to walk away as fast as possible without actually breaking into a trot.”13 Yet, even though Sigrid failed to assist Réouf in his dilemma, he was captivated by the courage she’d shown, and in November 1918, when the war ended and he was recalled to Baghdad, he asked her to accompany him as his wife.

“Our relations, which were indifferent at the beginning, became more and more intimate, you supported and advised me in every way,” Réouf fondly reminded Sigrid when he wrote to her fourteen years later.14 But, while she cared for Réouf, she had no interest in marrying him, not least because she was still in mourning for her fiancé and would continue to be so for “years and years.”15 Nevertheless, Réouf’s departure would leave an emotional as well as a financial void in Sigrid’s life, and she would feel his absence even more keenly when Germany’s defeat in the war was followed by months of revolutionary chaos.

Videos