A Stricken Field

The book covers a single week in Prague in October 1938. Chamberlain has just come home promising peace for our time, the Sudetenland is Germany's, and refugees who had fled Austria, Germany and the Sudeten districts to what was the last democracy in central Europe are being served with expulsion orders giving them days to leave. There is nowhere for them to go. The novel's American correspondent, Mary Douglas, has a passport, a press card and a return ticket, and she spends the week discovering exactly how little those are worth to anyone but her.

Gellhorn was in Czechoslovakia that year and the novel is close enough to what she saw that she called it autobiographical. The pressure it puts on itself is the gap between reporting a catastrophe and being able to stop any part of it, which is a question she spent the following sixty years not resolving. It is generally taken to be her strongest fiction, and the University of Chicago Press keeps it in print with an afterword by Caroline Moorehead.

Mary Douglas arrives in Prague to file on the aftermath of Munich and finds a city administering its own dismantling. The refugees she meets are stateless by paperwork rather than by war: protected one month, illegal the next, and given a handful of days to be somewhere else. Among them is Rita, a young German woman whose situation tightens through the week as the deadline runs down and the Gestapo's reach extends into a country that has not yet been invaded.

Around that thread the novel follows what a correspondent can and cannot do — the interviews, the appeals to officials, the attempt to get a document into the right hands, the private favours that fall outside what a reporter is supposed to attempt. Mary can leave at any time and everyone she is writing about knows it. The book's subject is that asymmetry, and it declines to soften it.