REPORTING
The journalists of Amman
BILL GRUNDY
I can never remember whether it occurs in Cecil Woodham-Smith's The Reason Why, Christopher Hibbert's The Destruction of Lord Raglan, or is embedded deep in War and Peace. You know the bit I mean; where the ladies and gentlemen with their hampers and champers look down from the heights on the soldiers killing one another in the- valley below.
From one point of view the life of a war correspondent can be rather like that, living lavishly while reporting the sufferings of others in phrases varying from the high flown to the fly blown. Which is why when we first heard that a hundred or so journalists were marooned in the Intercontinental Hotel in Amman, quite a few knowing smiles were exchanged, and there was some speculation as to what old x would be up to, and what state old Y would be in.
Well now we know that things weren't quite like that. Thursday saw most papers leading with their own correspondent's 'I was there' piece. The only difficulty is that in one sense they weren't. As John de St Jorre put it in the Observer: 'It's an odd sight, watching over 100 foreign pressmen huddled - round a radio set trying to catch the BBC news. .. The trouble is that at the moment, though in the eye of the storm, we are stuck with a virtually unreportable, non-com- municable situation. We know very little about what is going on beyond the environs of the hotel and might just as well admit it.'
Nevertheless, as we know, they did manage to get a pooled dispatch .out, thanks to Our Man in Amman who did it via the Embassy radio equipment. 'But after that,' one returned correspondent told me, 'the army came in with official handouts which were all balls, but were all they'd allow us to send.'
Most of the Thursday lead stories had graphic accounts of what was going on outside the hotel, which naturally had to be more or less based on intelligent guesswork. In the circumstances it is possible that the initial estimates of casualties in the town may be too high. Alan Hart said on his return that he thought they were, 'although I may be making the biggest mistake of my journalistic career in saying so.' He and Murray Sayle and some others did get out to look around and Hart reported that he didn't detect quite as much smell of death as other, perhaps more sensitive, nostrils picked up.
Nevertheless, Sayle's long article in the Sunday Times, entitled 'In the City that Committed Suicide', is a pretty hand) ing tale. He talks about soldiers 'with white handkerchiefs . . . over their mouths to stifle the stink of death rising from the ruins.' The photograph by Donald McCullen that heads
it, across all eight columns, also makes clear that whatever the final casualties add up to,
if indeed they can ever be totalled, the op- posing sides have not just been playing at war, but taking it very seriously.
Meanwhile, back at the Intercontinental things weren't too good either. Sayle makes the point that while the old buildings, made
of heavy masonry 'like Bath Stone' offered goodish protection, 'the more modern residences, including the Intercontinental Hotel, - were vulnerable to the smaller missiles which punctured the walls with ease.' The result was, as our returned cor- respondent told me, confirming what we'd read in Thursday's reports, 'only the madmen slept in their rooms. The rest of us kipped in the corridors, so there was at least one more thickness of wall between us and the shooting outside.'
In other ways, too, the conditions were hardly ideal for good reporting. There were no lights, few candles, and as the Middle East night descended with its usual rapidity, there wasn't much to be done after dark. Food started out not too badly but soon deteriorated. One correspondent I spoke to blamed it on the hotel manager, 'a horrible fat man who wore a black coat and striped trousers which he slept in, never shaved, never washed and was completely hopeless.' His picture is corroborated by John de St Jorre in the Observer, although perhaps with a little more charity: `Mr Daas, the night manager—a tub of a man—is in charge of the hotel as he was in all the previous crises. He begins by being wonderfully cheerful and efficient . . . but after a day or two, he packs up. His family are out there somewhere in that battered city . . . Control slips from his grasp as if from a dying man. On the third day of the battle all he can manage for us is two cupfuls fed rice and a bowl of granny's gruel' which, according to my informant, was merely the water the rice had been boiled in. My man also went on to say that the chap who did take control and get things as organised as they could be was one Michael Adams 'and thank God he did, or I don't know what would have happened.' Committees were set up, rotas established, rations determined and distributed and things in the end turned out all right for most of the journalists in Amman.
So it was a long way from the lush life. And yet despite it all, and despite the double professional frustration of not being able to see a great deal of what was going on, and not being able to report any of it, the cor- respondents have between them managed to convey to one reader at least, and I suspect to millions more, the magnitude of the hor- ror that has been going on out there. To select is probably invidious, but I do think that Murray Sayle and John de St Jorre deserve a mentioN for their long pieces at the weekend, while Kent Gavin of the Mirror and John Edwards of the Sketch can stand as representatives of the way the boys in the populars managed to convey an impres,ion of the heat, the dust and the death that .i1 rounded them.
There are times when the late EN el±n Waugh's irreverent book Scoop nrovides 1.h! truest picture of a correspondent's life. Wn.n all respect to his venerable shade, I thing that this was not one of them.
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