and of all women the great writer had known,
the bravest he said was Marty Gellhorn,
his blonde paramour of the Spanish Civil War.
So had he said it and he would say it again,
of his stately Bryn Mawr journalist friend,
a correspondent on the continent reporting at the scene
of the horrors then in fashion, for Paris Vogue,
and free-lancing on the side for Colliers magazine.
So had he said it and he could say it again,
that braver was she than most of the men,
bound away with the Navy for a war-torn shore;
to land on D-Day with the Army and Marine Corps.
Such kind of pluck would be too hard to find,
For a woman reporter with her press pass denied.
Left to book passage on a dynamite ship;
in trappings of a Red Cross medic, equipped,
she came ashore at Normandy bearing a stretcher,
packing bandages instead of her trusty pad and pen,
and that necessary pass now borne as a feather,
in her husband's hat band.
Who indeed of all men would be so brave as to take
the nerve to step into such a daring dame's place,
as Collier's correspondent to fill that tough post,
lest by her works any woman should boast;
None other than he, her own husband, of course!
Oh, so courageous a man it would take to do that,
a hero all alone in a class of his own,
a man braver than most of the men he'd known,
if not bravest above all in his own esteem;
a sentiment well known to his ex-wife Pauline,
who so loved to tell of how Ernie had whined,
to hear he'd been called 'yellow'
by his old pal, Gertrude Stein.
