The War Hotels: Introduction
A five-part series on where war correspondents have stayed throughout the decades
When the artillery shell from fascist guns on Garabitas Hill lands just outside Madrid's Florida Hotel with a terrific bang, the audience in the tiny, third-floor Mint Theater on West 43rd Street is appropriately startled. It is followed, according to stage directions, "by an incoming whistling rush, and another crash. You hear pieces of brick and steel falling, and the tinkle of falling glass."
The play was Ernest Hemingway's "The Fifth Column," his only full-length play, put on last year for the first time in America just as he wrote it. The title comes from a remark Gen. Francisco Franco made during the Spanish Civil War that he had four columns besieging Madrid and a fifth column of sympathizers within.
"The play is about a littler community that the residents of the hotel create for themselves under bombardment," the director, Jonathan Bank, told the New York Times last spring when the production began its run.
You could say that the play has four major characters, but the fifth is the hotel itself, where most of the real action takes place. Although the characters are fictional, the hotel was real. The main character, "Philip," is obviously Hemingwayesque, and "Dorothy" is a stand-in for Martha Gellhorn, the legendary war correspondent who lived with him in Florida before she became his third wife.
From the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s to today's conflict in Iraq, it seems that in most wars a hotel provides a stage set for a cast of characters trying to cope with the tragedy outside. They have long been the muse of great writers from Hemingway to Graham Greene and John le Carre. They are the sets for Hollywood scripts from "Hotel Rwanda" to "The Killing Fields."
In Saigon, there were several war hotels — the Caravelle and the Majestic come to mind. But it was the Continental Palace, an elegant old French hotel, that caught the imagination. During the war in Cambodia, the Le Phnom was the Florida of its day.
In Dacca in 1971, during the painful birth of Bangladesh, the Intercontinental Hotel became the war hotel. In August of that year, when I went down to the lobby to buy some smokes, a terrorist bomb blew up in the lobby.
Perhaps the quintessential war-time hotel was the Commodore in West Beirut during Lebanon's long and cruel civil war, and later, during Israel's invasion, when artillery shells rained down on the town. When the hotel was full I tried to bunk with a friend who told me I could have a bed, but under it was reserved for him.
Hollywood's "Hotel Rwanda" was actually the Hotel des Milles Collines in Kigali, which for a time provided sanctuary amid a genocide.
In Jerusalem, during one Palestinian intifada or another, or alternatively when the "peace process" finds a bit of daylight between Israelis and Palestinians, it is always the pleasant American Colony Hotel on the east side of the city where journalists from around the world gather.
In Iraq, the Palestine was the Baghdad war hotel during the last days of Saddam Hussein. But as the regime collapsed and the U.S. occupying force steadily erected the blast walls and barbed wire that would mark the Green Zone, the Al Hamra became the hotel of choice for most journalists. When I stayed there in 2005 it was almost entirely filled with journalists and private security employees. There were elaborate security precautions, sand bags around the front door, and a huge blast wall around the compound to keep out car bombers.
The Al Hamra had a look and feel that was perhaps not unlike the Florida that Hemingway made so famous during those desperate days of the dying Spanish Republic. The Florida became the temporary home of journalists, soldiers on leave from the International Brigades, and, as Hemingway later wrote, "the most varied collection of ladies of the evening I have ever seen." Hemingway had it figured that rooms 112 and 113 could not be hit because of the angle of fire — "what is called by artillerymen a dead angle," he would later write. It was in those rooms that Hemingway wrote his play in 1937. Some 30 shells hit the Florida, but his rooms were still intact when Franco marched into the city, though "very little else" was, as Hemingway wrote in a dispatch for the North American Newspaper Alliance.
And so from the fall of the Spanish Republic to the Fascist forces of Franco to the toppling of Saddam Hussein by the U.S.-led coalition that invaded Iraq, the war hotel is as enduring as war itself. In these digital days of instant email contact with editors, the camaraderie can be lost. Reporters are too busy reading text messages and talking on their Thuraya handheld sat phones to get drunk together. Still, the hotels remain a stage set for a cast of characters caught in the conflict of their day. And from then until now, there have been journalists, including this one, vying for those rooms with that "excellent angle" that Hemingway describes, the "angle" that journalists believe will be what protects them from the likely source of the bombardments and the truck bombs. In every war hotel, there is a journalist looking for that angle.
Read the rest of the War Hotels series by HDS Greenway: