Wars Without End

Rudolf Carl Nassar is Co-ordinator of Humanities at Champlain Regional
College in Lennoxville, Quebec, and teaches courses in journalism and
international politics.

On a visit to Hiroshima five years after the atomic bomb was dropped, Eric Downton met a Buddhist monk. He was a war correspondent, he told the monk, but he had not been able to solve the puzzle of why men waged war. The monk, or bonze, called Downton’s dilemma a “Terrible Riddle.”

As a war correspondent for some of the world’s largest news agencies and leading newspapers, Downton has pursued that “Terrible Riddle” for most of his life in journalism — a span of four decades since he was first dispatched, wet behind the ears, to cover the Spanish Civil War for a fledgling London paper.

His pursuit took him to Madrid in 1937, “a city reeling under bombardment, but finding within itself unexpected reserves of heroism and endurance”; to Singapore in 1939, “a fool’s paradise... playing out the myth of white supremacy until it was shattered by the Japanese armies”; then to Shanghai in 1939 and 1940, the most cosmopolitan place in the Orient devastated by the engulfing Sino-Japanese war; and to the forests of the Ardennes with General Patton and the U.S. Third Army (following a period of service in the Royal Canadian Navy).

After the Second Great War, Downton accepted assignments to cover conflicts in divided Europe, newly-born and embattled Israel, bristling and embittered India and Pakistan, besieged Korea, French-colonial Indo-China and revolutionary Egypt. He reported from the battlefronts of Kenya, the Congo and other African countries waging anti-colonial wars of independence. He sent dispatches from rebel strongholds in the Yemen and Aden, and bore witness to the fighting in the jungles of Vietnam and the onset of violence on the city streets of Lebanon.

Along the road, he met many of the men who either helped shape those tumultuous events or who were deeply involved in them: Ernest Hemingway and André Malraux quarreling in a Madrid bar, George S. Patton cursing and driving his army through German lines, Bashir Gemayel hoping Lebanon could still be saved, Yasser Arafat equivocating about PLO intentions, and Kim Philby behaving like an inebriated fool at dinner in Downton’s Beirut apartment shortly before his escape.

In his journey through the wars and violence of our age, Downton was never far from the secret silent wars waged by the espionage networks, and he was keenly aware of the attempts to use the press as a pawn in their deadly game of conspiracy and deception.

Whether he was travelling into the high mountains of Afghanistan to meet clandestinely with the leader of a rebel tribe, or flying in a helicopter gunship over central Vietnam, Downton has probably seen more faces of contemporary war than any other Canadian. And the record of his experiences as “an on-the-spot” observer, a reporter with urgent deadlines, is vivid, memorable, and poignant.

Yet there is something missing in this otherwise fascinating account. The “Terrible Riddle” of why men waged those wars and failed to establish genuine peace remains a puzzle throughout. After more than three decades on the front lines, Downton offers us little in the way of explanation: wars are “an uneradicable element of man’s nature,” he concludes. And then, looking at the grim prospects of more wars and the breakdown of Nuclear Peace, he sees the Terrible Riddle looming larger “and mocking even more menacingly than when the bonze of Hiroshima posed it.”

This reviewer would prefer to have seen more of the Terrible Riddle unravelled. But then, Downton makes no pretence of being an historian, preferring perhaps to tell his story as he saw it unfold at the time, and leaving academicians and historians to do the rest.