The
New York Herald solicited tributes to Don Martin from his two noted companion
war correspondents, Martin Green and Floyd Gibbons, and published these in its
Sunday edition, October 13, 1918 with an introduction and a photo of the three
comrades: --
Don Martin’s Comrades
at Front
Pay Touching Tribute
to His Memory
“He was a
Real Fellow,” Says Floyd Gibbons,
of the Chicago Tribune
“A Clean,
Sweet Character,” Says Martin Green,
of the New York Evening World.
There were
three of them who went out to war last year -- Don Martin of the New York
Herald; Floyd Gibbons, of the Chicago Tribune, and Martin Green of the New York
Evening World.
Only two
came back – Gibbons, wounded three times at Bois de Belleau and one eye gone,
but proudly wearing the Croix de Guerre, bestowed by the French government for
gallantry in action; Green, broken in health but now fully restored and about
to return to the battlefields of France.
Don Martin
is dead – dead of disease brought on by overwork, exposure and privation
endured patiently and uncomplainingly in the service of the Herald and its
readers.
Herewith
are touching tributes to the memory of Don Martin from two of the three brave
spirits who went to the front a year ago.
“My Girl
in the United States”
Was Don
Martin’s Little Daughter
Martin
Green Tells of His Comrade’s Devotion to Daughter,
Twelve
Years Old, as an Indication of His Character –
Tribute
to His Honor as a Journalist
By Martin Green, War Correspondent of the New York Evening World
A gray mist
hung like a pall over Neufchateau. The hour was eight in the morning; the month
was March. Into the headquarters of the press division of the Intelligence
Department of the American Expeditionary Force in France came the
correspondents of the American newspapers, wrapped in heavy overcoats and
slickers, carrying gas masks and steel helmets, sleepy eyed, because they had
reached the camp from the front late the night before – but eager to get back
to activities with American fighting forces nearly one hundred miles away. In
the dark narrow street half a dozen automobiles assigned by the army to men
reporting the war for the press at home were lined up, awaiting their
journalistic cargoes.
The first man
to enter the kerosene lamp lighted office of the army censor was Don Martin –
Martin of the Herald – not the almost slight, always well groomed Don Martin of
Albany and Washington and New York and the United States in general, but a
bulky khaki colored Don Martin, almost as broad as he was high, what with his
heavy uniform and his thick outer covering against snow and rain and his
hobnailed boots and his field accoutrements. Good little, old Don Martin,
always on the job – generally first on the job.
“Any mail?” inquired the round little
man, backing up against the alleged stove in the middle of the room.
“No mail until ten o’clock,” replied the
officer in charge. “The mailboat arrived
two days ago and I understand from Paris that we’ll get a mess of letters.”
“There’s a letter coming from my girl in the
United States,” said Don Martin. “If
I remain out at the front I wish you would send it to me by one of the boy’s
coming out tomorrow morning. Is ‘Jimmy’ James here?”
"Jimmy” James
– otherwise Edwin L. James of the New York Times, Don Martin’s touring partner,
as it were, along our battle front – had not arrived. He came in a minute later
with other correspondents who had breakfasted at the Officers’ Club. Don Martin
gave “Jimmy” James a complete calling down for being late and away they went,
their automobile leading the way to a long line of correspondents’ automobiles
bound for the Luneville sector by way of Nancy.
Don Martin
might have remained in Neufchateau to get the mail and the letter from his girl
in the United States, but his programme was “the paper first,” and it so
happened that he didn’t get his mail until three days later. He pounced on the
packet of letters, picked out two and opened one of the two and his face set
into a smile and his eyes moistened.
“She’s some girl,” said Don Martin to me,
who was fortunate enough to be with him when he received his belated
communications. “Only twelve years old
and look at the French she springs on me!”
Don Martin’s
girl was his only daughter and he used to read to me in France the sparkling
communications he received from her most regularly, and I can bear witness that
no matter how bulky his mail and no matter how many envelopes there were,
indicating from the green tinted envelopes that they bore messages from the New
York Herald, the first letters he read were those from a little girl in Silver
Creek, New York. The correspondence between Don Martin and his twelve-year-old
daughter, in mixed English and French, was a beautiful exemplar of the
household tie between France and the United States, which this war has created.
I think of him now crouched back in the seat of an automobile, whizzing along a
poplar lined road in France, reaching into his pocket for a letter and saying:
-- “I
want to read you something my girl told me in her last letter.”
And
he was never too busy or tired to write to his girl. He was always picking up
remembrances for her. I shall never forget what a row he raised when, on a trip
with a unit of our forces, he lost a pair of little wooden shoes he had bought
for her, with her name artistically cut into the sole of each shoe. He almost
tore up the United States army in France.
An
angle on the sentimental side of Don Martin, and a big side it was, too. Now
for another side.
On
the afternoon of Sunday, June 2, I met Don Martin at Montreuil, a town a little
to the eastward of Chateau Thierry. The Germans had taken the north side of
Chateau Thierry and American troops were swarming by us into the Belleau Wood,
to stop the German advance on Paris. American troops had played an important
part in preventing the Germans from crossing the Marne and taking the entire
town of Chateau Thierry. Montreuil was the headquarters of one of our
divisions.
Only
three American reporters were near Chateau Thierry that Sunday afternoon – Don
Martin, “Jimmy” James and I. I had ridden out from Paris in two hours. Martin
and James had come from Neufchateau, 150 miles away. The skin of Martin’s face
was peeling off from the effect of sunburn and windburn. He had a good story –
the first story of the presence of American soldiers in the Chateau Thierry
defense.
“Come back to Paris with me,” I urged. “You can file there tonight and beat New
York. This American intervention is a big thing.”
“I know,” said Don Martin, “but Jimmy and I promised Major McCabe, who
gave us a pass to come up here, that we would go back to Neufchateau and file.
You go back to Paris and file your story and beat me if you want to, and be
damned to you, but I’m going to keep my word.”
And
he did. He went back that 150 miles to file his story because he had pledged
his honor as a journalist, and to Don Martin his honor as a journalist was a
sacred thing.
A
clean, sweet character. I worked in association with him for sixteen years in
New York City, at national and State conventions and at the front in France,
and I have never known or heard of an action of his of which a man could be
ashamed.
 |
| Don Martin with daughter Dorothy, November 1910 |
Don Martin Did More Than Write About The War – He Lived It and Fought It
By Floyd
Gibbons, War Correspondent of the Chicago Tribune, Sioux City, Iowa,
Saturday, October 12, 1918
It is one of the unexplainable tricks of fate that a man of the fearless
spirit of Don Martin should die in France in this year of the Great War as a
victim of disease.
Don Martin, when marked for death this year, deserved a soldier’s grave
on the field of battle. In his death American newspapers lose a capable,
conscientious informant, and American journalism suffers the loss of one of its
finest exponents.
I have ridden the front of France with Don Martin. I have been with him
under shell fire and have observed his coolness in advance positions when
withering barrages of indirect machine gun fire speckled the ground close by.
One day last May I was in a dugout in a front line playing checkers with
Don Martin, when suddenly a terrific concentration of enemy shells landed near
by. The ground shook. Loose earth tumbled down from the roof of the shelter,
the air trembled and the candle – our only illumination - was extinguished by
the blast. By the time I had recovered my breath Don, sitting on a box on the
other side of the table, had relighted the candle and I heard him say in his
cool, even voice: -- ‘It’s your move.’
In the first days of June, Don Martin was the last American
correspondent to leave Chateau-Thierry as the Germans entered the north side of
the town. On July 21st, when the Germans were forced to evacuate
Chateau-Thierry and subjected it to a terrific long-range bombardment, Don
Martin rode back into the town with the first American troops. In the fighting
along the Marne, the Ourcq and the Vesle, Don Martin daily and nightly followed
the American advance, close on the heels of the retreating enemy. He visited
the front lines every day and more dangerous than that, he had to run the
double risk of transportation on the roads up to the front lines and back.
Twice his automobile was damaged beyond repair by shellfire, but these
incidents never seemed to prevent him from getting another car and going over
the same ground the next day.
During the cold and rainy season and the heat of summer this intrepid
journalist braved all kinds of weather to serve his readers. He competed
physically with men who possessed much younger bodies, but none that had a
younger mind. I have seen him returning at night to the correspondents’
headquarters, sometimes with his face pinched with cold, sometimes soaked to
the skin with rain, sometimes covered with the mud of the trenches, sometimes
with his face blistered from the sun and the wind and covered with the gray
dust of the road. I have seen him return dog weary and tired and forswear his
dinner hour in order that he might transmute into despatches, the human news
stories that he had gained at first hand along the fronts that day.
Don Martin above all was human. His pockets were always full of
cigarettes when he went to the front line, and always empty when he came out.
He liked to talk to our young American soldiers like a daddy or a big uncle. In
addition to his own work he wrote many times to their fathers and mothers
telling them that their sons were alive and in good health. In action he used
to take care of our wounded, giving them water or making them more comfortable
on the stretchers. When ambulances were scarce he used to transport them in his
automobile.
Don Martin did more than write about the war, he was living the war and
fighting the war every day and minute.
When I was wounded at the front Don Martin was among the correspondents
who offered to “carry on” in my place and protect my publications until a
relief could arrive. Although far from being a well man himself at that time,
he was among the first to visit me at the hospital.
He was a real fellow. Of the eighteen original accredited correspondents
at the American front, Don Martin, Green and I are the only three who are not
on the job today. As certainly as I expect to return, so surely do I feel that
Don Martin from the spirit land will observe and report from above the
triumphant entry of our troops into Berlin. The men who wear the green brassard
in France feel deeply the loss of a true comrade.
Edwin
L. James of the New York Times had been Don’s almost daily companion in an army
automobile for six months. James later became
Managing Editor of the New York Times, until he died at age 61 on December 4,
1951. Edwin James wrote the following story on October 7, the day of Don Martin's death. It ran in his paper, the New
York Times, on October 18, 1918.
DON MARTIN DIES
AFTER BRIEF
ILLNESS
Pneumonia contracted at Front Fatal to War Correspondent – Colleague’s Tribute to Him
By Edwin L. James, With the American Army
in France, October 7 –
Word came to the front from Paris this afternoon that
Don Martin, the war correspondent of The New York Herald, died there last night
of pneumonia. Martin contracted a bad cold on Sept. 26 while covering the
attack of the First American Army between the Argonne and the Meuse. Despite
the advice of friends, he kept at the front, and, travelling long hours along
the battlefield in cold and rainy weather, his cold became worse, until last
Friday he gave up and went to Paris for better medical attention. Yesterday I
received a telegram from him thanking me for a small favor.
Don Martin was known throughout the United States as one of
America’s foremost newspapermen. His duties took him to the London office of
The Herald last Fall, and early in the Spring he became The Herald’s accredited
correspondent with the American Expeditionary Forces. Due not only to the fact
of the circulation of the Paris edition of The Herald among the units of the
American Army, but also to his understanding of the issues of the war and his
gift of graphic portrayal of the battles, Don Martin was perhaps the best known
to the army of all the American war correspondents. Personally he was popular,
and numbered a large number of officers among his close friends.
In his writings Martin revealed his innate hatred of Germany
and German warfare. Few men had seen or known more about boche hate and
hatefulness, and he was an ardent advocate of the infliction of heavy penalties
upon the Kaiser and his tribe for the misery they had brought upon the world.
I was paired with Martin in the use of an automobile, and so
for the last six months had been in closest touch with him every day. From his
ability and experience I borrowed heavily, and I came to know him and his way
of working. For one who braved so many dangers at the front to get news, it
seemed a cruel fate to die as he did.
--------------
Don
Martin has been six months in France as The New York Herald correspondent at
American Army Headquarters, and prior to that he had achieved a reputation as
an observer and writer of politics, State and national.
Mr.
Martin was born forty-seven years ago in Silver Creek, N. Y., near Buffalo. He
began newspaper work in Buffalo, and obtained his first big success covering a
celebrated murder which was committed there about eighteen years ago. His work
on that case won him metropolitan recognition, and he came to this city in
1903, joining the staff of The New York American. Fourteen years ago he went to
The Herald, serving for a time as city editor, but devoting himself chiefly to
the political field. At Albany and is this city he built up a wide circle of
acquaintances with public men, and associates in discussing his work declared
that Mr. Martin probably was without a peer in sizing up a political situation
for forecast.
When
he was assigned to go to France, friends arranged a big send-off for him,
ex-Justice Charles E. Hughes presiding. Mr. Martin arrived in London, where her
stayed for two months, in time to report that city’s largest air raid -- Mr.
Martin being blown across a room in the Savoy Hotel when a building next door
was destroyed. His work with the American forces had attracted widespread
attention.
Mr.
Martin was a widower, his wife having died in 1906. He is survived by a
daughter, who lives with his mother at Silver Creek, and by several brothers
and sisters.
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