THE LONG TRAIN HOME
A few months after arriving in India, Shirer’s work came to a halt. Gandhi and thousands of his followers sat in prisons across the country, and Shirer’s cables back to Chicago covering the Indian political situation strained to report new developments. Worried, as always, about what the editors at the Tribune, and particularly McCormick, thought of his work, Shirer began looking for something else to write about that would justify his stay in India.
In October 1930, he attended a party in Bombay and, in a crowded room of Indian and British officials, was introduced to the crown prince of Afghanistan, Mohammed Zahir Khan, a haughty teenager who had been living in Paris, far from the hardships of his homeland. He was in India on his way to Kabul to celebrate his father’s first year on the throne.
If Shirer could get the British to give him permission to travel to Afghanistan, he would have a story no one else was covering. There were good reasons foreign correspondents had not traveled to the country. While Afghanistan had not been stable for years, for the past year or more it had been even more unsettled. Nadir Khan had been on the throne for a year, a significant achievement in Afghanistan, and Shirer wanted to be there to cover the ceremonies.
Shirer needed British permission to travel through the Khyber Pass and permission from the Afghan authorities to go on to Kabul. Earlier that fall, he had tried without success to reach the Pass to report on the fighting between the Afghans and British and Indian troops. A new effort to win British approval would almost certainly be rejected again, so he lobbied the teenage crown prince to intervene on his behalf. The teenager, long away from his country, spoke French and very little English. Using his own French, Shirer asked if Khan would help him get a visa to travel to Kabul.
“No problem with the visa,” Khan said. “I can arrange that. But with the British—that’s more difficult. If you like, I can make you an official member of our party. We’re already cleared to go through the Khyber.”
After a train ride to Peshawar, Shirer boarded a caravan of trucks and cars to make his way to the pass. At a British checkpoint near the mouth of the Pass, the teenage prince negotiated permission for Shirer to proceed. Long caravans of camels loaded with trade goods slowly made their way through the Pass on the way to India. Shirer couldn’t help but think about the adventure stories of Rudyard Kipling, but after two days on the road with the Pass still ahead of him, he failed to see any romance in the setting or the people with whom he traveled.
As they climbed higher, passing long columns of troops, they heard cannons and gunfire. Artillery pieces sat on every peak. After several hours of slow travel, they reached the Afghan border, where a sign warned Shirer that travel into the country was forbidden. In spite of that, the troops at a British outpost waved them through. Afghan troops lined the road on the far side of the border. As night fell, the caravan reached Jalalabad.
The city lay in ruins; a large palace where the caravan stopped was a mountain of rubble. Shirer tried to learn from his fellow travelers about the various Afghan tribes and their endless wars, but he could not keep the tribal names straight. Leaders were deposed so often and so violently—stoned, shot, and then whatever was left of the body hung from a pole—that Shirer could hardly come to any other conclusion but that the country was a sinkhole not worth a drop of foreign blood.
The group set up for the night in a part of the palace that still had a partial roof. “Soldiers lugged in a large wobbly table and some half-broken chairs for our simple dinner by the light of a couple of lamps, for there was no electricity,” Shirer wrote. “Two orderlies spread bedrolls on the floor to sleep on. The prince apologized for the lack of plumbing, but the makeshift toilet did not bother me. It consisted of a hole in the floor in one corner of the big room in which we ate and slept.”
Morning dawned hot and dusty, and after a make-do breakfast, the caravan proceeded on to Kabul, over an 8,000-foot pass where Shirer, who knew his history, recalled that a British army unit had been ambushed in 1842. They spent the next night in a tent on a hilltop above a ruined town, a company of Afghan troops posted above them. The following day they reached Kabul. In the bazaar they passed by a dozen bodies hanging stiffly from ropes, their hands tied behind their backs, their necks broken. They moved down unpaved streets, through crowds hastily assembled to greet the prince on his return to Kabul. It all seemed beyond strange—a teenage Afghan with royal pretensions who spoke fluent French waving to a crowd of tribesmen. Exhausted, Shirer found a room of sorts in a shabby hotel.
* * *
The problem with being the only Western correspondent in a far-off land, Shirer knew, was getting his stories out of the country. After all, the country was officially closed to foreign journalists; there was no infrastructure in place to assist their work, nor a body of officials whose job it was to help him or at least not get in his way. There were no telegraph lines, and no mail service that was anything but hit or miss.
Before leaving Peshawar in India, Shirer had put down a deposit at a radio station that he hoped could receive any dispatches he wrote from Kabul and wire them on to London. In Kabul he located a small radio station where he hoped he could send his stories on to Peshawar. No one at the station knew what he was talking about, but they wanted to be helpful. He wrote a lengthy account of the coronation celebrations and included with it a great deal of information about the country that few readers in America, or Europe for that matter, knew anything about. He hoped he would be able to wire it out of the country when the time came.
Over several days, he met an assortment of characters, including an American priest who was in the country to try to convert Muslims to Christianity; a deposed emir from a Central Asian country who had millions of dollars in booty and a harem and was living in squalor outside of Kabul, plotting to throw the communists out of his country; and a host of oddballs he could not imagine had any good reason to be in the country. Most came away thinking Shirer was a spy rather than a journalist.
Where it was safe, he traveled to towns around Kabul and, later that month, to the city of Paghman, where Nadir Shah had a palace. The king offered a lunch of lamb and no utensils. In the middle of the meal, the palace was attacked by mounted tribesmen with rifles, and the king and his guests fled in cars down a dirt road.
Shirer wrote a story about the interrupted lunch and, when he was back in Kabul, returned to the radio station to see if the operator could wire it to Peshawar. He said he would try. When Shirer returned the next day, the operator said he had had no success, as he could not reach anyone in Peshawar. A nightmare blossomed in Shirer’s mind, in which his editors in Chicago, pushed by McCormick, came to the conclusion that their reporter in Afghanistan had fallen down on the job and should be sacked.
“Each day as I waited vainly for the Peshawar operator to receive my copy I had growing visions of suddenly becoming jobless in this out-of-the-way place, five thousand miles from my post in Vienna, nine thousand miles from home in America,” Shirer wrote. “I realized I didn’t have enough saved up to pay the fare back to Vienna, much less to Chicago. I would be stranded in the remotest land in all of Asia. There was no U.S. legation to appeal to for help; I could certainly not wheedle anything out of the British. The Russians had already turned down my request for a place on the plane that left Kabul for Moscow once a week.”
Day after day, Shirer visited the radio station to watch the operator type out his story, hoping it would reach Peshawar. When it didn’t, Shirer, more and more convinced that his head was on the block, returned to his squalid hotel room. In the room he would rewrite his dispatch, making it shorter and shorter, hoping that fewer words would get through more easily, and return the next day to the station. After four days, for unexplained reasons, the operator in Peshawar spoke into the radio and agreed to take the story. When he did, he wired it to London, which in turn wired it to Chicago. On October 20, the story ran—“in the first column on the first page,” Shirer wrote.
He wanted to return to India and get back in touch with Gandhi as soon as he was out of prison and able to resume his revolution against the British. He saw several more weeks of work, then the long trip back to Vienna, where a life he had come to love—and his new friend, Tess—awaited him. Nearing the end of 1930, Shirer might have allowed himself the pleasant thought that the Tribune valued his services and saw his career at the newspaper on a certain and successful path. On December 29, the paper published an advertisement touting Shirer’s work in Afghanistan: “Only One Correspondent, a Tribune Man, saw Nadir Khan become King!”
The copy accompanying the ad said that Shirer was the “sole representative of the world press” at the event. “Only by spreading its own writers over the world can the Tribune make certain of information uncolored by propaganda or external prejudice. Far flung, experienced, its staff ensures reliable news from foreign countries.”
* * *
Safely back in India, Shirer resumed his customary task of writing letters to friends in Europe and America, keeping copies for his files. He wrote to his brother, John, who had graduated from Coe College in the class of 1928 and was living in Syracuse, New York. John sent his brother a copy of the Coe College Courier, an alumni newsletter that had been printed in November when Bill was in Afghanistan. Not one to shy away from praise, he was pleased to see his work extolled in it.
“William Shirer, ’25, the only former editor in newspaper work abroad, is on the staff of the Chicago Tribune. He was formerly located in Paris, but his headquarters are now in Vienna. According to a recent issue of the Tribune, he was the sole representative of the world press at the recent crowning of a king in Afghanistan.” The newsletter also mentioned Shirer’s teacher at Coe, Ethel R. Outland, class of ’09 and still teaching journalism, lighting candles on a cake at a school celebration.
After Shirer had returned to India, McCormick cabled him to reinforce how pleased he was with his work. One cable, addressed “Dear Shirer,” read: “Your work has been very interesting.” This was high praise from McCormick. By early January 1931, harsh economic conditions in America would begin to hit the Tribune’s foreign staff. On January 9 (after Shirer had made his way back to Vienna) McCormick cabled his correspondents to tell them to cut down on expenses. Some wire services, such as the New York Sun Consolidated Press service, which maintained correspondents in Europe, closed up. Shirer’s friend Whit Burnett lost his job. In a letter to a friend, Shirer wrote that Burnett “was left absolutely on his back with a three-month-old youngster and a wife to support.” Shirer found it difficult to find stories to file; his health was failing, with complications from malaria and dysentery he’d picked up in Afghanistan. He desperately longed to get back to Vienna.
In addition to getting his good health back, returning to Austria would give him a new and important story to write. Economic conditions in the country brutalized millions of the country’s citizens. Letters from friends spoke of severe hardships, both in Austria and across the border in Germany. Bread lines were common. In mid-September 1930, while Shirer was in India, elections to the Reichstag in Germany had completely recast Hitler’s National Socialist German Workers Party.
Just two years earlier, votes for the National Socialists had totaled approximately 800,000, qualifying the party for twelve seats in the Reichstag, the national legislature. A year later the Depression hit Germany, sharply increasing support for the Far Right. Less than a year after that, on September 14, 1930, Hitler’s party won more than six million votes, an enormous leap in voter support that qualified the Nazis for 107 seats in the Reichstag. With events in Germany changing rapidly, Shirer cabled McCormick directly to tell him of his plans to return to Vienna. He feared the publisher’s answer, but to increase the chances for a “yes,” he proposed returning to Austria overland, by way of Iraq, filing stories with exotic datelines the whole way. This appealed to McCormick, who cabled Shirer to return to Vienna “via Babylon.” Pleased that he was going home, Shirer returned to Bombay and boarded a freighter bound for the port city of Basra.
After several days at sea, the ship reached Basra, where Shirer boarded a train to Baghdad. With stops in a place a sign said was “Ur” and in a little village in northeast Syria where he met a group of French army officers, the train eventually reached Baghdad. From there he proceeded to Kirkuk, where the line ended. Joining a party of mostly British officials, Shirer proceeded in a car caravan to Mosul. Days later he reached Istanbul.
From there Shirer boarded the Orient Express, hoping he would arrive in Vienna in time for Christmas. When the train reached Budapest, he was overjoyed to see Tess waiting on the platform in the early morning cold. “She was bundled up in a heavy winter coat but her head was bare, her face eager and beautiful in the dim light,” Shirer wrote. “We fell into each other’s arms. By the time we proceeded on to Vienna a couple of days later, we had decided to marry.”