Despite having a novelist for a mother,
and the Philadelphia Inquirer’s managing editor for a father, Davis did
not make the most auspicious of starts, being that rare thing: a reporter
fired for being too well dressed. He survived, made his name covering the
Johnstown Flood of 1889, and was soon the highest-paid reporter in
America. He was also, especially when covering wars, one of journalism’s
major descriptive talents. His story on the execution of a young Cuban
rebel, ‘The Death of Rodriguez’, is one of the most anthologised
pieces of reporting in newspaper history, and, from the Greek-Turkish War,
he filed this little antidote to the romanticising of dead ‘heroes’:
“There was no selection of the
unfittest; it seemed to be ruled by unreasoning luck…If a man happened
to be standing in the line of a bullet he was killed and passed into
eternity, leaving a wife and children, perhaps, to mourn him. "Father
died," these children will say, "doing his duty." As a
matter of fact, father died because he happened to stand up at the wrong
moment, or because he turned to ask the man on his right for a match…”
These skills, when applied to novels or
plays, earned him a fortune. Yet, time and again, Davis left the comforts
of home and the plaudits of Broadway for life as a reporter on campaign.
In 1914, aged 50, and with a new young wife pregnant with their first
child, he left from the Belgian front, described the entry of the German
army into Brussels as “like a river of steel”, and was arrested as a
spy. Less than two years later, a week short of his 52nd birthday, Davis
died from a heart attack.
