Oldtime Vienna correspondents knew sharp-featured George Eric Rowe Gedye (rhymes with steady) as a cool little Englishman, always reserved and distantly polite, who could write with startling passion of his love (Austria) and his hate (the Nazis). Last week they caught the Gedye touch in London Daily Herald pieces pleading that unless the Allies acted, Vienna would starve within 30 days.
Gedye was back again after five years. In 1940, home-bound from Moscow, where he had been New York Times correspondent (he is so no longer), Gedye stopped off in Istanbul—and promptly vanished from newsprint. The spotlight touched him briefly in 1942 when Turkish police arrested him, and the German press howled that he had been plotting the assassination of Franz von Papen. What he calls "confidential" methods got him out of jail; he fled to Jerusalem, and there shouted a terse "nonsense" at the charges. Then the spotlight flickered out.
"Nothing Secret." The fact is that G. E. R. Gedye—having a wonderfully exciting time behind a cold, impassive exterior—had spent World War II in the Middle East "collecting confidential information," ostensibly for the British Ministry of Information. It had been better than his World War I service as an intelligence officer ("Nothing secret about it! Just questioning prisoners!"). It had almost satisfied his romantic dreams of 1925, when, as a new correspondent in Vienna, he had stood in awe before the Chancellery on the Ballhaus Platz, where Metternich had planned his tricks. "The very address," he wrote later with characteristic Gedye gusto, "was an echo of the spy thrillers by William Le Queux, who had filled my boyhood with the romance of international intrigue."
As a Vienna correspondent, Gedye was a lone wolf. He steered clear of the Cafe Louvre, where such mutually admiring members of the Anglo-American press club as Marcel Fodor. John Gunther and Dorothy Thompson talked away the days over Kaffee mit Schlagobers, and pooled their findings. He drifted around the country, wrote excellent travel and history books on Austria.
Sign on the Door. Editors did not find it too easy to get along with this chilly little ex-soldier. He made out best with the remote bosses of the New York Times: for 13 years he covered Vienna for them, for four years was their bureau chief. But the name on the door of a second little cubbyhole office he used was changed frequently. First it was the London Times; then in succession London's Express and Telegraph. As Hitler rose to power, Gedye's impassioned warnings fell painfully on British ears.
Three days after the Nazis seized Austria, Gedye was escorted to the border; He had offended: 1) by describing the cuffing German police had given some Austrian generals; 2) by casting doubt on a Gestapo assertion that it had arrested only 600 Austrians. In Prague Gedye continued his fight, sending bitter pieces to his papers,' writing a book (published as Fallen Bastions in England, Betrayal in Central Europe in America).