There is an article by Martha Gellhorn, published in a collection of her journalism, The View From The Ground, which she described as her "last piece of war reporting". It is an account of the Welsh miners' strike of 1984 and is called "The Enemy Within", an ironic reference to Mrs Thatcher's warning of the threat to liberty posed by the trade union movement. Gellhorn describes being driven around the Welsh valleys in a jolting, beaten-up old van talking to miners and their wives, watching charity workers prepare meagre food parcels for their families, witnessing at first hand how the prime minister's determination to defeat the union was destroying a community's way of life. She writes: "It would be useless to beseech Mrs Thatcher in the bowels of Christ to think it possible that she might be mistaken. Politicians do not err and repent; sometimes they U-turn, though not Mrs Thatcher. But what if she is mistaken? If, through hunger, the spirit of the bravest of the working class is crushed, that will indeed be a famous victory. And a most grievous mistake."
When the American journalist wrote this article she was in her late 70s. I still read it from time to time, for much the same reasons as my mother turned to the consolations of prayer. It reminds me of how privileged I have been to spend most of my working life as a journalist. But it also shames me. Most journalists, contrary to the popular view, start off with strong views about injustice and a desire to expose it. But it is all too easy, particularly as one grows older, to lose the necessary, uncomfortable curiosity, the capacity to be awed by the courage and generosity of so-called ordinary lives, and the energy to get the results into print.
Martha Gellhorn never lost these qualities. In her late 80s she was reporting from Brazil on the plight of street children in that country's capital. When she died on Sunday, most of the obituaries focused on her extraordinary career as a war correspondent. She covered the great conflicts of this tragic century - the Spanish Civil War, the Normandy landings, the opening of the concentration camps, Vietnam, the Middle East.
It wasn't the fact that she reported on these and many other key events of the 20th century which made her an incomparable witness. It was the way she saw them and wrote about them. Her view, as she said, was from the ground, standing among ordinary people - soldiers, victims, the survivors trying to rebuild their lives in the rubble of war. She didn't care much for politicians and was dismissive of "the official drivel" handed out at press briefings. She once wrote "I've no time for that objectivity shit". But she also gave young journalists advice that is more valuable than the sum of most text books. "Limit yourself to what you see and hear. Do not suppress and do not invent."
Gellhorn was married for some years to Ernest Hemingway and there are those who think that the great writer influenced her clean, direct prose style. But her burning sense of social justice was formed long before she met Hemingway. One has only to read the reports she wrote for Harry Hopkins, the director of the US Federal Relief Agency, about the lives of the forgotten poor to see what shaped her. The marriage to Hemingway, which ended in a rancorous divorce, was not helped when he was hired by her employer, Colliers magazine, as a war correspondent, and took over her official accreditation facilities. This meant she had virtually to smuggle herself onto a hospital ship for the D-Day landings, saying she had come to write pieces from "the women's angle" - interviews with nurses and so on. "Nobody cared a hoot about the women's angle. It served me like a perfectly forged passport."
Here we come to the special place which Martha Gellhorn occupies for many journalists such as myself. When I was a young reporter, women were still faced with a choice. You stuck with women's issues and hoped to be able to write intelligently within the confines of that ghetto. Or you tried to make the breakthrough to what was called "the mainstream", where you were expected to know as much as - and, more important, write like - a man. Martha Gellhorn never recognised these barriers and her reputation did a great deal to break them down. For example, she admitted that she knew very little about the technology of war. I can remember, in a much more modest way, how inadequate I felt when I was reporting from Northern Ireland because, unlike my male colleagues, I did not know the difference between a brigade and a battalion, let alone the relative firepower of their weapons.
These distinctions have largely disappeared now, of course. Some of the finest male reporters - John Pilger, Martin Bell - wear their hearts on their sleeves and see it as their duty to have a moral view of the pity of war. Feminisation of the news agenda is what it's called.
We keep being told that the dumbing down of the media is inevitable, that newspapers now are produced for consumers and that readers are no longer interested in war and famine in faraway foreign parts. Then I read Lara Marlowe's reports from Algeria and Maggie O'Kane's heartbreaking account of the children's ward in a Baghdad hospital and I know that Martha Gellhorn's legacy is safe with these, her heirs.
If, as seems desperately likely, the United States and Britain go ahead with a new assault on Iraq, we will hear a lot of excited talk about surgical air strikes and smart bombs and collateral damage. It will be more important than ever that there are journalists who share Gellhorn's view of "official drivel" and see it as their task to show us the other, human face of war.