ABSTRACT
the fortunate journalist is sometimes able to tell how he survived some appalling catastrophe, escaped some desperate danger, or how he came close to death. It has happened to many. To give the examples I know best, it happened to my father and to me. In 1907, driving in the Peking-Paris car race, my father was pinned under the ruins of a bridge of rotten wood, somewhere in Siberia, the car, an Itala, crushing his kidneys; he also crashed in a Zeppelin in the Black Forest and was rescued from the branches of a tree; and he narrowly missed being shot as a spy by the Germans, in Belgium in 1914. I disappeared in the Danakil desert during the Abyssinian War, with an adventurous small column that was practically wiped out in an ambush, and for days I was thought to be dead. Another time, having been refused permission to go at the very last minute, I was unable to fly in a military plane that was going to take over a distant Ethiopian province which was said to be ready to submit, indeed well disposed towards us. Those who set off in it were all slaughtered on arrival. The most senior of them, a young air force general, and a dear friend of mine, is now a street name in Palermo. The following year I was sunk on the Yangtze on board the Panay, an American gunboat bombed by the Japanese. Sandro Sandri, a journalist, who was with me, is now also a street name in Milan.
