Jungle Journalism

One and only one U. S. journalist has had the manly gumption to go jungaleering in Nicaragua and cable home true details of the war now being fought between U. S. Marines and the indomitable Nicaraguan guerilla, General Augusto Calderon Sandino (TIME, Aug. 1). The unique jungle journalist is Carleton Beals, now special correspondent in Nicaragua for The Nation, liberal, trenchant, enterprising Manhattan weekly review. Although Correspondent Beals was both prolix and tediously descriptive of scenery in his early despatches, it is now possible to cull one excellent purple passage and then get down to the solid news of the first interview obtained by any U. S. journalist from General Sandino. Mr. Beals, author, lecturer, and onetime schoolmaster at Mexico City, writes:

Purple Approach: "More jungle—humid, reeking. A soldier plucks twenty dollars' worth of purple orchids (New York quotation) and sticks them in the band of his sombrero. Troops of screaming monkeys swing past, stopping occasionally to grimace at us. From the depths of the forest, mountain lions roar. Huge macaws wing across the sky, crying hoarsely and flashing crimson. We ford and re-ford the north-flowing tributary, for endless hours we toil across the Yali range, and finally drop down near Jinotega in another night of driving rain over a road where the horses roll pitifully, up to their bellies in mud. ... I was finally brought to ... General Sandino's headquarters ... at San Rafael del Norte ... in the Department of Jinotega on the high flank of the Yali Range."

Sandino Described. "His regular, curved eyebrows are arched high above liquid black eyes without visible pupils. His eyes are of remarkable mobility and refraction to light—quick, intense eyes. ... He is short, not more than five feet five. When I saw him he was dressed in a uniform of dark brown with almost black puttees, immaculately polished; a silk red-and-black handkerchief knotted about his throat; and a broad-brimmed Texas Stetson hat, pulled low over his forehead and pinched shovel-shaped. Occasionally, as we conversed, he shoved his sombrero to the back of his head and hitched his chair forward. . . .

"His ideas are precisely, epigrammatically ordered. There was not a major problem in the whole Nicaraguan question that he dodged or that I even needed to raise. In military matters I found him most assured; a bit flamboyant and boastful and with a tendency to exaggerate his successes. However, he is exceedingly astute, knows the country well, and, with luck breaking even, can remain in the field indefinitely. By keeping the mountainous country north and east at his back, he cannot be cut off by 2,500 marines or 5,000; and he can shuttle back and forth . . . across Nicaragua, enjoying a fairly adequate food supply, tapping rich agricultural sectors, and passing rapidly from point to point; whereas the American troops, to cover this same region, and maintain intact their line of communications with Managua and Leon, must swing over an arc half again as long."