The Press: End of the Road

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Race to the Front. When a report reached Port Said that the Egyptians were sending a hospital train to the front to evacuate wounded, Shim and Roy hustled to shoot the scene. With Roy at the wheel, they raced south toward the front line along a road flanked on one side by the Suez Canal, on the other by a fresh-water canal. The front was unmarked. British paratroopers, dug in along the side of the road, saw the jeep coming and tried to wave it down. It roared by. Some 1,000 yards down the road, it shot past an Egyptian outpost. Then the luck that had held so miraculously through wars, riots and revolutions was suddenly shattered in a burst of Egyptian machine-gun fire. The jeep swung crazily off the road with the riddled bodies of the two photographers, the first press casualties of the war that had halted with a cease-fire even before they were hit.

In Cyprus, where he had gone to cover the Egyptian fighting, 27-year-old Angus Macdonald of London's weekly Spectator fell last week under a Cypriot assassin's bullet, shot in the back on a Nicosia street. He was the third newsman to die in the Middle Eastern crisis. Ironically, his last dispatch argued "the bankruptcy of [Britain's Cyprus] policy of shoot first, negotiate afterwards."