‘Sickening. Will try to get out information’

Marie Colvin’s final dispatch relating the agonies of Homs is a fitting epitaph, ANTHONY LOYD writes.

Among the small, tight-knit tribe of her profession, the news yesterday of Marie Colvin’s death felt something akin to the moment a previous generation recalled the killing of Kennedy.

Few foreign correspondents will forget where they were or what they were doing when they first heard word that the foremost champion among us, a woman who was the embodiment of all that was brave and wise and good in journalism, had been slain by Syrian artillery in the besieged city of Homs.

In death, as in life, she could make grown men cry. Perhaps we should have known better than to be shocked. Fortunes in war, after all, are governed by nebulous rules of chance. So how could we be surprised that Marie Colvin, the wounded one-eyed veteran of a 30-year career reporting in war, the cat who had far exceeded her nine lives, surviving innumerable scrapes with death in Iraq, the Palestinian territories, Chechnya, Sri Lanka and elsewhere, had finally been killed on assignment?

The answer is simple. Marie seemed too good to die. In a profession of many pretenders, she was the real Mccoy, an iconic figure cut from the same cloth as Martha Gellhorn, a fellow American and the pioneering woman war correspondent of World War II. Like Gellhorn, Marie believed passionately in the role of the war correspondent. This devout creed in what she was doing defined her, elevating her far above the familiar ego-driven dictates of so many of her colleagues. It made her great, and it made her good. Small wonder, then, that her circle of friends and admirers should be utterly shocked by her killing: for it feels as if the cosmos has somehow made a terrible mistake.

Though her talent, courage and self-belief were recognised widely enough for her portrait to be hung in the National Portrait Gallery, she was never conceited. Her humility made her a rare bird in an aviary renowned for its preening.

The list of her exploits is long and legendary. As a young woman she famously caught the eye of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi when she interviewed the Libyan dictator in Tripoli in 1986. The first she knew of his attention was when his personal doctor appeared at her hotel room in the middle of the night, complete with a syringe to check her blood before the colonel invested any more attention upon her. The hapless doctor was sent packing back to his master, mission incomplete.

By the time the Gulf War occurred in 1991 she was a seasoned veteran of conflict in the Middle East and something of a legend by the time I met her in Kosovo in 1999, where she was accompanying KLA insurgents on cross-border missions against Serb forces. She famously emerged from a vehicle shattered by Russian airstrikes in Chechnya in 2000, escaping through mountains into Georgia, just a year before being blinded in her left eye by a shrapnel fragment in Sri Lanka.

By the time she was killed she was the undisputed standard-bearer of our values, a woman whose courage and endeavour singularly advanced the capability of others by providing the benchmark for what we should aspire to. Her humour survived intact. ‘‘If you see a bit of eye lying in the jungle then pick it up,’’ she asked me before I went on assignment to Sri Lanka two years ago. ‘‘It could be mine!’’

She died as she lived: committed, impassioned, brilliant, truly exceptional.

‘‘I think reports of my survival may be exaggerated,’’ she wrote on Wednesday in response to a comment on a website congratulating her for returning from Homs safely.

‘‘In Baba Amr. Sickening, cannot understand how the world can stand by. Watched a baby die today. Shrapnel, doctors could do nothing. His little tummy just heaved and heaved until he stopped. Feeling helpless . . . Will keep trying to get out the information.’’

It was her last known correspondence, and finest epitaph.