Eyewitnesses to history: from Pliny to 9/11

Recalling the terrible events as they unfolded in live television pictures from New York on that crisp September morning seven years ago today, it is the images that overwhelm. The words uttered do not linger.

So how does the eyewitness reporter set down what happened that day to fix it in the collective memory? This was the problem John Updike addressed in his wonderful reportage for the New Yorker a day or two later.

"Suddenly summoned to witness something great and horrendous we keep fighting not to reduce it to our own smallness," wrote Updike. "From the viewpoint of a tenth-floor apartment in Brooklyn Heights, where I happened to be visiting some kin, the destruction of the World Trade Center Twin Towers had the false intimacy of television, on a day of perfect reception...

"It seemed, at that first glance, more curious than horrendous: smoke speckled with bits of paper curled into the cloudless sky, and strange inky rivulets ran down the giant structure's vertically corrugated surface. The WTC had formed a pale background to our Brooklyn view of Lower Manhattan, not beloved, like the stony, spired midtown thirties skyscrapers it had displaced as the city's tallest, but, with its post-modern combination of unignorable immensity and architectural reticence, in some lights beautiful.

"As we watched the second tower burst into ballooning flame (an intervening building had hidden the approach of the second aeroplane), there persisted the notion, as on television, that this was not quite real; it could be fixed; the technocracy the towers symbolised would find a way to put out the fire and reverse the damage."

This is eyewitness reporting at its best, a journalist able, with a few graphic words and images, to place the reader at the scene, to sense the moment of magic or horror of great and wondrous events. This has been so since men and women first felt the need to tell great tales and write them down - as if they were almost compelled by the drama of the occasion to do so.

Take Pliny the Younger seeing Vesuvius blow up in AD 79, describing it as if it happened yesterday: "It was not clear at that distance from which mountain the cloud was rising (it was afterwards known to be Vesuvius); its general appearance can best be expressed as being like an umbrella pine, for it rose to a great height on a sort of trunk and then split off into branches..."

Putting together some thousand different kinds of eyewitness reports for a new anthology (covering more than 4,000 years), I am convinced that great reporters are born and not made. They are driven by an innate curiosity to tell the tale in their own inimitable way. One of the best and most beguilingly brilliant was Rene Cutforth, a soldier in the Second World War, and a reporter in the Korean War. He was the best story-teller I have ever known - and in the end one almost didn't know or care if the tales were true, or not.

In his autobiography, written originally for radio, he describes the end of the war in Europe for him in a scene of bonfires and lynchings and liberated Polish and Russian women prisoners in Hermann Goring Strasse in Lollar. "The other end of the street was Polish, and here a manic figure with rapt face and streaming hair had claimed as his loot a huge grand piano. It was chocked up on an island in the middle of the street, and there all night among the bonfires below the corpses, the mad Pole played on."

Part of the magic of Cutforth and Ernie Pyle - greatest of 'embed' reporters, who was killed at Iwo Jima in 1945 - is that they avoided the excesses of the cult of celebrity, the bane of too many reporters today. They wanted the celebrity to be in the people they spoke of in their copy. Too often now reporters seem as preoccupied with their own status as with the story - a vice to which icons of the trade like Hemingway and Martha Gellhorn were no strangers.

One great reporter who would never become a household name was Kurt Schork of Reuters, killed in Sierra Leone in 2005. As an agency man his byline rarely appeared in newspapers. Some of his pieces from the siege of Sarajevo will live as long as reporters report. This was filed from Sarajevo on May 23, 1993:

"Two lovers lie dead on the banks of Sarajevo's Miljacka river... For four days they have sprawled near Vrbana bridge in a wasteland of shell-blasted rubble, downed tree branches and dangling power lines. So dangerous is the area no one has dared recover their bodies.

"Bosko Brckic and Admira Ismic, both 25, were shot dead on Wednesday trying to escape the besieged Bosnian capital for Serbia. Sweethearts since high school, he was a Serb and she was a Muslim. 'They were shot at the same time, but he fell instantly and she was still alive,' recounts Dino, a soldier who saw the couple trying to cross from government territory to rebel Serb positions. 'She crawled over and hugged him and they died like that, in each other's arms.'"

It's fashionable to say that reporting, like nostalgia, isn't what it used to be. True, commercial and political pressures on the big media organisations work against good, free and original reporting. But now the blogs are bringing wonderful witnesses, uncensored by editors, publishers and political spin merchants. From Iraq, Riverbend, a Baghdad housewife, writes of the daily, living nightmare. When she and her family sold their possessions to ransom one of her best friends from kidnappers, she wrote:

"Everything has felt so trivial and ridiculous... the blog, the electrical situation, the insomnia, the 'reconstruction', the elections, the fictional WMD... politics and politicians... I've been wondering about all those families who can't pay the ransom or the ones whose sons and daughters come home on a stretcher instead of on foot or in a garbage bag, as we heard about one family... and I've also realised how grateful we should be just being able to make the transition from one day to the next in a situation like ours."

At its worst, the blogosphere is an unedited, uncontrolled anarchy of rumour, slander and urban myth. At its finest, it is producing some of the best eyewitness reporting of our time.
Eyewitness to History, An Anthology of Reporting, edited by Robert Fox, is published today by the Folio Society. Four volumes, £120. ·