“Here is how I remember my friend Arthur,” he began. “It’s a hot afternoon in Phnom Penh, during the height of the war in Cambodia. A group of us have gone to the airport to try to catch a flight out to Thailand. We’re sitting on the floor of the terminal behind the sandbags, smoking cigarettes. Every few minutes, a shell lands near the airport. We’re tired, dispirited, feeling sorry for ourselves. After a while a two-engine plane circles the airport and lands. It’s the weekly flight from Bangkok, the one we’ve been waiting for. They open the door and out walks a guy in a white linen suit—the most beautiful suit you’ve ever seen—carrying a bottle of champagne. And, of course, it’s Arthur. He walks straight across the tarmac, ignoring the screech of an incoming round that lands a few hundred yards away. When he gets to the terminal, he looks at all of us, peering out over the sandbags at him like a bunch of gophers. ‘Hello, lads!’ he says. ‘Don’t tell me you’re leaving.’ He pops the cork and hands the bottle of champagne around.

“Needless to say, none of us left Phnom Penh that day. How could we, once Arthur Bowman had arrived? Our editors would have just sent us back, once his stories began to appear in the Times. I can imagine the cables we would have received from the foreign desk: ‘Times fronting Khmer Rouge massacre. Why we unhave?’” There was a ripple of laughter from the back of the church, where the old-timers were sitting. “There was a lot the Mirror unhad in those days, but we wanted to be a great newspaper. So the first thing I did when I came home to become foreign editor was to conspire with Phil Sellinger to woo Arthur from the Times. It was the best hire we ever made.

“Nobody was a better war reporter than Arthur, because nobody was a better reporter, period. He breathed a story in whole, swallowed it, devoured it. There was something overwhelming about his energy and appetite. It might be after midnight and long past time to go to bed, but Arthur would still be there at the bar, wanting to share one more story, throw down one more drink. You’d stay in bed the next morning until ten trying to sleep it off, and when you finally got downstairs and looked for Arthur, the desk clerk would say he left at seven-thirty to go interview the prime minister—an interview he had somehow forgotten to mention the night before, when he was telling you his life story.”