The Race for Paris Read online

  MAP

  Map designed by Nick Springer

  DEDICATION

  For Mac,

  pour toujours,

  and for Marly and Claire

  EPIGRAPH

  I would give anything to be part of the invasion and see Paris right at the beginning and watch the peace.

  —Journalist Martha Gellhorn in a December 13, 1943, letter

  And yet love turns out to be the only part of us that is solid, as the world turns upside down and the screen goes black.

  —Martin Amis, from The Second Plane

  CONTENTS

  Map

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Author’s Note

  Hôtel De Ville, Paris: Saturday, August 20, 1994

  A Field Hospital in Normandy: Thursday, June 29, 1944

  The U.S. First Army Press Camp at Château De Vouilly, Normandy: Tuesday, July 11, 1944

  A Field Hospital in Normandy: Wednesday, July 5, 1944

  Saint-Lô, France: Tuesday, July 18, 1944

  Outside Saint-Lô: Tuesday, July 18, 1944

  The Us First Army Press Camp at Château De Vouilly, Normandy: Tuesday, July 18, 1944

  Saint-Lô-Périers Road: Friday, July 21, 1944

  Saint-Lô-Périers Road: Monday, July 24, 1944

  Saint-Lô-Périers Road: Tuesday, July 25, 1944

  Saint-Lô-Périers Road: Tuesday, July 25, 1944

  Beyond the Saint-Lô-Périers Road: Tuesday, July 25, 1944

  Outside Canisy, France: Thursday, August 10, 1944

  Outside Canisy, France: Thursday, August 10, 1944

  Chambois, France: Saturday, August 19, 1944

  Bagnoles-De-L’orne, France: Wednesday, August 23, 1944

  Rambouillet, France: Thursday, August 24, 1944

  Near Cernay-La-Ville, France: Thursday, August 24, 1944

  Outside Paris: Friday, August 25, 1944

  Hôtel Scribe, Paris: Friday, August 25, 1944

  Paris: Sunday, August 27, 1944

  Paris: Sunday, August 27, 1944

  Outside Compiègne, France: Sunday, August 27, 1944

  Outside Compiègne, France: Monday, August 28, 1944

  Compiègne, France: Wednesday, August 30, 1944

  Near Cambrai, France: Tuesday, September 5, 1944

  The Netherlands: Wednesday, September 13, 1944

  Outside Valkenburg, The Netherlands: Wednesday, September 13, 1944

  Outside Valkenburg, The Netherlands: Thursday, September 14, 1944

  Valkenburg, The Netherlands: Thursday, September 14, 1944

  Valkenburg, The Netherlands: Thursday, September 14, 1944

  Valkenburg, The Netherlands: Thursday, September 14, 1944

  Valkenburg, The Netherlands: Thursday, September 14, 1944

  Hôtel De Ville, Paris: Saturday, August 20, 1994

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by Meg Waite Clayton

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  This novel was inspired by the women who defied military regulations and gender barriers to cover World War II and the “race for Paris,” vying to be among the first to report from the liberated city in the summer of 1944. They did so by stowing away in bathrooms of Channel-crossing boats, going AWOL from support positions to get to the front lines, climbing fences meant to contain them, struggling to get their photographs and stories out, and risking their lives. Despite being confronted with red tape and derision, denied access to jeeps and to the information and accommodations provided to their male colleagues at press camps, pursued by military police, and even arrested and stripped of credentials, women like Lee Carson, Helen Kirkpatrick, Sigrid Schultz, Iris Carpenter, Ruth Cowan, Lee Miller, Sonia Tomara, Catherine Coyne, Dot Avery, Virginia Irwin, Judy Barden, Tania Long, Barbara Wace, Margaret Bourke-White, and Martha Gellhorn proved that they could report the war, and opened the way for generations of women. Although this is a work of fiction, I’ve striven to make it historically accurate, and to that end have borrowed heavily from the facts of the lives of soldiers, support troops, journalists, and civilians involved in the war, and particularly from the experiences of these pioneering women.

  HÔTEL DE VILLE, PARIS

  SATURDAY, AUGUST 20, 1994

  Every image he sees, every photograph he takes, becomes in a sense a self-portrait.

  —Photojournalist Dorothea Lange

  The moon over the Hôtel de Ville hangs as round and golden as a C ration can to complete this fairy-tale setting: the clock in the tower striking the half hour; the stone flag bearers rising above slate roofs like egrets poised for flight; and the windows, of course, all those windows leaving guests trying to remember which one, exactly, de Gaulle addressed us from—those of us old enough to remember, anyway. Inside, tuxedoed men and sparkling women will be claiming flutes of champagne. They’ll be toasting Pushing Against the Fog, an exhibit of Liv’s photographs taken as she and Fletcher and I crossed Normandy fifty years ago, vying to be the first to report from a liberated Paris—a moment that could make a young journalist’s career. That’s what we were, Liv and I: young journalists. Before the war, I was a typist at the Nashville Banner and Liv was in school. Then Pearl Harbor was bombed and the boys headed for war, leaving girls like us to step into vacated bylines. Women, I perhaps ought to say, but we were girls then in so many ways, as surely as the men who came back, or didn’t, were boys when they left.

  Britt, who was sent to collect me for this opening celebration, nods at the clock, to the left of the de Gaulle window. Yes, I do remember which one it was. With my good hand, I smooth a wrinkle in her red silk sheath (vintage, they call it now) as a tour boat passes behind us on the Seine.

  “The gown fits you like a thick newspaper fits a Sunday morning, Britty,” I say, although in truth I prefer her usual cargo pants and T-shirts, the vest she wears unless the devil himself is sweating in whatever godforsaken war zone she finds herself. On impulse, I unhook my necklace, a lonely emerald in a circle of diamonds. “You have the better neck for this,” I say, “and I expect it will fit nicely in your field pack after tonight.”

  “That necklace wouldn’t last one moment in my pack, nor would my life if I were carrying it!” she responds easily, kicking the possibility of her death high and wide. Does anyone in her twenties imagine herself mortal? In her twenties, as Liv and I were when we met, Liv barely twenty-one and me just a year older.

  “Well, I’ll wear it for you tonight,” Britt concedes.

  I say, “It’s not too late. We could climb onto one of those tacky tour boats and make a getaway.”

  The look she gives me: No, we can’t; of course we can’t. Liv’s photos will be here for a month, with crowds lining up (queuing, Britt would say) at the side entrance on Rue de Rivoli to see the exhibit and perhaps buy the “companion book,” as if this exhibit came first and the book followed rather than the other way around. But tonight is for the book, which has been fifty years in the making, fifty years already made if you don’t count finding a publisher and getting the censors to release their sweaty grip.

  And it was so long ago—Fletcher and Liv and me. Maybe my guilt isn’t really guilt. Maybe it’s something else, or nothing at all.

  My eyes haven’t adjusted to the brighter light in the reception hall before the publicist hurries toward us with a gaggle of society reporters in tow. “This is Jane, of course,” she tells them, leaving me no choice but to accept champagne and settle into the wrong side of the interview, answering questions rather than asking them. I pocket my discomfort like an after-dinner mint and try to sound clever for the journalists while “chatting casually” for the ph
otographers, all of whom surely must be more interested in the movie stars and politicians scattered about the room, the computer kids in tuxedos and tennis shoes, the gray-haired Wall Street moguls in proper footwear escorting dates younger even than the computer kids. Copies of the book sit on podiums throughout the hall, not the cover photo I would have chosen but I do understand the choice. A sign points to the room where the photo exhibit begins. Its black lettering reminds me of that on the cave walls during the war, VERBLYF VOOR 5 PERSONEN. Everyone remains huddled out here in the reception hall, though, near the champagne.

  A journalist puts a question to Britt about her gown, and she tilts her head to mine to give a better angle on our companion jewelry, her emerald necklace and my matching earrings. Yes, the photographers do like that. They will run us under some caption like “Old Journalism and New, in Gucci and Gems at the Hôtel de Ville” in the Times Sunday style section tomorrow. The New York Times, not the London papers. The London papers will already have been put to bed.

  Britt negotiates our escape from the press and pulls me into the exhibit room, and there I am in the first photograph, taking aim with a pistol, Fletcher’s arms wrapped around me as he teaches me to shoot.

  Britt says, “‘For someone who so obviously loves the feel of a gun in your hand, it’s sad that you’re such a poor shot!’”

  “‘Such a bloody lousy shot,’” I correct her, wanting suddenly to tell her about the day Liv took this photograph, about the German boy. But her attention has been caught by the book sitting like a Bible—in the beginning, God created Liv—on a pulpit below the bloody-lousy-with-a-gun photograph. Someone has left it back cover up so that we’re looking not at the front but at a photograph Fletcher took: Liv in military fatigues, standing in that jeep with her Speed Graphic in her hands and her Leica hanging from a camera strap.

  They surprise me, these photos do, or the girl I was in them surprises me, the girls Liv and I both were. I didn’t have Liv’s delicate prettiness: her short dark hair and long dark lashes, graceful dark brows, her narrow nose with that odd little bump going down to a fragile tip of chin, her boyish build. Liv’s changeable eyes—the sturdy blue of my mother’s Sunday milk pitcher on a clear morning and something greener and more varied in other light—leave me thinking even now that my own eyes are as plain brown as the trunk of a walnut tree. But in the photo my legs look graceful where I thought them gangly, and my arms, too, my square shoulders. The wave in my bottle-blond hair frames a face that is clear-skinned, that might have been downright attractive if I’d had Liv’s confidence, or perhaps even was.

  Britt rights the book and opens it. She flips past the half title page to the title page and the verso with its copyright information and disclaimers, its grateful acknowledgment of permissions to reprint. When she reaches the dedication, she stops turning pages.

  “Renny—the Renny the book is dedicated to—isn’t my mother,” she says uncertainly, as if she wants to insist it must be.

  I lean close to her, the smooth silk of her gown cooling against my ruined hand as I trace the letters with my good one—the R and the e, the n, n, y—trying to weave a reply from the threads of hurt: all the days and nights Liv and I shared, the things we did during the war and the things we ought to have; the lives Fletcher and Charles and even Liv knew before the war and my own more circumscribed past; the unspoken words in the years since, the griefs held back out of respect for other, greater griefs. Have we ever spoken the truth about what the war made of us, or who we might instead have become? To Renny. So simple, and not.

  A FIELD HOSPITAL IN NORMANDY

  THURSDAY, JUNE 29, 1944

  So you want to go to war? . . . You won’t be very comfortable. Things will happen you won’t like. Do you think you can take it?

  —Chief of the War Department’s bureau of public relations’ war intelligence division, speaking to AP journalist Ruth Cowan

  It was raining again, still raining, the morning I first met Liv. I’d been at the Normandy field hospital for a week, sharing the end tent in the WAC stockade with Marie Page from Ladies’ Home Journal—a tent too close to the eight-holer latrine, but we’d been offered no other. Marie and I awoke in our bedrolls underneath our cots to the lousy plunk of rain on the tent canvas, and Liv entering through the door flap. Her poncho streamed water onto the dirt floor that we worked so hard to keep from turning to mud. Already, Marie was scrambling from her bedroll, reaching up to turn on the flashlight we’d strung from a rope across the tent and offering to help Liv with her rain gear, pulling Liv’s poncho over her head as if she meant only to be hospitable. Underneath the poncho, a lanky tripod hung from a strap at Liv’s shoulders, as did a large-format Speed Graphic camera and a 35mm Leica. The Leica’s chrome was painted a dull black lest it reflect light and draw sniper fire.

  “You must be the new girl,” Marie said.

  She held Liv’s poncho under the door awning outside and shook off the rain as she introduced herself.

  Liv tentatively touched the rope from which the flashlight hung. Like all correspondents, she wore a captain’s uniform for credibility with the soldiers and to convince the Germans we weren’t spies, hers with a P for “photographer” on her armband that replaced the original WC for “war correspondent” but also for “water closet”—the john, the bathroom, the loo; the Brits had a field day with that. She opened her Speed Graphic and accordioned out the bellows, locked the lens plate down, and took a photograph. Just that: the rope. Not even the flashlight.

  “Olivia James Harper, with the Associated Press,” she said. “I go by Liv.”

  I pulled my notepad from inside my bedroll and rolled out from beneath my cot, careful to avoid the tentacles of wet dirt left behind by Liv’s poncho. Liv turned her camera to photograph me as I did so, capturing me with tent-floor dirt on my face, morning breath, and my helmet on. Even inside the tent, it was as cold as a slave merchant’s heart.

  Liv said, “You sleep underneath your cots?”

  “Only when the Germans make night raids,” Marie answered.

  “Our sweet German lullaby,” I said. It was surprising how quickly I’d gotten used to huddling in the slit trench behind the tent when the raids started, and sleeping under my bunk in my fancy four-pound helmet, taking baths out of the same helmet, washing my clothes in the water afterward and hanging them to dry from the tent ropes on the sunny side of the tent when there was sun, which there wasn’t much.

  “I’m Jane Tyler, with the Nashville Banner,” I said, helping Liv ease off her rucksack and the smaller musette bag.

  Liv unstrapped her bedroll and draped it across the cot assigned to her. Marie asked if she needed any help unpacking and, when Liv declined, began to lay out her uniform on her own cot the way she did each morning, as if preparing for a homecoming dance.

  “You’re sure you don’t need help?” I asked Liv, but I was already settling cross-legged on top of my cot with my typewriter—a foldable Corona—in my lap. A lead for a story had come to mind as if ducking in with Liv, and the first words of a story are always the hardest to come by, and the most fleeting. I loaded the paper and carbon and tapped out several words, hit the carriage return, and typed the rest of the sentence and the blessed first period. The day was starting to look like a good one despite the rain.

  Liv said, “I love the sign, by the way. ‘1st Tent.’”

  “Don’t encourage her,” Marie said to Liv.

  The sign I’d made from an empty bandage box and hung over our tent door was meant to be funny. At the press camps where our male colleagues were billeted, a “1st Tent” assignment was a mark of prestige. We weren’t allowed at the press camps, though, even for the briefings. “No ladies’ latrines, and we aren’t about to start digging them now” was what we were told, although the press camps in Normandy were set up at swanky French country homes, with indoor plumbing and fireplaces, on-site censors and telephones and wireless transmission, and good whiskey on tap.

  Liv
said, “So how do I go about getting the commanding officer’s permission to go to the front?”

  “To the front?” Marie repeated.

  I said, “You haven’t even unpacked your nightie, Liv.”

  Liv eyed my long-handle GI underwear, the bedroll around my legs. I was still thinking of the press camps, wishing not so much for the whiskey (I poured my own generous whiskey rations for the doctors and medics I interviewed) as for the ability to negotiate changes to my pieces with the on-site censors and to make sure my censored copy made sense. Marie’s and my articles went by field messenger service to Price’s gang in London, who wielded their hatchets, stuck the remaining bits back together, and left our names on what was often not quite the truth, and sometimes pure gibberish.

  “We’ll never be the first to report from Paris if we’re not at the front,” Liv said. “But if we approach the CO together? How can he say no to all three of us?”

  Marie peered suspiciously into each of her boots, stuck a hand into one, and pulled out a snail—which she fussed at for coming in uninvited.

  “My editor wants coverage of the field hospital and the boys here,” she said to Liv.

  Liv began pulling rolls of film and cut-film holders from her musette bag, the realization dawning: neither Marie nor I had been granted permission to cover the front, or had even asked for it.

  “For pity’s sake,” Marie said as she stripped off her long johns and began dressing quickly in the cold. “Why would any decent woman want to photograph dead boys?”

  Liv watched Marie clip her regulation cotton stockings to her garter belt and try to smooth out the bagginess at her knees. And I watched Liv watch Marie; I watched Liv absorb Marie’s implication of Liv’s indecency, waiting for Liv’s hurt to work its way into harsh words. She only popped open the Speed Graphic’s back and focused on Marie, though, and handed the camera to me.

  “Have a look through the ground glass, Jane,” she said.