The Race for Paris Page 14

Fletcher reached into the back of the jeep and pulled out the musette bag he’d taken with him to the press camp, and set it in his lap.

  “Fletcher,” I said, “do you think you could kill a German?”

  A jeep passed on the road. Fletcher didn’t turn to look.

  “Fletcher?”

  “At Dieppe there was a barbed wire fence,” he said, staring blankly through the windshield, his voice flat, “and we were getting slaughtered, the dead and the wounded falling on the wire, and the bodies . . .” His Adam’s apple bobbed once, twice. “The bodies formed a human bridge over the barbed wire. Edward . . . he stood up right into German fire and called his men to follow him over the bodies.”

  “You were there?” I asked, confused.

  “I was in London with my photos of stuffy old men, and a girl in bed beside me that I’d just met that afternoon.”

  “Oh,” I said, startled by his frankness. “I’m sorry.” Meaning about his brother.

  “It wasn’t even . . . We had no hope of holding Dieppe. It was more of a . . . Would the landing crafts work? Could we make an assault on the beach? Six guns. We were after six bloody guns defended by barbed wire and pillboxes and flak towers.

  “My brother suffered burns all over his face and chest from a mortar explosion,” he said. “He lived for . . . for I don’t know how long.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said again, thinking of the German soldier, regretting having let him go free.

  “How do you do that? How do you charge into enemy fire over your own mates’ dead bodies?”

  I thought of Tommy commanding his men past the drowning soldiers on D-Day. “A friend of mine from home,” I said, “he says you don’t find courage, it finds you.”

  Fletcher said, “My brother told me that courage is merely another form of cowardice, that you fight because you don’t want to humiliate yourself, that on some level you know you’ll likely die but you can’t fathom it so fighting is easier than running away.”

  Instinct. Self-preservation. The need to live. That was what had driven Liv to fire at the German boy.

  Fletcher said, “I thought it was something my brave and modest brother said to spare me the dishonor of my lack of it.”

  I pulled my hands from underneath my legs. They’d finally stopped shaking.

  “Do you ever think you’ll die out here, Fletcher?” Liv asked.

  “Don’t you?”

  She considered this.

  “You didn’t imagine you would die even when we were caught in the short bombings at the Saint-Lô–Périers road?” Fletcher insisted.

  He fingered the musette bag in his hands for such a long time that I feared he was gearing up for another lecture on how Liv should photograph the faces of the dead and Charles should print them.

  “That last day in Poland,” he said finally, “Charles and me kneeling in the street, a German soldier with his pistol pressed to my temple. I do think about dying, all the time.”

  “Charles was nearly killed in Poland?” Liv asked.

  “I can still feel that small circle of metal. I can hear Charles telling the German that we were journalists, that we could tell his story. I can feel the selfish relief when the German turned the gun from me to Charles. I have no idea why he didn’t shoot us. It’s so random, who lives and who dies.”

  Liv said, “Charles never told me he almost died.”

  Fletcher said, “He wouldn’t have wanted you to worry, which you would have done had he returned here to cover the war.

  “Well then,” he said, “I’ve brought you a present, Livvie.” He upended the contents of the musette bag into her lap: dozens of rolls of 35mm film.

  She cupped her hands to catch the flow of film canisters.

  “Fletcher, do you think Pyle was right?” I asked.

  “About . . . ?”

  “About the MP knowing where we are once we’ve sent my stories and Liv’s film?”

  “If you send them as your own?” Fletcher asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Likely so,” he said.

  “And if we send Liv’s photos as yours? If we get someone to send my stories as his?”

  We might have died back in those woods, Liv clutching her spent film to protect Charles from what he must already know, that she was traveling with Fletcher, and me clutching my stories without even that excuse. Fletcher’s brother, Edward, was dead and Liv’s brother, Geoff, might be dying in some POW camp, a German guard holding a pistol to his head, and Tommy might be, too. Everywhere soldiers were dying while Liv’s photos and my stories remained in our rucksacks.

  I pulled out the last piece I’d written and handed it to Fletcher. Liv hesitated, but she gathered her spent film, dozens of sheets and rolls all enclosed in canisters and stored in condoms. And as Fletcher walked back to the press camp to send it all out—Liv’s photos as his and my piece under someone else’s name if he could find someone, which he thought he could—I unfolded my typewriter and slid in a fresh sheet of paper, and tried to find a way to start a piece about the German boy in the woods.

  CHAMBOIS, FRANCE

  SATURDAY, AUGUST 19, 1944

  Using a camera was almost a relief. It interposed a slight barrier between myself and the horror in front of me.

  —Photojournalist Margaret Bourke-White

  When the Polish infantry of the Tenth Dragoons finally fought their way into Chambois early in the evening of August 19, we were with them, documenting the taking of the tower and the march of forty German prisoners—their hands on their wool caps, their expressions impassive—toward the relative safety of an Allied POW camp. Before the day’s light faded, Patton’s Fifteenth Corps came up from the south and joined the Poles, closing the Falaise pocket to isolate fifty thousand German soldiers—a major strategic victory, with Paris not much more than a hundred miles away. Liv took photos and I tried to get down the words of the hurried toast between the two commanders (Polish vodka) as their troops took up defensive positions to hold the city—a story every newspaper and magazine in the United States would want to run.

  As we covered what followed, though, we knew that censors and editors like Charles would again and again discard our photos and words. German infantry and artillery soldiers spilled out from the Gouffern Forest and fled down the single road through the low valley as US artillery, posted every ten yards on the hillsides above them, rained a constant fire. Allied tanks and fighter planes pounded incessantly at the valley’s narrowed end. German soldiers were shot dead in horse-drawn wagons and in tanks flying white flags that were shredded along with their bearers. They were shot abandoning their vehicles. Shot being dragged by horses. Shot trying to scramble up dirt side roads and over wire fences, or with their hands high over their heads. Their remains were everywhere, skin and innards tinseling the hedgerows. The Allied military police already had more prisoners than they could guard; that was what was said. Horses were caught in the fire and wounded, some still hitched to teams and dragged along by frantic survivors, but the Allied soldiers took pity on the horses, standing by the banks of the Dives River and shooting them to save them from drowning, or from the slow death of a bleeding wound.

  On the second morning, Liv moved into the valley to better photograph the fleeing Germans, and because she did, Fletcher and I did as well. We went down toward the confetti of paper and clothing and supplies, medical paraphernalia and food packages. The twisted metal of abandoned vehicles. Blackened trees. Well-creased letters stuck in the mud, and frayed photographs of wives and children, of parents, of sisters and brothers. Sprawling tangles of hooves and necks and manes and bleeding horseflesh, and corpses.

  “Photograph their faces,” Fletcher urged Liv again and again. “You can’t control the censors, but you can photograph the faces, Liv.”

  Liv focused, though, on the medics with crosses on their uniforms, German and Allied medics working together, risking their lives to save fallen German men. The earth exploded around them and bullets flew past thei
r bent backs as they applied tourniquets, administered morphine shots, and loaded the living onto stretchers.

  “Do you think he’s here?” Liv asked.

  It took me a minute to realize she was searching not for her brother but for the washed-blue eyes we’d seen in those other woods, the straight blond lashes. She was dreading that the next boy she focused on would be the German boy we’d left without even his Mauser, who was somehow to help Geoffrey survive.

  We left, finally, climbing into the jeep and turning it around, heading away from the rattle of gunfire until the smoke of the burning tanks could no longer be seen across the landscape, until the firecracker smell of the bombs was faint and the sounds of the war distant, only an undertone to the metallic hum of the jeep engine and the gravelly crunch of the wheels.

  As the road turned to follow the Dives River, the faint burble of water flowing, Liv said, “We’re never going to get to Paris, are we?”

  Fletcher touched his dirty fingertips to his dirty combat helmet on his dirty face. “They’ll go around Paris, but does it matter?”

  The bumpy road passed under us for perhaps another quarter mile. I pulled out my typewriter to make some sense of the soldiers and the horses and my own emotion, but no words came. I hadn’t tried to stop even a single soldier back there. I might have saved a life or two or twenty, two hundred. But I stood silent, stewing in the satisfaction of seeing Germans dying after all the Allied dead we’d seen. Or not satisfaction, but something uglier, some filthy part of me I hadn’t known before.

  Liv said, “My brother and I used to swim in a stream like this. It was where Geoff and I went after Dad’s funeral, that stream. It was the first place I took Charles when I took him back to the town where I was a girl.”

  “Could we swim?” I asked quietly, wanting to weep and knowing I couldn’t, I was a war correspondent, I couldn’t weep in front of anyone, and there was so little private space in this war.

  Fletcher glanced at me, still with the gray skin, still with the sunken eyes. He wanted to push on as fast as possible, to leave this behind, but I said again, “Please, let’s stop and swim.” I hadn’t had a proper wash in weeks, and I felt the need for it now more than ever. “Just a short bathe in the river.”

  We passed an abandoned cottage alongside the river. A garden. A barn. As the road cut away from the water, Fletcher pulled off, bumping over the rutted earth toward the clean flow of the stream.

  “If we stop, this jeep may never start again,” he said.

  The river ahead disappeared through a stand of beech trees. The stout, gray trunks spread branches almost to the ground, standing hopeful, their leaves rustling in the breeze.

  “Just for a minute,” Liv said.

  Fletcher pulled alongside the trees, cut the engine, and commanded us to stay in the jeep while he checked the area. He left us the Webley.

  He returned a few minutes later and said he would wait until we were in the water.

  “We’re never going to make it to Paris,” Liv said more quietly but more certainly. “None of us are.”

  The water was deep here, the bottom not visible through the murky green. Liv and I unbuckled our military boots and skinned off our fatigues, stripping down to our brassieres and gray undershirts, gray panties, dog tags. I pulled Mrs. Roosevelt’s note from my brassiere and tucked it into a pocket of my abandoned clothes.

  “It’s from the boy from home?” Liv whispered. “Your Thomas?”

  I thought to tell her what Mrs. Roosevelt said about my “Operating Room by Flashlight” piece, to ask how a piece about a boy dying could have been made into one about a boy being saved. I thought to tell her how I’d tucked it away out of pride but now it weighed on me, a reminder to imbue every word I wrote with what needed to be said lest it be misconstrued.

  “Tommy is married,” I said. “He married a friend of mine when he came back on leave after basic training.” Although none of the Ingram girls was my friend. The Ingram girls were Belle Meade children, and I was to stay clear of them not because they were trouble, but because they were the children of prominent Nashville families while I took the trolley out with Mama, who worked for them.

  “I didn’t know he was seeing her at the same time he was seeing me,” I said.

  I hadn’t known what I hadn’t wanted to know; I’d been content to climb from my bedroom window to go parking with Tommy after his Belle Meade friends had all gone home.

  “But you still write to him?” Liv asked with a hint of disapproval, or maybe that was my own guilt creeping in.

  You’ve been my best friend since we were kids, he’d written in his first letter, as if he understood the shame I felt at the girl I was with him, willing to compromise myself for a boy who had never loved me back. Not honestly able to say whether it was him I was in love with, or the big house up on the hill on the rich side of town.

  “Tommy and I have been friends since we were nine,” I told Liv. “How can I not write him back?”

  I dove headfirst into the river, the cold knocking the air from my chest. I swam hard into the current, low to the riverbed, staying under although my lungs ached. I opened my eyes and mouth to the cleansing rush of water. I might cry about everything here. I might let the tears blend with the river water, let the cold keep my eyelids from swelling. No one would know to judge me poorly for being too weak to bear the things I saw here, for having no father, for shaming myself at the Harpeth River, for wanting to go home and yet not wanting to at the same time.

  When I surfaced in the shade of an upstream tree, Liv was standing with the cold water circling her bare ankles the way I used to at Richland Creek. Behind her, leaves rustled.

  “Oh, I’m desperately sorry,” Fletcher stammered, tugging on his ear that way he did when he was nervous, or when he was telling something short of the truth. “I thought you . . .”

  Liv dove in, emerging a moment later in the center of the stream. Not two feet away from her, Fletcher emerged, too. He floated on his back, his white legs and arms splayed from his undershirt-clad chest, his boxer-covered hips.

  There was nothing between them—Liv was married, and Fletcher had a girl back in England, his brother’s girl—but still I felt myself an intruder, still I tucked farther back into the shore as if witnessing something I ought not.

  “We shouldn’t have stopped,” Fletcher said to the sky.

  Liv soaked in the green water, the murky surface, the leaves and twigs and weeds and sun.

  I sank in as deeply as I could, surrounded by the hanging roots and the shade of a tree clinging to the shore as I listened over the lap of water at my ears. The water billowed my gray undershirt, but did not leave me feeling cleaner.

  “If you stop like this, you think about it,” Fletcher said to Liv. “If you think about it, it’s all too much.”

  “I needed to be clean,” Liv said softly.

  Fletcher said, “It doesn’t wash off.”

  Their fingers brushed each other’s and intertwined. I supposed perhaps Liv imagined they were Charles’s fingers. I supposed Fletcher was reaching for Liv’s touch just as he reached for mine sometimes at night, when we shared chocolate bars. And I wanted to be making love then, to Tommy, who was the only boy I’d ever been with; to Fletcher; to the German soldier we’d freed. I wanted to be in a place where the sun always shone and the world was quiet, no gunshots in the distance, no stench of death.

  “You go home and you sleep in a real bed,” Fletcher said to Liv, “and you eat real meat, drink good hot tea, good brandy. And still, it doesn’t go away.”

  He blinked and a drop of water—was it a tear?—ran down his temple and into the murky green river cocoon. He pulled Liv closer, the soaked fabric of her military-issue panties brushing the cotton of his boxers. I pressed my toes through the mud of the streambed, wanting to make a sound, to say something clever to remind them I was with them in some way that I was not.

  “I think you see what we do to each other,” Fletcher said
, “and I don’t think you ever live comfortably again.”

  BAGNOLES-DE-L’ORNE, FRANCE

  WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 23, 1944

  In case you don’t know, eau de vie is a savage liquid made by boiling barbed wire, soapsuds, watch springs and old tent pegs together. The better brands have a touch of nitroglycerine for flavor . . . I think every American who connects with a glass of eau de vie should get a Purple Heart.

  —Journalist Ernie Pyle in “Good-Will-Towards-Men Rang through the Air,” a June 24, 1944, dispatch from Barneville, Normandy

  Liv and I were sitting in the jeep, our boot buckles loosened but our feet sweltering in the leather, our fatigues damp against the seats and my blond wave plastered to my forehead, when Fletcher reappeared, hurrying toward us from the press camp.

  “The pistol has been shot, ladies!” he said as he leapt into the driver’s seat. “The starting gates are open!”

  He gunned the engine and lurched onto the road.

  Monk Dickson had come over from First Army headquarters to do the press briefing at Bagnoles-de-l’Orne—business as usual, more or less the same talk of what battles were where, more or less the same maps they’d been looking at for weeks. Then Dickson had looked up at the correspondents and smiled mischievously and said, “We may be in Paris tomorrow.”

  Representatives of the FFI—the French Forces of the Interior—had informed General Bradley that the German commander in Paris, General Dietrich von Choltitz, had received orders to destroy the city if necessary rather than give it up, orders from Hitler himself. Von Choltitz appeared ready to defy Hitler if he could promptly surrender Paris to regular Allied forces. He’d secretly asked for an armistice to allow a peaceful retreat northward. Allied troops could take the city without a fight.

  De Gaulle was rumored to have delivered a letter to Eisenhower saying if Eisenhower wouldn’t give the order to take Paris, he would. De Gaulle would not risk the possibility of the communists within the city taking charge of the liberation and staking a claim to the future rule of France he saw as his rightful place.