The Race for Paris Page 22

COMPIÈGNE, FRANCE

  WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 30, 1944

  I took a last picture of those feet still in their muddy boots and with the boy’s own rifle between them, where it served as a splint for a crushed leg. I knew I was getting dramatic pictures. If these men had to go through so much suffering, I was glad, at least, I was there to record it.

  —Photojournalist Margaret Bourke-White

  The last days of August brought a collapse of the German defenses. We moved with the Fifth Corps of the US First Army as it took Compiègne, while the Third Army entered the Argonne Forest not far from the German border and the British sealed off the German forces on the Channel coast, neutralizing their robot bombs. Rumors flew that General Bradley had ordered the winter uniforms coming in at Le Havre stored, expecting the Third Reich to collapse entirely before harsh weather came. The Germans fled so quickly they left behind field bakeries full of bread, depots stocked with millions of pounds of frozen and tinned meat, grain and rice and flour, sugar. They abandoned staff headquarters rich with cheese and sausages and fruits and wine, and train cars filled with coal and with other more interesting if less useful fare: ladies’ lingerie, lipstick, perfume. All of it found its way into our poker games with the soldiers, games in which our betting chips were photographs to be taken by Liv and Fletcher. This was worth more than one might have imagined: a chance at immortality when mortality had you by the throat.

  Liv enjoyed the games as much as ever—the men scooting over to make room for us, the spirited banter, their eagerness to win a chance to be photographed by her. We both won for the most part. Perhaps they let us. “Liberated items”: a ring setting missing its gemstone, a tin of caviar Liv couldn’t stomach, Belgian chocolates so creamy that we ate them all in one sitting without saying a word lest we break the spell. Fletcher shared Liv’s Saint-Lô–Périers road nickname with the soldiers, Pitiless Livvie, but they thought it was only right that Liv and I had all the luck, “being dames and all.”

  Crazy Livvie, Fletcher started calling her, because unlike in Normandy, where Liv and I had stayed back when Fletcher went out on patrol with the soldiers, Liv now insisted on going. The patrols generally went at night because daylight brought the added danger of visibility now that the weather had improved, and nighttime photographs invariably came out grainy and flat, the low light bleaching contrast to a muddy gray. Still, Liv seemed unable to get enough of the patrols.

  “It’s absurd,” Fletcher told me. “Even the soldiers don’t go every night. They go when it’s their turn in the rotation to do so, and are relieved to return.”

  He had slept with Liv, and now he couldn’t look at her without thinking of that, and he couldn’t not look at her. He watched her through the lens, achieving with that barrier the same false sense of security he felt looking through it at a German, as if the lens isolated him from everything. He saved his talk of Liv for his late-night conversations with me, as if I were just the one to understand. We split chocolate bars and he talked about Liv as if he’d never cared for Elizabeth Houck-Smythe. Not that he ever said he’d slept with Liv. He was a gentleman. He talked about what she should be doing but wasn’t, what she was doing but should not. And he talked about Charles, too—Charles who was his friend, who’d saved his life.

  Liv talked to me about Fletcher, too. “I slept with him, I don’t even know why,” she told me late one night as she put on her woolens to go out on patrol, a night after a day spent like all the days: interviewing men who were not obvious heroes, taking sympathetic portraits of them washing socks and underwear in their helmets, eating unenthusiastic bites of pork-and-apple-and-carrot mix, stirring lemon powder into water with wooden spoons. I supposed she was looking for me to say I understood, that what she’d done was forgivable, perhaps that Charles need never be told. She repeated the words again later, as we settled into our bedrolls—Liv so overwhelmingly tired that I worried for her even more than for myself. Still, I offered no words of comfort. I left her to her nightmares: little girls with big eyes looking mutely up at her, refusing to tell her their names; Charles somehow not Charles, with the little girls around him, their laughter all the same dry cackle as Fletcher demanded she fetch tea.

  The entire Fifth Corps ground to a halt on the second of September, unable to go beyond Cambrai for lack of gas. The Allied armies were outrunning the supply line. The French railway east of Paris had been bombed to rubble, and the pipeline extension to move gasoline under the ocean and on to Chartres wasn’t operational yet. Some six thousand Red Ball Express trucks were carting gasoline from the ports to the front—a fifty-hour round trip, and none of the drivers slept until after they returned—but even operating twenty-four hours a day, they couldn’t cart enough five-gallon cans across Europe to sustain the advance. We began to hear rumors of a squabble between Montgomery and Patton, Patton raging that his men could eat their goddamned belts but his tanks had to have gas.

  Patrols continued to go out on foot each night, though, or sometimes just before dawn, and each time the soldiers readied to go out, Liv loaded her film. Because she did, Fletcher and I, too, pulled on our woolens, cursing the damp and the cold, and Fletcher checked his Webley. The war was nearly over, and we had no intention of dying in the final days.

  The morning after we won a second box of Belgian chocolates, we awoke before dawn to the sound of gunshots. Fletcher was already out of his bedroll, sprinting. We caught up to him at the edge of an open field not far ahead, where a number of soldiers huddled together behind a stone fence, peering out into the white air of the morning. The patrol was made up of new recruits—that had been how Fletcher had talked Liv out of joining it. New recruits bunched up rather than spreading apart, making them easy targets. They couldn’t help talking. They even lit cigarettes. Their inexperience left them far more likely to return from patrol in body bags—as was anyone who went with them—than men who’d been at the front for any time at all. You learned quickly at the front, or you lost all opportunity to learn.

  My eyes adjusted to the dim light, catching movement out in the field: the shadow body of a soldier making his way across.

  “He’s one of us?” Fletcher asked, and one of the soldiers confirmed this.

  “Why do I have the feeling this is too close?” I whispered to Liv, trying to calm myself with my words.

  The soldiers watched silently, breathing warmly into the mist as the single figure made his way across the field.

  “Why is he going alone?” Liv whispered.

  No one answered at first. Then a voice—Fletcher’s voice?—said, “He shouldn’t be going alone.”

  “Frigging war’s almost over,” another voice answered. “You want to go, go ahead. Say hello to those Germans for me.”

  “How many?” I asked.

  “Quiet,” said the first voice—not Fletcher’s voice after all, not even British. But a familiar voice, someone who sounded like someone I must once have known.

  Another shot rang out, a single report. The shadow in the field lurched up, then crumpled.

  A second figure sprinted forward, seemingly out of nowhere, crossing the open field, shouting, “Medic! Medic! Don’t shoot!”

  I raised up from my squat a little, scanned the field for the fallen soldier. At the horizon, where the rolling earth met the lightening purple-black of the sky, were the Germans I couldn’t see.

  The medic hurried in a low crouch across the field toward the fallen man, the bright red cross hand-painted on the white square on his helmet visible even in the early-morning mist.

  German fire cracked out again.

  The medic put himself squarely between the wounded man and the Germans and began to tend him. Liv focused her camera, took the first distant photograph—a shot that would be washed out in the dim light and the mist.

  “It’s Hank,” she said. “It’s Hank Bend.”

  I nodded, remembering the familiar voice that had spoken, although I couldn’t make out the round face and round glasses of the ambulan
ce driver from Colorado Springs who’d driven us from the field hospital to Saint-Lô.

  The other soldiers remained behind with us, their attention fixed on the medic and the wounded man but their feet as unmoving as my own.

  “Can’t you help him?” Liv pleaded to them as she took a second, no better photograph.

  “He’s a medic,” someone answered. “He’s protected.”

  More shots rang out.

  Liv screamed over the rattle of the gunshots, then, for the soldiers to help him, to help Hank help the wounded man. She swore—anger, frustration, hopelessness—and she sprang forward as if her body were moving of its own will. She tugged away from Fletcher’s hand on her sleeve and raced across the field, not all the distance to Hank and the wounded man, but closer, to a fallen tree trunk in the field halfway to them.

  The medic used a pair of scissors tied to one of his wrists with a shoestring to cut away the wounded man’s shirt. Liv took the photographs: the medic grabbing the bottom hem of his own raincoat and slicing off a strip of it, slapping it onto the man’s chest where the skin was torn open, a sucking chest wound, and covering it with a compress. Not Hank Bend after all, but a boy who looked impossibly young, as if the pack he wore on his back ought to be filled with schoolbooks and baseball cards. He looked like his first kiss must be in his future. His eyes were the bright white of a young man who grew up on carrots and Brussels sprouts, who built snowmen in the front yard without once imagining he would never see them melt.

  She focused in more closely on the medic: the hem of his raincoat tattered as a result of dressing so many similar wounds; his eyes behind his glasses intent on the soldier, oblivious to her. Her shots would be no good; she knew that. There was simply not enough contrast, not enough light to capture the quick, sure movements from that distance.

  Shots rang out again, more shots from the Germans across the field as the American soldiers continued to do nothing. Liv froze for a moment, paralyzed by the pop of a bullet near her left ear. But her camera found the wounded man again, his clear eyes looking up at the medic with an utterly unbearable hope. And she was already moving forward again despite the German fire.

  Fletcher’s voice rang out, then, his words indistinguishable, guttural. Liv swung her camera to photograph him charging. In his hands, he held not his camera but the Webley that had been his brother’s gun. He sprinted past Liv, ahead of her, ahead of the medic and the wounded man, shots ringing from the Webley while, not far behind him, the soldiers, too, finally charged. They were too bunched together, but Fletcher started yelling for them to spread out, and by some miracle they did; they spread out as they ran past Liv toward the Germans, with their rifles aimed.

  NEAR CAMBRAI, FRANCE

  TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 5, 1944

  We decided, like millions of other people, that we were most heartily sick of war; what we really wanted to do was borrow a sled and go coasting.

  —Journalist Martha Gellhorn, from “The Battle of the Bulge,” Collier’s, January 1945

  There was no talk at the poker game that afternoon of the German soldiers taken prisoner, no talk of the American soldier with the sucking chest wound who’d still been alive when they’d carried him from the field. There was only spirited banter and men betting everything they had, and laughing when they lost. Fletcher alone was subdued—Fletcher who’d led the men, who’d saved the soldier tended by the medic who was not Hank Bend. The word that came to mind from Fletcher’s quiet expressionlessness was “ashamed.”

  One of the poker gang tossed a Luger into the pot, the futuristic revolver carried by German officers that was the favorite war souvenir of all the soldiers; none doubted that the very luck of having such a trophy could save your life. And this one had saved its owner’s life that morning. He’d been hit by German fire, but the bullet struck the Luger and he was unharmed.

  He lost the gun with two pair to Liv’s three of a kind.

  The poor boy looked devastated by the loss, but still, I was surprised to see Liv pick the gun from the pot and hand it back, saying, “You keep it. I’d have no idea how to shoot it anyway.”

  It wasn’t like Liv to give up her winnings.

  The boy caressed the gun. “It will bring me luck for sure now, Mrs. Harper,” he said, “because you owned it, because it was a gift from you.”

  When he said he wanted to give her something in return, another of the players suggested the biscuit from his ration tin. In response to the looks given him, he said sheepishly, “It’s all Mrs. Harper seems to eat.”

  “The only other thing I got is a bicycle,” the soldier with the Luger said to Liv. “Not much of a bicycle, but I’d be proud for you to have it.”

  “A bicycle?” Liv asked.

  Fletcher pulled a pack of Chesterfields (“Milder—Cooler—Better Taste”) from the netting of his helmet, and lit one with the Zippo. “Have you any idea where we might find two more bicycles?” he asked the boy.

  The Parisians, when they’d had no gasoline, the Parisians had gotten where they needed to go by bicycle.

  Fletcher said, “We have a perfectly good jeep we can give in trade.”

  “With a cracked windshield,” I pointed out.

  “With a cracked windshield,” Fletcher allowed.

  “A propensity to flat tires,” Liv said.

  “And not a drop of gasoline in the tank,” I said.

  Fletcher said, “If there were a drop of petrol to be had anywhere this side of Paris, we wouldn’t be offering to trade a perfectly serviceable jeep and a fine Luger for three bicycles with rusty handlebars and bent frames.”

  It took the better part of the day to round up two more “liberated” bicycles, arranging a complicated series of liberated item trades. They were slightly smaller than the mangled-handlebar thing Liv got from the boy with the Luger (which took some substantial balance just to ride straight), but they all had sturdy chains and front baskets and back wire carriers, and they required no gasoline.

  Fletcher asked me to cut his hair again that night. I followed him to collect the scissors from the emergency kit in the jeep, and we sat at the edge of his foxhole, his legs dangling into it. I ran a hand through his hair and said it didn’t look bad to me. He patted the ground next to him for me to sit, too, and he pulled out a chocolate bar, fine chocolate the Germans had left behind for him to win in a poker game. He peeled the wrapper back, and I put my hand to his, to hold it steady while I bit off a piece. His fingers were warm against mine.

  I said, “Delicious dessert.”

  “‘Pudding,’” Fletcher said. “I hear it can’t hold a candle to your mum’s berry cobbler.”

  “It’s her peach cobbler that’s best,” I said.

  “Yes, I remember,” Fletcher said.

  He peeled back the chocolate wrapper and held it for me again. It was a quiet night, with the Germans cleared out in the morning foray. Only the occasional trickle of quiet conversation. The moon was up, and the stars. Another patrol would be going out soon.

  “It was brave, what Liv did this morning,” I said. “What you both did.”

  “It was foolish, what Liv did. It was bloody foolish and it left me no choice but to follow her.”

  I let the chocolate sit on my tongue as I considered the possibility that Liv’s running out to the medic might have put others in danger.

  “Your following her was brave, anyway,” I said. “Your brother would have been proud.”

  He pulled his feet up and put his arms around his knees, easy with his body. “Bravery is merely another form of cowardice. You fight because you don’t want to humiliate yourself.”

  His brother’s words that he’d shared weeks ago, the day of the German boy in the woods. I’d never told Fletcher about that, and I didn’t imagine Liv had either.

  “I thought that was courage,” I said.

  “Aren’t bravery and courage the same thing?”

  He unwrapped the last of the chocolate, confirmed that I truly didn’t want
it, and popped it in his mouth.

  I said, “If what your brother described is courage—that you fight to keep from humiliating yourself when you don’t really believe you’ll die—then maybe bravery is acting even when you know you’ll be killed, or believe you likely will.”

  Fletcher had rushed out after Liv, expecting to be killed. The only protection against death he imagined was whatever his dead brother might have provided, a superstition that I supposed had more to do with an afterlife in which Edward waited for him than with any defense from death.

  He said, “I’m not sure Liv would survive this war without you, Jane.”

  I said, “And you think she’ll survive it with me?” And I laughed, because I wanted him to laugh.

  He did laugh, too, and I remembered, then, the play we’d put on for the Fourth of July back at the field hospital, the lovely sound of an audience laughing because I’d written words to make them laugh.

  “I think she couldn’t bear to do nothing,” I said.

  “Sometimes nothing is the best thing you can do.”

  I crossed my arms, feeling chilled, wondering if he was right, if the bravest thing to do sometimes might be nothing at all.

  “You’re shivering, Jane,” Fletcher said, and he gave me his jacket, and he scooted up right beside me and put his arm around me.

  He said, “I’m not sure how I’d survive this war without you.”

  We sat together like that for a long time, with our feet dangling into the foxhole and the taste of chocolate on our tongues, the quiet between us comfortable.

  Before the mist burned off Wednesday morning, Fletcher was leaning down into the foxhole Liv and I shared, and I was saying good morning and tapping Liv’s shoulder, then shaking it lightly.

  “Okay, I’m awake,” she said without opening her eyes.

  Fletcher took four rations out and set them around the edge of the foxhole.

  Liv turned onto her back and opened her eyes. I hoisted myself up to sit at the edge of the foxhole, took one of the rations, and set to breakfast, such as it was. Fletcher handed Liv his biscuit, which she ate in three swift bites while lying on her bedroll in the trench. She sat up, shook off the bedroll and adjusted her helmet, then hoisted herself up beside me. Fletcher opened first one ration, then another, and set them back on the ground beside her. She picked one up and extracted the salt tablet.