The Race for Paris Page 25

  “I’m sorry I wasn’t able to see you safely back to camp,” Fletcher said, “but my gut told me the chaps from the underground could be trusted. And it was safer for you to have no idea where I was.”

  Around us, men were stirring, gathering their gear and speaking quietly in the darkness. I sat at the edge of the foxhole, shivering in the damp chill. Liv didn’t wake.

  “Lordy, I want a cigarette as badly as a preacher wants to cuss,” I said.

  Fletcher leaned into the foxhole and rustled Liv’s shoulder. She hooked an arm over her helmet as if to shield herself from him. She was wearing gloves—a good thing. She never dressed warmly enough. She said she was too warm even when I was cold.

  Fletcher lifted her arm—heavy with sleep—and patted her gloved hand vigorously, the leather all scrunched together at her wrists.

  “Come on, Livvie,” he said. “Time to go to Valkenburg.”

  She rolled over onto her back and looked up.

  “You’re ill?” I said.

  “No,” she said. “No, I’m just not sure I can—”

  “Liv, we’re almost to Germany!” Fletcher said, his voice far too loud. Everyone turned. Why not just light that cigarette? Why not send up a flare to announce to the Germans that we’re here, right here?

  Fletcher reached behind him for the ration tins and cranked open a chopped ham and eggs, her favorite. “Eat,” he said in a more controlled tone. “You’ll feel better after you eat.”

  Liv climbed out of the foxhole and removed her helmet, her hair sticking out at odd angles. She ran gloved fingers through it and set the helmet back on and tightened the chin strap. She loosened the fingers of the glove on her left hand and pulled it off, revealing the two wedding rings. She pulled the other glove off as carefully, folded them, and returned them to her pack, with the red gown.

  Fletcher said, “You two will stay back with the troops until the rendezvous is complete,” and he laid out for us what he had arranged for the morning: He would go with the small patrol that was to protect Captain Sixberry during the rendezvous. We would wait up the road with the rest. If the rendezvous was successful, Fletcher would ride in our jeep for the assault on the bridge.

  Major General Hobbs didn’t know Liv and I were going, and Captain Sixberry didn’t know we hadn’t been invited; Fletcher meant to keep it that way.

  Liv didn’t object.

  “The child was a girl,” Fletcher said. “The baby born in the cave. I heard earlier this morning.”

  Liv and I smiled at the thought.

  The mother had died giving birth, but Fletcher didn’t have the heart to tell us.

  I looked around, at the boys girding themselves as best they could against the planned foray into the city. I met Fletcher’s gaze, his green-brown eyes, and I wondered if his brother had had those same eyes, those same generous ears, and if his brother’s baby would have had them had he or she lived. I wondered if that was when Fletcher had gone gray, when he’d lost his brother, or if that had happened after Poland with Charles.

  Fletcher found and opened another ration, and we ate silently but quickly: chopped ham and eggs, all of our biscuits, powdered coffee mixed in cold water—I didn’t even care, didn’t even add my box of sugar, just drank it thin and gritty, unsweetened, most of the grounds at the bottom. When I finished, Liv, too, had eaten everything, even the caramels. Fletcher handed her his salt tablet without her even asking. Liv took it, and she began to gather her gear.

  I turned to her then, and I whispered, “You don’t have to do this, Liv,” thinking I ought to tell Fletcher about the salt. Fletcher hadn’t seen that in the cave; he’d already gone to give the chocolate to the sleeping children. I understood in that moment that the salt meant something, although it seemed impossible that it could mean what it must. That Liv was pregnant. That she’d realized it herself as she’d watched the child being born. That was why she offered the pregnant woman the thing she could never get enough of, the salt. Why she hesitated now. Why she didn’t insist on going to see the rendezvous.

  How could she not have known she was pregnant, though? How could I not have seen it even if she didn’t realize it herself? But it can be impossible to see what’s right in front of you when it doesn’t make sense, and so many things get muffled in the fog of war.

  Or maybe Liv had known? Maybe seeing the birth in the cave had only made her own child more real? She’d kept the telegram about her brother secret even after we’d watched the boy die by flashlight in the operating room. Don’t tell anyone, she’d insisted after she set free the German soldier in the woods. Not even Fletcher. I couldn’t bear for anyone else to know.

  “You don’t have to do this, Liv,” I repeated, thinking they were impossible, the choices. The mother sending little Ange out to tell us about the gasoline in the cemetery shed, offering us their only means of escape if the Germans returned. My own mother watching as my train left Union Station. The mother pulled from the refugee line outside Compiègne, who’d sold her whole future for a few red Life Savers, for a child’s rabbit coat.

  Liv wiped the lens of her Leica carefully with a cloth. She capped the lens and looped the camera strap over her neck and shoulder, and began loading film canisters into her pockets, along with a handful of condoms. When she was ready, she took the red gown from the bottom of her pack and pressed her face to it for just a moment, as if something of her mother might be left in the silk.

  “This is all I can do,” she whispered. “Shutter speeds, f-stops, angles of light.”

  VALKENBURG, THE NETHERLANDS

  THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 14, 1944

  The war correspondent has his stake—his life—in his own hands, and he can put it on this horse or that horse, or he can put it back in his pocket at the very last minute.

  —Photojournalist Robert Capa

  Fletcher hid in the brush on a bank near the rendezvous area with several soldiers from the patrol as Captain Sixberry sat coolly waiting on a bench near the entrance to a coal mine. The early morning was eerily quiet as a Dutchman in civilian clothes appeared some distance down the Daalhemerweg street. The Dutchman approached the bench cautiously, his eyes darting from the captain to a limestone sign painted with black letters—“Daelhemer-Berg Steenkolenmijn”—to the building to the right of the mine entrance and the stone stairway leading up to woods behind it, where anyone might hide. He glanced back to the crumbling walls of an old castle and the town beyond it, too. He was older than Fletcher expected, considerably older than Fletcher himself. Perhaps in his forties.

  The captain, watching the approaching Dutchman, grinned and said, “Hey there, you want a cigarette?”

  The tension in Fletcher’s fingers on his camera made them ache. He’d agreed to take no photos until after the contact was made, and these were not the photos he needed in any event, but he longed for the distraction of his camera, the excuse to hide his fear behind his lens. He’d been farther than this the night before, but he’d been alone. So often, it was safer being alone.

  “I like Steeplechase,” the Dutchman responded to Captain Sixberry, and he introduced himself as Paul Simons, saying the name with conviction.

  Fletcher wondered what his real name was.

  Captain Sixberry asked the man how many German soldiers remained in the town and where they were. He spread an ordnance map across his lap, and Paul Simons studied it.

  No one was left on this side of the Geul, Simons said.

  “This bridge by the Den Halder Castle,” he said, indicating a point on the map, “is the only bridge now, but it is mined and it is guarded from the Hotel Oda, over there.”

  There might be Germans left in the casino dance hall, he said, and there was German traffic from Meerssen through Houthem to Valkenburg, traffic heading on through Heerlen to Germany.

  A few of the soldiers with Fletcher emerged from the brush, one of them already speaking into his walkie-talkie, passing along the information. Simons watched, wide-eyed. Fletcher was sure
the Dutchman must be used to men emerging from hiding after this much time spent under German occupation. It must be the walkie-talkie that fascinated him.

  Fletcher stood.

  A squawking voice replied over the walkie-talkie, directing the platoon to try to take the bridge over the Geul in a pincer movement. Deploy the soldiers in two separate groups, the voice directed. Position them to allow snipers to surprise the Germans, to prevent them from blowing the bridge. “We need that bridge. Don’t let it blow.”

  Paul Simons turned down the road and waved, beckoning someone.

  Fletcher held himself perfectly still.

  A single, younger Dutchman emerged from hiding and approached—Stewart.

  L’Istelle, he said his name was now, and perhaps it was.

  The two Dutchmen deliberated for a moment in their language before Simons nodded to the captain. The captain said Simons would come with his platoon, and Stewart would go with the other.

  “Okay, let’s go,” the captain said.

  VALKENBURG, THE NETHERLANDS

  THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 14, 1944

  I’m never sure what I am going to do, or sometimes even aware of what I do—only that I want that picture.

  —Photojournalist Margaret Bourke-White

  Around the bend up the road where the rest of the patrol waited—Liv and I with them—the driver of the lead jeep signaled. The drivers released their brakes, and the queue of open jeeps, machine guns fixed to some of their hoods, began rolling silently down the steep incline. Partway down the hill Fletcher leapt into our jeep. Farther along, the lead jeep pulled to a stop at the bench and Captain Sixberry and two soldiers at the rendezvous with the Dutchmen jumped in. The captain directed Simons to climb up onto the hood and Stewart to the same post on a second jeep. The captain didn’t trust them.

  We rolled on downhill along the Daalhemerweg street, past a crumble of ancient castle wall to our right, a perfect perch for snipers. The morning was still, only the roll of the jeep wheels on the road.

  At the square, a small cluster of people awaited us. The older Dutchman sent them quietly off to warn the few townspeople who hadn’t fled to the caves to be silent, not to start celebrating the arrival of the Allies as was so often done. The town remained mute, the houses and shops appearing abandoned but for a drape moving here and there behind closed windows.

  Liv seemed to hesitate as we piled out of the jeeps. She still looked so pale that I wanted to tell her it wasn’t too late to turn back, that I would turn back with her if she wanted to. I said nothing, though, as we followed the soldiers into the narrow lane.

  They split into two platoons.

  We went with Captain Sixberry and Paul Simons, headed for a position from which to observe the bridge. We passed through an ancient stone archway, an old castle gate as high as the two-story buildings crowding the lane’s edge, with a statue of the Virgin Mary looking down on us from a recess between two windows. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death.

  From the street beyond the archway, we slipped into the Hotel Smeets-Huynen. Inside, an older lady gasped at the sight of us, but the family stayed otherwise silent, leaving only their expressions to betray their fear.

  The rest of our patrol would be pushing two of the jeeps forward, the heavy machine guns fixed, the engines switched off. They would station the guns between two other hotels, the Neerlandia and the Bleesers. From there a small group of soldiers would follow Stewart along the back sides of the houses to the Protestant church, through some gardens and on to another hotel, the Prince Hendrik. Others would try to reach the banks of the Geul through the school yard.

  We slipped out the back door of the hotel as silently as we’d entered. Liv seemed to hesitate as she crossed the threshold back into the open air, as if she would just as soon hide in the basement with Mrs. Smeets-Huynen until the Germans left. But she took a photograph: several of our soldiers with their machine guns, ascending a church tower from which they could cover the bridge. A little color seemed to return to her cheeks.

  Fletcher did not use his camera. It was the positions of the Germans, how they defended the bridge, that British intelligence would want.

  Paul Simons led us to a nearby building that smelled of yeast, a brewery. My mouth was dry, but I hadn’t brought a canteen. Fletcher’s hung from his utility belt, clipped to the holes in the canvas alongside his extra film, but I couldn’t have managed to open the canteen to drink even if I could have gotten it from him without making any noise.

  We made it to the spot that was to be our observation point, and Captain Sixberry fished a periscope from his pocket. A castle wall obstructed the view of the bridge, though. This castle, unlike the one up by the coal mine, was more or less intact.

  Simons indicated another location with a gesture, and the captain nodded.

  Silently, we slipped along the castle wall to a lower wall on the Geul River. The wall offered so little protection.

  Captain Sixberry again raised his periscope.

  “Jerry on the bridge,” he mouthed.

  He beckoned Simons to look through the periscope. The Dutchman watched for a moment, frowning.

  “He sees something,” Simons whispered. “He is stopped. He is looking toward the Hotel Prince Hendrik.”

  That was where the other patrol was meant to be.

  “He is looking now to the dance hall.”

  There might be lookouts at the dance hall, he’d warned.

  The captain took the periscope, and looked, and whispered, “He’s seen someone from the other platoon.”

  Liv looked to me, her hand on her camera, as if she needed to take the shot but could not.

  I thought, Are you close enough now, Liv? I thought, You don’t have to do this, Liv.

  She began to rise from her crouch, and I was sure she was going to run; she was going to take off back in the direction of the hotel, and I watched as if in slow motion, wanting her to run and wanting to run with her, and wanting not to want to run.

  She lifted her camera and turned toward the bridge.

  “Liv, don’t,” I mouthed, but she was already looking over the wall, her eyes taking it in through the lens. I rose, too, then, not like Liv but just enough to peer over the edge of the wall.

  Just a single man—one German soldier—stood on a small stone bridge.

  That was what everyone was afraid of, a single young man who must be far more terrified than we were, standing over a river so narrow you could almost step across it if the years of water flow hadn’t cut so deeply into the earth. A single man standing out in the open where anyone might shoot him, while we hid in the shadowed protection of the wall. He was young; his body as he turned to flee the bridge moved with the fluid ease of a boy, his uniform jacket stretched across his narrow shoulders, his rifle following the movement of his arms. He glanced back, and Liv took the shot: a soldier in a battle helmet, his jacket buttoned to the top. Maybe my age or Liv’s, not a boy like the German in the woods, but still with women to love and children to have.

  He shouted.

  He’s German, I reminded myself. He’s the enemy.

  I tried to capture the scene in my mind as Liv shot the photo: the man’s deep-set eyes under his helmet, his mouth shouting German words I didn’t understand. He was just a man on a bridge, a man trying to do his job like Tommy or Fletcher or Charles or Geoff or any man any of us had ever known. A man who did not want to end up like the soldiers Liv and I had watched the nurses clear from the field back in Normandy, who’d lost their legs and then their lives or, if they were lucky, everything at once.

  The world filled with such a loud noise then, and the bridge was exploding and I was diving for cover, a reflex, as the explosion enveloped me, everything fire and flying debris. And Liv was not there for a moment, for maybe longer, maybe less. The world was perfectly quiet and Liv was not there, Liv was not anywhere or I wasn’t, and there was no pain, I felt nothing at all.

 
I needed to crawl away, but I could not lift my arm.

  Then Fletcher was dropping his camera and shouting, his words coming to me as if through water, “Jane! Jane!” And Liv was nearby, her face pressed to the cobblestones, and the sound was all around me again, but muted now, as if someone had known the world was too loud for me and had turned the volume down. A voice was humming, too. A soft, beautiful voice. “Tell me a word I don’t know, Janie,” the voice said. Was I home? I wanted a blanket and I wanted to tell Mama a new word, but no words came.

  VALKENBURG, THE NETHERLANDS

  THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 14, 1944

  No one ever understood disaster until it came.

  —Journalist Josephine Herbst

  The explosion was still overwhelming Fletcher, the shrapnel and earth and the stone of the bridge improbably filling the air as he shouted, “Jane! Jane!” Then, “We need a medic here!”

  Something hit his bare hand, stinging like a bullet. He fell sideways with the force of it, and there was Liv, too. “Liv!” he said. “Oh, Livvie.”

  He crouched beside Liv, his hand dripping blood on her helmet as he cried, “Medic! We need a medic here!”

  Blood soaked the arm of her blouse.

  He pulled out his shirttail, tried to tear it for a tourniquet. The damned fabric wouldn’t tear.