The Race for Paris (14 page)

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.

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

W
hen 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 their 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.”

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

L
iv 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 head
quarters 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.

“That’s what my husband has always thought,” Liv said, “that de Gaulle would liberate Paris, that it would mean the war would be won and anyone who called himself a photojournalist ought to be there.”

That had been before, though, when she’d first started working for Charles, when she’d been his protégée but not yet his bride.

“Charles wanted to honeymoon in Paris,” she said, “but of course we hadn’t been able to, not with the war.”

It seemed that since that moment in the Dives River Liv was forever talking about Charles.

T
he threatening rain clouds had brought no relief from the heat and humidity as we entered Rambouillet, just thirty miles outside Paris. Our jeep was large and conspicuous on the town’s narrow cobblestone roads. The shops were all closed and wary, only the occasional flutter of curtains at upper-floor windows. Several journalists loitered outside the high iron gates of the Hôtel du Grand Veneur, a three-story, slate-roofed hotel designated as the press headquarters pending the march into Paris. No troops were anywhere in sight, though. No snowdrop helmets.

Fletcher pulled into a little forested park off the square and stopped under a low tree—scant protection I supposed was meant not against the Germans but against Major Adam Jones, who might be having a cool drink in the hotel bar. If everyone headed for Paris was coming through Rambouillet, we wouldn’t be hard to find.

Behind us and about a hundred yards farther on, a wide channel of water beckoned, peaceful and cool. On a church spire up a narrow lane in the opposite direction, an ivory clock face between the bell chamber and the peaked slate roof clicked off minutes, as if meaning to hurry us along before Paris went up in flames. The church’s stained-glass windows would cast a forgiving light inside. There would be an old wooden confessional with a private little bench retreat, a priest to slide the confessional door open and murmur low French words inviting me to set down my sins, lest I die here with a mortal stain on my soul.

Liv and I waited and watched through the low branches as Fletcher sussed out the situation, then waved us over. One of the journalists, as we joined them, was saying de Gaulle was back in France for the first time in four years.

“Jolly good of him to show up,” Fletcher said.

“He spoke in Rennes to a square overflowing with people despite a pouring rain,” the journalist said. “There wasn’t room to raise an umbrella.”

“The man was stiff as a board, speech-wise—that’s what MacVane told me,” another said. Then to me, “You know him, Miss Tyler? The NBC radio fellow?”

I had no idea how the journalist knew my name.

I glanced to the church again, the comfort of a confessional giving way to the threat of German snipers. The spire would be where they watched our arrival, if they did. Had the Germans all fled, or were they waiting for better prey than a few journalists before they showed their hand?

The first journalist said, “But the crowd was screaming for de Gaulle, who commanded everyone to sing the ‘Marseillaise.’” The emotion of the moment washed up in his sweaty face as he shared the details: de Gaulle’s single voice singing the opening phrase of the French anthem to the crowd in the square and the hundreds more who’d climbed onto the roofs of bombed-out buildings to see him; French soldiers standing guard over the scene with their new American carbines slung over their shoulders; the crowd joining the singing, the hope they’d hidden during four years of German captivity finding voice in the forbidden song.

“Some of your lady reporter friends were there,” the man continued. “Iris Carpenter and Catherine Coyne. Virginia Irwin. Sonia Tomara.”

“And Helen Kirkpatrick?” Liv asked.

We’d heard a rumor that the
Chicago Daily News
London bureau chief had gained Eisenhower’s blessing to go wherever she wanted, that she’d gone to see him after the German V-1s started dropping on England and told him that since London wasn’t safe she ought to be sent to France.

Fletcher said, “Rennes was liberated
before
the women were
allowed in, Liv. Lee Miller is there, too.” He paused for emphasis, wiping the sweat from his brow with a sleeve.
“Under house arrest.”

The
Vogue
reporter had gone to Saint-Malo when she heard the fighting was over only to find it wasn’t over, bullets were still whizzing through the air.

“No women permitted in combat zones,” Fletcher said, “or even in zones they fail to realize are still combat zones.”

I startled at the sound of military vehicles rumbling up the cobblestones—a reconnaissance group sent ahead toward Paris by General Leclerc returning from beyond the town, French troops who wouldn’t give a blink about Liv and me. They’d lost one soldier, and a second had a bullet in his arm. The road to Paris was not yet clear.

Leclerc’s tanks began rolling up the main road and pulling off into the reserve in which we’d left our jeep. Soldiers climbed from their vehicles and removed their helmets to relieve the heat. Several American officers sped into town, and Liv and I ducked into the gated courtyard of the hotel, melting into the doorway.

We might be caught, taken into custody, sent back to the States—here, just outside of Paris.

The Americans didn’t stop, though. Arresting us was someone else’s job. They sped right out the other way, only to return just as the French had, having found the road to Paris remained in German hands.

One of the French soldiers told us we might find Leclerc at the château. We walked with the other journalists toward several brick chimneys rising above a slate roof as if daring the bombers to try. A small lane off the main road led to guard towers and gates and a turreted limestone castle. A note on the door announced the château was reserved for General de Gaulle.

We found Leclerc in the gardens, poking at a path with his cane, oblivious of the walkways and balustrades and statuary inviting strollers toward the ponds we’d first seen from the park. The general wore his kepi and a pale, tightly knotted tie despite the heat. His stunted mustache was as precisely sculpted as the garden’s carefully squared-off trees.

His troops had come too far too fast, he told us. They were not ready to go into battle. And the armistice had been broken. The Germans were going to fight.

Several of the correspondents badgered him for the details of his plan, but he demurred, saying we were only looking for a story. His concern was the liberation of France.

W
e would have been too conspicuous at the official press headquarters even if we were allowed entrance, so we found a cozier family inn just outside of town, where Liv and I were given a tiny, hot attic room and a private bath with a real porcelain tub, big and deep—unfathomable luxury. A crystal jar on a table beside the tub held bath salts, an indulgence I’d not known even before the war. There were two of us, though, and a single tub, and the nagging memory of signs over hotel bathtubs in London: “The Eighth Army crossed the desert on a pint a day. Three inches only, please.” Even the king of England had a low fill line painted on his tub and bathed just once each week.

Liv uncapped the crystal jar and smelled the salts.

“Your three inches and mine would make six,” I said, “which with our bodies added might actually fill the tub.”

“And would save us from having to knock each other over in the fight to bathe first.”

We’d been through so much together that it seemed
nothing, really, to add bathing in a real tub to the list of things we’d shared.

I said I needed to do my roots first.

“‘For pity’s sake, can anyone self-apply that stuff?’” Liv said.

“Remember how Marie used to lay her clothes out so neatly on her cot every morning?” I said, and we laughed as we unbuckled our boots and stripped off our khakis and blouses and underwear, letting it all fall to the floor.

Liv applied the bleach for me, and I turned the tap—in the middle of one side rather than at the tub’s end—until the water was streaming. Liv poured out a handful of the salts, and we sank in with our backs at opposite ends. I lay in the water, remembering a house we’d stopped at to trade for supplies, where they’d had the foresight to fill their bathtub with water—all they would have to drink for weeks, their water and electricity lost in the Allied bombing and the brutal German retreat. I tried to imagine the fancy floors of the Belle Meade mansions back home under German boots, and Mama keeping our own little bathtub full of water, hiding resistance fighters and knowing we would die if they were found. Maybe that wouldn’t be more dangerous than what I was doing, running around Normandy in broad daylight, but I couldn’t have borne living with the possibility of being discovered and tortured into implicating those I loved.

I soaped Liv’s hair, scrubbing out the thick dirt of the road, of sleeping in trenches. Liv lay back in the bathwater to rinse, and she soaped my hair and I rinsed, and she soaped it again to make sure she’d gotten all the bleach out. When we climbed from the tub, finally, I caught Liv’s reflection in the small mirror over the sink. Her shoulders seemed bonier and whiter, her collarbones sharper than they seemed in their unreflected real
ity. Even her face was sharper and something more, too, something that left her barely recognizable as the person who’d arrived at the field hospital just weeks ago.

We were clean, though, for the first time in weeks, and with a four-poster bed instead of our bedrolls to sleep in, too.

We put on our freshest clothes—damp, but not soaking—and brushed our wet hair and our teeth. We rinsed our extra fatigues and underwear in the bathwater, then hung some in the bathroom and the rest from the long, leaded-glass dormer window, not sure whether to hope for the rain to hold off long enough for our clothes to dry a little or to wish our clothes be drenched if only a good solid rain would bring relief from the heat. We left the blackout shade up for whatever little breeze might cool the room, and we headed down to join Fletcher, who had promised to find us a bottle of wine, or at least a little eau-de-vie.

T
he small, candlelit dining room overflowed with correspondents who’d pushed tables together to accommodate large groups. In the middle, a bronze woman sat naked on a bronze jug, her graceful shoulders turned to an old man carved in stone as, above them, a cluster of cherubs laughed and sang. The stone walls and stone floor of the room kept it cooler than our top-floor bedroom despite the crowded tables buzzing with talk of history in the making, full-page headlines, and special editions. Fletcher, freshly shaved and with his hair still damp, stood and waved to us, and we set off toward him, stopping as we crossed the room to acknowledge hellos, to laugh off smart remarks about us being “wanted women,” and to exchange excited and contradictory speculation: the Germans were reinforcing the ring around Paris; the German
commander wanted to surrender to the Americans; Leclerc’s French forces alone would enter the city; the French and the American forces would enter together, but the Germans would destroy Paris before they would give it up.

“
We
are going to be the first correspondents into Paris,” Liv and I insisted, but of course so did everyone else.

Fletcher, sitting at a table of journalists, pulled out chairs for us, and I sat facing him while Liv took the seat beside him. He introduced us to the others—all British journalists—and sat only after we’d sat, laughed only as we laughed at the banter about how they’d thought we were just a legend, and how we made them look bad by staying forever at the front. One of our old poker pals from the Saint-Lô–Périers road games asked for a rematch and told us where the game would be after dinner if we wanted to play. All the while, Fletcher’s gaze shifted uncomfortably around the dining room—looking for MPs, I realized. We were quiet and discreet compared to the Americans at the table behind Liv and Fletcher, but they had no AWOL women sitting with them.

I leaned across the table toward Fletcher and said, “Don’t worry, they have ladies’ latrines here, after all.”