The Race for Paris (17 page)

FRIDAY, AUGUST 25, 1944

I will never forget the next morning coming up over the hill and there below is Paris—white and shining in the sun.

                    
—Journalist Helen Kirkpatrick

I arrived exhausted by my share of millions of handshakes—the embraces of grandmothers—of French sharpshooters and bevies of French girls. I was the “
femme soldat”—small use to say I was just a journalist.

                    
—Vogue photojournalist Lee Miller

T
he tourniquet that was on my arm when I fell asleep was no longer there when I woke to the sound of the jeep engine jumping to life, but the bandage was and the shirtsleeve wasn’t, and the arm hurt like hell.

“While we were sleeping,” Fletcher said, “some of Leclerc’s men entered Paris.”

“You’re kidding!” Liv said.

“Word just came down the line. They got as far as the Hôtel de Ville. No press there, though.”

He turned back to me. “How is the arm?”

“Drink some water, Jane,” Liv said.

I kicked off my bedroll, feeling I ought to be doing something, saying something to mark the morning, but I could not get “good morning” from my lips. I pulled off my helmet, ran my fingers through my hair, pulled the helmet back on again. The arm didn’t feel so bad, and it was my left arm—there was that.

It was just after dawn and the tanks were rumbling to a start. The air was thick with a white mist.

“You take the front seat, Jane,” Liv said. “I can photograph better from the back. It’s a little higher up.”

With the windshield down she would have a better view in the front, but it was bumpier in the back; she wanted me to be comfortable.

Fletcher held a cigarette out to me, a Lucky Strike.

“‘Lucky Strike Means Fine Tobacco,’” I said.

I stuck it between my lips, and he lit it for me.

I asked Liv to hand me my Corona. I unfolded it—that did hurt—and rolled in a clean sheet of paper. I thought better of that and rolled the paper back out. Liv folded the typewriter up for me, and I pulled out a notepad and pen. Liv loaded new film in her Leica and carefully cleaned her lenses.

The troops began to move, and Fletcher cranked the steering wheel, jockeying for position, weaving through the line. We turned onto a narrow side road not a mile from where we’d slept, heading north, reaching Gentilly before eight to find what must have been the entire population lining the street, crowding the military convoy, cheering.

Minutes later, as we approached the Porte de Gentilly, I
turned to Liv and said, “Climb up here with us, Liv! I can’t bear to beat you to Paris!” And she did, holding on to Fletcher’s hand to steady herself so she wouldn’t fall back or bump my arm.

The moment wasn’t anything like I had imagined. The wall that had once marked the city’s boundary and the city gate had been taken down after the last war. We might not have known we were in Paris if the soldiers ahead of us weren’t cheering wildly as they entered the traffic circle. We couldn’t see Notre Dame or the Louvre or even the tip of the Eiffel Tower. But the street overflowed with people. Children—all unbearably thin and unmistakably happy—danced everywhere, oblivious to the old men scurrying worriedly around them, warning of the continued presence of snipers. Women in bright dresses, flashy jewelry, and hair ribbons the blue, white, and red of the French flag waved and screamed and laughed and kissed everyone, climbing up onto jeeps and tanks, their pale white arms reaching up to take soldiers’ cheeks in both hands. They kissed the French soldiers in their American helmets or leather tank helmets or French berets. They kissed Fletcher again and again, his cheeks becoming red with lipstick or with the constant pressing of lips on skin, or perhaps with the embarrassment of so much adoration. They kissed Liv and me, too, even as Liv tried to steady her camera and I tried to protect my bandaged arm. They kissed first one cheek and then the other, and I felt all they’d endured in the sharp bones of their half-starved shoulders.

Bicycles, bicycles. Everywhere, there were bicycles.

And flowers. Flowers thrown joyfully, bright red and yellow flowers strewn in the cobbled streets, landing on the military vehicles and in our jeep, their sweet fragrance blotting out the smell of gunfire.

The men slapped one another’s and the soldiers’ backs and shook hands and bellowed their joy, too, kissing the same dou
ble kisses the women did, their shoulders as bony or more so. And everywhere people were crying. Tears streamed down the hollow, stubbled cheeks of old men, the old and the sick brought out from the hospitals to greet freedom in the streets. Young women pulled their children tightly to their sinewy legs, watching for their children’s fathers, hoping they might appear in a passing truck and wondering if they would recognize them. The crowds applauded and held babies high to see—undaunted by the sounds of the war continuing around them: the rattle of machine gun fire elsewhere in the city, the whine of shells, the low boom of explosions as the Germans tried to destroy the bridges over the Seine.
“Vive la France!”
and
“Vive la liberté!”
and simply
“Bravo!”
the Parisians shouted as Liv’s shutter snapped and snapped.

Much of Paris had been liberated from within, by young men in FFI armbands taking control of the telephone network and the metro, Nobel Prize–winning scientists assembling Molotov cocktails, grandmothers and mothers heaping furniture and stoves and dustbins onto barricades of overturned trucks and downed branches and barbed wire—barricades often topped with Hitler’s photo or a Nazi flag so that attacking Germans would have to fire on their own flag or, worse, their führer. Even young children participated, their bicycle baskets loaded with cobblestones hacked from the roads by older, stronger citizens to reinforce the barricades, or with food and drink to reinforce the men guarding them. After four years, the entire population had finally said no to German occupation, unaided by generals squabbling over who would govern after they were freed, or by journalists vying to be the first to capture the beginning of a liberation that had already begun.

As we passed Parc Montsouris, one of the Haussmann parks I’d seen in pictures in high school French class, the sound of
war began blasting right in my ears again, that staccato rat-a-tat-a-tat. The crowd dove, clenched-fist salutes opening, grabbing for cover, unblown kisses left on hands scrambling for the ground, babies tucked up to their mother’s chests, pressed between parental body and unyielding ground.

Fletcher grasped my torn sleeve, sending fresh pain through my arm as I tumbled from the jeep. He shoved the Webley into Liv’s hand and shoved Liv and me both behind the jeep, telling us to stay down.

We crouched there, the fear in Liv’s eyes mirrored in my cottony throat as shots rang out.

Liv peeked cautiously over the top of the hood, and despite Fletcher’s admonition, I followed her lead to see Fletcher crouching low to the ground. The gunfire came from a stone tower, or from a house across the way, or from both. He moved carefully toward them as he shot photographs, recording the details of the places German soldiers sought refuge in a city under siege, and how and when they fought from the hiding spots they chose. He didn’t even have a gun. He’d left that for Liv and me.

Leclerc’s men fired on the tower and the rooftops with machine guns mounted on the trunks of vehicles, the stone flying into the air in sprays of white, sunlight reflecting off flying shards. When had the sun come out?

Liv rose just a little more and swung her Leica to catch several FFI men taking cover near the house, storming the door. A moment later, the bang of a grenade, and then silence.

The crowd surged again, pouring out of the buildings, leaving only a narrow lane for our convoy, which moved along the Boulevard Jourdan and up the Rue Saint-Jacques. We crested a hill as we crossed Boulevard Saint-Germain at the Sorbonne, and there was Paris stretched out before us: the Eiffel Tower
and the Louvre, Notre Dame, the River Seine. As we rolled downhill and crossed a cast-iron bridge to the Île de la Cité, the sun was blinding, the light beautiful on the water and on the cathedral’s square towers, on the barricades.

We crossed the Seine a second time, to the plaza at the Hôtel de Ville. The clock face in its tower read ten o’clock, although my watch read nine and was ticking; the Paris clocks had been advanced an hour, to German daylight savings time. Liv photographed a crowd celebrating at the intersection across from the Hôtel de Ville, people gathered around an old car in front of a barricade. The wheel of an upside-down wheelbarrow atop it spun behind them as an emaciated old woman handed what must have been her last tomato to a soldier, who handed it back to her. A curly-haired toddler threw flowers. An old, old man held up a baby, waving its little hand.

“They’re my mother’s eyes,” Liv said.

It took me a moment to realize she was talking about a middle-aged woman standing atop the old car in front of the barricade, cheering with the crowd and yet not quite with them. The woman was just that little bit higher up on the car’s roof, setting her apart. Thin, square shoulders in a thin, flowered dress, like so many of the Parisian women. Her hair was short and dark, like Liv’s, but her nose was stronger and her mouth, too, her brow bone sharper under the perfectly arched brows. Blue-green irises against a sturdy, determined white unsoftened by her lashes, or that’s the way those eyes seemed. Joyful, yes, but something else, too. Looking straight into Liv’s camera as Liv photographed her, as if some answer she needed might be found in Liv’s lens.

Imagine that, Livvie
, I thought, and I wondered if Liv understood yet that this was what her mother meant for her to imagine. I imagined my own mother opening the newspaper
in the morning and saying to herself,
My own Jane. Imagine that.

The rip of gunfire cut through the air again, shots from the Notre Dame Cathedral tower behind us now across the Seine—a sound so loud that I couldn’t hear Fletcher shouting. He grabbed my arm, thrust me on the raw road under the jeep, and Liv at the same time, Liv’s camera scraping along the ground beside me under the jeep’s metal undercarriage. Rat-a-tat-tat, rat-a-tat-a-tat. I made myself open my eyes, raised my head in the direction of the gunfire, banged the back of my skull on something metal and greasy and hard.

“Are you close enough yet, Liv?” I asked, gallows humor, but she couldn’t hear me over the noise.

I wondered where Fletcher was. He’d given me the Webley this time. It had all happened so fast I hadn’t even realized.

Beyond the jeep’s tilted wheels, girls in Red Cross uniforms carried a stretcher out into the gunfire, waving a Red Cross flag. They laid their stretcher beside a wounded soldier and moved swiftly to attend to him as the bullets rang in the air around them. Liv focused her Leica as best she could and took the shot: the stretcher, the hands holding it, their feet, legs, hips, waists, and the Hôtel de Ville behind them. The gunfire continued for perhaps twenty minutes, and Liv shot what she could from the vantage point of the jeep underbelly. I didn’t even try to take notes.

The gunfire sputtered, sputtered again, and a long silence descended, leaving only the wail of a child somewhere. I looked at Liv, so close beside me, the pupils of her eyes huge and dark. I scanned the square for Fletcher, found him just a few yards away, returning to us as we climbed out from under the jeep and the crowd swelled again.

A rumor rippled through the soldiers that Billotte had used
the telephone network at the police prefect to reach von Choltitz and demand a German surrender, but the German general had refused. Our line of troops would be making their way toward German headquarters at the Hôtel Meurice.

Around the corner on Rue de Rivoli, a news kiosk displayed Nazi and collaborationist newspapers. The window of a bookshop read
“Buchhandlung,”
the glass pockmarked with the star shatterings of bullet holes. Swastikas flew over the hotels everywhere, along with signs that read
“Soldatenheim,” “Speiselokal,”
and
“
Lese Schreib und Spielzimmer.”
The ugly flags hung above the doors of stores now closed for the celebration, over playhouses where, when the city had become dangerously low on electricity, plays were put on by candlelight. Signs taped to
téléphone
booths and
vespasiennes
—the French public toilets—read “
Accés interdit aux juifs
,” not to be used by Jews.

The German resistance grew even more intense as we approached the Louvre Museum and German headquarters beyond it. The fighting in the Tuileries Garden was tree to tree, the only things separating us a high and highly permeable iron fence and the few hundred yards we stayed behind the front troops. At the Hôtel Meurice, two French officers, covered by machine gun fire, ran through the front arches and tossed in phosphorous grenades. Smoke billowed out the door and up to the Nazi flags hanging over it, driving out several German soldiers with their hands over their heads. Liv and Fletcher both took the shots: the French soldiers, the improbably tidy plaques on either side of the doorway, the German guards.

One of the French officers entered the hotel. We waited, watching for what seemed such a long time. Fletcher had turned his camera back to the soldiers in the garden, photographing through the gaps in the fence, when the French officer emerged
from the hotel with the German general carrying a suitcase, as if headed for a weekend at Mont Saint-Michel.

“Von Choltitz,” Liv said.

The general who might have set Paris burning instead lit nothing more than a cigar.

Men and women and even children surged toward von Choltitz, yelling curses and spitting. One woman rushed at him and smashed the cigar. The crowd cheered even as the French soldiers tried to protect him. A Red Cross nurse hurried them to a waiting car, leaving the crowd to spend the rest of its anger tearing his abandoned suitcase open and ripping its contents to pieces. And still, the gunfire rang out from the Tuileries, where Fletcher’s camera remained focused.