The Girls in the Picture

by Melanie Benjamin

  And the smells—I would never forget them, but how to write about a smell? How to describe how it made your eyes water or your stomach turn over or your hand fly to your nose? The odor of mud and filth and mildew—mossy at its best, pungently acidic at its worst. The sinus-clearing stench of antiseptics. How to describe what gangrene smells like? I didn’t even try, because I didn’t ever want to remember it.

  Perspiration—no, Fran, not “perspiration”; that’s such a prissy word. Sweat. Stink. Bodies foul and ripe on men beyond caring, sometimes even on my own body when baths were scarce. Trench foot—those cases were the worst, for some reason. I once witnessed a reconstructive surgery that involved sawing a man’s scalp almost entirely off his head, and I saw brain—not pink, as I’d always imagined, but gray. But that had nothing on the cases and cases of trench foot—flesh falling from bone with a moist, sucking sound, and the odor so foul, so decayed, no perfume could ever erase the memory of it. Battlefields—fresh mounds barely covered in mud, wooden crosses hastily nailed and plunged into the earth like hatpins on a filthy hat—had a peculiarly sweet smell. Someone explained that this was how a body smelled after the initial decaying process was over. I wasn’t sure I wanted to know that, but thanked the eager young orderly anyway.

  Mostly, my letters home—to Mary, to Charlotte, to Adela and Bess, to friends like Hedda Hopper and Marie Dressler, to a new acquaintance, the writer Mary Roberts Rinehart, herself a war correspondent in France, and to Elsie, the reason I was here, but whom I never once met up with—were cheerful, self-deprecating; to them, I made it sound as if I was having the adventure of my life.

  When I did finally tell them of my biggest ordeal, my grandest adventure—the one that made headlines for my being the first Allied female to cross enemy lines—I finally gave myself permission to talk about the shoes.

  It was soon after Mary had sent a letter. “Psst…the word in the studios is that there are to be no more ‘Kill the Hun!’ pictures.” And I had already noticed a difference in the very air; people smiled more, all of a sudden. Allowed themselves to joke. So the war must be winding down. Right about then, I received orders to head to the front to join the Signal Corps and the Red Cross, who were crossing into Germany after the retreating German army, to tend to the American wounded left behind in their prisoner hospitals.

  That afternoon, I was late; I’d rushed to where I was to meet my caravan in Paris, only to discover it had already left with Wes and Harry and our cameras in it. The rest of the vehicles were filled with doctors and nurses and their medical equipment.

  “What do I do?” I hailed a young corporal who was studying a clipboard and waving cars off to their destinations.

  “What’s your mission?”

  “CPI—filming the Signal Corps and Red Cross.”

  “Filming?” The corporal shook his head. “We don’t have any room. My advice is to turn back. Stay in Paris and have yourself a nice, warm dinner and a bubble bath.”

  “I’ll do no such thing!” The back of my neck twitched and I glared at the boy; oh, how annoying it was to have boys ten years younger order me around all the time! “I have a job to do and I’m going to do it. I’ve never ‘turned back’ in my life, Corporal, and I have no intention of doing so now.”

  He sighed, rubbed his eyes, and shrugged.

  “Suit yourself. Grab a seat in that truck there. But you’re going to be in for a bumpy ride.”

  “Fine.” I snatched up my duffel bag, filled with a change of underwear, a toothbrush, a brush and some hairpins, and not much more, and climbed into the only empty seat I could find, beside the driver of a transport truck who gave me one look and said, “Goddamn, son of a bitch.”

  “Hello to you, too, Sergeant.”

  With an explosive sigh, the driver put the car in gear and we lurched away. I didn’t know where I was going and I didn’t ask. I only knew that I was going to be closer to Germany than I’d ever been before, and I shivered. So far I hadn’t actually seen a Hun. The prospect was equally exciting and terrifying.

  In my hand, I clutched a letter I’d just received from Fred, the reason for my tardiness that morning. “Darling, we’re finally going to the front. Hooray! Try not to worry, although I know this is a useless request. I will be fine, I have a real feeling I’ll be spared, and my men, too, for what better purpose I don’t understand yet. Only know I’m pathetically proud to finally be asked to do my duty, when so many other men have already done theirs. And that I will return to you even more pathetically proud to be yours for the rest of my life.”

  So he was going, finally! All this time, as I’d darted back and forth from my home base in Paris, never feeling I was really in harm’s way except for one air raid that left some buildings only half a mile away from my hotel in ruins, I’d silently rejoiced that Fred and the 143rd had remained stationed in Brest. He did not rejoice; I answered his increasingly irritated letters with proper sympathy but never revealed how thankful I was that he was safe. That wasn’t what you told a soldier who had yet to face battle.

  But now he was leaving for the front—wherever that was, somewhere deeper in Germany than I was going, surely. From what I could glean from the tight-lipped sergeant driving the truck, we were headed to Luxembourg as there were huge gaps in the rapidly disintegrating Western Front. Finally the sleeping beast that had always resided at the edges of my consciousness awoke; Fred and I were both headed into danger, his the greater, and it was real now. Not a movie.

  As the truck lurched on its way, I gave up trying to get the taciturn sergeant to talk. Instead, I decided to try to get some rest. Using my bag as a pillow, I dozed fitfully, but found it impossible when the ruts in the muddy road became deeper and closer together and I was tossed around the cab of the truck like a salad.

  “Verdun,” the sergeant spat out. “Look.”

  Up ahead, there were small bonfires set along the road, on either side.

  “What on earth? I thought the battle here had happened long ago.”

  “To keep the fucking rats away, lady. This place—all these son-of-a-bitch battlefields—are crawling with rats. The damn rats love the dead.”

  My stomach lurched, and I remembered I hadn’t eaten since late yesterday, which was a good thing. For now.

  The truck swayed, the axles squealed, ahead of and behind us were dozens more trucks, more machinery moaning and groaning, lurching forward. But on either side of the road, as far as I could see beyond the flickering flames of the bonfires, was a vast emptiness, a heartbreaking silence. Abandoned vehicles, walls of a bombed cathedral silhouetted against the pink, twilit sky. Foundations where homes had once stood. So much rubble, piles and piles of it, wood and metal dangerously mingled, ragged edges poking out like gleaming teeth. A skirt—filthy but miraculously untorn—hanging from a clothesline. Gardens with unpicked, rotting vegetation. Trees with no leaves, their twisted limbs stretching up to the sky like fingers in supplication. A seesaw, lonely, in a park without trees.

  Up ahead were the trenches, and we were almost upon them when I saw the shoe. One red shoe, a child’s shoe, poking up out of a pile of bricks and rubble. Impossibly small, this shoe; impossible to imagine the tiny foot that once fit it.

  All too real to imagine the fate of the child who once wore this shoe, this shoe that must have run and jumped, danced and kicked; dangled innocently from a high chair. All too easy to sit and wonder what became of the other shoe, ponder at the force of whatever had hit this rubble that could separate it from its mate. Far too easy, and too devastating; I began to shake, taking noisy breaths to prevent tears from streaming down my cheeks, trying to stifle a sob.

  This was war. Not a pretty picture staged by D. W. Griffith—I remembered how I’d gasped at the realism of the battlefield scenes in The Birth of a Nation. How naïve I had been. They weren’t realistic, they were artfully staged vignettes, carefully composed, lit, framed. And even Griffith didn’t have the courage to film a child’s empty shoe.

&nbs
p; This is what I should have been filming, not only the women behind the lines—although of course they were important, their stories were important. But perhaps more important were the women caught up in battle without their consent; women struggling to live their lives, feed their families, care for their children, who found war, uninvited, at their doorstep. Who was filming them?

  But where were they to be found now? I didn’t even know where to look. I didn’t have the strength to start tearing through the rubble with my own two hands, and now we were almost out of the town, entering the abandoned trenches, and that sickeningly sweet smell was everywhere so I sat rigidly upright next to my sergeant, who never once seemed to take in his surroundings, after the bonfires. He was concentrating only on the road ahead.

  We bounced on in a sudden rain, until without warning the truck gave an awful jolt and my head slammed against the door.

  “Bastard of a bitch, this whoring ball biter of a truck!”

  In a way, I was grateful that he didn’t take any pains to modify his language; he didn’t seem to care if he offended me, so for once, I wasn’t reminded of my gender. Still swearing—creatively—he coaxed the groaning vehicle toward the side of the road so the few trucks behind us could go on. Then we were alone on this road, surrounded by ghostly trenches, and it was nightfall. And pouring.

  Taking my suddenly foulmouthed sergeant’s lead, I got out of the truck and immediately sank to my knees in mud; I shivered as my skirt and stockings plastered my skin in a cold, slimy compress. But there was nothing else to do but slosh around to the other side of the truck, close to the road, where the sergeant was on his hands and knees in the slime, peering beneath it.

  “Broken bitch of an axle, goddamn it to hell.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means we’re not going a goddamn inch farther until some other son of a whore comes along and we can hitch a ride.”

  “When will that be?” I peered up and down the narrow, muddy, pothole-filled road in the dusk; there was no sign of any vehicles.

  “Damned if I know, lady.”

  “Well.” I patted my matted hair, deciding. “I’m going on foot. I don’t want to wait, because I might miss my crew.”

  “The hell you are!”

  “How far is it to Luxembourg?” I was already slogging through the mud to the front of the truck.

  “Fucking miles. At least two hours, maybe three, by truck.”

  “Look, I can walk faster than this truck is going, anyway.” I retrieved my bag. “And I’m sure I’ll catch up with someone sometime.”

  “Yeah.” The sergeant was now beside me, leering; I’d never felt so small and helpless before. This man had limbs as thick as trees, stubble on his face, and while he didn’t look menacing he did look strong and big; much bigger than me. “You’ll catch up with someone, sweetie. Maybe some bastard not as gentlemanly as this son of a bitch.”

  “The Germans have retreated, haven’t they?” I tried to reason with both the man and myself; why I was filled with this insane urge to march on toward my destination at all costs, I had no idea. Except that I had a duty to do and I would do it. Because I had to. Because—unlike the child whose shoe was left behind—I could. I possessed two strong legs, strong lungs, my heart was beating true. I was alive. I was going to go on, because to stay here in this field of death was to tempt death—that was how I felt.

  “Do you have anything to eat?” I pulled the collar of my coat up, trying to prevent the freezing rain from trickling down my neck. “A candy bar, an apple, anything?” Suddenly my stomach was gnawing at itself.

  “Here.” The man reached into a pocket and handed me a wad of jerky—what kind, I didn’t ask. One of the more enterprising mess cooks at my last field hospital had sold jerkied rat out of his tent. “You’re a crazy dame, you know that? What in Christ’s name do you do back in the States?”

  “I’m— Oh, it doesn’t matter.” And for the first time, it didn’t. I didn’t feel proud of what I did, and it simply didn’t matter. It didn’t matter what any of us did back home; even thinking of Hollywood right now made my head feel like it was stuffed with lightning bugs. Hollywood was fantastic and far away and as flimsy as the ripped canvas covering the back of the truck. The only thing that mattered, that was real, was this road, this moment, this Dante’s inferno of a night.

  “Go ahead, then, but you’d better stick to the fucking road. And if any bastard comes by I’ll tell ’em to keep an eye out for you or I’ll blast his balls. Crazy dame,” the sergeant muttered, but stuck out his muddy hand, and I shook it. Firmly.

  I bit into the jerky—it was so tough my teeth were nearly yanked out of my jaw—and began to chew it slowly to make it last, savoring the juices that trickled into my empty stomach, hoping it would all stay down, for I needed the fuel. Then I began to walk, sticking to the side of the road where sometimes grass met mud and the slog was marginally easier.

  The farther I got from the truck, the more ominously silent it became, and I missed my sergeant’s colorful cursing; again, I marveled at the lack of birdsong but then scolded myself. It was night. No birds sang at night.

  The rain continued to beat down and I gave in to it, stopped fighting it. I let it wash over me, drenching every fiber of clothing, my hat, my hair, and making my journey that much harder, but soon I actually forgot about it and accepted the bone-chilling, teeth-rattling cold and wet as simply part of a new reality. Just as I accepted the trenches and the rubble and the occasional cross that emerged from the gloom, the churned-up devastation of the earth, as if it had been plowed for some future planting, a planting that would never come.

  I walked. My wool stockings were soaked; water was pouring into my boots so that my feet sloshed with each step. My lower back began to throb in time with my footsteps; shivering was so constant I didn’t know if I’d ever be able to stop. The jerky was long gone, and I began to wonder how much longer it would be until dawn. Surely, I’d reach Luxembourg by then?

  Once, I heard footsteps behind me and my skin pricked; I didn’t cry out but I did turn around, very slowly, only to find a dog panting next to me. But I had nothing to give him, even as my heart ached at the sight of this starving, mangy animal. And I did begin to cry then, as I hadn’t for the child’s shoe, and I cursed myself for eating all the jerky, and before I knew it I’d picked up a rock and was throwing it at the dog. “Go! Shoo! I don’t have anything!” The poor thing gave a pitiful cry and slunk away into the fetid darkness.

  And I knew this was one more thing I couldn’t write about, and I wondered again why I’d come, if I never wanted to record any of the real things that were happening all around me, the gritty, desperate reality, the echoing emptiness, the death.

  As I continued to trudge down that infinite muddy trail, I found myself thinking of Mickey and Mary and Charlotte and everyone back home in Hollywood. Oh, if only I could be there with them, I’d never, ever leave! And so, in order to shut out everything I was trudging through—that sweet stench of death seemed to be everywhere, permeating my rain-drenched skin—I began to concoct outlines for comedy scenarios instead. Maybe something for Mary that involved a monkey, a circus-themed film. Mickey could do something with that; he was brilliant at those atmospheric kinds of things, busy scenes in the background, children with cotton candy, elephants, clowns on tiny bicycles…Mary could be a pretty little high-wire dancer, maybe twelve or so, who had been kidnapped as a small child by the evil circus owner, brought up in the poor but convivial atmosphere of the circus performers who loved her, and tried to protect her from the evil owner, and so she grew to love them. Then, one day, her real parents, still grieving for their lost little girl, saw her photograph on the circus poster, and…

  The bleat of a horn made me jump, my breath exploding in ragged gasps; I spun around, nearly falling over in a heap, blinded by the headlights of a car that screeched to a stop as I waved my arms wildly. Shutting my eyes, I steeled myself for the impact—


  Which never came. When I opened my eyes, I saw the car had stopped only a few feet away, and I let out a shaky sigh of relief. The car had a star in the windshield—the star of a general in the United States Army.

  “What the hell is an American woman doing on this road?” an irritated voice barked from the olive green Cadillac touring car, standard U.S. military issue.

  Hastily digging through my bag to retrieve my identification papers and pass, I tried to look inside the car but could see no one but the driver, a lieutenant, who was now walking toward me with a shocked—and furious—look on his face.

  “Here,” I called, my voice bigger and braver than I felt. “I’m Lieutenant Frances Marion, of the CPI.” I handed the other lieutenant my papers; he in turn passed them to the unseen general in the back of the car.

  “Lieutenant Marion, where the hell do you think you’re going?” Again the irritated bark.

  “Luxembourg, sir.” I saluted. And smiled.

  “Damn fool women, poking their noses into a man’s war. Well, damn it, get in, Lieutenant.”

  My hands flew to my hair in order to arrange it in a becoming way—such a foolish, feminine gesture so completely out of place that I felt as if, with that one movement, I’d let my entire gender down.

  Besides, there was no fixing to be done; I was a drowned cat and surely looked like one. Giving up, I opened the car door, and slid inside.

  I didn’t ask the general his name, and he didn’t offer it. Squeezing myself into the farthest corner of the seat, as far away from him as possible, I shut my eyes and must have fallen asleep immediately.