The Race for Paris

by Meg Waite Clayton

  “Make your career,” Marie repeated under her breath, a reprimand. We were all supposed to be doing whatever we were meant to do to win the war. We were to follow orders. We were to set aside our discomfort. We were to do everything for the war effort, and nothing for ourselves.

  “Well, for my part,” I said, smoothing over Marie’s censure and tucking away my own, “I figured I’d be an old maid by the time the boys returned home, so I thought I’d best come here to find a beau!” As if I’d skipped the whole routine of accreditation and vaccination, passport and visa and PX card, and gone directly to be measured for my Saks Fifth Avenue uniform—which had been the idea of my publisher’s wife, as had been my move from the typist pool to the books page, from journalist to foreign correspondent. Lord & Taylor had made Catherine Coyne’s uniform to order for the Boston Herald; Savile Row had made Helen Kirkpatrick’s; and when Patricia Lochridge went to the Pacific for Woman’s Home Companion, Saks made hers, and Mrs. Stahlman insisted the Banner’s women readers would accept no less for their own “Intrepid Girl Reporter,” whom she insisted they have. That was the truth of how I got to Europe: my mother washed Mrs. Stahlman’s dishes and mopped her floors, and Mr. Stahlman owned the Nashville Banner, and Mrs. Stahlman—who wanted a lady war correspondent like the big-city papers—could imagine me in a role I’d never imagined for myself. I’d lived my whole life on the wrong side of Nashville and that was my future, and this was my one shot to change that.

  None of our reasons for going to war made sense, and yet they all did.

  The drone of planes sounded again, faint but present, and Liv and Marie and I started singing together, lying underneath our cots and waiting for morning to come around. We sang softly, barely over whispers, just because it felt good to sing. “The White Cliffs of Dover.” “Always.” “As Time Goes By.” I closed my eyes to block out the shadow of canvas cot above me, the drone and the ack-ack, the sharp corner of my notepad pressing against my back. And I imagined I was a girl again, singing alongside Mama’s high, sweet soprano voice, just the two of us in harmony as we washed Mrs. Stahlman’s Wedgwood china in the big sink in the big kitchen at the Belle Meade mansion, where I used to imagine I might someday live.

  THE U.S. FIRST ARMY PRESS CAMP AT CHTEAU DE VOUILLY, NORMANDY

  TUESDAY, JULY 11, 1944

  If we really wanted to go to a battle, we simply showed up on the doorstep. The briefing officer would tell us where action would be that day. If we wanted to attend, we picked up a jeep and went. We might stay for two or three days, we might live in a foxhole or in a nearby farmhouse or go back to the base to file our stories.

  —Walter Cronkite

  Fletcher eased the jeep past a cluster of two dozen journalists’ tents, the mess tent, and the wireless trucks improbably mingling with spotted cows in a field along the drive of the Château de Vouilly, the US First Army press camp in Normandy—for the time being, anyway. The air was fresh with the smell of dawn mist and cows and new-mown hay. No cordite. No death. The countryside was alive with such a delightful racket of chirps and trills and hoots, the quacks and honks of ducks and geese, that Fletcher might have left the world of the war behind entirely. And the stone home in the early light (not sunrise so much as a vague transition from starless black to gray haze) reminded him so much of his own family’s country house back in England that he just sat there for a moment, thinking of the evacuee schoolgirls billeted in Trefoil Hall, and of his parents, and of Elizabeth Houck-Smythe. It was only half five; the morning briefing wouldn’t start for hours. Half five on Tuesday, July 11. Edward’s birthday. His brother would have been twenty-nine.

  Fletcher climbed from the jeep and crossed the little moat, following signs to a door to the left of the arched front entry. It opened into a long, cool hall: limestone floor, white walls, and blue doors running along the front of the château’s north wing. A dining room done in white with blue trim—now set up for the censors—was empty, as was a living room cleared of furniture and reloaded with rows of hard wooden chairs and small writing tables, with maps and charts hung on its walls. But at a table in the kitchen, a regal, white-haired woman chatted easily in French with an American corporal and several farmhands.

  “Bonjour! Je m’appelle Alexandrine Hamel,” she said, greeting Fletcher with an enthusiasm that suggested this was exactly what her home was intended for, to provide for foreign journalists and the occasional military photographer. She offered him a glass of milk still warm from the cow, and introduced one of the men at the table as her son. The man nodded but did not rise.

  “Et mon épouse,” the son said, nodding to a younger woman, who was pregnant, at the sink.

  “Vous avez été à Saint-Lô, Monsieur Roebuck?” Madame Hamel asked Fletcher.

  “Non, à Caen,” he answered, not offering more because of the son, because this chap Hamel was safe in his château rather than in a German POW camp and that left Fletcher suspicious. Suspicion, he’d learned, served one well at war.

  “Vous aimeriez prendre un bain, j’imagine,” Madame Hamel offered. “La guerre prend un tres mauvais tour à Caen, oui?”

  Yes, Fletcher thought, a bath would be just the thing to wash away this bloody war, which was indeed going badly at Caen. He’d set off in his jeep with his gear, a sleeping bag, a change of clothes, five ten-in-one ration parcels (food enough for a month), and orders to trust his instincts, to return to the press camps or to England when he needed to return. He’d lasted a mere eleven days photographing the fighting at Caen, though—an objective meant to be taken on D-Day but still in German hands—before fear and exhaustion drove him here.

  He glanced at the Hamel son’s warm, open face. Fletcher supposed that if he were at Trefoil Hall and the Germans marched into Chichester, he’d do whatever he needed to do to stay alive, too.

  He ought not to accept Madame Hamel’s offer of a bath, he knew that. He ought not to impose. But he imagined his own mother in this position, and he heard voices in the hallway now, too—the censors arriving. So he accepted, asking only if he could get his film off first.

  He asked the younger Madame Hamel when the baby was due, and when she said October, an image of Elizabeth pushing a pram through Hyde Park on a warm October day came unbidden, unwanted.

  “Félicitations,” he said, silently hoping for them that their child would be a daughter who would never be sent to war.

  The American corporal offered to show him the way to the darkroom, but Fletcher assured him he’d manage himself. He headed not to the darkroom, then, but rather directly to the censors’ room, where he found his contact. As he waited for the man to get settled, Fletcher looked out through the wavy windowpanes crosshatched with safety tape to three herons floating in the moat below the window, raindrops plinking on the murky water. The walled pasture beyond the moat, where at Trefoil there was a proper garden, hosted spotted cows like the one Fletcher had shot the day before, there being no bovine ambulance to help the poor wounded beast. Beyond the cows, a charming outbuilding set into the stone pasture wall sprouted radio antennas—Fletcher’s excuse for this interlude from dead cows and dead soldiers and the possibility of dying himself. A booster rigged up here extended the 75-mile transmitter to 190, allowing transmission to London.

  “All right, then,” the censor said, and Fletcher handed him two rolls of film to be developed and transmitted.

  “Uncensored,” Fletcher said. The rest, he said, could be sent by courier.

  “To British intelligence back in England—undeveloped and uncensored,” the censor confirmed.

  Fletcher lowered his voice and asked about the Hamel son.

  “He fought in the French army and spent some time imprisoned by the Germans,” the man answered as he marked the two rolls for processing. “But he was no good to them because of the leg.”

  “The leg?” Fletcher said, registering why the son hadn’t stood to greet him.

  “The Germans released him in the relève, I believe. French workers
volunteering to work in Germany in exchange for the release of prisoners. But of course the Germans only released prisoners they couldn’t get work out of anyway. Monsieur Hamel’s good luck, the fact that he will never walk well again. His ticket home.”

  By the time Fletcher bathed and stopped by the mail room to send off his letters (to his parents, to the evacuee schoolgirls, to Elizabeth), the mess tent in the pasture was filled with correspondents eating a full hot breakfast. Fletcher grabbed a cup of tea (bitter, oversteeped American stuff) and a plate of eggs and bacon and toast, and he joined Matt Halton and Charles Lynch at one end of the table. The two Canadians had brought a basket of carrier pigeons along on the D-Day invasion, meaning to use the birds to send their reports back across the Channel—birds that, when released, headed instead directly toward Germany.

  “Too bad about those Nazi birds,” Fletcher said by way of greeting.

  “Traitors! Damn traitors!” Lynch replied, shaking his fist in the air as he had when the birds had flown the wrong way.

  “Roebuck, you unsympathetic bum,” Halton said. Then to the others, “Careful of this one. He looks like one of us, but he’s a British spy.”

  Fletcher nodded in greeting to the others, saying, “AFPU, actually.” The British Army Film and Photographic Unit. Fletcher had spent the first years of the war photographing bigwigs in England for the British military newspapers, a cushy position his father had arranged, that allowed the respect of a uniform without the danger—what Fletcher had wanted after Poland. It wasn’t until Edward died at Dieppe in August of 1942 that Fletcher had felt his own cowardice, and it was almost two years more before he joined the AFPU’s new No. 5 section, which was being formed to support the Normandy invasion. Fletcher hadn’t volunteered; he’d only agreed to the transfer. He was charged now with getting photographs revealing the positions from which the Germans best fought, to identify the vulnerabilities of their pillboxes and tanks and planes—photographs that could communicate in a moment’s glance as much information as pages of military reports requiring hours to read, and with an accuracy that eyewitness reports could never match.

  “I’m just a military photographer,” he said.

  Halton said, “And the difference between a spy and a military photographer is what?”

  Fletcher said, “Maybe we should have asked those Nazi birds of yours?”

  Fletcher listened to the resultant laughter, thinking if he had any guts at all, he’d at least use a movie camera; you couldn’t wear a helmet while operating a movie camera because it banged the eyepiece. He’d gone to Poland without a helmet, certainly. But back then he couldn’t quite believe war would actually break out, and he was too young to believe he was mortal even if it did.

  The journalists, as they ate, gossiped about Ernest Hemingway’s wife, Martha Gellhorn, a Collier’s reporter who had hidden in the loo of a hospital ship just after D-Day to become one of a very few correspondents—female or male—to go ashore for the assault on Omaha Beach. When she returned to London, she was stripped of her military accreditation, her travel papers, and her ration entitlements, and confined to a nurses’ training camp. “She hopped the fence and hitched a ride to an airfield,” someone said. “Left a note for Hemingway that she was off to Italy. Some RAF pilot flew her to Naples.”

  Gossip. It was the favorite pastime at the press camps.

  More coffee, more tea. More off-color jokes. “It could be worse,” someone said. “We could be in the Pacific, having our photos intentionally miscaptioned to leave the impression that General MacArthur is at the front when he’s nowhere near it, or our articles censored out of existence if his military genius is brought into doubt.” And more posturing about which correspondent would do what by when, most importantly who would be the first to report from Paris. Fletcher listened quietly, remembering when he’d been one of this club, when he’d walked away from Oxford with only his camera, in search of adventure.

  “So you’re Fletcher Roebuck,” an American said, a cameraman by his armband, so Fletcher gave him some respect.

  “‘This crazy Brit who will stand up against anything for the photo’—that’s the way Charles Harper describes you,” the chap said. “He likes to tell how prescient you were in Poland, although of course that story makes Charles Harper himself prescient, too.”

  Laughter again, this time at Charles’s expense. The American cameraman laughed the loudest.

  But Charles Harper had saved Fletcher’s life on that street in Warsaw—or, if you believed Charles’s account of the story, then it was Fletcher who’d done the saving, and Charles whose life had been at risk. It had been exciting, Poland had been, but you couldn’t see how close to being killed you were until you arrived home and knew you had survived. And if you had any sense you found a nice girl and settled down to a normal life, like Charles had.

  The cameraman said, “I guess the prospect of fatherhood is making Charles Harper soft, keeping him Stateside.”

  A Stars and Stripes journalist replied, “But I heard Olivia Harper is here, in France.”

  “You think Charles Harper’s wife is his only chance for fatherhood?” the cameraman replied.

  Fletcher frowned as the others again laughed. Even in Poland, Charles had girls, yes. A cameraman he and Charles had met in Warsaw—Julien Bryan—loved to joke with Charles’s Polish girls that Charles could only put them in stories while Julien could put them in the movies. That was before Charles married, though, and it was one thing to risk getting a girl pregnant when you were free to make it right, and quite another when you had a wife.

  “To Charles Harper, a hell of a reporter,” Fletcher said.

  “To hell with Harper,” the cameraman said. “To Paris!” And they raised their cups to that.

  In the château’s living room, new maps and charts were swapped in for ones from the prior day, and journalists settling into the hard wooden chairs made plans to jeep together to the front or to meet back at the château that evening for a bit of hard cider from the tap in the kitchen or a neat whiskey, or two, or three. A. J. Liebling from The New Yorker was taking up a collection in hopes of acquiring a barrel of old Calvados from a neighboring farmer. The American cameraman from breakfast invited Fletcher to join in a poker game at the end of the day, but Fletcher claimed prior plans with Charles Harper; Fletcher couldn’t say why he wanted to yank the shirty little American’s chain, except that the chap slept in a dry bedroll in a tent and wore laundered uniforms, and came back to friendly poker games in the warmth of the correspondents’ room fireplace every night.

  A hush fell as Monk Dickson took the front of the room and smiled his shy smile. “Shall we talk about where you can find the war today, if you’re so inclined?” he asked. He set to on the details: a million men, a half million tons of supplies, and two hundred thousand vehicles had landed on the beachhead, which was now seventy miles wide. The next objective was the city of Saint-Lô and the commanding ground encircling it.

  “Isn’t Paris in the other direction?” one of the correspondents called out.

  Another answered, “I’ll have a glass of champagne waiting for you when you get there,” and everyone laughed.

  A coordinated attack by three divisions through the hills protecting Saint-Lô originally scheduled for July 9 was going forward that morning, along a ten-mile front, Dickson explained. The Thirty-fifth Division was to take the right bank of the Vire, the elbow made by the river northwest of the city. The Second Division would make an assault against Hill 192. The Twenty-ninth would push toward the ridges along the Saint-Lô–Bayeux highway and Saint-Lô itself, to cut off the German reserves from the south and east.

  Saint-Lô, Fletcher decided. If he had any guts, he’d still be with the soldiers at Caen rather than eating hot eggs in a press camp and casting suspicion on a Frenchman who had by some miracle survived a German camp. But Fletcher couldn’t bear to return to Caen.

  Monk Dickson had barely finished his presentation before everyone piled
into jeeps. Fletcher followed them down the rutted drive and along a sunken road through Saint-André-de-l’Epine, the journalists going slowly so as not to kick up dust, staying low as bullets flew overhead. Outside Saint-Lô, while the journalists left their jeeps at the point beyond which nonmilitary vehicular traffic was prohibited, Fletcher showed his British military identification and continued on. By noon, he was on foot, too, photographing engineers from the US Sixtieth Combat Battalion planting discarded casings of 105mm shells filled with TNT to blow through the hedgerows. He checked his pistol—a Webley Mk IV that had been his brother’s—and gathered his nerve to follow a platoon of German soldiers long enough to see them sever the wire connecting the Second Battalion from its command. There was nothing he could do to stop them. He took the photos and slipped back to rejoin the exhausted Allied soldiers pressing on, replacements coming in, going out, getting killed. More replacements replacing them.

  A FIELD HOSPITAL IN NORMANDY

  WEDNESDAY, JULY 5, 1944

  Dearest Mrs. R; Thank you very much for letting me come down. The White House is certainly a fine rest cure place . . . I was a fool to come back from Europe and I knew it and was miserable about it; but it seemed necessary vis-à-vis Ernest. (It is quite a job being a woman, isn’t it; you cannot do your work and simply get on with it because that is selfish, you have to be two things at once.)