The Race for Paris

by Meg Waite Clayton

  —Journalist Martha Gellhorn in an April 28, 1944, letter to First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt

  The Normandy weather routinely went from bone-cold rain to yellow-dust heat with nothing in between, but on the rare fine days at the field hospital, Marie and I would pull a table and wooden folding chairs from the mess tent into the shade of an apple tree, and we’d set up our typewriters and smoke and talk and bang out our stories. Liv would join us when the mail came (thin paper, thin envelopes), and I would share my mother’s letters, always reading them twice to myself first, choosing carefully and editing to make it seem that Mama sat, wool and needles in hand, in the drawing room with the Belle Meade ladies rather than coming around with the coffeepot and washing the china afterward. Liv and Marie loved Mama’s colorful expressions—“every dog should have a few fleas” to excuse someone’s shortcomings or “the bishop himself is kicking in the stained glass” when something irritated her. They loved, too, the snippets she sent from Eleanor Roosevelt’s popular “My Day” columns. I’d just read one—“‘No creative work, it seems to me, can be accomplished unless people sometimes have quiet and peace around them. It is hard to find such peace in this war period.’”—and I was imagining the First Lady’s secretary adding one of my pieces to the clippings of women’s writing she compiled for her boss or even inviting me to attend Mrs. Roosevelt’s weekly gathering of women journalists at the White House, when the CO’s clerk came to find us.

  As he approached, Liv whispered, “Why does he always look like he means to send us home to shoot fancy wedding copy for the society pages?”

  Marie said under her breath, “‘Fancy wedding copy’—for pity’s sake,” her feelings hurt by Liv’s easy dismissal of the kind of reporting Marie had done before the war, and which I imagined as the best I might hope for after the peace.

  The clerk, though, had come with news that the CO had found a spare jeep for the next day. “Two seats, for Mrs. Harper and Miss Tyler,” he said.

  Several AP newspapers, including the Chicago Daily News, had run Liv’s shots of the Count fingering the boys’ intestines and of Joey and Annette—photos that were grainy and dark, the slight blur from the long exposures leaving the subjects ghostlike, evocative. “Operating Room by Flashlight,” they were captioned. They’d run in the Nashville Banner along with the piece I’d written, too. And they were the reason the CO had found us a jeep.

  After the clerk left, Liv shared a letter from her brother, the first she’d received from Geoffrey since she’d been in France, as far as I knew. He’d written from “somewhere in England,” where he was training for a special mission, so she shouldn’t worry if she didn’t hear from him for weeks or even months. As I listened to her read—every word down to the “P.S. Do you remember that doll with the shoe that disappeared? I needed a fishing bobber. Sorry!”—I thought really the best way to get anyone to start worrying about a thing is to tell them not to. But Liv tucked her worry down under a good thick layer of how smart Geoffrey was, how he could do anything.

  It was the fifth of July, that day was. We hadn’t had fireworks or even a bonfire the day before because of the blackout, but we’d received no new wounded, the hospital emptying in preparation for leapfrogging forward, closer to the front. And I’d written a little skit the nurses and the mess tent staff had performed. A skit didn’t have to be all that funny to make people laugh when they’d spent their day tending maimed boys—gallows humor was the way we let the steam off the boil of war, the little bit of insanity that kept us sane. Still, it was gratifying to hear the laughter, to know that my words had a hand in making people forget what they wanted to forget, even if just for an hour.

  The next morning, Liv and I loaded cameras and notepads, gas masks, and lipsticks into our musette bags, and climbed into the back of a jeep that took us to a cemetery near the coast—a jeep not able, inexplicably, to take us to the front. At Omaha Beach, “Jerome Neff, with Graves Registration,” introduced himself while men with spades in hand poked about wherever sticks protruded from the white sand, each stick topped with a canvas bag attached like a hobo’s burden. A few feet from where our jeep had dropped us, two soldiers pulled a body wrapped in what had been the dead boy’s half of a pup tent from the sand, unwrapped the boy, and put him in a clean white shroud.

  “We don’t get too many newspaper girls here,” Jerome said with a smile that seemed out of place in the setting, but I supposed if I spent my days digging up the dead and reburying them, I might grow immune to it, too.

  During the first days of the invasion, he explained, they’d buried fallen men shoulder to shoulder in mass graves in the sand so that each new wave of soldiers coming ashore wouldn’t see them. They put each dead man’s belongings on a stake where he was buried, along with one of his dog tags—that was what the bags were. It was a month to the day after the invasion had begun, and the whole beach was awash in the detritus of war: the remains of half-tracks and jeeps and tanks on the sand, ocean-soaked rucksacks and bedrolls, a typewriter with its roller intact but a wiry tangle where its keys ought to be. The wreckage of the American Mulberry—six hundred thousand tons of concrete towed across the Channel from Britain for a landing port—lay ugly and useless, destroyed by a gale before it could be anchored to the Channel seabed. Antiaircraft balloons dotted the Channel, though, protecting arriving ships, and one high bluff housed a hospital tent, a barbed wire enclosure for prisoners, and long stretches of wooden crosses marking new graves. Everywhere, men and equipment rolled inland as others reburied the dead, the Graves Registration staff pausing in their work to answer my questions or to smile for Liv’s camera, or simply to watch Liv and me the way the boys back home watched the prettier girls.

  We were soaked and weary, ready to return to the field hospital without complaint, when it became clear there’d been a snafu—situation normal: all fucked up. Our return jeep wouldn’t be available until morning. Jerome found us bedrolls and a tent (we didn’t ask where they’d come from, among all the dead) and took us to dinner in the officers’ mess. We were treated to mystery beef, peas, and fresh bread from a nearby village (bread I held to my face to breathe in the smell), along with a good bit of cemetery humor (“This place is so popular—people are dying to get in here”), and assurances they were digging a new latrine just for us. “We’re not good at much here,” one of our dinner companions said, “but we surely do know how to dig.”

  As we settled into our bedrolls under a starless sky later that night, a line from a Baudelaire poem emerged from some part of my mind unvisited since twelfth-grade French class. “Je suis un cimetière abhorré de la lune.” I am a cemetery by the moon unblessed. I hadn’t thought to ask for a flashlight, and it was too dark to see my own writing, but I pulled out my notepad. I wrote just a few lines on each page so I wouldn’t scribble one line atop another, a full piece taking shape in my mind—the contrast between the commotion of the men and supplies coming ashore to head for war and the stillness of the dead left behind. If the words slipped away, the emotion would go with them, whatever part of my subconscious I might have exposed tucking itself back out of sight and leaving behind nothing but sludge.

  I wished I had my typewriter. I could type blind perfectly well.

  “What could you write about this place that anyone would print?” Liv asked. “There’s no hope here, nothing to suggest victory is just a hedgerow away.”

  She stood and wandered out into the graveyard as my words ebbed, and with them my pride that I could call to mind the Baudelaire quote, that the poet was French, that two lines from the poem would have been the perfect opening and closing for a piece about this moonless cemetery and the memories buried here.

  “‘J’ai plus de souvenirs que si j’avais mille ans,’” I said to myself, the first line of the poem with which I’d meant to end my piece. I have more memories than if I’d lived a thousand years.

  In the distance, truck engines whined and gears ground. I took a long drink from my canteen and
I followed Liv out into the wooden crosses spooling toward the darkness, toward the cliff and the white sand and the men and tanks and trucks and the dark Channel, the ships.

  “Thomas,” she said as she sat in front of one of the crosses. “I saw this grave earlier. Thomas James, although if he’s any relation to me I don’t know it.”

  Thomas. I closed my eyes the way I was meant to close them when I was necking with Tommy Stahlman in his Chrysler Highlander, down by the Harpeth River, although I always peeked; I always needed to see Tommy falling in love with me. Tommy, whom I’d known since we fished together in Richland Creek the summer Mama, left with no one to care for me after Grandma died, began taking me with her to work, slipping me books from Mr. Stahlman’s library and sending me off with an admonition to stay clear of the Belle Meade children.

  I said to Liv, “I was in love with a boy back home named Thomas.”

  “And he’s here now?”

  “Lordy, I sure hope he’s not here!”

  There was nothing funny about this cimetière abhorré de la lune, but we both laughed. It sounded eerie, our laughter among the graves.

  Liv said, “That’s who you write to? Those long letters you write at the picnic table. That’s who the letters you don’t share are from?”

  I reached out and touched the dog tag nailed to the cross, thinking of the D-Day letter Tommy had written to me because who else could he write to—I knew him better than anyone. Thirty-mile-an-hour winds and the troops vomiting into the sand from the fire buckets or using their helmets or puking their guts out over the rails. They were relieved to pile onto the landing crafts despite German fire and bodies falling everywhere. That’s what Tommy had written: “I thought I’d rather die quickly, Jane—a bullet to my chest.” And German machine gunners firing and boys begging for help in the bloody water and Tommy’s boat passing right by them. They were not a hospital ship, he kept telling his men, all the while praying to the god he never did believe in.

  Liv asked, “Will you marry your Thomas after the war, Jane?”

  He’ll be marrying one of the Miss Ingrams—that’s what Mama had told me when I came home far later than a nice girl ought to one night to find her sitting in her rocking chair on the front porch. I’d been so angry at her—not at Tommy, who was necking with me even after he was engaged to one of the Miss Ingrams, but at Mama, who spent her days washing the Wedgwood china he ate from and her evenings washing our own plain white dishes while I was out trying to ruin my reputation with a boy who never did mean to marry me.

  I fingered the raised name on the dog tag of this Tommy who wasn’t my Tommy, who wasn’t anyone’s Tommy anymore. “I don’t know,” I said.

  Liv and I returned the next morning over roads pounded dry overnight, the traffic kicking up a caustic dust, to find our field hospital settling into a new field closer to the front. A medic chased two cows through the long grass to uncover trip wires or mines left by the Germans, and gear was strewn everywhere. Not so much as a tent set up in the shade of a moss-covered tree yet, though, and the place stank to high heaven, a dead animal smell.

  “In no time, they’ll have the unit back up again. They just have to clear the area first,” I told Liv.

  Clear the area, as if the nurses were moving rocks and twigs, maybe the occasional rusty plow blade. But the dead animal smell was no run-over ground squirrel. No dead cow like those we heard were everywhere at the front. Liv slid a cut-film holder into her Speed Graphic and focused on a nurse waving over a stretcher crew, then on the crew laying the stretcher in the grass and gently lifting a dead soldier, an involuntary hero who’d made it across the Channel only to end up here with the dice he carried for luck still in his pocket, his Saint Christopher’s medal at his chest. Where his legs ought to have been was a stringy mass of muscle and skin and a sharp shard of thighbone the dirty red-black of dried blood.

  Liv adjusted the bellows but didn’t take the shot.

  “If that boy were my brother,” she said, “I wouldn’t want anyone to photograph him like that. I wouldn’t want anyone to photograph his face.”

  The stretcher crew carried off the dead boy, and the nurse returned to walking the field, looking methodically, mechanically, for the dead. Other nurses and medics dragged a large canvas out over a cleared section of the field, the tent’s red cross in the white circle taking shape, albeit deflated and creased. I left Liv to photograph it while I helped Marie set up our smaller tent, then fetched water for a sponge bath and examined the prior day’s mail: letters from Mama and Tommy, and one with the return address simply “The White House, Washington.” I carefully peeled open that envelope as if it might not really be meant for me, to find a typewritten slip no longer than a bread-and-butter note:

  July 2, 1944

  Dear Miss Tyler,

  Your compassionate portrayal of the nurse helping save the wounded boy in “Operating Room by Flashlight” will surely help convince American women how dearly the auxiliary military services need them. Thank you for writing it.

  Very Sincerely Yours,

  Eleanor Roosevelt

  I tucked the note back into its envelope, wanting someone to assure me it was real and at the same time trying to understand how Mrs. Roosevelt could have been left with the impression that Joey was back home eating peach ice cream. I read Tommy’s letter (a short thing, mostly about how the watermelons at home would be ripe), thinking perhaps the censors had cut the last paragraph of my “Operating Room” piece, or even just the last line. And when Liv and Marie went out to the latrine that night (Marie saying she hated moving forward because the shelling was always worse, but at least we had newly dug latrines), I puzzled over the note one last time before burying it in my rucksack without mentioning it to anyone. I only asked Liv and Marie, as we lay in our cots that night, whether there was ever a scrap of truth left when the censors finished.

  “Never mind that the fellas’ stories are wired off while ours go by carrier pigeons, with the darn birds stopping to party in Brighton and Crawley on the way so our news is old and moldy before anyone reads it,” I said. I felt like a fraud, someone claiming to understand the meaning of this war when all I saw was its wreckage, when even the wreckage I reported was edited into something else. “At least you don’t have a problem, Liv,” I said. “The Signal Corps staff might ruin your film in the darkroom, and the censors might crop a shot or blur a face or censor a photo out of existence, but no one is going to cut pieces out of your shots, paste together what’s left, and put your name to it.”

  Five days and five more “regrets” by the CO later—with just a few days left in Marie’s and my three-week accreditations and not much more than a week in Liv’s—a jeep became available to take us to a nearby landing strip: planes taxiing to a stop, loading litters of wounded boys through their wide double doors, and taking off again for England. Twelve minutes, that was how long it took each plane, not much longer than it took the pilot to smoke a cigarette and all the notice we’d been given about the jeep. When we returned to the field hospital—mercifully the same evening—we resolved to keep our rucksacks always at the ready: a change of fatigues and socks and underthings; a canteen, a mess kit, and a few K ration breakfast boxes; a tin tube of cold cream, a towel and soap, lipstick and powder; poncho; folding spade and gas mask; notepads and pens. Liv forsook her spade in favor of film and flashbulbs, and her gown and gloves. And as we organized ourselves, Liv began talking about Helen Kirkpatrick’s Herald Tribune piece that had first exposed the German rearmament of the Rhineland.

  “In March of ’36,” she said, her awe communicating an ambition even she wouldn’t voice, that she longed to break a major story like that. Kirkpatrick had left Switzerland for Freiburg, Germany, on rumors of activity along the riverfront, and found German soldiers in the streets and Nazi flags flying everywhere in open violation of the Treaty of Versailles.

  Marie said, “Can you imagine that woman leaving a perfectly good marriage by cabling her husband fr
om Europe simply ‘NOT RETURNING’?” She giggled the way she did, at that rumor which was the truth of how Helen Kirkpatrick had ended her marriage.

  Liv said, “Helen was the sole newspaper representative coordinating the invasion press coverage, and still they won’t let us beyond the hospital camps.”

  Marie said, “For pity’s sake, Liv, you can’t mean to go on and on again about getting to the front.”

  By the time the CO found us a third jeep, Liv was scheduled to return to London in three days. Marie and I each had been granted three more weeks at the field hospital, but her request for more time in France had been denied. “It wasn’t my call, Mrs. Harper. You’ll have to take it up with your Public Relations Division friends,” the CO had insisted, “or perhaps with the First Lady.” Liv, too, had received a note from Mrs. Roosevelt by then, one dated after mine, which referenced Joey’s death—a fact that Mrs. Roosevelt must have come to understand somehow in the days between the two notes. And still I didn’t share my note. It was hard to explain why I’d kept it secret, and I wasn’t sure how Liv would feel to know of the misimpression her photographs had left.

  As we stood with our readied rucksacks, waiting for our jeep—this one to take us to a recently liberated village to meet with a woman sharpshooter who’d trained the French resistance in weaponry—Liv suggested that if we could get our driver out even briefly, we could hijack the jeep to the front.

  I pulled out a notepad and pen and pretended to begin writing a letter. “Dear Mama,” I said, “I know you’ll think I don’t have the sense God gave a goose, but I went AWOL to cover the fighting rather than to run away from it, and now I’m locked up in England, waiting to be put on the next ship home.”

  “We wouldn’t come back, not before Paris,” Liv said. “I could say I think one of the tires is flat, and one of you can agree.”

  Marie said, “You’re such a card, Liv.”

  I laughed uneasily, imagining my mother kneeling at mass the way I’d knelt during the mess tent mass that morning, and knowing her prayers would be for me.