The Race for Paris

by Meg Waite Clayton

  The sharpshooter—Jeanne Bohec—told us of gunfire at dawn and urgently coding telegrams to London and carrying messages by bicycle, letters that weren’t letters at all. When Germans stopped her, she told them that she was going to visit her grandmother, that she carried a map because she didn’t know the area well. She told us, too, of a last-minute sermon held under a parachute, the look of her camp as it was destroyed by the Germans, the frustration of being able to do nothing to fight back, having been refused a weapon because of her gender even though she’d taught the boys to shoot.

  As we headed back to the field hospital that evening, Liv said the little town reminded her of the first photo her mother had ever shown her, a Margaret Bourke-White aerial shot that ran in the debut issue of Life. The town in the photo wasn’t really similar to the French town disappearing in the distance—houses and fences all the same dull brown-gray—but there was the same sameness about it, the same house after house not much different from the next.

  “My mother told me Bourke-White was a chubby girl who dressed abominably,” Liv said. “She was called Peg, and she wore cotton stockings and no makeup, and she once took a snake to school. ‘And she’s divorced’—you could sure hear Mother’s disapproval on that. But still, she was awed by those photographs.” Liv looked to the pockmarked road ahead. “‘Imagine that, Livvie.’ That’s what my mother said to me as she admired that photograph, and she looked right into me the way she did, and I had no idea what I was supposed to imagine.”

  I touched her arm lightly, sure it was the fact of a woman photojournalist that Liv’s mother had meant for her to imagine, wishing that my mother, like Liv’s, could imagine a life for me that was different than her own.

  Liv said, “Photos of the parachute sermon itself, the gunfire, the bicycle ride—those are the photos I ought to be taking. Not photographs of a woman in a safely liberated French town recalling them.”

  In less than seventy-two hours, Liv was to return to London and perhaps even to the United States, where the head of Immigration and Naturalization, a Mrs. Shipley, would likely pull her passport and give her a devil of a time before giving it back. Mrs. Shipley held that women had no business being in war zones. She and the CO, we liked to joke, must be from the same austere Vermont whistle-stop.

  “Doesn’t it feel like one of the tires is going flat?” Liv said loudly enough that no one could fail to hear her even over the rush of wind in the jeep.

  Our driver glanced in the rearview mirror, then reached up and adjusted it. “It’s not the tires, Mrs. Harper, it’s the road,” he said.

  Marie and I said nothing at all.

  The jeep-ambulances bringing back the wounded the next morning came with rumors that Saint-Lô was finally being taken. Gerhardt’s Twenty-ninth Infantry had made its way through the German line and taken the high ground a half mile from the city. The road was open. We heard the news from an ambulance driver we’d befriended, a conscientious objector from Colorado Springs named Hank Bend who had the round face and round spectacles of a Bill Mauldin cartoon soldier-innocent. “Gerhardt has a division in the field, one here in the hospital, and one in the cemetery already,” he told us. “God help him today.” And when Hank returned later with another ambulance load, he brought more news: Boston Globe and BBC correspondent Iris Carpenter and Liv’s fellow AP correspondent Ruth Cowan were at Saint-Lô.

  “They can’t be!” Liv protested. “They’re assigned to a hospital like we are, the Fifth General outside Carentan.”

  Hank shrugged and said the story he heard was they got tired of the lizards and the mosquitos, tired of yellow dust all over everything they owned, so they caught a ride on an ambulance to the front. “Story I heard,” he said, “is when they were found thumbing a ride back to file their stories and asked what the hell they were doing—they were war correspondents, weren’t they? didn’t they have jeeps?—Miss Cowan said yes, they were, but they were ‘just women,’ they didn’t rate being taken care of like the men.”

  “Don’t rate being taken care of like the men,” Liv repeated later that evening as I struggled to apply bleach to my roots—a thing I’d never have thought to do back home, where people tallied that kind of thing against a girl. The idea to bleach my hair (which, unbleached, was the dingy color of autumn weeds plastered flat after a rain) had come to me as I’d stood before the Saks fitting room’s three-way mirror, a professional tailor pinning the skirt of my Intrepid Girl Reporter uniform. Some prettier and more accomplished me had peered back, someone who might carry off shorter, blonder hair set in a permanent wave. I’d only been headed for London then; I hadn’t imagined I’d be sharing a tent in a field in Normandy with no privacy to update my look discreetly and nothing more than a helmet in which to rinse the bleach from my hair.

  “For pity’s sake, can anyone really self-apply that stuff?” Marie said. “Here, let me.”

  She took the bottle and set to work, the tent air sharpening with the bleach scent as we talked about the problems with trying to look anything like feminine here: the boots that shortened our legs; the slacks that hid them; our skin so quickly toughened from living in the foul weather, from washing with harsh soap.

  “I’ve stopped getting my period,” Marie said.

  “Me, too,” Liv said, swatting at a mosquito on her too-thin arm and missing.

  “Well, a small blessing that,” I said. A result of the travel, the work, the stress, but a convenient one.

  Liv, who lay on her cot in her long underwear, launched into a funny little riff about how I might react if German bombers interrupted the bleach routine, then another imagining herself as a blonde. “Can blondes wear red?” she asked. And she started talking about her gown, then, which she’d never unpacked. “It’s the only red thing I’ve ever worn,” she said, although that wasn’t quite true; she’d never worn it, not the dress and not the gloves either.

  I said, “You brought your dancing slippers, too, I hope, Liv. You can’t be dancing in a red gown and combat boots. They’ll revoke your dance card!”

  “I suppose I’ll have to dance barefoot,” Liv said, and she tossed a dirty sock at me.

  I said, “You’d best find a dancing partner who’s light on his feet!”

  Marie rinsed the bleach from her hands in the water in my helmet, and I wiped the bottle with my towel, tucked it back into my rucksack, and settled in to wait for the bleach to work its magic on me. And we sang more softly than ever as we lay in our cots later that night, torn between the too-hot bedrolls and the too-hungry mosquitos. “We Mustn’t Say Goodbye.” “She’ll Always Remember.” “We’ll Meet Again.”

  When I woke not long before dawn the next morning, Liv’s rucksack was gone, and her bedroll and cameras. I threw on my slacks and stuffed my typewriter into my musette bag, grabbed my pack and ran, dragging my sprawling bedroll behind me. Liv was already setting off, but Hank Bend, in the driver’s seat, said, “I think that’s Miss Tyler,” and they stopped and backed up.

  “Livvie, they won’t give you time to repack your nightie before they take your passport and send you home,” I whispered.

  “You can have the front seat if you want it, Jane,” she answered. “But we’ll get Hank in trouble if we dawdle here.”

  She had already promised Hank this would be a one-way ride, that she would find her own way back rather than take space needed for the wounded.

  “Lordy, I should have seen you for trouble the day I met you, Liv,” I said as I threw my rucksack and my sprawling bedroll into the jeep and climbed in, doubling Hank Bend’s crime. “You surely don’t believe in the easy way, do you?” I said, wondering how long we could last outside the field hospital before the military police found us, or how we’d get our work censored and sent home, or what we’d eat beyond the breakfast rations in our packs.

  As Hank shifted into gear and we set off, Liv said to him, “I always did think passports were overrated, didn’t you, Hank? They don’t get you anywhere you want to be.”


  And I supposed she was right. I supposed we could cross our bridges when the river ran too high to wade across, when the water ran too fast to swim.

  SAINT-LÔ, FRANCE

  TUESDAY, JULY 18, 1944

  I learned to appreciate a nice, deep, muddy ditch which I could roll into during shelling . . . to take a satisfactory bath in my helmet without upsetting it . . . to live like a gypsy, out of my bed roll, and to sleep almost anywhere.

  —Photojournalist Margaret Bourke-White

  The narrow dirt road was rutted and shell-pocked, and hectic with GIs in Volkswagen command cars and BMW motorcycles left behind by the Germans, with spotted cows in the fields mooing to be milked, with abandoned dogs. Hank chatted nervously, filling the empty ambulance with apologies for the jarring ride and look-at-thats and explanations for so many things that didn’t need explaining: fuchsia bushes bright against old stone walls German gunners might be hiding behind, an improbably white rabbit tail disappearing into the rubble of what had been a cottage, and everywhere the remains of tanks and airplanes and gliders in the fields or pushed off to the sides of the roads. “Our tanks burn when hit, which the German tanks don’t,” Hank explained, “and only one man can get out at a time.”

  As we approached Saint-Lô, Hank fell silent, no longer even honking at fellow ambulance drivers or leaning out to call greetings to the soldiers securing the area, standing every few hundred yards on the road. I welcomed the quiet at first, before I began to doubt myself or to doubt what we were doing, disobeying orders, coming to the front. The silence of the jeep, though, was nothing compared to the silence of Saint-Lô.

  A single part of a cathedral spire stood awash in a wreckage of collapsed stone. We saw it as we topped a distant hill. All the rest of the city was strewn across the landscape in great sprawls of broken building timbers, vast rubble piles of stone, heroic trunks of trees spilled like toothpicks, all dulled to the sooty gray of ash. Allied bombs—not German ones—had leveled the city. Tons of American-made explosives dropped by American boys from American-made B-17s and B-24s.

  Hank pulled to a stop when the jeep could no longer plow through the rubble. “We sure liberated the hell out of this town, didn’t we?” he said, a choke in his voice even though he’d approached this city ruin before. I made the sign of the cross over my chest.

  Hank and I climbed from the jeep-ambulance, but Liv only stood on the passenger seat and raised her Speed Graphic toward the ruin of the cathedral. There a dozen or so soldiers gathered around a jeep-ambulance that had come from another direction. Two of them were removing an olive drab blanket from a body laid out on a wooden door while two others carefully unfolded an American flag. They laid the flag reverentially over their commander, Major Thomas D. Howie of the 116th Infantry. He’d led the attack on Saint-Lô under orders to take the town if he had to spend the whole battalion to do so. Spend the whole battalion, as if hundreds of men’s lives were no more than pocket change.

  Liv photographed the soldiers, their helmets removed out of respect as they lifted the flag-draped body up onto the pile of cathedral rubble. She flipped the cut-film holder and took the second shot before climbing from the jeep. She wasn’t the only one to capture their stricken faces; a knot of photographers and reporters had followed the men all the way from Hill 122, staying the night in the shadow of the jeep-ambulance. No one broke the silence. No one questioned this display of emotion from men known for their hardness to the realities of war.

  Liv switched to her Leica as I looked to the others, feeling a want to have someone to share this silent emotion with, not that Hank Bend and Liv Harper were no one, but for this moment I needed a whole congregation around me, the comfort of all those understanding glances and silent prayers. A photographer who’d had his camera pointed in our direction lowered it and put it into a changing bag to swap out the film, his square shoulders and his eyes and his stubbled chin ordinary, really, with only his generous ears and his hair—prematurely gray—at all remarkable. British, by the uniform. A small parenthesis of lines lingered at the edges of his mouth, a note of recognition. He finished changing his film and tucked his spent roll into his musette bag, and he took a drink from the canteen on his utility belt. Without a word to anyone else, he split off from the group and headed toward us, his lanky frame in his military garb moving easily.

  He addressed Liv as he reached us, saying, “He took a shell fragment in the lung yesterday, before dawn. He was looking out over his troops, making sure everyone had their heads down.”

  His eyes were the green-brown of moss, the skin below bruised with exhaustion. His Adam’s apple bobbed in the stubble of his neck. I wondered who he was, and how he knew Liv.

  “He taught English literature,” he said, “before the war.”

  “English literature,” Liv repeated dully.

  He said to me, as if it might be an easier question of me than of Liv, “You ladies do have your CO’s permission to be here?”

  Liv focused her Leica on the flag-draped body, the red and white of the stripes, the stars against the blue. I stared down at the notepad that, by some instinct, had found its way into my hands.

  “Livvie, oh, Livvie, you are daft.” His voice lingering on the last perfectly hit t.

  Liv adjusted the lens and took photograph after photograph in rapid succession while I scribbled my words. She spent the whole roll, as if she had film to waste.

  “How will you manage to get your film out?” he asked softly, the solid set of his lips suggesting he wasn’t challenging or reprimanding; he was just being practical.

  Liv lowered her camera, finally, and said, simply, “Fletcher.”

  I looked to Hank—poor Hank, doubting now that he should have brought us here. I wanted to reassure him, but something in his eyes behind his round glasses reminded me so much of the wounded soldiers waiting patiently outside the hospital tent that I thought better of saying anything.

  Liv put her Leica, a fresh roll of film, and a lightproof canister in her changing bag and, with her hands in the armholes to work inside the bag, removed the exposed film and enclosed it in the canister, taped the canister closed, and loaded the new roll.

  Fletcher took the spent film from her and placed it in a condom. “To keep it dry,” he explained as he tied it closed, like tying a balloon. He hesitated for a moment—the awkwardness of having to hand her the film-filled condom? But then he did so without seeming to think the least of it.

  “You might have a go at it in Kodachrome, Livvie,” he said. “The shot wants color.” The suggestion offered gently. That had been his hesitation: he was uncomfortable suggesting how Liv ought to shoot her photographs.

  Liv had only one roll of Kodachrome, but she put the canister in the changing bag with the camera. “If we’d followed the rules, Fletcher,” she said quietly as she swapped in the color film, “I’d have no pictures to worry about getting out, and Jane would have no stories.”

  Fletcher smiled a little sadly in my direction, his slightly crooked teeth white against his sun-worn and unshaven skin.

  I said, “We haven’t a fool’s clue how we’ll get our work out.”

  At the pile of rubble that had been the church of Saint Croix, soldiers and civilians alike began to put flowers on the flag-draped corpse. Liv resumed taking photographs with the Kodachrome, capturing the flag and the flowers against the rubble gray.

  Fletcher sighed. “I do have an idea. For today, anyway.”

  Then to me, again with the charming little bit of smile, just enough to convey warmth while remaining respectful of the circumstances, “I’m Fletcher Roebuck, by the way. I’m afraid Livvie here has lost her proper manners. Her husband, Charles, and I are chums.”

  He shook my hand, his fingernails dark with dirt.

  “Fletcher,” I repeated, lingering on the comfortable flick of his name.

  OUTSIDE SAINT-LÔ

  TUESDAY, JULY 18, 1944

  [Lee Miller, under house arrest for her actions at
Saint-Malo] was rubbing eau de cologne all over herself because she’d been bitten by fleas. I told her calamine would be better, and gave her some of mine.

  —Journalist Catherine Coyne

  Fletcher’s jeep—a thing with no doors and a hairline crack in its windshield—had a propensity to find and share every bump and hole in the road. Liv sat in the passenger seat, her lens trained on the military trucks moving troops and supplies, the roadside littered with gum wrappers and cigarette butts, the summer-green landscape ahead carved with unexpected strips of black. I braced myself with one hand and held my Corona in my lap with the other as we banked into a turn, our rucksacks shifting sideways, pressing the two side buckles on my boot into my leg. I righted my typewriter again, and as I tried to make something of the flag and the flowers and the door stretcher and the soldiers we’d left behind, the dust everywhere, I envied Liv and Fletcher their cameras, their ability to capture a moment as they observed it and then leave it behind.

  Fletcher relaxed his grip on the steering wheel, leaving a single index finger there. “Your military will have someone looking for you two in no time, Liv,” he said. “They probably already do.”

  Liv had met Fletcher just twice before that morning, although Charles and Fletcher had known each other for years. The first time she’d met him, at the New York Daily Press office just after she and Charles had become engaged, Fletcher had asked Liv to bring him tea—with lemon, he’d said; his blunder, his presumption, mistaking her for an office girl—and she’d set him right, she’d answered, “You must be Fletcher Roebuck, then,” in a tone meant to leave no doubt she’d heard enough about him to disapprove and didn’t mind if he knew she did. Still, she’d been the embarrassed one.

  They’d met a second time when Liv and Charles had bumped into Fletcher at the Palm Court in London, the day before she was to cross the Channel. Fletcher invited them to stay the night at his family’s country home, Trefoil Hall—which Charles had visited when he and Fletcher had returned from Poland years before. It wasn’t far from the port where Liv was to disembark. Fletcher hadn’t meant to go with them to Chichester, he’d meant to stay the night in London, but Charles somehow persuaded him to drive them down.