The Race for Paris

by Meg Waite Clayton

  The men draped a sign around her neck—“J’ai couché avec un sale Boche”; I slept with a dirty Hun—and forced her to stand, and the crowd booed one last time. Fletcher was beside the girl then, and although the crowd continued to jeer, the anger had ebbed.

  Someone handed Liv back her camera, and she took a shot of the girl’s naked scalp—a startling white against the bent-armed cross of hair and the red where metal had nicked skin. “Swastika,” from the Sanskrit “svastika,” meaning a talisman. I’d written a column on it back in Nashville. The German word meant, literally, “it is good.”

  Fletcher lifted the girl and carried her off, bending his head low and murmuring some small, soothing words as the older woman who had been weeping hurried after them.

  Liv and I ducked into the nearest building, an empty schoolhouse, and sank into little chairs in the first room we came into. The seats were hard, the smell of eraser dust stifling. The room had been used as some type of command post: There were lists written in German on the chalkboard. Maps and elevations taped to the walls marked the locations of troops, planned lines of attack, points of the earth seeded with mines. I went outside again, but that was worse: the bright sunlight, the dark curls blowing across the square.

  I found Liv again in another of the schoolrooms, one with German tourist posters decorating the walls and German and French words chalked in blackboard language lessons: “Vater—Père, Mutter—Mère, Bruder—Frère, Schwester—Soeur.” Liv stood with her camera focused on the word “Bruder.”

  Fletcher called to us from outside: his voice, and then silence. The door to the schoolhouse creaked open, the smell of the warm summer air flushing into the chalky, dusty room. Liv took the photograph of the chalkboard—“Vater Mutter Bruder Schwester”—then turned the camera on him. He held a gas canister with German words like those on the chalkboard marked on it, along with a swastika.

  “We have petrol,” he said in a dull voice. “The last of it in this town. I suggest we move along before someone sees we have it.”

  “Is she all right?” My voice low and soft.

  “She’s . . . She’ll be fine.”

  I said, “Those people, they . . . they were thrilled by it.”

  Fletcher set the canister down heavily on a desk and rubbed his hand where he’d held it. “They had nothing, and she had petrol. She ate beef and candies when they were starving. She never wanted for soap or warm water.”

  “You don’t know that,” I said. “You think that because you want to think it, you want her to be that person. You have no idea who she is.”

  He rubbed the edge of the gray stubble on his neck. “She was a source of information for the Germans, Jane. She fingered fellow townspeople working with the resistance, people she grew up with.”

  “You don’t know any of that,” I said. “Those people, they just wanted to be cruel, and she was someone they could be cruel to. And she—”

  “Have a look at what the Germans do to French girls who help hide resistance fighters,” Fletcher interrupted. “Or—”

  “But she was pregnant, Fletcher!” My hand going to my own waist.

  Outside, the sound of someone passing, laughing. I wondered where the boy was, if he would survive the war, if he would grow old with a wife and children back in Germany, untouched by the disgrace that would be this girl’s and her child’s, too.

  “She was pregnant,” Liv repeated—a fact, it was clear from her voice, that she hadn’t realized.

  We slept in an open field that night, Liv and I with our bodies under the jeep but our heads out so we could see the stars, so many stars in the clear sky. Our helmets on, though, and Fletcher discretely several yards away, under a tree.

  “Liv?” I said.

  “What it is, Jane?”

  “Do you suppose that girl loved the boy who got her pregnant?”

  She turned her head in her helmet toward me. I kept my gaze on the sky.

  She said, “I don’t know.”

  “Why do people judge like that, just because a girl falls for a boy they don’t think she should love?”

  “Why do people judge anyone for anything?” Liv answered.

  “I could have been that girl.”

  “I know, Jane. We all could.”

  “I’m not smart at knowing who to love,” I said.

  “No one is,” Liv said. “That’s the problem with love.”

  Planes sounded faintly, and a church bell tolled from the direction of the town.

  I said, “But the mistakes ruin us.”

  Liv said, “Yes. Even when they aren’t mistakes.”

  OUTSIDE CANISY, FRANCE

  THURSDAY, AUGUST 10, 1944

  The men don’t want us here.

  —AP correspondent Ruth Cowan in a wire to Eleanor Roosevelt that never made it out of Africa

  I awoke in the passenger seat to a change—some difference in the environment that made me sit bolt upright. The silence. No grinding of truck gears, no spinning of tires stuck in the mud, no low rumble of tanks, no gunfire. That and the slowing of the jeep. I felt the motion high in my stomach as Fletcher turned the wheel and braked, stopping the jeep alongside the road.

  Liv reached into her pack for the last unopened B tin—a biscuit, a “confection,” Nescafé, and sugar—and extracted the biscuit. She offered me a bite of the dry, floury puck, and I took it. I preferred compressed corn flakes, but we were out of breakfast rations and down to a very few provisions. We’d opened our last package of halazone a few days earlier, and the chlorination tables lost their effectiveness after they’d been opened for a day or two. We’d had no option, though. We couldn’t accept the soldiers’ supplies and leave them without good water.

  I pulled my jacket tighter, thinking that might explain why I was queasy even riding in the front.

  Fletcher opened a can of meat-and-vegetable stew and sniffed it—as if it might smell any better than it always did. “We’re outside Canisy,” he said. “It won’t be a half mile to the First Army press camp.”

  We were hoping to catch up with the First Army, which was said to be meeting German resistance in Mortain, or to join the British Second, where Liv and I might be safer. American papers didn’t want photographs and stories about British boys, American papers wanted pictures and stories about American boys, but we wanted to get to Paris and we weren’t sending off our work anyway, for fear that it would lead the MPs to us.

  Liv set the ration tin back in the pack with the last of the biscuitless rations and all the letters we’d written since Saint-Lô, letters we couldn’t mail if we didn’t want to be found out and sent home, but still we’d written them. Fletcher tucked his own letters in his pocket, took out his revolver, checked to make sure it was loaded, and handed it to Liv.

  “I should be an hour or perhaps two,” he said. “Any special requests? The delicious chopped ham and eggs? Hershey’s chocolate? We have cigarettes and a bit of tinned meat but not much else, and our film is about at an end as well.”

  Liv took another nibble of the biscuit, then stuffed the rest in her pocket and focused on the revolver. The metal, she’d told me, was as cool as the metal of her Leica, and similarly empowering.

  “Correspondents aren’t supposed to carry weapons,” I said, an old habit by now.

  We all climbed from the jeep, and Liv took aim at one of several cigarette butts littering the road twenty yards up, not waiting for Fletcher to pick out a target. The gun popped and the butt flew into the air, blown by the force of the bullet striking the macadam in front of it.

  Fletcher smiled at the new scar on the road. “You’re still aiming a bit low, Livvie, but if I were a German in your path, I wouldn’t hang about to give you a second go at me.”

  Liv handed me the gun, and I aimed at the butt, now just in front of a coil of telephone wire dangling from a pole. I took the shot, and a second, a third.

  Fletcher put his hand on mine on the gun, saying, “That poor, wretched butt is quite dead enoug
h, isn’t it, Jane?”

  He took the gun from me and set the safety, then handed it back to Liv. The butt remained on the ground just beyond where it had been. Like Liv, I was still aiming low.

  “Why don’t you take the jeep, Fletcher,” Liv said.

  “So, you’ve got—what?” he said to her. “A month’s worth of exposed film?”

  “Take the jeep, Fletcher,” she said.

  “French film isn’t like French wine,” he said. “It won’t improve with age.”

  “Take the jeep,” she repeated. “It’s not like Jane and I are going anywhere.”

  “I can send it as yours, Liv. I can manage that. Don’t worry, I don’t intend to pinch your—”

  “I know.”

  “Beastly hell, Liv! You won’t shoot the faces, that’s your own decision even if it is mistaken, but why the devil won’t you send the shots you do take?”

  A transport truck loaded with Americans sped past, splashing mud behind it. It was not raining at the moment but likely would be again soon. We watched the truck disappear around the bend, the soldiers staring out the back at us. I wondered where they were going, whether they’d get there, if they’d be lucky enough to come back alive.

  Fletcher sighed. “Stay with the jeep,” he said, “and do mind the woods.”

  Always, there were Jerries in the woods. An Allied unit would clear an area, pushing through it or surrounding it, forcing out the few soldiers left behind by the fleeing German army, but within hours the woods would be thick with them again.

  “Take the jeep, Fletcher,” Liv insisted.

  Fletcher slung an empty rucksack for carrying back supplies over his shoulder and added a smaller musette bag, also empty. “Mind the woods,” he repeated, directing the words to me now as if Liv couldn’t be trusted. Then to Liv, “Reload the Webley and remember what I said about hard surfaces. The bullet will skip and fly about and you’ll end up plugging some poor sod you haven’t meant to shoot, and Jane here is too attractive alive to be shot dead.”

  Too attractive.

  Liv tightened the strap of her helmet as Fletcher set off down the road. “A playboy, but a charming one,” she said, leaving me holding my pathetic little heart upright, as I had when I’d served dinner plates back home on the Stahlmans’ lawn.

  Liv and I sat on the hood of the jeep, the metal cool through the seat of our fatigues and the French countryside sprawled out around us: rolling hills that allowed for some measure of vista, hedgerows giving way to fences of granite slabs. A jeep sped by, then a transport truck, each slowing to see if we needed help. Ten or fifteen minutes later, an American soldier approached on a BMW motorcycle left behind by the Germans. No snowdrop helmet, I noted as he stopped to walk the bulky bike through a shell-pocked portion of the road. He, too, asked if we needed help. It was an odd sight, I supposed, the two of us in American fatigues, helmets, and combat boots, sitting atop a jeep in the middle of a war zone.

  A second jeep hurried by a few minutes later, then stopped abruptly a few yards ahead and backed up. My throat tightened, but the two were newsmen, NBC radioman John MacVane and AP correspondent Hal Boyle. We’d gotten to know them while following Patton’s army, and they liked to give us a hard time about our AWOL status, our careful avoidance of the press camps.

  “The party won’t be the same without you,” John said.

  “No ladies’ latrines there,” I answered.

  They were already late for the briefing, they said.

  As they hurried on their way, Liv raised the pistol and took aim at a tree overhanging the road, the bullet rattling the leaves over their heads.

  “Damn, Liv,” I said.

  “What do you say we get out of the path here so all these boys will stop gawking?”

  “I don’t mind the gawking,” I said, only half in jest. But we’d made ourselves unobtrusive enough at the front to avoid attention, or we’d gotten lucky, or the MP charged with finding us was too cowardly to come after us as we followed the front. Farther away from the danger, though—back here near the press camp—who knew who might say what to whom about seeing us?

  I climbed from the hood and took the driver’s seat, Liv beside me, and drove a few yards across the scrub. I tucked the jeep under some low-hanging oak branches at the edge of the woods so it wasn’t easily visible from the road.

  “I have half a mind to set out into the woods, the way Geoff and I did as kids,” Liv said.

  “You drove, or your brother did?” I asked.

  She took aim at the road, but didn’t shoot. “Our friend Oscar Miller, too, sometimes,” she said. “Never during hunting season, though.”

  A few minutes later, a jeep came from the other direction, not in a hurry. We sank lower in our seats as it approached: a driver in a snowdrop helmet. I hoped we were tucked back well enough. I was glad Lucky Strike had given up their green dye for our sake.

  The MP seemed to be going so slowly, but he passed without seeing Liv and me.

  As we watched his jeep disappear down the road, I whispered, “I sure hope he wasn’t looking for us. It would be such a shame for him to have missed us when he was so close.”

  Liv whispered, too, although the MP was too distant by then to hear us. “Well, he came up the road from the press camp, so it does seem unlikely he was looking for anyone from the press.”

  “Certainly not women correspondents,” I said. “No ladies’ latrines and all that.”

  She closed her eyes. She looked in sad need of a rest, and I supposed I did, too, despite all the attention we’d drawn. In a war zone you didn’t have to be gorgeous. Being female was enough.

  At the sound of rustling leaves in the woods, I whispered, “Just a bird.”

  “A squirrel or a rabbit,” Liv agreed.

  “A wild boar, maybe,” I said. “Aren’t there supposed to be wild boar in the French woods?”

  Liv set the Webley in her lap and closed her eyes and slept, or pretended to.

  I closed my eyes, wondering if the MP was our Major Adam Jones, thinking how lucky we were that he hadn’t passed by just minutes earlier. Wondering if he’d been at the press camp when Fletcher had arrived, and who he’d talked to there, whether he’d learned anything about us.

  I must have dozed off, as I was jolted awake by an explosion. Liv sank lower in the seat, turning at the same time to aim the pistol over the pile of gear and the spare tire, toward the road.

  An Allied jeep skittered to a stop at the road’s edge, headed away from the press camp, like the MP had been. Two men, cursing loudly, piled out of the jeep and stood scowling at their blown front tire.

  “We are fucking gonna be the last ones to Paris at this rate,” one of them said in a thick Alabama accent. “The champagne bottles will be empty and the dames all shacked up with soldier boys.”

  Liv recognized the pointy nose and chin, the scrawny cheeks and red-rimmed eyes as those of a journalist to whom Charles had once introduced her, whose name she couldn’t recall.

  The rat-faced man’s companion grabbed the jack, and the two began to repair the wheel.

  Gossip. The favorite pastime at the press camps, Fletcher had told us. We could only hear the rat face, but that was what these two were doing now as they fixed their tire. We listened a little more carefully. Well, why not? It wasn’t as if we ever got much gossip from Fletcher.

  Lee Carson had vanished from a “facilities tour” in Normandy, the rat face was saying. It comforted me to know the experienced International News Service reporter—whom people said could get anything she wanted just by flexing a pretty ankle—had to resort to going AWOL to get to the front, too. The rat face and his friend talked Lee Carson to death, then started in on Iris Carpenter’s husband taking up with someone else—Iris Carpenter, whom I would have thought to be beyond gossip’s reach. She was one of the most gracious women I’d ever met, impeccably British and proper and yet so warm, and she’d given up her post at the Daily Express to care for her children before the
war. She couldn’t be accused of having ambition. She’d come back to work for the BBC only when the British government summoned her.

  I wanted to give the obnoxious American a piece of my mind. He couldn’t hold a burned-out candle to Iris Carpenter. He was putting her down the way men were forever putting down women more talented than themselves. His reproach had nothing to do with anything other than making his little rat face turd of a self feel manlier.

  The rat face’s companion stood again and tossed the jack and the pump back into the jeep, and the two climbed in.

  The briefing must be over if these two were leaving; Fletcher would be gathering supplies. He’d be back soon.

  “I heard Bourke-White has hooked up with some counterintelligence fella down there,” the rat face said. “Some Major Poopart. Must be the lady’s ass that guy is after, not her tits.” His Southern accent dragging through the words in double syllables—ay-ess, tee-its—leaving me ashamed to be Southern.

  “Tits-wise, she’s got nothin’. My grandmama’s got better tits than her. I got better tits than her.”

  “Papurt—Major Jerry Papurt,” Liv whispered, raising the gun and sighting the rat face’s pointy nose, right between his dull eyes.

  The motion—the emotion—must have frightened her. She held the revolver away from her, as if her aiming were the gun’s doing and not her own, and as the two fired up their jeep, she bolted from ours into the woods, lurching forward from the waist just in time to choke up the biscuit into the underbrush. By the time I reached her she was sitting with her back up against a tree, wiping her mouth with her hand, and the rat face and his companion were puttering off.

  “God, I might have shot that little jerk,” she said.

  I said, “Oh, but he did need shooting.”

  I reached for my canteen to offer her a sip but Fletcher had taken the canteens to the press camp to rinse out the sediment and fill them from the château’s clean water supply. It was a rare treat, water that wasn’t cloudy, like so many simple things we’d always taken for granted at home.