The Race for Paris

by Meg Waite Clayton

  The fact of not having water made me thirsty.

  “Three ration-can meals a day, that’s what the brochure promised, but you didn’t read the fine print, did you?” I said. “‘P-38 included with every C rat so you can leave your can opener at home, and one free package of halazone tablets . . . but drink the water at your own risk.’” The last bit offered in my best fine-print voice.

  Liv closed her eyes and rested against the rough bark of the tree trunk. I did the same, the damp ground soaking the seat of my slacks.

  A minute later or ten or thirty—I didn’t know how long—I gasped as my eyes flew open to see Liv already aiming the revolver.

  Fletcher, I thought.

  I said, “Don’t shoot, Liv!”

  A German soldier drew back, reaching for his rifle.

  Liv pulled the trigger, the blast of the gun absorbed by the forest as the bullet buried in the ground just in front of him.

  He dropped his rifle and raised his hands over his head, all knobby wrists and dirty hands and thin blue eyes sunken and scared under a military cap that wouldn’t protect him even from the nonexistent sun.

  The revolver shook in Liv’s hand, the four inches of metal ahead of the trigger jittering.

  The soldier cowered, pleading in German, the Adam’s apple of his thin neck bobbing above the neatly buttoned military jacket.

  “No!” Liv said, moving to her feet now, the guttural sound of his voice tugging at her trigger finger.

  He looked from Liv’s face to the revolver and back, his wide-set eyes unblinking over smooth cheeks filthy with the dirt of living outside. He started speaking again, hesitantly, quietly. Mixed in with the unintelligible rest, I heard, “Gunther.”

  “No,” Liv said. “No. I don’t care what your name is. You’re not human. You . . . You put guns to their heads and laugh. You cut their belts and buttons off so they have to walk humiliated, holding their pants up. You . . . God, you . . . You shoot them when they’re surrendering, when they’re unarmed and kneeling on the ground.”

  Though she didn’t know, really, what the Germans did to their prisoners. Charles had been talking about what Allied soldiers did to the Germans when he told her that—facts he’d heard from journalist friends but which no responsible editor would print. Allied boys shooting terrified, exhausted German boys who’d already laid down their guns.

  The German began to murmur again. He’d wet himself, the dark stain spreading down the leg of his pants.

  Liv held the revolver in one hand—shaking a little less wildly—while she wiped her eyes and nose with the back of her other hand. I heaved a big breath, but the air didn’t fill my lungs.

  “His gun,” she said to me.

  I approached him, trembling like hell, turning sideways toward him as if that might be safer. Liv, with the gun fixed on his face, motioned for him to step back, and I kicked the Mauser away from his feet. It was surprisingly heavy, and I had to kick it several times to get it out of his reach, backing it awkwardly through the undergrowth on the forest floor. When the gun was far enough from him, I stooped to pick it up, grabbing it by the wood stock.

  Liv trained the revolver on the German’s chest now, the second coat button.

  The boy’s washed-blue eyes watched our every move.

  The Mauser weighed on my muscles, the creep of exhaustion emerging in my arm and in my shoulder as I backed away from the boy.

  If this German was here, others likely were as well.

  The boy blinked pale eyelashes as straight as mine, as straight as Tommy Stahlman’s. He was as tall as Tommy, too, but gawky-thin, a young man not yet grown into his size. His uniform was well kept but for the stain where he’d wet himself. He was not missing a button.

  “Geoff was on an intelligence mission,” Liv said quietly, not to me but to the German. “He was on an intelligence mission and he was reporting in like he was supposed to and then he wasn’t, he went missing. That’s what the telegram said.”

  The German looked from his Mauser in my hands to the Webley pointed at him.

  “He was on leave in London when I was there and I didn’t even know it,” Liv said. “I didn’t even see him. Then he was sent on an intelligence mission somewhere, I thought he’d be here in Normandy but by the time I got here he was already missing from wherever he was supposed to be. No one knows if he was captured or if he’s hiding in the woods or if . . .” She tightened her grip on the pistol, tears spilling down her cheeks.

  The soldier leaned away from her and raised his arms higher. Again, the softly spoken, guttural words.

  “Geoff could have escaped,” Liv said, suddenly insistent. “He wouldn’t give up. He would escape.”

  The German, his face still a deathly white, remained silent.

  With the gun pointed at him, Liv reached into her uniform blouse pocket and drew out a letter, which she unfolded awkwardly with her free hand, exposing the easy, looping handwriting, the “Dear Mutt.” A photograph of her brother wrapped inside fell to the ground, landed almost in the putrid bit of biscuit she’d not been able to keep down. Without taking her eyes off the German, she picked up the photo, brushed the mud from it, and handed it toward him.

  “Liv,” I said, alarmed that she would approach him.

  “My brother,” she said to him, stopping well out of his reach.

  The German looked from the photograph to her, still with his hands raised. He risked a glance at his rifle in my hands.

  Liv held the photograph up for the German to see. She lowered the revolver slightly. “Do you understand? My twin brother.”

  The German looked at the picture, a flick of pale eyes and then a longer, steadier glance.

  “Geoff,” she said.

  Mutt and Jeff.

  The German lowered his arms slightly as if to move toward her and take the photo. Liv aimed the gun squarely at his chest, and he again raised his arms. He wore no wedding ring.

  “Surely someone is helping him,” she said. “Surely some mother or sister or someone has found my brother and she knows all we can do is help each other.”

  After a moment, the German spoke, soft words that sounded like agreement that some German mother somewhere was helping Geoff.

  Liv’s skin stood white against the cold metal, against the khaki of her sleeve. “It’s only the soldiers who kill, isn’t it?” she said. “The mothers, even the German mothers . . .”

  The boy kept his hands in the air, still with the stain on his pants. “Ja?” he said.

  With the gun trained on him, Liv awkwardly folded the snapshot back into the letter.

  I set the barrel end of the soldier’s rifle to the ground, held it like a cane. “Yes,” I said. “Ja. Not the mutters.”

  I reached into my pocket, moving slowly so as not to alarm either of them. I didn’t have much—just a chocolate bar and a pack of cigarettes—but I tossed them to the ground in front of the boy.

  Liv, with the gun still pointed at him, said, “Look for my brother.” She began to cry again. “Find him. Tell him I’m here.”

  The boy looked at her, his Adam’s apple bobbing in his too-thin neck.

  She nodded toward the candy bar, the cigarettes. “Take them.”

  He hesitated, looking to me, and I nodded. He lowered his arms slowly, keeping them in a surrender position but his palms at the height of his shoulders now.

  Liv lowered the pistol, still gripped tightly in her thin, pale fingers, to aim it at the muddy ground. She nodded again to the chocolate and the cigarettes, her tears trickling over her jaw. With her free arm, she used her sleeve to wipe her nose, the little bump from that childhood fight.

  The German squatted carefully, his eyes fixed on her. He picked up the chocolate and the cigarettes with his right hand while keeping his left raised, returning both to the surrender position as he stood.

  “Go,” Liv said. “Go.”

  The German took a step back, watching us, and then another. He said a few words softly, “Sie werden
nicht schiessen?” A question, I knew, from the inflection, from his pale expression.

  “Go,” I said. “Allez.” Wishing I had any idea how to say the word in German.

  He took another step back, then lowered his hands and turned and ran. His boots struck hard on the muddy ground. He splashed through a puddle and veered through the trees, the gray of his uniform blending with the tree trunks, the brush, the leaves, then disappearing altogether into the thick green of the woods.

  OUTSIDE CANISY, FRANCE

  THURSDAY, AUGUST 10, 1944

  Who got to a town or across a river first was a silly game the newspeople played. I’d never realized how intense the competition was for datelines.

  —Journalist Andy Rooney

  Fletcher caught a ride from the press camp back to the jeep with two Stars and Stripes journalists, including a young American named Rooney he’d gotten to know a little at the briefings. When they got to the side of the road where Fletcher had left us, he was startled to find nothing there—no jeep, no Liv, no me. “Liv!” he called out, ignoring Rooney’s joke that it wasn’t like him to lose a dame. “Jane!”

  He spotted us in the jeep under the tree and rushed over, calling our names again.

  “Whatever is it, Fletcher?” Liv answered with a calm I certainly didn’t feel.

  What I felt was utter exhaustion. The face-to-face encounter in the woods was somehow more frightening than the bombs or the night in the gun pit or the days following the tanks and clearing the towns, even though it had been us holding the gun on the German boy and him in danger. Or maybe because of that, because we might have killed him. I felt exhausted and, at the same time, as if I might hold the gun on the frightened German boy myself and be glad for doing it.

  “Beastly hell,” Fletcher said. “I was sure you two had stumbled into the hands of the Germans.”

  “Oh, yes, of course, Fletcher,” Liv said. “We just made friends with one in the woods.” Making a joke of a truth she couldn’t tell him lest it provoke him to take us directly to Major Adam Jones himself. Don’t tell anyone, Liv had whispered after the German was gone. Not even Fletcher. I couldn’t bear for anyone else to know. Leaving me wondering if she meant about shooting at the German or about her twin brother being missing in action all the time I’d known her. “Missing” or “missing, presumed dead”? I’d wanted to ask, but I’d been afraid to suggest a death that hadn’t been mentioned.

  I made myself smile, and I said, “We were pretty damned close there, Liv. You did get his photograph, didn’t you?”

  Liv said, “I’m afraid we weren’t quite that close.”

  Fletcher took the Webley from Liv and cocked it open, spilling out the empty shells. “You didn’t even reload,” he admonished us as he reloaded. “What if you actually had run into trouble?”

  He took out a cigarette and offered it to Liv, then to me when she declined. I declined, too; I couldn’t stop my hands from shaking, and I didn’t want Fletcher to notice.

  Fletcher extended the cigarette pack to the Stars and Stripes journalists, who were just catching up, offering, “Have the last of Mrs. Harper’s poker winnings?” He lit his own and said, “We’ve got another damned flat.”

  He set about jacking up the jeep for the third time that week, a task made no easier for the jeep being off the road, near the woods. He removed the tire from its rim, took out the inner tube, and pumped air in it to find the hole as the Americans told Liv and me what they had learned at the briefing: We’d taken Guam and Tinian in the Pacific, and a thousand German prisoners at Rennes. Canadian and British forces had opened a new offensive south of Caen, thrusting four miles into the German blockade of the roads to Paris.

  Rooney said, “Listen to this, the latest ploy in the race to get the first dateline. Have you heard this, Mrs. Harper? You head for a city that maybe hasn’t quite been taken but is about to be. You go as far as, say, a road sign on the outskirts of town, something that shows that, technically, you’re in the boundaries. Then you scurry on back to the correspondents’ tables at the press camp to write your story as the news comes in, with the dateline the city.”

  “You can’t do that,” Liv said, the repair kit in her hand, its metal cap already removed. “No one would try to do that.”

  “The patch?” Fletcher said.

  Liv looked down at the kit, then back up at him. “No hot patches left,” she said, handing him the cap. “Only cold.”

  “You underestimate the human desire to be first, Liv,” Fletcher said, and he began sanding the inner tube with the rough side of the cap.

  “No one reputable would,” Liv said.

  But the culprits included correspondents from the Associated Press, INS, Reuters, and UP.

  “I don’t want to malign anyone,” Rooney said, “but Hank Gorrell—you know him, right? Harry Harris and Bert Brandt have taken to calling him X-ray Eyes.”

  Liv cut a piece from the red sheet of cold patch and shoved the rest back into the cylinder. I watched her, still thinking of the German boy in the woods, Liv with the empty pistol pointed at him. Thinking about what Liv had said to him, wondering how she could have tucked away the telegram about her brother being missing in action and made polite conversation that first morning at the field hospital, with a nurse tending a wounded German boy.

  Fletcher dabbed the glue on the inner tube, slapped the patch over it, and looked up at me as if he might know I was keeping something from him.

  “So the good news for you photographers,” Rooney’s companion said to Liv, “is that a photograph of a road sign at the outskirts of Paris doesn’t sell as well as the story written from it might.”

  At that, Rooney suggested they hit the road before everyone got to Paris ahead of them. Fletcher retrieved the jerry cans of gasoline and his rucksack from their jeep up on the road, and they puttered off.

  Fletcher returned his attention to the tire, inflating it. “I understand Martha Gellhorn has joined the Poles in Italy and no one is troubling her,” he said.

  I looked out across the landscape—the sharp-edged bomb craters, the dangling telephone wire—wanting to object, to insist that we follow Patton’s troops straight to Paris. We could get to Paris and I could write my story and Liv could take her photos, and we would go home.

  “Some of the lads of the Thirtieth Division are holding Hill 317 against all odds,” Fletcher said. He shoved the tire back on and tightened a lug nut, then another. “They are surrounded by Germans, though, and I can’t fathom how we could get to the hill to photograph them. The word is the Seventy-ninth Infantry have taken Le Mans and—”

  “They’ll get to the road signs for Paris and say they’re already there!” Liv said.

  Fletcher’s hands slipped on the lug wrench and the thing thumped onto the ground, smashing his finger. “Hell,” he said, shaking his hand to try to ease the throbbing.

  “Listen to me, Liv,” he said. “What have I been telling you? No one is going straight for Paris. Rooney was yanking your chain.” He picked up the wrench, fitted it back onto the lug nut. “The plan is to encircle the Germans west of Paris, with the Americans coming from the south and the Canadians and the Poles from Caen, to the north. We can connect with the Poles or the Canadians.”

  “Eisenhower isn’t going straight for Paris?” Liv said. “Why not?”

  Fletcher gave the wrench one last frustrated yank, then stood and stowed the jack and climbed into the driver’s seat, still nursing his finger. “Do I look like Eisenhower?”

  Liv leaned back a little as if to get the whole view of him. She looked slightly better now, her color returning.

  “More like de Gaulle,” she said, a mocking little smile creeping into her slightly pink-rimmed eyes. She raised one brow, with a glance at me.

  “The sharp nose, maybe?” I said.

  Fletcher smiled slightly despite himself. “I’m leaving you two behind if you don’t get in the jeep,” he said.

  Liv took the passenger seat, peering
exaggeratedly at him. “The weak chin?”

  “I expect it’s my ears,” Fletcher said.

  “De Gaulle’s ears are not that big,” I said, settling into the backseat.

  “It’s just that hat he wears,” Liv agreed.

  “I should have left you both back at Saint-Lô,” Fletcher said. He rubbed the finger he’d banged with the jack, saying, “I expect Eisenhower wants to avoid the destruction of Paris and the cost of supplying it. The fuel and food needed for a liberated Paris could support eight infantry divisions in the field.”

  The Allies had spared Paris in their bombing, hitting only the rail yards and other outlying facilities, but would the Germans, if forced to retreat, grant it the respect of surrendering it unscathed?

  Fletcher sighed and said, “It happens that I just missed your snowdrop chum, Major Adam Jones. I’m told he is well aware that we’re traveling together, and in this neighborhood.”

  Liv and I glanced at each other. Maybe our luck with the MP, like our luck in poker, would stay with us, or maybe it was just about to run out.

  Fletcher had heard two other pieces of news at the press camp, which he reluctantly shared: Three French journalists—Pierre Bourdan, André Rabache, and Pierre Gosset—were captured when their car was halted by machine gun fire at Rennes. Worse, Bill Stringer was killed doing just what we’d been doing, following the tanks.

  Bill Stringer. He was an American, a Reuters photographer.

  Fletcher focused on the jeep’s choke although it wasn’t cold enough to need it, averting his gaze lest we see the truth in his eyes: that if we insisted on following the Americans, he would take us; that he was scared for us all, whichever way we went.

  Liv, in the passenger seat, shoved her hands underneath her thighs. My hands, too, were still shaking.

  The engine cranked to life, but Fletcher didn’t shift into gear.

  “I would have taken his picture,” Liv said, “but I didn’t think I should waste the film.”

  “You would have taken whose picture?” Fletcher asked.

  She tilted her head toward the woods and said, “Our German friend.”