The Race for Paris

by Meg Waite Clayton

  It happened all at once then: A scream of rushing wind. Ducking low in the jeep. Covering our helmeted heads with our arms.

  A boom. The ground trembling. The jeep shaking.

  A sharp bite in my left arm.

  Liv and Fletcher grabbed their cameras and climbed from the jeep, their shutters snapping at the smoke and the blackened earth just yards away, the remains of an 88mm shell in flames.

  Fletcher turned back to me, saying, “Jane?” Then he was in the jeep beside me, pulling out his shirttail.

  As calmly as anything, he called, “Livvie!”

  I felt as if some part of me were floating up out of my body, hanging in the air just above the jeep.

  Liv, barely visible in the light of the flames, turned toward us.

  “There’s an emergency medical kit mounted under the dash,” Fletcher told her. “Get it right now please. Put down your camera and get it right now. The electric torch, too.”

  He tried to tear his shirttail. It wouldn’t tear.

  Liv climbed back into the jeep, on the driver’s side, found the flashlight, and shone it in my eyes. With the blinding light, I was no longer floating. I thought I would vomit.

  “The medical kit, Livvie,” Fletcher said. “The tourniquet, please.” Then to me, right in my face, looking into my eyes as if to climb inside me, “I’m here, Jane. I’m going to take care of you. You’re going to be fine.”

  Liv dislodged the metal box that was the medical kit from under the jeep’s dash and opened it. She found the tourniquet in a small cardboard box inside the metal one and handed it to Fletcher. He wrapped it around my arm almost at my shoulder and pulled it tight.

  He took the flashlight from Liv and shone it over me, fingering my face, my neck, my chest, my hips. Mercifully, he didn’t touch my arm, which burned like the second circle of hell.

  “You’ve been hit in the arm, Jane,” he said. “I don’t see anything else. Do you hurt elsewhere?” He shone the flashlight on my arm again for a longer moment. He went back over the rest of me with the light, then handed it to Liv. She shone it right in my eyes.

  “Her eyes look okay,” she said to Fletcher. Then to me, “Your eyes look okay, Jane. Do you feel sick at all?”

  She leaned over the seat and put the back of her hand to the bridge of my nose, just below my helmet, then to my cheek. She put two fingers to my neck, feeling my pulse. “She doesn’t seem to be in shock,” she said to Fletcher.

  Fletcher said to me, “I believe you’ve taken on a bit of metal, Miss Tyler.”

  The sound of his voice soothing. Liv’s touch soothing, too, like when she’d washed my hair.

  Liv extracted another little cardboard box from the emergency kit, opened it, and handed Fletcher the scissors I’d used on his hair. He cut away the shredded khaki sleeve of my blouse.

  I mustered a weakly voiced “Hey, that’s from Saks.”

  Liv said, “Rest in peace, you gorgeous Saks Fifth Avenue blouse.”

  Fletcher examined my arm more closely in the beam of flashlight. A piece of metal not much wider than a typewriter ribbon guide protruded from my skin. I started to reach for it, thinking if I just pulled it out, it would stop hurting.

  “Don’t touch it, Jane!” Liv said. “Don’t you touch it either, Fletcher. It could still be hot. It could burn you and then we’ll be two men down.”

  She handed Fletcher my canteen, and told him to pour water over the wound. She held the flashlight again so he would have both hands free.

  Fletcher tipped the canteen.

  “Oh oh oh oh oh!” I said. But after he finished pouring the water, the sting of pain was less biting.

  Fletcher said, “There you are, you crusty bugger.”

  He doused my arm again with the water from my canteen, and I gasped again.

  “We ought to get you to an aid station, Jane,” he said.

  “You can pull out the shrapnel with forceps,” Liv said.

  “Shrapnel wounds get infected,” Fletcher said.

  Liv looked at the road ahead of us, the long line of troops. “How do you feel, Jane? Does it hurt a lot?” She focused on me again, intently, like the nurse promising Joey his peach ice cream. “And the pain isn’t anywhere else, Jane? Just that one piece?”

  I said, “If y’all keep repeating my name, I’m going to start thinking I’m dying.”

  Liv said, “If you say ‘y’all’ again, Jane, I’ll know you’re dying.”

  She shone the flashlight into the emergency kit and started extracting things from it: iodine, tweezers, gauze, bandages. She handed Fletcher a bottle of hydrogen peroxide, training the flashlight on me again.

  “This is going to sting like hell,” she said. “On three. One. Two. Three.”

  Fletcher poured some of the hydrogen peroxide over the wound.

  “Mary, Mother of God!”

  Liv handed Fletcher the tweezers. “On three again,” she said, now with the tweezers.

  “Wait!” I said. “Give me a minute.”

  I took a few deep breaths, then a few more. I told myself the doctors at the aid stations patched up soldiers in far worse shape than I was and sent them back to the front, but that didn’t ease the pain.

  “Liv,” I said, stalling, “Liv, if you reload your camera, you can shoot ‘Operating Room by Flashlight Redux.’”

  Liv said to Fletcher, “Don’t listen to her, Fletcher. Jane is such a card.” She smiled a little, and said to me, “Marie is probably back in the US now, with her 4F fiancé.”

  She said, “One.”

  “Sweet Jesus!” I said.

  “You nasty little prat,” Fletcher said to the shrapnel now at the end of the tweezers, a thing the size of a poker chip, perhaps, although I didn’t really know; we’d played for cigarettes and gum.

  “What happened to two and three?” I asked.

  “I thought it best to have it done,” Fletcher said.

  Liv took the tweezers still with the shrapnel caught in its grasp, saying, “I’ll tuck this little souvenir safely away for you, Jane. Someday you’ll show it to your grandchildren.”

  She handed Fletcher a piece of gauze and told him to dab at the wound with it.

  “It’s hardly even bleeding,” I said.

  Fletcher said, “That, love, is the tourniquet. We need to get you to an aid station.”

  Liv said, “It doesn’t look too bad, does it?” She put some hydrogen peroxide on a clean bit of gauze, handed it to Fletcher, and directed him to dab at the wound with it. “Gently.”

  Fletcher said, “Perhaps you ought to do this yourself, Livvie.”

  Liv handed the now-empty tweezers back to Fletcher, saying, “There’s one more little piece, see it?” and pointing. “You can get it with the forceps.”

  He pulled it out without even a one-count warning.

  Liv gave him the iodine and told him to swab around the wound but not in it.

  Fletcher gave her a look.

  Liv said, “It says so on the lid of the kit.”

  Fletcher started swabbing with the iodine.

  Liv said, “Every Saturday night bar-brawl victim was brought to our door and laid out on the dining room table. I’m a decent assistant, but I pass out if I touch. Put a piece of gauze over it, though, Fletcher, and I can wrap a bandage as well as anyone.”

  Fletcher repeated to me, “We need to get you to an aid station.”

  Liv wrapped the bandage so it kept pressure on the gauze over the wound. It felt good, the pressure, as if everything that was meant to stay in my body might stay there after all.

  I said, “I can’t be showing my grandchildren a piece of metal no bigger than a thumbnail and saying this is why I missed the liberation of Paris.”

  “A thumbnail from a giant’s thumb,” Fletcher said.

  Liv extracted another box from the emergency kit and read the directions on it in the light of the flashlight. She opened the package and dumped out a handful of pills.

  “All of these?” I aske
d.

  “Sulfadiazine,” she said. “They’ll help keep the wound from getting infected.”

  She handed me her own canteen, since mine was now empty. “Drink as much water as you can with them, and every time you think of it, drink more.”

  The tourniquet needed to be released gradually, she said. Loosened just a little every ten minutes or so. I don’t even remember the first adjustment. I don’t remember Liv and Fletcher waking me to tip the canteen to my lips and make me drink. My sleep the rest of that night was exhausted, and mercifully dreamless.

  OUTSIDE PARIS

  FRIDAY, AUGUST 25, 1944

  I will never forget the next morning coming up over the hill and there below is Paris—white and shining in the sun.

  —Journalist Helen Kirkpatrick

  I arrived exhausted by my share of millions of handshakes—the embraces of grandmothers—of French sharpshooters and bevies of French girls. I was the “femme soldat”—small use to say I was just a journalist.

  —Vogue photojournalist Lee Miller

  The tourniquet that was on my arm when I fell asleep was no longer there when I woke to the sound of the jeep engine jumping to life, but the bandage was and the shirtsleeve wasn’t, and the arm hurt like hell.

  “While we were sleeping,” Fletcher said, “some of Leclerc’s men entered Paris.”

  “You’re kidding!” Liv said.

  “Word just came down the line. They got as far as the Hôtel de Ville. No press there, though.”

  He turned back to me. “How is the arm?”

  “Drink some water, Jane,” Liv said.

  I kicked off my bedroll, feeling I ought to be doing something, saying something to mark the morning, but I could not get “good morning” from my lips. I pulled off my helmet, ran my fingers through my hair, pulled the helmet back on again. The arm didn’t feel so bad, and it was my left arm—there was that.

  It was just after dawn and the tanks were rumbling to a start. The air was thick with a white mist.

  “You take the front seat, Jane,” Liv said. “I can photograph better from the back. It’s a little higher up.”

  With the windshield down she would have a better view in the front, but it was bumpier in the back; she wanted me to be comfortable.

  Fletcher held a cigarette out to me, a Lucky Strike.

  “‘Lucky Strike Means Fine Tobacco,’” I said.

  I stuck it between my lips, and he lit it for me.

  I asked Liv to hand me my Corona. I unfolded it—that did hurt—and rolled in a clean sheet of paper. I thought better of that and rolled the paper back out. Liv folded the typewriter up for me, and I pulled out a notepad and pen. Liv loaded new film in her Leica and carefully cleaned her lenses.

  The troops began to move, and Fletcher cranked the steering wheel, jockeying for position, weaving through the line. We turned onto a narrow side road not a mile from where we’d slept, heading north, reaching Gentilly before eight to find what must have been the entire population lining the street, crowding the military convoy, cheering.

  Minutes later, as we approached the Porte de Gentilly, I turned to Liv and said, “Climb up here with us, Liv! I can’t bear to beat you to Paris!” And she did, holding on to Fletcher’s hand to steady herself so she wouldn’t fall back or bump my arm.

  The moment wasn’t anything like I had imagined. The wall that had once marked the city’s boundary and the city gate had been taken down after the last war. We might not have known we were in Paris if the soldiers ahead of us weren’t cheering wildly as they entered the traffic circle. We couldn’t see Notre Dame or the Louvre or even the tip of the Eiffel Tower. But the street overflowed with people. Children—all unbearably thin and unmistakably happy—danced everywhere, oblivious to the old men scurrying worriedly around them, warning of the continued presence of snipers. Women in bright dresses, flashy jewelry, and hair ribbons the blue, white, and red of the French flag waved and screamed and laughed and kissed everyone, climbing up onto jeeps and tanks, their pale white arms reaching up to take soldiers’ cheeks in both hands. They kissed the French soldiers in their American helmets or leather tank helmets or French berets. They kissed Fletcher again and again, his cheeks becoming red with lipstick or with the constant pressing of lips on skin, or perhaps with the embarrassment of so much adoration. They kissed Liv and me, too, even as Liv tried to steady her camera and I tried to protect my bandaged arm. They kissed first one cheek and then the other, and I felt all they’d endured in the sharp bones of their half-starved shoulders.

  Bicycles, bicycles. Everywhere, there were bicycles.

  And flowers. Flowers thrown joyfully, bright red and yellow flowers strewn in the cobbled streets, landing on the military vehicles and in our jeep, their sweet fragrance blotting out the smell of gunfire.

  The men slapped one another’s and the soldiers’ backs and shook hands and bellowed their joy, too, kissing the same double kisses the women did, their shoulders as bony or more so. And everywhere people were crying. Tears streamed down the hollow, stubbled cheeks of old men, the old and the sick brought out from the hospitals to greet freedom in the streets. Young women pulled their children tightly to their sinewy legs, watching for their children’s fathers, hoping they might appear in a passing truck and wondering if they would recognize them. The crowds applauded and held babies high to see—undaunted by the sounds of the war continuing around them: the rattle of machine gun fire elsewhere in the city, the whine of shells, the low boom of explosions as the Germans tried to destroy the bridges over the Seine. “Vive la France!” and “Vive la liberté!” and simply “Bravo!” the Parisians shouted as Liv’s shutter snapped and snapped.

  Much of Paris had been liberated from within, by young men in FFI armbands taking control of the telephone network and the metro, Nobel Prize–winning scientists assembling Molotov cocktails, grandmothers and mothers heaping furniture and stoves and dustbins onto barricades of overturned trucks and downed branches and barbed wire—barricades often topped with Hitler’s photo or a Nazi flag so that attacking Germans would have to fire on their own flag or, worse, their führer. Even young children participated, their bicycle baskets loaded with cobblestones hacked from the roads by older, stronger citizens to reinforce the barricades, or with food and drink to reinforce the men guarding them. After four years, the entire population had finally said no to German occupation, unaided by generals squabbling over who would govern after they were freed, or by journalists vying to be the first to capture the beginning of a liberation that had already begun.

  As we passed Parc Montsouris, one of the Haussmann parks I’d seen in pictures in high school French class, the sound of war began blasting right in my ears again, that staccato rat-a-tat-a-tat. The crowd dove, clenched-fist salutes opening, grabbing for cover, unblown kisses left on hands scrambling for the ground, babies tucked up to their mother’s chests, pressed between parental body and unyielding ground.

  Fletcher grasped my torn sleeve, sending fresh pain through my arm as I tumbled from the jeep. He shoved the Webley into Liv’s hand and shoved Liv and me both behind the jeep, telling us to stay down.

  We crouched there, the fear in Liv’s eyes mirrored in my cottony throat as shots rang out.

  Liv peeked cautiously over the top of the hood, and despite Fletcher’s admonition, I followed her lead to see Fletcher crouching low to the ground. The gunfire came from a stone tower, or from a house across the way, or from both. He moved carefully toward them as he shot photographs, recording the details of the places German soldiers sought refuge in a city under siege, and how and when they fought from the hiding spots they chose. He didn’t even have a gun. He’d left that for Liv and me.

  Leclerc’s men fired on the tower and the rooftops with machine guns mounted on the trunks of vehicles, the stone flying into the air in sprays of white, sunlight reflecting off flying shards. When had the sun come out?

  Liv rose just a little more and swung her Leica to catch several FFI me
n taking cover near the house, storming the door. A moment later, the bang of a grenade, and then silence.

  The crowd surged again, pouring out of the buildings, leaving only a narrow lane for our convoy, which moved along the Boulevard Jourdan and up the Rue Saint-Jacques. We crested a hill as we crossed Boulevard Saint-Germain at the Sorbonne, and there was Paris stretched out before us: the Eiffel Tower and the Louvre, Notre Dame, the River Seine. As we rolled downhill and crossed a cast-iron bridge to the Île de la Cité, the sun was blinding, the light beautiful on the water and on the cathedral’s square towers, on the barricades.

  We crossed the Seine a second time, to the plaza at the Hôtel de Ville. The clock face in its tower read ten o’clock, although my watch read nine and was ticking; the Paris clocks had been advanced an hour, to German daylight savings time. Liv photographed a crowd celebrating at the intersection across from the Hôtel de Ville, people gathered around an old car in front of a barricade. The wheel of an upside-down wheelbarrow atop it spun behind them as an emaciated old woman handed what must have been her last tomato to a soldier, who handed it back to her. A curly-haired toddler threw flowers. An old, old man held up a baby, waving its little hand.

  “They’re my mother’s eyes,” Liv said.

  It took me a moment to realize she was talking about a middle-aged woman standing atop the old car in front of the barricade, cheering with the crowd and yet not quite with them. The woman was just that little bit higher up on the car’s roof, setting her apart. Thin, square shoulders in a thin, flowered dress, like so many of the Parisian women. Her hair was short and dark, like Liv’s, but her nose was stronger and her mouth, too, her brow bone sharper under the perfectly arched brows. Blue-green irises against a sturdy, determined white unsoftened by her lashes, or that’s the way those eyes seemed. Joyful, yes, but something else, too. Looking straight into Liv’s camera as Liv photographed her, as if some answer she needed might be found in Liv’s lens.

  Imagine that, Livvie, I thought, and I wondered if Liv understood yet that this was what her mother meant for her to imagine. I imagined my own mother opening the newspaper in the morning and saying to herself, My own Jane. Imagine that.