The Race for Paris

by Meg Waite Clayton

  “How can you chew those things when you won’t touch a normal meal?” he said.

  “Normal meal?” She eyed the lovely variety he’d hoped would entice her to eat before we set off on what might be a very long bicycle ride. “But I am ravenous enough to eat almost anything this morning.”

  He offered her a second biscuit, but she waved it aside and reached for a K ration tin of chopped ham and eggs. She downed it in a few oversized bites.

  He offered her the last tin, a C ration meat-and-vegetable stew she’d pronounced “the most revolting muck she’d ever seen” just days before.

  She wrinkled her nose at the sludge in the tin. “Amazing what we get used to here.”

  Fletcher watched as she made her way through the second tin in slow, steady bites. “Liv,” he said finally, his voice low, serious, “that was stupid as hell, what you did.”

  “Well, Fletcher,” Liv said, “I thought that poor boy needed his Luger more than I did.”

  “Liv,” Fletcher said.

  She ate a last bite of the stew and set the empty tin down. She ate the salt tablet, then asked Fletcher if he wasn’t going to eat his, and ate that one, too.

  “Thank you for coming after me,” she said to him.

  “The medic was already helping the boy, Liv,” Fletcher insisted.

  Liv said, “He didn’t have a camera, I don’t believe.”

  She unwrapped the chocolate bar from the ration and took a bite, then another.

  “Yes, but—”

  Liv cut him off with just a look. Not the I-don’t-fetch-tea look, but one that left him holding back his admonition not to run toward firing squads or German soldiers, not even for a Pulitzer.

  Where did you draw the line between photographs important enough to put lives at risk and those that ought to be left untaken? Could you even know until you saw what showed up in the film?

  We stripped down to the barest essentials in the rucksacks we wore on our backs, and we strapped our bedrolls to the back carriers and loaded our cameras and typewriter into the front baskets. Our plan was to pedal along until we found a Red Ball Express convoy, and to hitch a ride with it to wherever it delivered gasoline. As we pedaled off, I let go my handlebars, stretched my arms out like wings, and called out, “Look!” and when Liv and Fletcher did look, I lifted my feet, too. “No hands!” I said. “No feet!”

  We biked all morning, our only company coal-black crows, jackdaws, magpies with their long shiny-dark tail feathers. We stopped for lunch under the shade of a scrappy tree, then pedaled on only to see, at the next intersection, a line of trucks disappearing in the distance, a convoy we might have connected with if we hadn’t stopped. We consulted the map, Liv determining that we ought to head for a small hamlet on the other side of a long, narrow woods. Fletcher worried the copse and town both might be in German hands, and Liv didn’t want to go through the trees any more than I did after that. We decided, finally, to stay put, since we knew convoys passed here, and we were tired of biking. Fletcher pulled out a package of Lucky Strikes (“Lucky Strike Means Fine Tobacco”) and we smoked and talked and sat in silence together, waiting. If this was a main supply road for gas to get to the troops, the Allied effort was in trouble.

  When darkness fell, we ate dinner from tins and rolled out our bedrolls, Liv and me on one side of a privacy screen of bicycle frames, thin rubber tires, and even thinner spokes, and Fletcher on the other.

  I woke with the dawn light to Liv sleeping beside me but Fletcher nowhere in sight. The Webley rested on the ground between Liv and me, the safety on.

  “Liv,” I whispered, “Fletcher’s gone.”

  Something appeared on the horizon. I checked the Webley to make sure it was loaded, but already the something was taking shape as a long line of six-by-six, two-and-a-half-ton Jimmies flying down the dead middle of the bumpy road—sixty miles an hour at least, although the speed limit for Allied vehicles in Europe was twenty-five and the trucks were all equipped with speed guards that had to be disabled to go faster, a court-martialable offense.

  The crack of a branch in the woods startled me, and I turned and aimed, the pistol’s cold metal evoking Fletcher’s admonition not to aim too low so that I raised the gun slightly as I shot, and shot again.

  “Jane!” a voice exclaimed. “It’s me! It’s Fletcher!”

  He waited until I lowered the pistol before reappearing from behind a tree, coming to us, and taking the pistol. He put the safety on.

  “Bleeding hell, Jane, if you’d aimed an inch or two lower, I’d be dead!”

  Perhaps my queasiness at that registered on my face because he put his hands on my arms, and he looked at me as closely as he had when I’d taken the shrapnel hit, and he said lightly, as if this were just another shooting lesson, “Jane, for someone who so obviously loves the feel of a gun in your hand, it’s sad that you’re such a bloody lousy shot.”

  We laughed and laughed then. Gallows humor. I laughed so hard I began crying, and then I was crying without laughing at all, and I was thinking I couldn’t cry, I was a war correspondent, and if I couldn’t do my job without crying they would send someone to replace me, and Fletcher was holding me, saying, “I know. I know, Jane. I know.”

  Liv, with a gentle touch on my arm, said, “The drivers are all Negro. Have you ever seen a photo of a Negro soldier, Jane?” She hurried to the side of the road, where the trucks whizzed by without even slowing, and she waved her arms high over her head lest we be left behind again.

  I pulled myself together as one of the last trucks slowed for Liv. It didn’t stop, but Liv raised her camera in salute to the next truck, one that looked like the farm trucks back in Tennessee, but with military letters and numbers painted in white on the front bumper and the hood. It pulled to a stop just up the road.

  The driver leaned out the window. “You look like you need a lift,” he said, his lovely deep voice surprising me, his t as perfectly pronounced as Fletcher’s always were.

  Liv asked if she could take his photograph. She didn’t say she wanted to take it because he was Negro. Neither of us had ever seen a photo of a Negro soldier in any newspaper, not in all the years of the war we’d spent in the States. I thought of the black maids on the trolley back in Nashville, always at the back. “Segregate”—a word I’d once offered Mama on the way home. “To set apart.” It was in the dictionary between “seethe” and “segue,” words I also meant to offer Mama that evening, but she’d begun singing without asking me to define anything.

  We strapped our bicycles to the top of the truck and crowded in beside the driver, who set off again, going even faster now to catch up to his convoy. He didn’t slow to read the signs warning vehicles to stay to the middle of the road in uncleared areas, or for the minesweepers off to the sides, or even for the MPs directing the trucks which way to go on the one-way roads. He slowed only once—as we crested a hill in the mostly flat terrain—and only slightly, only long enough to scan the horizon, alert to the possibility of German planes.

  Not much later, Liv and Fletcher and I stood with our bicycles atop another hill, where the 743rd Tank Battalion of the American Second Armored Division and the Thirtieth Infantry Division, “Old Hickory,” overlooked the ruins of Tournai, Belgium, bombed to almost nothing by the Germans early in the war.

  The gas cans were still being unloaded from the trucks when Fletcher was summoned to see the commanding officer, a dark-haired major general named Hobbs.

  “I’ve heard about the work you’re doing, Roebuck, the look you’re giving us at the Germans,” Hobbs told Fletcher. “I’m pleased to have you in our neck of the woods, I don’t mind telling you that.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “You have pictures to get out? Anything else you need?”

  Fletcher said he’d get what he needed to send out to Hobbs’s aide, and that he could use some food and film.

  “Welcome to my war,” Hobbs said. “We’d have this thing won if we could get supplies. But what�
�s ours is yours.”

  “Thank you, sir,” Fletcher said. “I could use a typewriter ribbon as well, and paper.”

  “Could you, now?” Hobbs called to his aide, “Do you have a spare typewriter ribbon for Mr. Roebuck here?”

  “What kind of typewriter?” the aide asked.

  When Fletcher didn’t answer, Hobbs said, “I don’t give a good goddamn who you’re traveling with, Roebuck. If those ladies want to get themselves killed, that’s their business. But if they endanger my men or my mission, I’ll have them out of here faster than you can cap your lens.”

  Fletcher said, “I assure you, sir, Miss Tyler and—”

  “Like I said,” Hobbs said, “I appreciate what you do for us, the intelligence you gather. And I understand we’re allowing lady journalists in these parts now, accredited ones, that’s fine. If your traveling companions don’t happen to have their papers in order, well then, I’m sure you’ll have the good sense to keep that to yourselves. Are we clear?”

  Fletcher assured him we were, indeed, clear as a well-polished lens.

  “You let my aide know about that typewriter ribbon,” Hobbs said. “And you tell your friends I expect them to do my men justice.”

  “Yes, sir,” Fletcher said.

  We made sixty-five miles the next day, over a gray world dotted with coalfields and slag heaps that reminded Fletcher of Wales. We camped south of Brussels, and made another twenty-five miles on the eighth before again running out of gas. The wait lasted only a day, though. By the tenth of September we were at Fort Eben-Emael, near the border with the Netherlands, hearing rumors of a frantic and confused German retreat, with soldiers as well as Dutch, Belgian, and French Nazi civilians fleeing in trucks and armored vehicles and even a horse-drawn hearse, and on stolen bicycles and children’s scooters. The roads were reportedly thronged with dazed and disoriented Panzer troops in their black battle suits but without their tanks, with Luftwaffe airmen and Wehrmacht soldiers and even Waffen-SS troops. Trains heading for Germany and barges sailing up the Rhine were crammed to capacity, luggage left behind on station platforms. There were runs on banks all over Holland, and German soldiers were trading weapons for civilian clothes in which to avoid the Allied forces and their own military police.

  On the eleventh of September, American patrols crossed the German border near Aachen.

  THE NETHERLANDS

  WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 13, 1944

  I lose my friends and complexion in my devotion to the rites of flagellating a typewriter—and although the use of everything I send is madly satisfactory in the end, I’ve had time to be depressed to unproductivity, near suicide, or a change of career . . . I want more than anything, to be able to follow this war to the finish over here.

  —Vogue photojournalist Lee Miller, in a December 1944 letter

  By the thirteenth of September, when we moved with Old Hickory over a bridge thrown up across the Maas River to the rolling hills of Holland, I’d come to recognize the hope in Liv’s eyes every time the country was mentioned; she was convinced Holland was where her brother’s mission had taken him. As we drove into Holland, the Fourth Division east of Saint-Vith in the Ardennes drove right through the Siegfried Line—the three-mile-deep band of concrete pillboxes, troop shelters, command posts, and pyramidal concrete “dragon’s teeth” antitank projections that stretched along the border of Germany and through Holland and Switzerland. They found machine gun emplacements with cement walls a meter thick and roofs three or four times that, all empty. Old Hickory, though, encountered resistance through the fields of wheat and sugar beets we slogged across, and into Eijsden and Gronsveld and the suburbs of Maastricht. Panzer shells disabled three Sherman tanks in our platoon, and those still firing were immobilized, again out of gas. Somehow, the German officers had taken the terrified, fleeing German soldiers and lined them back up.

  “The Germans are defending themselves again,” Liv said.

  I didn’t correct her. I didn’t say that if they’d meant to defend themselves, they’d have fought in eastern France. We weren’t twenty miles from the German border. What the Germans were defending now were their wives and mothers and children.

  I said, “Why are you so sure he’s here, Liv?”

  Liv said, “Hobbs is giving Fletcher a courier to run our work back to the nearest press camp. Do you have your piece ready?”

  “Your brother,” I said.

  She began pulling condom-wrapped film canisters from her bag for the courier. “His last letter, the postscript about the doll. It was a baby doll, a cloth one that I never played with. He said he used the missing shoe as a fishing bobber. I suppose it must have been made of wood. I suppose he was trying to tell me he was going to Holland in a way that would get past the censors and wouldn’t mean anything to anyone else.”

  Liv was dealing cards early that evening when Hobbs’s aide came for Fletcher, saying there was someone the major general wanted him to meet, and a task he had for him if he was willing. Liv and I slipped with them back to the abandoned farmhouse to find Hobbs in intense conversation with two members of the Dutch underground, big men in underfed bodies from a small town on the Geul River a few miles away. No one gave names—it was safer that way—but I silently filled the void with nicknames: Stewart for the one who was as tall and stoop-shouldered as the movie star Jimmy Stewart, and Bird for his companion with the fluttering hands.

  I took notes while Liv photographed their pale, gaunt faces straight on in the dim light of the farmhouse. Fletcher listened but spent no film.

  The two resistance fighters conversed in Dutch, their language sharper-edged than the French we’d become used to, more Germanic—as was their appearance. Stewart then addressed Hobbs in English, leaving me wondering where he had learned it, and how Hobbs knew he could trust these two, or if he did.

  The town of Valkenburg was nearly empty of Dutch citizens, Stewart said. When the artillery fighting in the woods began and the first bridges were blown, most of the townspeople had moved to safety in caves outside the town. Only a handful of German soldiers watched over the last bridge not yet blown.

  I knew I ought to be paying closer attention to the talk of the city and the bridge, the German soldiers, but my attention was fixed on the townspeople living in caves. The caves I’d seen back home, just over the Kentucky border, were as dark as the inside of a cow.

  Hobbs nodded at Fletcher and at Captain Sixberry, with whom we’d shared a bit of jenever, a Dutch liquor something like gin, the night before. The three of them stepped aside to confer for a moment.

  I asked the Dutchmen if they would tell us about the caves.

  Stewart said, “These caves, they are from the marlstone, the castle stone. Many miles of these caves, yes?”

  “But the people,” I said. “They live underground?”

  Back home, miners wore helmets with carbide lamps on them, helmets that offered little protection when a mine collapsed.

  Stewart looked to the remaining men as if trying to understand what to make of me.

  “I’m Jane Tyler,” I said. “I write for a newspaper in the United States. And this is Olivia Harper. She’s a photojournalist.” Talking over Bird when the man interrupted.

  “Not the names,” Stewart insisted. “We want not the names.”

  Bird took my measure, and Stewart watched him, and when Bird nodded almost imperceptibly, Stewart returned his attention to me and spoke slowly, intent on my understanding what he said.

  “If you are from Valkenburg, then you live in these caves for days, yes?” he said. “Since the shooting is first, and then the freedom. The freedom, it is no good if you are shot dead.”

  “No. No, of course not,” I agreed.

  He told us whole families lived hidden in an extensive network of underground caves. When the Germans insisted the mine’s owner take them through it, the owner led them into an unstable section and poked his walking stick at the ceiling so that part of it came down and the Germans turned back
.

  “If you are American pilot,” Stewart said, using his hand and his voice to suggest an airplane crashing, “then you are in these caves for months, misschien.”

  “A crashed American plane?” Liv said, focusing intently on Stewart. She extracted the photograph of her brother from her pocket and showed it to them. “It’s my brother,” she said.

  Bird frowned at her and muttered something to Stewart, the words in his low voice disconcertingly Germanic.

  “Geoffrey James,” Liv said. “You could find out if he’s hiding in the caves?”

  “Not the names,” Stewart said. “Begrijp je mij? The names, they make more danger.”

  “Vertel haar over de Joodse mensen,” Bird said to Stewart—sharp, guttural sounds that suggested Stewart took direction from Bird. “Vertel haar dat de Joodse mensen hier al jaren hebben ondergedoken.”

  “You are Jew?” Stewart asked Liv.

  She shook her head, and he turned to me.

  “No,” I said, a fear creeping in: Holy Mary, Mother of God.

  “If you are Jew,” Stewart said, “you hide in these caves for long time, yes? More than four years.”

  “Will you take us to the caves?” I said. “Tonight. After it’s dark. I would write about the people living there.”

  “You will write the story?” Stewart asked.

  He looked to Bird, who nodded slightly just as Fletcher and Hobbs and Captain Sixberry rejoined us, Fletcher asking Stewart where he’d learned to speak English with a note of suspicion in his voice. Bird spoke to Stewart before Stewart could answer. Bird had understood Fletcher’s question but didn’t want us to know it, or didn’t want Stewart to answer, or both.

  Hobbs arranged with Stewart and Bird for an American patrol to move into the city early the next morning using the password “Steeplechase” to connect with the Dutch resistance. Steeplechase, as if this were some course to be run by beautiful horses, where one had only to sit in the saddle and hang on.