The Race for Paris

by Meg Waite Clayton

  Liv started to insist on being included, but Fletcher shot her a warning glance. He meant to take us along somehow, and he didn’t want to give Hobbs an opportunity to forbid it.

  OUTSIDE VALKENBURG, THE NETHERLANDS

  WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 13, 1944

  In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.

  —Prime Minister Winston Churchill

  As a child, I loathed the dark, and I’ve grown no fonder of it since the war began,” Fletcher said as Liv and I gathered our gear later that night, to be ready when Stewart and Bird returned to take us to the caves. I’d always liked the dark: its protective cloak, its heightened sense of sound and smell, touch and taste. Summer nights with my bare arms humid-damp against the seat of the Chrysler.

  Liv said, “You ought to have stayed back in Paris, Fletcher, in your warm bed.”

  “With Hemingway,” I said.

  “There will be a real war to photograph come sunrise,” Fletcher said, “and there will be no light by which to take photographs in these caves.”

  Liv slung the Leica strap over her head, then put on her helmet.

  “Anything the two of you get will be censored,” Fletcher insisted. “Forever caught up in Washington red tape. We’ll be beyond the front, in German-controlled territory.”

  I tightened my chin strap and the lace of my left boot. Maybe Fletcher was right. Maybe nothing we did tonight would make it into print. But what if these people didn’t survive?

  “I’m a photojournalist,” Liv said. “This is my job and I’m damned well going to do it. You don’t have to come, Fletcher. I’m not asking either of you to come.”

  “Going to the caves tonight was my idea,” I said. It was the kind of story that could make a difference, the kind of vivid story that would lodge in people’s imaginations.

  But of course Liv was thinking of her brother.

  “I don’t even need the kind of light you two do to work,” I said.

  “You stay behind if you want, Fletcher,” Liv said. “Jane and I are fine.”

  Fletcher muttered an obscenity and went to fetch his gear, to my relief. Everything felt safer with Fletcher. And when Stewart and Bird returned—searching us for weapons before leading us off—Fletcher waded along with us through the fields outside Valkenburg.

  Stewart led and Bird followed as we made our way by the light of a hazy moon in a starless sky to a hillside entrance hidden in the brush, like the machine gun emplacements of the Siegfried Line. Within a minute, the world around us was pitch-black and I was creeping uneasily behind Liv, groping for the sides of the cave. They were gritty cold, but anchoring, and slightly less frightening than the smell of the damp stone and the taste of underground air and the quiet crunch of steps that might be ours alone, or might not.

  “Did I tell you how much I loathe the dark?” Fletcher whispered behind me.

  I wondered again how Hobbs knew he could trust these two Dutchmen, or if he did. I wondered why Stewart hadn’t answered Fletcher’s question about where he had learned English. I wondered what Stewart’s and Bird’s real names were. I wondered if they were even Dutch.

  Stewart lit a dull flashlight, and I was just able to distinguish the outline of Liv a few steps ahead of me, and then the shadow of Stewart. A faint circle of light bobbed on the path ahead of him as we made our way forward and down—for thirty minutes or perhaps more.

  A wail sounded in the distance—high-pitched and animalistic. Liv stopped and I did, too, leaving Fletcher bumping into me, his front warm on my back for that short moment, a strand of my hair catching in the stubble of his chin.

  I reached for the cold, gritty cave wall. It was utterly dark, even Stewart’s dull flashlight extinguished.

  Human. The wail was human, I thought as it sounded again. Someone being tortured. But I wasn’t sure.

  Fletcher’s hand touched my shoulder gently, and he stepped in front of me, and in front of Liv.

  “It is fine,” Stewart said, clicking his flashlight back on. He offered no explanation for the cry, nor did he sound surprised or troubled by it.

  After another minute or two, the Dutchman stopped and said a few words, not in English, and a voice—male, elderly, suspicious—answered, more guttural foreign words that tingled at the back of my neck.

  A workman’s boots were caught in the dull circle cast by Stewart’s flashlight.

  A few more words were exchanged, and the elderly voice called back to someone behind him, the hard foreign words more brutal in the louder tone.

  I inhaled the stink of human sweat over the damp-stone smell and a fainter, more unpleasant smell, too. Urine. Excrement.

  A moment later footsteps sounded, coming from deeper inside the cave.

  A bright light flashed onto Fletcher, who instinctively raised one hand to shield himself, reaching back with his other hand to protect Liv and me.

  The click of a gun being readied to fire.

  “Nee!” two voices said at once, Stewart ahead of us and Bird behind.

  Several less frantic Dutch words followed as Fletcher lowered his arm, still shielding Liv behind him, all of us blinking into the sudden brightness. A stooped old man lowered a pistol, the cave passageway now lit by a bright beam of flashlight trained directly at us, casting frightening shadows back across the old man.

  “Hij moet de vrouwen zien,” Stewart said to Fletcher. “He must see the others.”

  Fletcher stepped aside slowly, and the light beam fell on Liv. She raised her hands slightly: empty. The light moved on to me.

  Again, a few words in Dutch, Stewart’s stooped shoulders relaxing as he gave a curt explanation to the old man. I made some sense of a few words I could pick out: “fotograaf ” and “camera” and “journalist.” He did not use our names.

  The old man tucked his pistol into the waistband of his trousers and turned and began down the passageway, the single beam of his brighter flashlight lighting sharply cut stone walls—a mine rather than a natural cave, or a cave that had been mined. After a moment, we came to a narrow passageway marked with a black arrow and black letters painted on the stone: verblyf voor 53 personen.

  “There are fifty-three people living here?” I whispered.

  “In this . . . in Dutch, one says ‘grot,’ yes?” Stewart answered. “This room, and others.”

  “Fifty-three in this cavern and others?” I said, trying to imagine fifty-three people living underground together, even in separate caverns.

  “In some larger grot, two hundred, yes? In some smaller, ten.”

  In another moment, the old man’s flashlight splashed out over a stone chamber. A group of women sitting together blinked into the light, moving their arms protectively over children sleeping stretched out on blankets on the ground beside them. Everywhere, people slept, and those who didn’t were impossibly silent. Fifty-three in one cavern.

  The old man called out a few quiet words.

  A hushed murmur of relief exhaled from those who were awake, a sound that echoed off the stone. Several of the children stirred.

  The single beam of light splashed over an entrance to another cavern across the way. The entrance—marked in the same black writing, verblyf voor 8 personen, with the same black arrow—was framed with wood beams, and there were posts supporting the ceiling in both this first room and the far one. I followed Liv’s gaze to a mother with a child, hardly more than a baby, in front of the sign. A faint light seemed to linger behind them even after the old man’s flashlight fell back onto the stone at our feet.

  The child might be half German, but the war had come suddenly to this part of the Netherlands, in early 1940 before anyone could even believe what Hitler was doing; there were young men here who had come of age under almost five years of German occupation, who never had a chance to join an army. Stewart himself. Stewart couldn’t be much more than twenty. The mother might be Jewish, too. She might have been living in this cave with her husband for the entir
e war.

  “This is where the people, they wait,” Stewart said to us. “The soldiers, they use the dynamite. It is to fire de huizen en de stad—Valkenburg, yes?—but what do these Germans care? They leave Valkenburg and nothing left, yes?”

  I wondered if he’d learned English from the American pilot hiding here.

  “We have the ration cards, yes? Gestolen. Not for us, but we take. Now we can get no more the ration cards. Now the children, they eat first.”

  Fletcher, his eyes fixed on the dark shadow of the mother and child, felt in his fatigue pockets for something, but left his hands there.

  It was surprisingly temperate in the cavern, warmer than the chill passageways, the body heat of the cave’s inhabitants warming the air. The warmth accentuated the stench of human life lived without access to fresh air or sewage drains.

  Another wail filled the air—this time distinctly a woman’s voice, long and high. It came from beyond one of the other entrances, from another chamber. Everyone turned toward the noise, but no one looked startled or even troubled.

  Several of the children again stirred, but none woke.

  Stewart said something to a stout woman sitting with several others just inside the cave, and she answered with a pleasant smile and a few words.

  “Zij is voor het eerst moeder, yes?” Stewart said. “She have no baby, but this one, he will be born tonight. Tomorrow, misschien.”

  “Someone is giving birth here?” Liv asked.

  Stewart’s grin revealed bucked front teeth. He looked so kind, suddenly. “The babies, what do they know?” he said. “It is the time to be born even if it is the war.”

  Liv, camera in hand now, scanned the room. “May I take photographs?”

  “This is why we come,” Stewart answered. “One man, he dies here already. Not dies from the war but dies only from the being old. It is no place to die, yes? In this cave with only the fear.”

  I said, “Perhaps we could . . . The mother? If we wouldn’t be too intrusive?”

  “The photograph of the child is being born,” Stewart said, “it will make the difference for the Americans?” He nodded, and he spoke a few words to the old man, who uttered a single syllable and disappeared in the direction of the entrance to the eight-person cavern, the light bobbing along beside him. A moment later, he reappeared, signaling with a wave of his free hand to follow him.

  A short passageway led to another cavern, this one marked in the same black arrow and writing, verblyf voor 5 personen, and dimly lit by a single candle. A woman lay stretched out on a thick layer of blankets on the ground, panting, her knees up and her legs open. Fletcher averted his gaze, and I knew he was thinking of Elizabeth Houck-Smythe then, and his brother’s baby.

  Two older women tended the birthing mother, one running a damp cloth over her forehead, the other at her feet. A fourth woman—a woman almost as pregnant as the one giving birth—busied herself with something off to the side. She was fair and blond and big-boned. She might have passed for the sister I never had.

  The birthing woman wailed, a raw sound.

  Liv stood staring, wide-eyed, her camera limp at her side, a single graceful hand touching her own stomach as if trying to absorb some of that pain herself.

  “The photograph, it is permitted,” Stewart said. “She say is fine.”

  “Okay, then, on three,” Fletcher said to Liv, raising his camera, not looking through his lens but only pointing his flash unit in the right direction.

  The pale skin of Liv’s neck flexed and her delicate fingers moved to her chest, her camera untouched.

  “Liv?” Fletcher said.

  She looked to him, and he nodded at her camera and indicated his.

  “If we coordinate the flashes,” he said, “there might be light enough.”

  Liv looked down at her Speed Graphic. “Yes,” she said. “Yes, of course.”

  “On three,” Fletcher said. “One. Two. Three.”

  The light fell back again into the glow of the single candle and the flashlight, barely making a dent in the darkness.

  Liv looked at her flash as if it might somehow be coaxed to do more. Even with the larger-format film of the Speed Graphic, the light wasn’t enough.

  She opened her musette bag, extracted something, and set it on the floor, not too close to anyone—the ground flare she’d traded a whole box of French cigarettes for earlier that evening, after the Dutchmen had left and before they’d returned for us. The transport truck driver she’d made the exchange with said she could just have it, but she didn’t like to take it from him without giving him something in return.

  “It was what Margaret Bourke-White used to light the Otis Steel Mill; it’s how she made her career,” Liv said. “Hers was magnesium. Bright white. I have no idea what this is.”

  She flipped the dark slide over and pulled, flipped, and reinserted the film holder to ready the second shot.

  I offered to light the flare, so she could focus on the photographs, and I extracted from my slacks’ pocket the Zippo lighter Fletcher had given us at the inn in Rambouillet.

  Stewart explained to the women about the flare so they wouldn’t be startled, his Dutch words sounding rounder now, less threatening.

  When the next contraction started, I flicked the lighter and set it to the fuse.

  In the longer, brighter light of the flare: the woman’s contorted face, the mucous red of the blood, the twist of hair at the crown of the head that surged just the slightest as she groaned. Liv took shot after shot—images I couldn’t imagine ever being in print anywhere, but maybe I could couch the moment in words that would go down well enough with breakfast even if a photo might not.

  Fletcher patted his shirt pocket for cigarettes, then shoved his hand into the pocket of his fatigues where he kept his last chocolate bar. He’d lost his nerve. He turned to the other woman, the pregnant one, and met her brown-eyed gaze, and he pulled the chocolate bar from his pocket and offered it to her.

  Liv, watching the exchange through her lens, became so still that she seemed to be her own tripod.

  She lowered her camera and stared at the pregnant woman.

  The woman shook her head, saying something about the chocolate to Fletcher, declining it although her expression made plain her hunger.

  “She wishes for you give this to the children,” Stewart translated.

  “I want her to have it,” Fletcher said. “She should have it herself.”

  Elizabeth Houck-Smythe had craved chocolate when she was pregnant, he’d told me.

  Again Stewart translated. Again the woman shook her head. Again, the birthing woman began to groan, and Fletcher looked uneasy. Stewart smiled slightly. “I think you will like to give this chocolate to the children yourself. Then you can continue on, yes?”

  Liv let her camera hang from its strap and began fishing in her pockets. She pulled out a chocolate bar and handed it to Fletcher. She opened her musette bag and fished from it a second candy bar, pausing for a moment, looking from her bag to the pregnant woman. She pulled out two more chocolate bars and handed them, too, to Fletcher, her eyes fixed on the woman, the skin pale in the slant of light.

  “Go ahead, Fletcher,” she said. “Jane and I will follow in a minute.”

  Fletcher looked to Bird. Bird nodded at Stewart and said a few Dutch words to Fletcher that I took to mean “follow me” or “this way,” that only in retrospect would I realize included “Valkenburg” and “de brug over de rivier.”

  As I listened to the sound of receding footsteps, Liv stared at the pregnant woman who had declined the chocolate. The woman stared back with brown eyes, like mine.

  Liv moved her musette bag from her side to her front, her belly.

  When the sound of Fletcher’s steps was distant, Liv looked into her bag again and extracted something. She held out a closed fist that was pale and yet steadier, more certain. With only the quickest glance at me, she opened her palm to the woman.

  A single salt tablet rested
there.

  “Salt,” Liv explained.

  The woman stared.

  Liv turned to Stewart. “Tell her it’s salt.”

  Stewart said, “Zout,” and the woman smiled slightly, the light from the flare reflecting in her eyes.

  Liv nodded. “Zout,” she repeated.

  The woman reached out with slender fingers, and in the light of the waning flare, she took the salt tablet and set it in her mouth.

  Fletcher was nowhere to be found when we emerged from the smaller cavern into the larger one. Stewart, after a heated exchange in Dutch with Bird, told us they would see us back to the camp. Liv and I protested again and again that we wouldn’t leave without Fletcher, but Bird, his hands fluttering nervously near a pistol holstered at his waist, ignored us, demanding of Stewart, “Begrijp je mij? Begrijp je mij?”

  Stewart said to Liv and me, “Yes, you will follow me now.”

  OUTSIDE VALKENBURG, THE NETHERLANDS

  THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 14, 1944

  I know it will be a long time before I want to go with any attack to take pictures again.

  —Photojournalist Robert Capa

  Liv slept beside me in our foxhole perhaps four hours later, only half covered with her bedroll despite the predawn cold. I lay on my back with my helmet off to better hear, listening as I had all night. Still, I was startled half to death when Fletcher peered down at me.

  “Showtime,” he whispered.

  “Fletcher,” I said, working hard not to cry with relief as I climbed from the foxhole.

  He hugged me for a long moment, saying, “You and Liv put me in a devil of a spot. I hadn’t meant to take a detour to visit bloody caves on my way into town, but I sure as hell couldn’t let you two go alone.”

  “You went into Valkenburg?” I said.

  When Liv and I had returned from the caves, we’d gone to Hobbs about Fletcher’s disappearance, only to have the major general appoint a soldier to escort us to our foxhole and keep an eye on us—punishment for having left the camp without Hobbs’s knowledge, we thought. Now I saw it was Fletcher’s safety that had been his concern, that Hobbs had known where Fletcher was. From the caves, Fletcher had snuck into town to assess the position of the Germans before this morning’s assault on the bridge began. What he would capture on film during the planned attack in the coming day—how the Germans guarded the bridge and the positions of their snipers, their explosives—would be helpful for the future, but it wouldn’t help Hobbs’s men this morning. That was why Fletcher had been so reluctant to go to the caves, because Hobbs had needed him to suss out the situation in Valkenburg.