Gone to Soldiers (102 page)

Louise felt her presence had to be intrusive, but she wasn't the only camper. Claude's wife, streaked as if her black hair had been painted white with a brush, her eyes enormous in her thin face, her hands covered with burns, had brought home from prison four other women equally gaunt and staring. Among the rotund mahogany pieces the size of sedan cars, they were drooping as if an enormous wave had cast them up here with the life beaten out of them. Claude seemed to settle down. He spoke differently here, softly and diffidently, almost cooing. His two teenage sons looked at him and looked away. They seemed not to know what to say.

Why did he let me come? she wondered, but realized he had no idea until they were actually in Paris where his wife was and whether she was alive or dead; similarly, he had no idea whether his mother had been shipped off to a camp. Maybe he had permitted her to come as padding between himself and the ugly realities he might encounter. Tomorrow she would find another place to stay. Claude seemed largely unaware of her presence, as of the four other released prisoners. His two sons stared at him and he at them. The younger, Roland, was fourteen and the older, Jules, sixteen. They seemed unsure what attitude to take toward their father. With their mother they were overjoyed but shy. She had been in prison two years.

Claude was appalled to discover both sons were armed and had already been involved in skirmishing. The older boy, Jules, paid no attention to his father's arguments but simply picked up his rifle, his grenades, some bread and a demi-bottle of red wine and went off to take up his duties for the night at a barricade. Roland did not so much entertain as terrify his father by describing how students at his lycée had made Molotov cocktails out of sulphuric acid and potassium chlorate from the chemistry lab. Simone did not seem to find her sons' activities unusual and confined herself to ordering them to be careful. Claude was going to have trouble adjusting to his family. She stayed against the wall, invisible in the family turmoil, with one of the released prisoners slumped beside her, with tears appearing against her cheeks as if they were condensation on a stone wall, while her eyes remained shut.

The next day Louise was in the Hôtel de Ville interviewing the Resistance authorities when the Germans attacked. The telephone was working again, functional even into the American sector and beyond. She was able to file a story. She had just got it off when the first shell landed. Cautiously she peered out. Four Panther tanks were in the enormous plaza in front of the Hôtel de Ville that stretched from the rue de Rivoli to the Seine. They had just lobbed a shell to blow up the iron gates. From nearby windows people were firing at the tanks, doing no damage. Another shell hit the ornate facade and a ton of assorted statuary cascaded into the plaza. Below her, Louise heard screams and the sound of falling plaster and masonry. Under her feet the floor lurched. Was the building surrounded? Gunfire was general all about them but she could not tell who was shooting.

While she was peering down, a woman came running at the tanks. Her dead-on frantic rush was riveting, as if she meant to throw herself down and appeal to their mercy or fling herself in their path. From above, her wide scarlet skirt looked like a flower. She ran pell-mell all the way up to the one that had been firing and smashed a Molotov cocktail against the turret as she was cut down by machine-gun fire from the others. The tank burst into flames. Suddenly the other three Panthers turned and clanked out of the square. Louise could not believe that one woman, lying in a puddle of her own blood on the stone pavement, had saved the Hôtel de Ville, a formidable number of Resistance officials and Louise herself, but the tanks continued retreating. The woman's hair had been brown, her age perhaps seventeen or eighteen. Her face was intact, but her body had been torn like a paper sack. Another woman knelt over her, weeping. A life combusted in one act of bravery.

Just as if she were a tourist arriving in Paris, Louise went to the Left Bank hotel where Oscar and she used to stay. All the little Left Bank streets, too narrow for tanks to penetrate, were held by the Resistance. Whenever German tanks or personnel carriers passed on the Quai, they sprayed the streets with machine-gun fire. Medical teams were set up in every block and Resistance people directed pedestrian traffic between the bursts of firing. From the hotel, she called the baron, hoping she could find out where Gloria was. She asked for the baron, gave her name, and heard clearly through the phone the exclamation, “Impossible. C'est une espèce de tromperie.”

The maid reported that the baron had gone on an extended trip.

“Actually it was the baronne that I desired to speak with. She's my sister-in-law.”

Again the maid repeated clearly what she had said. Most certainly the maid was not covering the mouthpiece, so that Louise suspected she was the benefactor of a miniature uprising at the baron's. Indeed the maid said quite simply, “Excuse me, madame, but he says to hang up.”

Gloria had a house in Maisons-Laffitte. She called there and got the cook. “Ah, madame, I remember you and your charming husband and your little girl who cried to ride the horses. The house is closed up except for me and the grooms.… Oh, madame, they took her away, the Boches.… The Gestapo, madame, they took her in March. Not a word since. But I pray for her.”

She continued to use the
Combat
offices as her base. She was their pet American, proof that the troops would arrive. It was ten at night when a phone call came that the first tanks of the French armor had entered the city through the Porte d'Orléans. The city sputtered with the crack of rifles, pistol shots, shells bursting, booming explosions and the grinding roar of tanks and half-tracks and trucks. It was hard to believe anyone in Paris was sleeping, for in spite of the fighting, sporadic everywhere and heavy in places, the city was pouring into the streets.

They could not get near the Porte d'Orléans, but soon the tanks approached as she stood in a crowd of people screaming for the best parade they had ever seen, three and only three Sherman tanks decorated with flowers, with tricolors, laden with women and children hanging off the turrets. People were singing the “Marseillaise” and embracing each other if they could not reach the tankmen. No more tanks appeared, although the soldiers assured the crowds there were lots more on the way, for they had outraced the others. They were headed for the Hôtel de Ville, followed by thousands of Parisians through the warm and smoky night.

The rest of the tanks did not arrive until early morning, when they entered Paris from three different directions. The streets had been crowded since she arrived in the city, but now they were mobbed. Even in hospitals, people were at the windows and up on the roofs. Armed resistants mingled with mothers pushing baby buggies and couples strolling arm in arm. Everywhere flowers rained down or were crushed on the pavement.

The French armor had broken their columns and tanks were rumbling down streets all over the city, heading to seize the railroad stations or ministries, and in many cases, finding them already occupied by the Resistance. She followed one half-brigade that trundled along accompanied by several thousand people toward the Quai d'Orsay across the Seine from Le Petit Palais. The Grand Palais was in ruins from a recent shelling. On the way, she saw Claude's older son Jules and his group marching along with a group of German prisoners. The French armor seized the German barracks at the Avenue de la Tour-Maubourg without opposition and then had a quick fierce battle outside the foreign office at the Quai d'Orsay. When the tanks rumbled up to ministries, the crowds erected barricades to prevent counterattacks and then stormed the buildings and took them over.

At the foreign office, after the initial battle, everyone thought the way was cleared and people started surging in. Shots rang out, sharply, and then automatic weapons fired on the crowd. A suicide squad of Germans lay in wait and opened up on people rushing the steps. All around Louise people fell. She rolled down the steps and took cover behind a tree. Then she crawled and ran back through the park, bullets whining around her. Beside her, an old woman fell on the tricolor she was carrying. Louise stooped over her. Shot through the head. Grey matter oozed with blood through the exit hole. She dodged on, taking refuge behind a stone wall that ran between the park in front of the Foreign Office and the street, the quai bordering the Seine.

She was pinned down by fire and lay in a stupor, realizing how exhausted her body was while her mind still raced. She felt foolish and naked, stomach to the sidewalk behind the stone wall in the summer dress she had put on so that she would not be so conspicuous in Paris. All round her vast spaces yawned, Les Invalides to the right, the Seine behind and across it open spaces stretching to the distant Louvre. She was protected unless a shell landed, as she watched the Resistance fighters storm the building until the street and the park were littered with bodies lying smashed in their blood.

Finally tanks began to shell the building. One of them was hit by mortar fire and burst into flames, the men inside screaming as they burned. She could hear equally fierce fighting from the rue de l'Université at the rear of the same ministry. She had followed a parade and fallen into a battle. Fragments of masonry fell around her and one struck her in the shoulder. At first she thought her arm broken, but it was only badly bruised. She crawled backwards away from the explosions, feeling the heat of a fire on her back. Behind her wall several wounded men and women had taken shelter. Louise crept over to help apply a tourniquet.

When the remains of the building were taken, she rose and crossed the Seine, feeling terribly exposed, trotting bent over behind the parapet like all the other pedestrians. The Place de la Concorde was studded with antitank stakes driven in. She realized she needed a rest room, badly. She ignored the bullets whizzing across and ran on. On the rue Royale, a restaurateur had broken out a keg of wine and was passing it around. The café was out of food but the toilets were functional and she could clean herself from her long crawl on the pavement. Then she took a seat at a table crowded with strangers who were all in love with each other. She felt dazed and disoriented. It was as if she were attending a huge unruly party where in certain back rooms, people were killing each other. Her left arm throbbed badly where a fragment of the Foreign Office had landed on her. She felt as if the front of her mind, her eyes, her senses were overpowered to bursting with images and sounds, but that her self had dropped away. At once numb and overstimulated, she found it hard to speak, but the noise level was such that no one would have heard her anyhow.

“De Gaulle is in Paris!” the restaurant owner shouted, climbing up on his own table. “He is going to the Gare Montparnasse to receive the German surrender. Paris is free!”

Everybody screamed and embraced and drank or spilled what was left of the wine. The “Marseillaise” was again sung and people began dancing to an accordion. Wearily she began worming her way through the mob toward the street. She was here at this vast dangerous party to do a job, and that included getting to the Gare Montparnasse to hear de Gaulle. Strange men grabbed her and kissed her wetly. She could not escape or wriggle free but must endure until let go. Her arm was hit so many times, she felt like bursting into tears or throwing up. She pressed on, suffering the hands of strangers, along the rue de Rivoli under the arcades.

Out in the street a big bonfire blazed with German signs and Fascist papers, while people capered around singing. A blind man sawed at a violin and a woman was standing on a barricade, singing. Children were squirming through playing soldier. Everywhere people were kissing or twirling around two by two or in large circles, hands clasped. On one street she heard a song of the Spanish Civil War she remembered, “Los Cuatro Generales.” A Sherman tank was smoldering beside a Tiger.

By tomorrow the government would be in place no doubt, hundreds of other correspondents in town and everybody jostling for the same stories. She did not really mind. She had her stories and perhaps with other Americans, she might recover a sense of self again. She felt as if she had come to inhabit an eternal overwhelming present that had pressed out of her all personality. She recorded like a machine. Idly she wondered if Ari had found his Daniela as she pushed along under the arcades. In the Tuileries across the street people danced on the grass.

She passed the Hotel Meurice where the German commander von Choltitz had surrendered that afternoon after a short fierce exchange of fire. The bodies still lay in the street. At the far end of the block, a medical team was working with the wounded, carrying them into the former headquarters. Two young militants with FFI armbands lay where they had fallen, their gelid eyes open. One of them was Claude's fourteen-year-old son Roland.

ABRA 9

The Grey Lady

Abra was relieved that the regular air raids had ended, but there was something new. Fewer buzz bombs had been getting through lately, since the antiaircraft people had got quite good at shooting them down at the Channel. With this new disaster, no planes were heard. No siren went off. Nothing gave warning until an immense explosion sounded, a shock wave traveled out breaking windows and toppling objects for a mile and a column of smoke and flames rose.

The government announced that another gas main had exploded, until people began making cracks about the flying gas mains. Finally Churchill spoke. They were officially called V-2s. Abra had not bothered to go to the shelters for a long time, and indeed, with the V-2s, there seemed little point. By the time you heard the explosion, you were still alive and they had missed you.

Frequently Americans just over mistook Abra for British. They said she looked like a Londoner. She understood what they meant, whenever she saw herself reflected in a mirror beside one of the newcomers. She had no mirror at home because hers had shattered in nearby concussions. There were no shop windows in which to catch a reflection, had not been in years. Abra was dependent on the still-intact mirror in the women's room at OSS to see herself in anything larger than a compact. When they said she looked like a Londoner, they meant she had no tan, looked pasty and thin. She wore her uniform almost always, because her other clothes had worn out and could not be replaced.