The Race for Paris (18 page)

I pulled out my Corona and rolled in a sheet of paper, and the words came spilling out despite the pain in my left arm as I typed, mostly one-handed. And while the jeep edged forward and Liv photographed it all—a toddler’s hands grasping his mother’s hair, a soldier weeping with joy, a frail old couple wrapped in a shawl of tricolor flag—I wrote my guts out. I wrote to get it down, to have a piece I might have time to edit, or might not.

The Place de la Concorde up ahead wore a thorny crown of barbed wire and logs at its base, an echo of the obstacles at Omaha Beach. We turned right before we reached it, heading north toward the Place de la Madeleine and l’Opéra and the hotel press camp, where journalists coming in with troops from the other directions might or might not have arrived before us. The opera building with its towering columns and great winged figures was almost dwarfed by the volume of traffic signs for branches of the German forces:
“General der Luftwaffe Paris,” “Zentral-Kraft,” “Zentral-Ersatzteillager.”
Across the imposing stone building that might have withstood al
most anything stretched the heavy letters
kommandantur
,
the great landmark reduced by German bureaucracy to a place where Frenchmen came to apply for requisite permits, or to file forms, or to do whatever else needed to be done to conduct routine business under the Nazi regime.

“Boulevard des Capucines,” Liv called out, intent now on reaching the press headquarters before anyone else, while I wrote and wrote. “And there’s the Scribe!”

I looked up from my typewriter. A block up on the avenue to the left, a six-story building wrapped around the corner as if not to be contained in a single block. Signs on the wrought iron railing at the base of the second floor and again higher up proclaimed it to be the Hôtel Scribe, the predesignated press headquarters in Paris—with a Nazi flag flying between the two signs. If the Germans, who used it as a propaganda office, hadn’t been able to destroy their transmitters before they fled, Liv and I would send out our work in just minutes.

A beaming man welcomed us under the square awning over the entrance, announcing even before I could set aside my typewriter that he was Monsieur Louis Regamey, agent-general for the Canadian National Railway, which leased the building to the hotel. The hotel manager was there, too, and the head porter, both of them opening the doors of the filthy jeep and offering to take our bags as if we’d just arrived in a limousine. Our Allied uniforms served as the once-required jacket and tie, although just hours earlier only a German uniform would have sufficed.

“Scribe,” Liv said. “What a perfect name for the press headquarters!”

“I’m afraid it’s pronounced ‘
screeb
,’” Fletcher said.

I pulled the page from my typewriter, grabbed a pen, and climbed from the jeep. My piece was more typographical error
than not and lacked a closing line, but a copyeditor could fix the former, and a piece that ended abruptly but might be the first out of Paris was better than a polished one that lagged.

“Mademoiselle, you are in need of a doctor?” Monsieur Regamey said, the note of alarm in his eyes carefully kept from his voice as he registered my bandaged arm. “I will call the doctor for you, yes?”

A thunder of cheering rose from behind us, and we turned to see a tank passing through the intersection at Avenue de l’Opéra and Boulevard des Capucines just a few yards away. Two French officers and one German one rode together in the tank, announcing something in French and in German that couldn’t quite be understood over the cheers of the crowd. You didn’t have to speak either language, though, to understand that they were announcing a cease-fire. And the people in the street were kissing again, and we were kissing, too. I was kissing a baby whose mother held him out to drool on my copy when another sound—a sound as antithetical to the sounds of gunfire as could be imagined—caused a silence to fall over the crowded streets.

From behind us, the bells of Notre Dame clanged and clanged and clanged.

Other bells joined in, one after another after another, until the whole city juddered with the sound. The ringing was marked by the occasional boom of a heavy gun, the pop of rifles, but then the sound of voices joined in, the spontaneous singing of the “Marseillaise” in the streets: “
Allons enfants de la Patrie. Le jour de gloire est arrivé.
” Everywhere, people were singing the same notes, the same French words:
The day of glory has arrived.
Paris was free.

FRIDAY, AUGUST 25, 1944

The General said, “If you’re fool enough to be here, I haven’t seen you.”

                    
—AWOL journalist Martha Gellhorn

F
letcher said—for about the fifth time—that we needed to find a doctor for me, but I couldn’t imagine another hour or two would matter for my arm and it certainly might for Liv’s photos and my copy. Fletcher relented, and he offered to go into the Scribe to see about getting our work off for us.

“I don’t care if they take me into custody now,” Liv said, her blue-green eyes bright against her grime-streaked face, her unkempt hair, her wrinkled and muddy uniform. “I’ve gotten what I came for.”

“Liv,” Fletcher insisted.

But Liv had always spoken of getting to Paris. Fletcher was our ride to Paris, and here we were, and now she would go back to Charles. Had Fletcher really imagined anything else? Liv had done what she’d come to do, and so had I, even if
I hadn’t known it was what I’d come to do until I met Liv. We were in Paris and the city was free, and soon the world would be free and we could return to the lives we’d left behind, mundane lives for which we now had a great appreciation. I would go home to Nashville, to Mama and the trolley to Belle Meade. There would be no place for newspaper girls after the men folded away their uniforms, and Mama couldn’t wash dishes forever, and she had no one else to care for her.

I gathered myself and said, “We want to hear what excuse the army devises for excluding us now, Fletcher. Surely they can’t stick with ‘no ladies’ latrines’ in Paris.”

Fletcher laughed in spite of himself. I could make him laugh.

“You underestimate the military mind,” he said. “Or maybe you overestimate it.”

He ushered us through the door into the hotel’s Art Deco interior, the Baccarat crystal chandeliers bubbling light onto marble floors and deep wood paneling, heaps of khaki duffel bags and bedrolls, stray gas masks and mess kits, men in field clothes and mud-caked boots. Waiters hauled in champagne by the case and served it to journalists already sitting everywhere, their typewriters set up on tables in the lounge and on the registration counter and even the floor. British and Canadian press, but also Americans—damn! Still, the tapping of keys and the popping of corks together were glorious.

It wasn’t something you could capture in a photograph: the ache of a soldier’s voice asking you to talk American to him, the tapping out of the news, the joy that was every church bell in the city clanging as the people of Paris sang.

I put my foot on a metal heat register and tried to hold my copy steady on my knee with my left hand—yes, it did hurt—long enough to scribble a last line, trying to capture the bells
and the voices, the cacophony of freedom, while at the same time scanning the room for the censors. The first floor was consigned to the press offices, with men setting up bare tables and lines forming (damn again!) although no censors had yet arrived.

“The mess is being set up in the basement,” someone said. “Today’s special: K rations, coffee, and champagne.”

We turned to see the man shake Fletcher’s hand enthusiastically, saying, “Fletcher Roebuck! Imagine seeing you after all this time!”

“Hell, I haven’t seen you since we were in short trousers,” Fletcher said. He was, I thought, grasping for the friend’s name.

“These are my traveling companions, Jane Tyler and Liv Harper, Andrew,” he said, pulling the name out of thin air. He hesitated—was the fellow’s name Andrew?—but he wasn’t corrected. “Andrew was a clarinet player,” he said, “and good at maths.”

“You’re still rattling around the Continent, then,” Andrew said to us. Then to me, “What did you do to your poor arm?”

The German cable setups and broadcasting studios were intact, Andrew assured us, but the censors were not even in Paris and wouldn’t be for hours at best. I turned to my copy again, setting it on the registration counter this time. I struck through every line and word I could spare, distilling the piece to its most vivid images, a length of text that could be cabled. It always surprised me how tightening a piece to fit space restrictions could make it pop.

The hotel manager set a glass of champagne beside my copy. “
Pour mademoiselle la journaliste,
” he said, “
avec la reconnaissance de toute la ville de Paris.
”
With the gratitude of all of Paris
—as if the pen with which I edited were as important as any weapon. “
Monsieur Regamey m’a demandé de vous dire que le médecin va
arriver bientôt, pour s’occuper de votre bras.
” A doctor was on his way to see about my arm.

He handed a second glass to Liv, saying, “
Et pour mademoiselle la photojournaliste.
”

“Would you point me to the darkroom, please?” she said.

“We are converting the bathrooms to this purpose, Mademoiselle,” he answered, “but I am told that we have not at the moment the warm water, and the temperature, it must be just so, yes?”

He offered to take her film, but she—perhaps thinking of Capa’s D-Day shots—declined. She asked him if there was any way to get information about an American soldier, and he took her brother’s name and said he would find out what he could.

Within moments we were incorporated into a large group of correspondents: a man whom Fletcher met in Caen; one he’d worked with years before, in London; a friend of his brother’s who was saying how sorry he had been to hear about Edward and asking about Elizabeth Houck-Smythe. Already the competing claims over who had been first into Paris were beginning, everyone having come into the city from different directions with different forces. Sonia Tomara had some claim to being first, having ridden in on a weapons carrier. Bob Reuben of Reuters joked that Lee Carson wasn’t sharing the honor even with her jeep mates.

“We were in the backseat while Lee here particularly chose the front,” he said.

Carson hadn’t been able to get a single story out while she was AWOL, which she still was, of course.

Catherine Coyne, Iris Carpenter, and Lee Miller, who’d been confined to the press building in Rennes until Paris was liberated, hadn’t yet arrived, but
New Yorker
columnist Janet Flanner was there, dressed in an officer’s uniform with a scarf
made of parachute material at her heavy jaw. Ruth Cowan pulled me aside to ask how I’d gotten my roots done in the middle of a war zone; her first order of business after she got her work out was to find a beauty parlor, she said, so she would match her passport and credentials again.

“I’d gladly swap my hair for your credentials,” I said.

Ruth said, “As long as I don’t have to take your blouse in the bargain. Whatever happened to you, Jane?”

My own first order of business after I got my story out would be to change my blouse.

Someone said Charles Collingwood from CBS had prepared a draft report of the liberation of Paris—complete with street names and landmarks—and sent it to London the day before, marked “Hold for Release.” It wasn’t clear exactly what had happened in London, but somehow the story came to be read on the air a full twelve hours before the liberation. If that wasn’t bad enough, King George of England, having heard the radio broadcast at Buckingham Palace, had announced the “liberation” over the BBC.

Fletcher was still laughing at the Collingwood story when I caught site of an MP across the lobby. Nearly colorless eyes.
You don’t want to get close enough to him to see that
, Ernie Pyle had warned. As the man approached in long, swift steps, I scanned the room for the easiest exit. There was Lee Carson slipping out before she was seen. But it was too late for Liv and me. I folded my copy, meaning to sequester it next to the note from Mrs. Roosevelt in my brassiere, then thought instead to tuck it into Liv’s musette bag and hand the bag to Fletcher, who accepted it as easily as we all accepted cigarettes from one another, without much thought. I hoped that when Liv and I were in custody he would realize what he had and get it out for us. I could rewrite my piece, but Liv’s photos of the liberation
would be held as evidence against her, never to see their way to the front pages or anywhere else.

The major said a polite hello to the gathered correspondents, introducing himself as Major Adam Jones almost as if he were one of us: dedicated, benign. A New Yorker, I thought as Fletcher stepped forward a little, imposing himself between the major and us. The major’s accent like Liv’s husband’s, I supposed. His eyes the palest hazel.

“I have orders to apprehend Mrs. Olivia Harper and return her to London,” the major said to Liv.

I braced myself for the sound of my own name as a murmur ran through the group. Others from the lobby turned to look.

The major lowered his voice and said, “I don’t suppose any of you has seen Mrs. Harper?” He studied Liv. “You, ma’am, look rather like you fit her description.”

When Liv started to respond, the major cut her off, saying, “Perhaps I could see your tags?”

Left with no option, Liv took her dog tags from around her neck and handed them to the major.

He looked at them—Olivia James Harper—then handed them back to her.

I scanned the room again, as if there must be a way out of this, but there wasn’t. Lee Carson was gone and Ruth Cowan was accredited, and Liv and I were the charge of this Major Adam Jones.

“I saw the photographs this Mrs. Harper took at the Falaise gap,” the major said. “They sort of made me proud to be the one chasing her down.”

As Fletcher looked from the major to Liv putting her tags back around her graceful, gritty neck, I wondered whether the major meant the photograph of the Polish vodka toast or the others, the medics and the horses. If those photos had run in
newspapers, they would have appeared without attribution beyond “AP” or, if they’d been transmitted, “U. S. Signal Corps Radiotelephoto,” but I supposed any number of people might have identified them as likely Liv’s. And the major would have been kept abreast of where Liv’s photos and my writing were coming from, to track us down, whether or not our work had found its way into print.

“I was thinking, ma’am,” the major said to Liv, “that you might want to get out of here before I mistake you for Mrs. Harper.” He looked to Fletcher. “We have information that Mrs. Harper is traveling with a British military photographer named Fletcher Roebuck. You haven’t seen him, I don’t suppose?”

Fletcher tugged unconsciously on his ear. “No,” he said. “No, I’m sure I haven’t done, but if I see either of them I will certainly let them know you’re looking for them.”

Fletcher took Liv’s arm to hurry her out the door before the man changed his mind, but she didn’t budge.

“The photos,” she said.

“Beastly hell,” Fletcher muttered.

The major was disobeying orders for no apparent reason other than some odd combination of the goodwill of the moment and his admiration for Liv’s work.

Liv linked her arm in mine. “We need to get our work out, sir,” she said.

The major laughed, a big booming laugh from underneath the silly mustache and the pale hazel eyes.

Fletcher said, “Liv, you can’t send your photographs uncensored, and no one has any idea when the censors will show.”

S
afely outside the Scribe, we laughed even harder than the major had. When we’d stopped laughing enough to catch our
breaths and get the words out, finally, Fletcher said there was a press wireless facility at Cherbourg, that if we could somehow get our work to Cherbourg, they could transmit directly to the United States.

“Cherbourg!” Liv exclaimed. The city was two hundred miles away, at the northernmost tip of the Cotentin Peninsula. But with the line already formed at the Scribe’s unmanned censorship tables, our work would not be the first out from the Scribe.

Moments later we were in the jeep, heading for Orly airbase, Fletcher easing us through the throngs of people again, and the trucks and army cars and motorcycles clogging the road. Liv, in the front seat, set my typewriter in her lap. I took the scrawl of my piece out and read it aloud to her, editing as I did, and she typed as ferociously quickly as she could.

At Orly we found an American Piper Cub just about to depart for Cherbourg.

“I don’t care who gets the credit, I don’t want the credit, I only want the photos to get to the press pool, to be shared,” Liv told the pilot.

“Don’t be going all noble on us
now
, Livvie,” Fletcher said. “We know you a damned sight better than that.”

Three minutes later the plane was in the air, carrying a story banged out in road-bumpy typescript and a sack of film to deliver to the darkroom staff at Cherbourg along with instructions that if they worked quickly they could have a part in the first news of the liberation of Paris to reach the world.

“Now the arm, Jane,” Fletcher said, and he asked around until he found a doctor at the airbase. The doctor unwrapped my bandage and had a look at the wound, and asked who in the world had dressed it. Fletcher allowed that he had, without fingering Liv for having put him up to it.

“The antibiotic, too?” the doctor said. “You’d make a fine medic, son, if you’re ever inclined to set aside that camera.” Then to me, “I might have put a few stitches in to save you a scar, but that’s a fine job is what that is.” He redressed the wound and said if I left the dressing in place for a few days, it should heal well enough. Then he excused himself, saying he’d best get along or they’d leave for London without him.

“London?” Fletcher said, and he joined the doctor long enough to arrange with the flight crew to get his film to British intelligence headquarters there.

B
ack in Paris, we checked for news of Liv’s brother—nothing yet—and we set aside our work for the white and red Burgandies, the red Bordeaux, the champagne and brandy and cognac, rum, Calvados, Armagnac, all hidden from the Germans in anticipation of this day. We raised our glasses time and again, and we shouted with the crowds and sang when others sang, and we laughed and hugged and kissed. We kissed other correspondents at the zinc-topped bar in the Scribe basement, and strangers in the streets.