The French Photographer

by Natasha Lester

  She concentrated on her fingers. They responded to her thoughts, flexing, and she remembered the cameras in her hands. She flicked the Leica around her back and lifted the Rollei. Look through the lens, she told herself. A camera reduced things to the size of a frame and she could certainly do with the chaos being minimised in some way.

  Her mind was functioning enough for her to know that it would be lethal to move suddenly or distract the attention of the American soldiers. But the benefit of a twin lens reflex like the Rollei was that she shot from the waist and could be unobtrusive. The captain was too close to her for perfect focus but, rather than fiddling with the focusing knob, she leaned back a little, allowing her position to focus the shot. Then, while he shot bullets at a small posse of German soldiers she could just make out when she lifted her head to the edge of the ditch, she shot photographs.

  Focus, shoot. Focus, shoot. She repeated the words over and over in her head. And she concentrated on deliberately blurring the background of each picture so that the flashes of light from the bullets or shells or God only knew what were rendered flamelike, dancing around the captain’s hands, which were so rigid and black with dirt they almost appeared to be a part of the gun they held.

  How does one grow accustomed to the noise, she wondered as she at last began to discern individual sounds within the roar: a sudden loud shriek and bellow, which made her flinch, followed by the earth lifting into the air and then raining down just a few feet away as the jeep, with most of her belongings in it, blew up.

  After a time, the rain cleared enough for Jess to see that the Germans were far closer than she’d realised – thank God she hadn’t noticed that when she’d first landed in the hole or she might never have found a way through the terror. They looked bewildered, not at all like the devilish beings she’d imagined them to be. In fact, they seemed just like the captain next to her: youngish, mid-twenties perhaps, filthy, tired, wet, caked in mud and oblivious to anything other than the sighting and shooting of an enemy.

  Then the captain began to make a series of complicated hand gestures – which she gathered were a way of communicating through the noise – to the other soldiers, and she saw some of them climb out and race a hundred yards forward before disappearing into another ditch. She lifted her head up just enough to record their flight on her camera.

  ‘You can’t do that!’ the captain yelled.

  ‘Why the hell not?’ she retorted. If he stopped her from taking pictures then she would have nothing to distract her from the still-terrifying reality of being in the Nazis’ line of fire. Like a reflex, her body defaulted to the wit and the smile that had always got her what she wanted, and she was once again amazed at how she was still able to function amidst the inferno. ‘Stop worrying about me,’ she said. ‘I’m much less deadly than the Germans.’

  She thought she saw a flicker of a smile; at any rate, he turned his attention away from her and back to the exploding stars that burst into life and flickered out before them, into the smoke, thicker than any fog rolling up the Hudson, into the choking smog of earth and ammunition and adrenaline that hung in the air.

  Who knew how long she crouched there, recording every moment first with the Rolleiflex and then, when it only had one shot left – which she wanted to save – with the Leica. In between bouts of fire, the GIs wisecracked to one another, finding time to light cigarettes from the ubiquitous white and red packs of Lucky Strikes. She remembered reading one of Martha’s articles about Spain in which she’d said that you couldn’t wait forever for the shell to fall on you; you couldn’t cower in expectation of death all day. Watching the men around her, Jess understood what those words meant.

  Then, just as she had the Leica lined up, her finger depressing the button, she saw, through the viewfinder, a man in a German uniform fall, the consequence of a shot from her partner’s gun. The captain didn’t react, just lined up the next one and shot him, too. The men died, not gloriously, not spectacularly and certainly without anyone to mourn them, disappearing into the mud beneath their feet. Two lives had just ended, one of them was frozen in time inside her camera. She didn’t know how she would bring herself to look at that negative, didn’t know that she could ever allow herself to discover exactly what it meant to die.

  She was supposed to be glad; two fewer Germans was a good thing for her country. But how could anyone be glad of a boy dying alone, an unthought-of consequence in this grand mess called war?

  ‘I need to send you out with the medics,’ her companion said a while later when the shooting had lessened and the men were drinking from their canteens.

  ‘Where are the medics?’ Jess asked. ‘All the noise has mixed my head up into jigsaw pieces. It’s my first day on the job – and I’m not saying that for sympathy, but by way of explanation.’

  ‘Explanation accepted and no sympathy given.’

  ‘How long has it been like this?’ she asked, indicating the mud and the rain, knowing her job was to get answers to go with her pictures, and that conversation was, like the Rollei, a good diversion from fear.

  The captain rubbed his temple tiredly. ‘Weeks. Since we arrived in September. Apparently nobody thought to check what an Italian winter was like.’

  He was a veteran, then. Very few US Army units had served in Europe, but he’d already done two months in Italy. His words reminded Jess of her father who, like the people who hadn’t understood what havoc Italian rain could wreak, was always the one wanting to go to faraway places in winter, who never considered the weather, who would never remember where exactly they’d pitched the tent. It was as if men like her father were running the war, although that probably wasn’t fair. It was just that, out here in slime and sludge that roiled around them like a living thing, in rain like nothing seen since the time of Noah, in the midst of men who were alive one minute and dead the next, organisation must be impossible. And Jess thanked God that she wasn’t a dumb debutante model like they all thought, that she was her mother’s child, that she had learned from a young age to organise herself amidst the worst kind of shambles.

  ‘What?’ he asked, studying her face.

  ‘I was just being thankful for being caught in a hurricane in Tahiti when I was six. It wasn’t as bad as this, but …’ she shrugged.

  ‘Tahiti?’ he asked, eyebrows raised.

  ‘Tahiti,’ she repeated.

  ‘Sure as shit would give anything to be there now,’ he said. ‘Hurricane and all. Let’s go.’

  Jess began to stand, to revive her cramped legs, but immediately ducked upon hearing the whistling sound she’d come to realise preceded a shell explosion.

  ‘No need to duck,’ he said. ‘That one’s ours. We try not to hit ourselves too often.’

  ‘How can you tell?’

  ‘Listen,’ he said, cocking his ear as if they were straining to hear when in fact it was impossible to do anything else. ‘If you hear the whistle first and then the thump, it’s theirs. Thump first, echo after is ours. You learn to tell a thump from a whistle from an echo pretty damn quick. We’re heading for that foxhole over there. Should be a medic inside. You’ll be okay.’ He glanced up at the sky as if he had the power to stop shells from falling in their vicinity during the time it took them to scramble to the back of the line.

  Jess was thankful for the mini-lesson on the intricacies of shells. There was so damn much she didn’t know. But Martha had said that she knew nothing about war when she arrived in Spain in 1937. And Martha had survived and learned from men like the one beside Jess now and done a damn good job. It wasn’t in Jessica May’s make-up to give up after one frightening encounter. But she said none of this to the captain as they hurried along, although hurried was the wrong word – the ground was so slippery she was terrified of falling over and ruining her film, if not her pride.

  ‘Wouldn’t it be easier to slide along on our stomachs like penguins?’ she asked at one point after she’d had to drop her pride and grab his arm just in time to save herself from
landing face first in the slime.

  He laughed. ‘It probably would be.’

  They found the medic and the scramble continued to a point even further back, where a jeep was parked. An injured man was laid in the back and the captain climbed in after Jess.

  ‘You don’t have to escort me,’ she said.

  ‘Jerry’s retreated for now. Won’t be back till tomorrow if we’re lucky. I can spare half an hour. Besides, if anyone finds out I had a woman in my foxhole and didn’t deliver her to a point out of shooting range, then I’ll be serving as a private in a company in a training camp rather than running a company in the field. And yes,’ he grinned, ‘there are so many jokes you could make about what I just said that it’s hard to know where to start.’

  She burst out laughing. If anyone had said to Jess that it was possible to smile or laugh at the most dangerous moment one had ever faced in one’s life, she wouldn’t have believed them. But now she saw that was all you could do to get through; that on the other side of jocularity lay despair and nobody could afford to waste a single moment on that out here otherwise they might as well run without a weapon straight into the open arms of the Germans.

  It was only a short drive to the field hospital, which was altogether too fine a word to describe the tents, the stretchers, the bodies, the stink of mud and flesh, the too few people unloading the ambulances with the too many bodies. ‘Flick!’ he called to a woman who’d come out to check over the wounded men in their vehicle, ‘Can you take Captain …’ He stopped.

  ‘Oh, Jessica May. Lovely to meet you,’ she quipped, holding out a filthy hand for him to shake.

  Before he could reply, Flick accosted him. ‘Where’ve you been hiding, stranger?’ She gave him the kind of easy smile that suggested they’d done more than share war stories.

  And Jess knew it was why she’d saved that one shot on the Rollei – for just such a moment. She took it. The grubby officer looking back over his shoulder to the battle he’d left, to the men he probably needed to check on, and the nurse gazing up at him with adoration.

  That night at the Eleventh Field Hospital was almost worse than the battlefield. The Germans controlled the high ground of the mountains, and the hospital was within shelling range, the place of greater safety it had moved to proving only to be the better of two bad choices, rather than a sensible position.

  Within minutes of her arrival, Flick had shown Jess a spare cot in a tent with five other nurses, the cot only available because the nurse who’d once occupied it was now a patient. That was the cost of having nurses closer to the front line than they’d ever been in any other war but it was counterbalanced by the fact that they could have a man in the shock tent and hooked up to life-saving plasma within one hour rather than five.

  Jess was lucky enough to cadge a roll of film for her Leica from the supply store – someone had died with it on them and nobody else had a use for it. But that was the only piece of luck in one long and unlucky day as the Germans began to toss shells at the hospital with deadly intensity.

  ‘Never shelled us before,’ Anne, a nurse – a small woman who looked as if she would hardly be able to help lift a stretcher but here she was, carrying the weight of every injured man’s survival on her tiny shoulders – said grimly to Jess. ‘First time we thought it was an accident. Now we think Jerry means it.’

  And Jerry did mean it. Before long, a shell made a direct hit on the mess tent, leaving a stew of ration boxes, canned eggs, salted peanuts and onions embedded in the mud. It was fortunately empty of people at the time but the result was that the electrical system, which had been wired through the mess tent, went out and the night continued on through the beams of flashlights.

  So Jess found herself in an operating theatre holding one of the flashlights when all other hands were busy, watching doctors operate with their boots covered in mud, their surgical gowns covered in blood. Jess’s camera caught them as she concentrated once more on looking only through the frame; it was the best way to keep her stomach calm. And she had to stay calm because what did anyone back in America know of any of this?

  Of exactly what a mortar could do to a leg, tearing away flesh so that only bone held the limb to the body, of the screaming sound of a shell, which caused everyone to drop to the floor of the theatre – but only after, Jess noticed, petite but gutsy Anne had paused to check the position of the plasma needle in the boy’s arm – and then, once the explosion was heard and the shell thus detonated, to stand up, retake their positions and continue operating as if they wouldn’t all die at any moment. And so it went on, the whooshing sound, the dive to the floor, the explosion, the standing up, the return to the operation, the endless changing of blood and plasma bags.

  Man after injured man came in, faces lacerated, bones smashed. So many men needing so much blood that, after midnight, supplies ran dangerously low. The staff gave their arms over to needles to draw out their blood and so did Jess. She saw a surgeon, Major Henderson he’d said his name was, trying to stop an injured soldier – whose lungs were full of blood – from drowning, by drawing the blood out of his lungs with a tracheotomy tube and feeding that same blood back to the soldier intravenously. Wounded men arrived unabated and Jess couldn’t believe that ambulances were still driving through the sleeting rain and pitch dark outside.

  ‘Hold his foot,’ Major Henderson ordered Jess at one point.

  Jess put down her camera and found herself staring at a leg being sawn off. She followed instructions, forcing herself to look at the face of the injured soldier without crying; he was the one losing his legs, not her.

  The soldier grabbed Jess’s hand. ‘My feet are cold,’ he murmured. ‘Blanket.’

  And even though the soldier had no feet, Jess found a blanket and tucked it around the empty space. It was that one small act of comfort that finally tipped her over into tears. She tried to dam them but Anne saw her face and touched her shoulder gently.

  ‘Keep busy,’ Anne said. ‘When it’s quiet, we have too much time to think, which only leads to crying. Try not to think, as much as you can.’

  Jess tried, she really did. But when she saw the pile of amputated legs stacked against the side of the tent, she had to stop, breathing hard to keep the nothing in her stomach from pouring out. She wanted to go home.

  Thankfully, the shelling lessened around the same time and Jess and three other nurses were sent off to bed where Jess struggled not to let the sudden and aching homesickness show on her face.

  ‘Best put your bedroll under the cot,’ Anne advised. ‘If this keeps up we might need the protection.’

  So Jess did as she was told, watching while Anne heated water in an empty ration can on a little oil stove in the middle of the tent before tipping the water into her helmet to begin a rudimentary wash. One of the other nurses scrubbed her thin and shivering back. Anne kept her boots on throughout because even the dams the women had built around the tent couldn’t stop the rainwater from oozing across the floor. She finished by removing one foot at a time from her boots and sprinkling each one liberally with the contents of a yellow tin of Marathon foot powder.

  ‘You can have the next bath,’ Anne said, nodding at the fresh batch of water that was heating.

  ‘We’re going to have to dig the trench around the powder room a bit deeper tomorrow,’ another nurse said as she entered the tent. ‘I think the entire Volturno River has been redirected at us.’

  All that night, Jess sobbed in her bed and nobody could hear her through the noise. If Emile had been there, she would have taken him into her bed because the familiarity of his physical presence, his connection to a world she could comprehend, would at least be a kind of comfort. Instead, she saw all the photos she’d taken, the combat pictures the less powerful of them all: the nurse who’d called their forlorn latrine, its walls made from piles of folded blankets, a powder room; Anne’s insistence that her rudimentary wash out of her helmet was a bath; Flick’s bright pink painted fingernails; the full-length
mirror one of the nurses had picked up from a wrecked palace on their way north into Italy and which hung from a rope attached to the tent roof. And the photo she hadn’t taken, of the boy who’d died despite the tracheotomy – the boy who’d asked for watermelon just before his heart stopped; his ghost was there in every image.

  The world needed to know that Monte Cassino, a speck on a map, the name of a battle to anyone in America, was a boy with no feet searching for comfort in a blanket. But what if Jess couldn’t convey that? Her job was so much more than she’d understood it to be. And that was another reason she cried: because she doubted she had the talent, the stamina and the stomach to do her job the way it ought to be done.

  Perhaps she should admit that she’d made a mistake. Perhaps she should ask Bel to send somebody over to take her place.

  Four

  She didn’t have a chance to ask to be replaced. Instead, the enraged PRO from Naples – the one who’d told her to make sure she wasn’t responsible for any shit landing on him – arrived at the hospital in a furious spray of mud, telling her she’d completely disregarded his directives when she waltzed out into a battlefield.

  ‘It was a little tricky to think about you while I was in a ditch being shot at,’ she retaliated, sounding more like her old self than she had for the past two days.

  Somehow, word had spread, quicker than lice in a foxhole, that there’d been a woman at the Italian front, which was a violation of the terms of her accreditation and was also, apparently, a crime worse than slaughter. She was put on a plane in Naples and sent back to England. She’d thought she wanted to get out of the hell that had left the underworld and landed on a mountain in Italy, but the way she’d been yelled at and ordered away had made her seethe and not give anyone the satisfaction of telling them she didn’t want to be in Cassino anyway.