The French Photographer

by Natasha Lester

  ‘Come here,’ he said, lifting his arms and she walked into them, helmet pressed awkwardly into his shoulder, crying now, but only for a few minutes because if he could stomach everything he’d seen, which would be so much worse than what she’d witnessed, then so too could she.

  ‘Sorry,’ she said, drawing back. ‘And thanks. I haven’t had a shower for five days. It’s an act of bravery in itself coming close to me right now. I think you just repaid the favour you owed me.’

  ‘Jess, holding you while you cry isn’t repaying a favour. It’s being a friend.’ His voice was soft, a lovely caress amidst the savagery.

  She shook her head. ‘God, don’t say that. I’ll start crying again.’ She smiled. ‘It’s good to see you alive.’

  ‘It’s good to see you too.’

  ‘Do you have to get back?’

  He checked his watch. ‘Not for an hour.’

  ‘Then come with me.’

  She led him to a small ridge, a place she’d sat a few times over the past couple of days, watching the activity on the beach. They sat there now, backs against the rock, flattened blackberry brambles twisting forlornly around them, and she told him about Martha’s escapade and the parachute jumps they’d been denied due to having delicate female apparatus and what she’d said to Warren in reply.

  He laughed and she saw his face relax for a moment, the lines furrowed on his forehead suddenly fall away, but return just a moment later.

  ‘Oh no,’ she said with a sudden flash of horror. ‘Not Jennings?’ She gestured to the graves behind them.

  ‘Not Jennings. But a hell of a lot of others just like him. Some didn’t even make the ground alive. Their time in the US Army consisted of a training camp in England, a plane ride across the Channel, then death in the air.’ He rubbed his face but it didn’t erase the troubled expression. ‘I was ordered to take this afternoon off to sleep; I haven’t slept properly for a week. But now that we’ve secured the causeway and the beachheads have been joined up, I had to come here.’

  Jess jumped up. ‘I’m keeping you from sleep. You should go.’

  But he stayed where he was and patted the ground beside him. ‘No, this is what I need. To laugh. To talk …’ He stopped.

  ‘Tell me about it,’ she said, sitting back down.

  ‘Have you ever seen an airborne division in the sky?’ he asked.

  She shook her head.

  ‘It’s kind of beautiful. There are so many parachutes. It’s like, I don’t know, watching a thousand pure white hankies flutter to the ground. That’s if you can shut out the vibration of the C-47s and the fact that you have to carry eighty kilograms of equipment, which is more than what some of the younger GIs weigh. We had to jump before we’d reached the landing zone; Jerry was throwing too much at us. Then we were in the inferno, a sky filled with fire and smoke so thick you couldn’t see your hands, the entire carcasses of damaged aeroplanes hurtling at us through the sky; I saw so many men hit by their own plane before they’d even reached the ground.’

  He stopped and she waited, knowing he hadn’t finished, that the terrible stories of what ‘invasion’ actually meant were numberless and that he wouldn’t have said any of this to anyone else because he was the man in charge, the one who did the ordering and the listening but never the confessing.

  ‘We were supposed to land around Sainte-Mère-Église but we landed all over fucking Normandy, split by the Merderet River,’ he continued. ‘The men near Carentan landed in mud to their necks and it sucked them under like quicksand. The gliders came down too hard and impaled themselves on Rommel’s damned asparagus and all that survived was the equipment. The crickets we use to call to one another to rendezvous were useless because nobody was in hearing distance of anyone else. A brand new private got stuck in a tree, hanging from his chute, and we found him, not taken prisoner by the Krauts as he should have been but riddled with one hundred and sixty-two bullet and bayonet holes. Scattered at his feet were the ripped pages of his prayer book. Greater love hath no man than this,’ Dan quoted, ‘that a man lay down his life for his friends.’

  This time, it was Jess’s turn to reach out for Dan’s hand, just as he’d done at Easter. Because in spite of the fact that Dan’s division had been unable to land in their drop zones, they’d taken the town of Sainte-Mère-Église by the early morning hours of D-day, thus securing a defensive position to prevent German reinforcements arriving on the beaches. That success had been much spoken of, but not what it had cost to gain.

  ‘I was never more relieved than when I found Jennings after only a couple of hours,’ he eventually said.

  ‘Thank God,’ Jess breathed.

  ‘By D-day plus two our division only had two thousand fighting men left. That’s less than half the number who left England.’

  They sat in silence after that. Below them, on the beach, they watched litters disgorged from ambulances and onto aeroplanes, a never-ending stream of men who would return home vastly different to how they’d used to be.

  Neither let go of the other’s hand. At last Dan said, ‘Are you waiting for a ride back to England?’

  ‘How did you guess,’ she said, ruefully acknowledging her state of extreme dishevelment.

  ‘I remember how well the fellas in public relations look after you. Let’s go. I’ll find you a chauffeur.’

  As they wound their way down to the sand, Jess noticed the more than usually deferential ‘sirs’ sent Dan’s way and she suddenly understood when she saw one man nod at Dan and say, ‘Lieutenant Colonel.’

  ‘Lieutenant Colonel?’ she asked.

  He flushed, reminding her of Jennings. ‘And Battalion CO.’

  ‘How many men are you in charge of now?’

  ‘About seven hundred and fifty.’

  And she was glad, foolishly glad; with someone like Dan in charge of all those men, the invasion might actually succeed.

  Within an hour she was stepping into a plane and Dan was asking her, ‘When will you be back?’

  ‘Soon, I hope. None of the female correspondents are allowed to stay over here yet.’

  ‘Make sure you send me a note and come find me when you do. And,’ he paused, ‘Victorine …’

  ‘Is well and happy. I’ll go see her again, tell her you’re okay.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  She saw him waiting by the airstrip as the plane took off into the sky, not waving, just watching her leave, then, at last, turning around to go back to fighting to win a war. All the way back to England, she held her right hand – the one Dan had held – inside her left, but it didn’t comfort her the same way he had.

  When Jess arrived back at the Savoy and handed her uniforms over for cleaning and delousing, she learned that Iris Carpenter had been court-martialled. Iris had strayed from the ‘beachhead’ and the Ministry of Information was trying to make an example of her. As well as that news, there was a letter waiting from Martha.

  I couldn’t sit around in a nurses’ training camp forever. So I managed to get out and I’m on my way to Naples. I don’t have any orders or papers or a goddamned passport – they took everything off me – but I can sweet-talk my way into anything. Everyone’s so focused on France I don’t think they’ll care about me all the way over in Italy. If I can find a unit of French or Canadians who’ll let me attach myself to them, then I can avoid the rules of the US Army altogether.

  You do a damn fine job of France and I’ll do a damn fine job of Italy.

  Marty

  Jess smiled as she read Martha’s words. It would have been nice to have Martha by her side. But Martha was right to go to Italy and escape Warren Stone. SHAEF had managed to get rid of one woman. Jess prayed they wouldn’t be able to get rid of any more with Iris’s trial.

  Thankfully Iris had ambiguity and a colonel on her side. Nobody could define precisely what was meant by the beachhead. ‘Colonel Whitcomb, who gave me an escort to Cherbourg, told them the beachhead stretched as far as the town,’ Iris told Jess over whi
skey that night. ‘And none of the PROs were able to produce a different interpretation from anyone as high up as a colonel who’d actually been in France.’

  ‘So they let you off? Will they let you back though?’ Jess asked, moving from joy to hopelessness in the space of those two sentences.

  Iris grinned. ‘Brigadier Turner told me, eyes bulging, that it would be a very long while before I got orders to go to Normandy again.’

  ‘Why are you smiling, then?’ Jess asked despairingly.

  ‘Before I left Normandy, I had Colonel Whitcomb issue me orders to return to the beachhead as soon as possible.’

  ‘Bravo!’ Jess cheered, chinking her glass against Iris’s.

  ‘I think you’ll find that, after this brouhaha, they’ll have to change something about the way they handle women over there,’ Iris finished.

  Luckily Iris was right. After the bungled court martial, SHAEF PR did have to change the way they let women into France. Every woman who wanted it was issued permanent orders to go to France, and those orders were valid for an entire month. Jess hugged her papers to her chest, unable to hide her smile even from Warren.

  His attempt to dampen her spirits by telling her she had to wait a week for transport didn’t make a bit of difference. Besides, he looked cowed for once, as if all the fighting and the losing was wearying him. Jess was hopeful that, once she was in France, she wouldn’t have to deal with him anymore and he would let go of their feud and they could both just do their jobs.

  She used the week before embarkation to say goodbye to Victorine and to visit her friend from boarding school days, Amelia, with whom she had continued to exchange letters. Amelia had been begging Jess to visit since discovering she was in England.

  ‘Jessica May!’ Amelia said when Jess arrived on the doorstep of a grand country home in Cornwall. ‘I couldn’t believe it when you telephoned. Come in.’

  Jess hugged Amelia, who looked as devastatingly pretty as she had in school. ‘You haven’t changed a bit.’

  ‘Oh, but I have.’ Amelia waggled her left hand at Jess. ‘I got myself married, remember.’

  ‘I can’t imagine you a married woman,’ Jess said as she followed Amelia into a masculine drawing room adorned with stags’ heads and other hunting souvenirs.

  ‘I can’t imagine myself a married woman either,’ Amelia said with a grin, before commanding a maid to bring them champagne. ‘I’m having to work very hard to behave myself.’

  Jess laughed. On the rare occasions Jess was actually in school in Paris, she and Amelia had, most weekends, snuck out of the boarding house and into the jazz clubs of Montmartre where they’d refined their drinking and kissing skills even though they were only sixteen.

  ‘Luckily he’s a corporal or a colonel or an admiral or something in the Navy – I can never remember all of those ranks – so he’s on a ship somewhere and I’m here hosting house parties.’

  Jess’s hand tightened on her champagne glass. ‘Aren’t you worried about him?’ she asked. For Victorine’s sake – at least she thought it was for Victorine’s sake rather than her own – Jess worried about Dan every morning when she woke and every night before she slept.

  Amelia laughed. ‘He’s a friend of Daddy’s and almost as old so let’s just say that the war is very convenient.’

  ‘Why did you marry him?’

  ‘For freedom, of course.’ Amelia stared at Jess as if she were being obtuse. ‘Married, I have the money and the means to live life as I choose. I wanted a military husband. I well know from having a military father how little time they spend with family. It suits me perfectly; I don’t have to behave all that much,’ Amelia finished with a wink. ‘You’re lucky I’m even awake. Last night’s party didn’t finish until dawn.’

  ‘Shouldn’t you be doing war work? I thought all the women in England –’

  ‘Jessica May!’ Amelia exclaimed. ‘Or are you really an imposter? Bring back my friend. You’ve become so … earnest.’

  Jess sighed. She was earnest. Where was the laughing girl who’d danced all night at Greenwich Village clubs or at Condé Nast’s parties, wearing beautiful gowns and a much-photographed smile, who’d fallen into bed with Emile at all hours of the morning and had damn good sex? Had she really been that person?

  She took a large swallow of champagne. How was it possible to see Omaha Beach and not be earnest? ‘For today,’ she said to Amelia with a weak smile, ‘your job is to make me not quite so earnest.’

  ‘Hallelujah.’ Amelia raised her glass, sipped, then something like earnestness fell over her face too. ‘It really is good to see you,’ she said. ‘Everyone sleeping it off up there,’ she raised her glass to indicate the bedrooms on the upper floors, ‘has only known me with all of this.’ Her hand swept around to encompass the large room with its expensive but fusty adornments. ‘Whereas you knew me before any of it.’

  Jess stayed that night for Amelia’s party but, rather than finding solace in another man’s arms as Amelia did, Jess went to bed early and wrapped her arms around herself, Amelia’s words playing through her head: you knew me before any of it. And the reply Jess hadn’t made: But where did that world go? And, without it, who are we?

  Twelve

  Over the next few days in France, Jess discovered what a goddamn joke the ‘rules’ designed to ‘protect’ women were. The press camp for the men was miles further back from the front and thus a hell of a lot safer than the Fifth General Hospital outside Carentan where Jess was posted. As a woman, she had absolutely no access to press camps, which meant no access to briefings, or to maps, or to news about hot spots and likely strafing attacks and the day’s objective or anything else that would actually give her an idea which part of the country was safe and which wasn’t. When Jess had pointed out that this would put her at more risk than the men, nobody seemed to care. And she still had to wait in line with her stories; hers were sent back to London where the censors tore them apart and then directed them on to Bel, which meant that her words occasionally made no sense as she wasn’t allowed to review them. Whereas the men submitted theirs direct from France after their very own censor had checked them and allowed the men a final edit.

  Warren had made sure to stress that she wasn’t to leave the field hospital without permission from the CO. And then he’d added, smiling, that he was going to France too. It had taken all of Jess’s willpower not to say, But that’s a little too close to danger for you, isn’t it? Instead she’d swallowed the retort and prayed that he’d stay at his cosy press camp and that she’d never have to see him again.

  But she did hold on to his words: without permission from the CO. She knew a CO who’d give her permission, she was sure of it. It wasn’t exactly what Warren had meant but nor had he been precise enough to specify that he was referring to the CO of the hospital – and she would take full advantage.

  At her new home on French soil, she quickly became adept at diving into the slit trench behind her tent whenever the Germans flew over at night strafing, at pretending the enormous red welts of mosquito bites didn’t itch like the devil, at never being alone, not even on the toilet – the latrine had a row of six seats and more often than not at least one or two of the other places were occupied by nurses clutching their precious rations of Scott paper. It was incredible the conversations that could be had while doing one’s business, especially during the rare quiet times, which everyone dreaded, because that was when the nurses would finally break down.

  She also became expert at sleeping in spite of the maddening ringing in her ears from the constant boom of shells and guns, at eating in spite of the way the smells of ether and gangrene and blood seemed to coat the inside of her mouth. Most of all, she became proficient at pretending not to be scared, at only crying in the shower, at being the one to tell the new nurses to sleep under their cots rather than on top, or the one to move aside and let the new recruits lie beside her when she heard them sobbing as the Stukas shrieked overhead, at telling them it would be al
l right.

  She remembered her first night in Italy and knew that she was just as scared now as she had been then, but she also knew how to hide it better. Humour and dispensing practical advice were her chosen means for this, making a show of demonstrating how to tip one’s head upside down at the end of each day and shake it thoroughly before bed in order to dislodge another day’s worth of the thick yellow dust that covered everything; the bombed-out earth of France had taken to the skies in search of refuge, where it floated around them all day long, discovering what everyone in France already knew: there was no place of refuge. France was no longer France.

  Once past the seductive vista of silky blue sea at the edge of the country, everything changed. On the beach and between the hedgerows, the land was scarred with shell craters, slashed with foxholes and trenches and wretched with newly dug cemeteries. Boards painted with red skulls and crossbones and menacing warnings about the dangers of mines were as commonplace as apple trees. New roads unfurled brutishly from the maws of bulldozers and were quickly overrun with convoys of military vehicles. Each set of crossroads bore a pole stabbed into the earth with arrows directing traffic to the different units: Madonna Charlie, Missouri Baker, Missouri Charlie. Strung over everything like Christmas tinsel were reams of wire for communications.

  Her days consisted of hitching rides on ambulances to collecting posts closer to the front then watching as ambulances brought in men from the battlefield, their faces stark white beneath the dirt and cut through with tears. Many were uninjured bodily, but their minds were lost somewhere in France, and Jess photographed the medics working with especially gentle hands to do whatever they could, which was very little, for those men.

  The bocage fighting in the area was the dirtiest anyone had ever seen, from the castrator mines that leapt up and detonated at crotch height, to the surrendering lone German soldier who would emerge with hands up until the American GIs came to take him prisoner, whereupon he would leap to the side and the machine guns hidden in the hedgerows would mow down every American soldier who’d thought the white flag was the one thing that could be relied upon in war. But nothing could be relied upon, not anymore.