The Race for Paris

by Meg Waite Clayton

  The rip of gunfire cut through the air again, shots from the Notre Dame Cathedral tower behind us now across the Seine—a sound so loud that I couldn’t hear Fletcher shouting. He grabbed my arm, thrust me on the raw road under the jeep, and Liv at the same time, Liv’s camera scraping along the ground beside me under the jeep’s metal undercarriage. Rat-a-tat-tat, rat-a-tat-a-tat. I made myself open my eyes, raised my head in the direction of the gunfire, banged the back of my skull on something metal and greasy and hard.

  “Are you close enough yet, Liv?” I asked, gallows humor, but she couldn’t hear me over the noise.

  I wondered where Fletcher was. He’d given me the Webley this time. It had all happened so fast I hadn’t even realized.

  Beyond the jeep’s tilted wheels, girls in Red Cross uniforms carried a stretcher out into the gunfire, waving a Red Cross flag. They laid their stretcher beside a wounded soldier and moved swiftly to attend to him as the bullets rang in the air around them. Liv focused her Leica as best she could and took the shot: the stretcher, the hands holding it, their feet, legs, hips, waists, and the Hôtel de Ville behind them. The gunfire continued for perhaps twenty minutes, and Liv shot what she could from the vantage point of the jeep underbelly. I didn’t even try to take notes.

  The gunfire sputtered, sputtered again, and a long silence descended, leaving only the wail of a child somewhere. I looked at Liv, so close beside me, the pupils of her eyes huge and dark. I scanned the square for Fletcher, found him just a few yards away, returning to us as we climbed out from under the jeep and the crowd swelled again.

  A rumor rippled through the soldiers that Billotte had used the telephone network at the police prefect to reach von Choltitz and demand a German surrender, but the German general had refused. Our line of troops would be making their way toward German headquarters at the Hôtel Meurice.

  Around the corner on Rue de Rivoli, a news kiosk displayed Nazi and collaborationist newspapers. The window of a bookshop read “Buchhandlung,” the glass pockmarked with the star shatterings of bullet holes. Swastikas flew over the hotels everywhere, along with signs that read “Soldatenheim,” “Speiselokal,” and “Lese Schreib und Spielzimmer.” The ugly flags hung above the doors of stores now closed for the celebration, over playhouses where, when the city had become dangerously low on electricity, plays were put on by candlelight. Signs taped to téléphone booths and vespasiennes—the French public toilets—read “Accés interdit aux juifs,” not to be used by Jews.

  The German resistance grew even more intense as we approached the Louvre Museum and German headquarters beyond it. The fighting in the Tuileries Garden was tree to tree, the only things separating us a high and highly permeable iron fence and the few hundred yards we stayed behind the front troops. At the Hôtel Meurice, two French officers, covered by machine gun fire, ran through the front arches and tossed in phosphorous grenades. Smoke billowed out the door and up to the Nazi flags hanging over it, driving out several German soldiers with their hands over their heads. Liv and Fletcher both took the shots: the French soldiers, the improbably tidy plaques on either side of the doorway, the German guards.

  One of the French officers entered the hotel. We waited, watching for what seemed such a long time. Fletcher had turned his camera back to the soldiers in the garden, photographing through the gaps in the fence, when the French officer emerged from the hotel with the German general carrying a suitcase, as if headed for a weekend at Mont Saint-Michel.

  “Von Choltitz,” Liv said.

  The general who might have set Paris burning instead lit nothing more than a cigar.

  Men and women and even children surged toward von Choltitz, yelling curses and spitting. One woman rushed at him and smashed the cigar. The crowd cheered even as the French soldiers tried to protect him. A Red Cross nurse hurried them to a waiting car, leaving the crowd to spend the rest of its anger tearing his abandoned suitcase open and ripping its contents to pieces. And still, the gunfire rang out from the Tuileries, where Fletcher’s camera remained focused.

  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 almost 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, unt
il 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.

  HÔTEL SCRIBE, PARIS

  FRIDAY, AUGUST 25, 1944

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

  —AWOL journalist Martha Gellhorn

  Fletcher 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.