No, no, she said. I’m quite all right.
I’m—I’m sorry, he said.
No, no need, Sutton said, preparing herself to depart. Absolutely no need.
Where her hands had trembled, they were steady now. She felt devastatingly calm.
Perhaps, she said—clutching her umbrella tightly in one hand as she rose and made for the door—we should not have not given up so easily. The Messiah will be arriving after all. And somewhat sooner than expected.
—
SUTTON WAS LESS THAN A MONTH IN THE HAGUE BEFORE BEING REASsigned, along with three other American journalists (two of them women) to the South Pacific. At first she was desperately disappointed. She had hoped she might be transferred to Paris—or at least (because even during the height of the war, everyone wanted Paris) stay on in Europe. She could not help but suspect that, even from afar, Walker was doing whatever he could to keep her, and the other female journalists, from the heart of the war.
When she landed in Guadalcanal, however, at the end of January 1943—right in the midst of the Watchtower campaign—she had to admit that this was far from the case.
SIX WEEKS LATER SHE was posted to Guam, which—after the soundand-light show of Guadalcanal—proved relatively quiet. At least for her. The fighting was taking place just a few miles away, but she was not permitted anywhere near it. Instead, she spent most of her time at headquarters—a dingy hotel in Honiara—typing up the reports of the other correspondents and wiring them back to Washington. It was there that she received word that her mother had died—“peacefully,” Germaine wrote, “in her sleep.” (In a hurried addendum she reported that “probable cause of death” could be owed to a bungling of prescription files, and the unfortunate oversight of a night nurse—later dismissed for her mistake.)
It was hard to feel anything. She had, after all, lost her mother many years before—that day when she was eight years old and stood in front of Brueghel the Elder’s Big Fish Little Fish, and discovered the absolute relativity, and mutability, of perception. Thinking of that, she felt sad, but mostly what she felt—as she sat out on the balcony at the hotel in Honiara and listened to the explosions from the direction of Henderson Field—was vague relief. She could not help but hope—and she did, so fervently in those moments that, briefly, it bordered on firm belief—that her mother had been returned, in death, to whatever native island from which she’d come; that life, which had for so long held her captive, had been shaken from her as easily as if it had been a dream.
She wrote to Alden in Paris, and tried to convey something of all of this, what she felt just then—a mixture of sadness, relief, and the stirrings perhaps for the first time of something else, something more; for which she did not, in the end, have a word, and so failed utterly to understand. (Was it faith? Was that even possible, she wondered, when one had lost, long ago, any sense that there was anything in which to believe?)
But Alden’s reply when it came was almost as incomprehensible to her as the small poem that accompanied it—she could make no sense of it at all. He mentioned their mother only in passing, spending the rest of the brief note (as had become usual with him) recounting the trivial details of his daily rambles; sketches of places that seemed to her of scant significance; people whom even he didn’t know.
After that, their letters tapered to a minimum, and though Sutton missed the correspondence, she did not blame Alden particularly for his cryptic replies; it was only natural, she reasoned, that their letters should have become, over the passing months, increasingly strained. Even she had begun to find, more lately, when at last she did sit down to write, that she had, after all (especially after the censors had been taken into consideration), very little to say.
IN APRIL, SHE WAS transferred again. To Makin Island this time, though nothing much was happening there. There was always the chance, she was told, that it might, and—sure enough—by June the Japanese had moved nearly five thousand troops to the islands of Betio and Tarawa, directly to the south. Still—no one made a move. It rained, and Sutton wired in every day that there was nothing to report. That lasted all through the summer and fall of that year—’til nearly the end of November. Then, on the twentieth of that month, just before dawn, sixty-six U.S. destroyers, thirty-six transport ships, twelve battleships, and just as many cruisers emerged on the horizon.
The Japanese opened fire; the Colorado and the Maryland immediately countered with their own. One of the American shells found its mark, opening a key entryway into the lagoon.
The plan had been to land Marines on the north of the island, but they soon found (though they now had a point of entrance) that the boats couldn’t clear the reef. They bided their time, waiting for the tide to change, but, according to later reports, the ocean just “sat there.” It was weird. Everything—the ocean itself—was at a standstill.
What they hadn’t known, and so had been unable to account for in their approach, was that when the moon was in its last quarter, it exerted hardly any pull on the water just north of Tarawa Beach at all. Soon there were Marines stranded everywhere—still on the boats, or else stuck on reefs, their vehicles swamped and taking on water. By the end of the day, only one tank was still functioning properly. Still, they had somehow managed to cut Japanese communication lines, forcing Commander Keiji Shibazaki to abandon his post. He readied his men and prepared to move farther south—but before he could do so, a naval high explosive detonated just outside the command post, and he and most of his men were killed. After that, things started to go a little better for the Americans, and three days later they held the island.
“Cleanup” continued up and down the beaches for another week. When the last pockets of resistance were cleared out, only one Japanese officer and sixteen enlisted men—the only ones willing to surrender— remained alive. American casualties were disastrous as well: upward of three thousand.
The numbers set off a furor in Washington. How could a tiny island in the South Pacific possibly be worth the lives of three thousand American men? General Holland M. Smith, commander of the V Amphibious Corps, did nothing to dampen the public’s growing concern when, after touring the beaches one day toward the end of the battle, he compared the scale of the loss he witnessed there to Pickett’s Charge.
Sutton saw nothing of the battle itself, of course, until it was over— but then she saw plenty. On the twenty-fourth of November, just after the worst of the fighting had ended, she traveled back to the United States aboard the hospital ship Solace. At first she went among the men, interviewing those who could still speak about their experiences in “the largest single operation ever launched in the Pacific,” but after a while she stopped asking questions or writing anything down. Later, when Walker asked her about a story on the Solace voyage, she said there wasn’t any.
How’s that? he asked.
Sutton had shrugged. I wasn’t on assignment, she reminded him— that was just my ticket home. But who knows—maybe I’ll write about it someday, she told him.
She knew, though, that if she ever did, it wouldn’t be for him.
So, Walker said. Had enough? He was grinning at her.
Sutton shook her head.
—
YOU WOULD THINK THAT THE WAR WOULD HAVE PREOCCUPIED ALL OF her thoughts, so she would hardly have had a moment to think about Louis in all that time—but just the opposite was the case. She found that, in fact, she had nothing but time on her hands to think back over everything that had happened between them; to retrace the chiasmic route of their correspondence, which she knew practically by heart; to count the days ’til the arrival of the Messiah (as she ever afterward referred to the child in her mind); to wonder wryly when she might begin to see the signs that he was indeed living among them, on earth …
She chastised herself endlessly for it, willing her thoughts to find for themselves some different course—but without fail they found their way patiently back to that same tired groove, each time as if they (and therefore she hersel
f, she could only suppose) somehow imagined there was some way she might think her way out. That if she approached the thing (the great tear in her heart, which not even the war could distract from or repair) from the right direction—if she managed to surprise it somehow from an unexpected angle—it might just … go away. That Louis would be returned to her; that everything would go back to the way it had been. The problem was, she considered: it never really had been anything much at all. Not, at least, anything solid enough (nor even, for the most part, she was forced to admit, desirable enough) that, with her rational mind, she could ever really will its return. Yet still, whenever she was not completely vigilant, her heart slid back there every time, and her mind followed.
Sometimes she would manage to convince herself that it was not really Louis she longed for. Perhaps, she reasoned, he stood for something else—something larger. Her father’s or her mother’s death; her worry over Alden; the outcome of the war. But mostly, as she could not help but be aware, it was—the pattern of her thought, and the system to her grieving—a very small, very personal, and very limited spiral.
And she had plenty of time to dwell within it—especially after she returned from the Pacific. Once more, it took nearly six months before she was dispatched again. New York, empty of Louis, was nearly unbearable; she could not remember a time she had ever felt so alone.
IT CAME AS A tremendous relief, therefore, when, in mid-April, she was posted to Italy—just before the Allies attacked the Gustav Line. That was the first time she got anywhere near the front—which served to get her mind off Louis anyway. That, and Lieutenant Frank Jenson—a shy young redhead from Washington State.
She was just about to go out flying with Jenson one afternoon when he got a radio call to go out on a mission instead. A rocket gun—what Jenson called a screaming meemie—had been holding up an infantry division; Jenson’s job was to spot it, then radio in its coordinates back home.
Nothing too special, he said. I should be back before lunch—I’ll take you up then.
How ’bout I come along now? Sutton asked.
Jenson hesitated, then shrugged. The captain—Benelli—a skinny man of about forty with a nose and eyes like a hawk, balked at the idea, though.
Girls can’t go out on missions, he said.
They can if you take them, Sutton replied—to which Benelli laughed loudly.
All right, he said. Come on.
IT WAS AMAZING, ONCE they got some height, to look down from above and see how the pattern-bombing tracks, which always looked so chaotic from the ground, seemed as regular as though they had been drawn with a ruler and compass. As though there were some bigger picture in mind—and if they could only just pan out a little farther, they might at last be able to make out what it was.
Sutton took pictures until her hands went numb. Then she tucked them into her coat to warm them and asked Jenson how long it would be until they got to the front—and how they would know when they got there.
Oh, that’s easy, Benelli said. It’s when you stop seeing stars on things.
She looked below and saw that the jeeps and trucks and landed aircraft were all marked with a white star, clearly visible from the air.
The best way to tell, Jenson put in, is actually the bridges. When you see trestle bridges like those, he said, pointing, you know you’re in friendly territory—those are bridges built by our own engineers. When you start seeing blown-out bridges, you’re in no-man’s-land: the last thing the Germans do is blow up their bridges. If they haven’t been rebuilt yet it’s because the territory’s still too hot—gotta wait awhile. The first intact bridge you see after that? That’s when you know you’re in Jerry land.
THEY HAD JUST CRESTED the hills surrounding the Cassino Valley. Below them, the highway wound its way through the mountains. Then, in another moment, the whole Cassino corridor opened up below them, the valley glistening with shell holes made by the guns of both sides. It had recently rained and the holes had been filled with water; these glinted in the sun, nearly blinding them. Sutton leaned out again and looked back to where, from their own territory, the distant muzzle flashes of guns blinked on and off like fireflies. They dipped down toward the highway where wrecked tanks were strewn across a bend in the road; beyond that were the demolished bridges. Benelli phoned in the coordinates of these, and Sutton continued to take pictures.
Then—suddenly—the airplane seemed to buck under them, and there was a sound like a freight train passing. Benelli swore.
High explosives, he said.
Then he swore again.
Dammit. We’ve got troops down there.
Jenson pointed the nose of the airplane up, and they flew—leaving the turbulent air, and the men (impossible to imagine within it) behind. Ahead of them was an open stretch, split by a road with no one on it; then, at the far end of the road, was an arched bridge. It looked like no one had set foot on it in a hundred years.
Here we are, Benelli said. Jerry country.
Again, Jenson tipped the nose of the plane up and they rose higher.
Keep your eyes peeled, he said.
Once we spot that meemie, Benelli said, we can go home.
But just then they heard something: a faint crackling sound, like grease popping.
We’re being shot at, Jenson said.
Spandau, said Benelli.
Again, Jenson tipped the nose of the plane, and they rose.
Spandau only has a range of twenty-four-hundred feet, Benelli explained to Sutton. He turned to Jenson. And we’re at what?
Thirty-two hundred, Jenson said.
Sutton saw that his knuckles were white on the controls.
Benelli gave one of his laughs. Hoo-hooo! he yelled. You got that? he asked Sutton, turning around now to face her. D’ye get all that?
She leaned out again, but without really looking this time. The air was numbingly cold. She could hardly feel her fingers and so didn’t even know if she was taking pictures anymore. She pointed her camera back toward the earth and just held it there.
Hoo-hoooo! yelled Belthat was for Sevastopolnli again.
When she couldn’t bear it any longer, Sutton leaned back in, and tucked her hands into the pockets of her thin coat to warm them.
Shortly after, Jenson turned the aircraft around, and they headed home.
THE ALLIES TOOK ROME. Then, beyond that, Florence—closing in on the Gothic Line. Then came Omaha Beach, and the U.S. invasion of Saipan in the Marianas. In July, the Soviets captured Minsk, and by August Paris was free.
Sutton spent the fall and winter of that year reporting from Rome; then, in March 1945, she was dispatched to western Poland to follow the Russian and American forces as they advanced, in a final push, on Berlin.
—
SHE HERSELF DROVE INTO BERLIN ON FRIDAY, APRIL 27, 1945 (THE same day, as they later learned, that Mussolini attempted to escape to Spain). In a Russian jeep, with the British journalist Walt Kinsey, their driver—an American, Sergeant Gene Dobbs—and another female journalist, Frieda Westin—from St. Paul, Minnesota—who had spent most of the war in the South Pacific, and couldn’t believe she had found herself “right in the middle of it all,” and just in time.
It was a wonder they ever arrived. They lost their bearings as they approached the city and pretty soon it seemed like there were no longer any coordinates at all. Sergeant Dobbs, at the wheel, was as white as a sheet as, from behind, Kinsey shouted at him whatever conflicting thought or direction occurred to him in a nearly incomprehensible language all his own, as though speaking in tongues. Each moment a new emotion would occur to him—anger first, at being driven out into the middle of the German wilderness to die, then embarrassment at not being personally able to deliver them from the situation, and finally the sudden inspiration that he might do so after all.
Sutton had never been to Berlin before but the extent to which she did not recognize it when, finally, they did arrive, went beyond the features of the city itself—or what, of the
city, remained. The Russians had reached Berlin several days before; now they galloped through the streets with such mad and vengeant joy that it was as though the entire city were adrift, “run off the map.” It was not any longer even properly victory that was being celebrated, but something larger, more total. Everything had been overturned. Quite literally. German goods spilled from carts, which had been left abandoned in the streets when the Russians arrived. Russian tanks drove right over them and everything else in their path. Shop doors hung on their hinges, their contents spilled into the street—anything worth taking had already been taken, and long ago. Every woman had been raped; every building had been blasted or burned. Still, the Russians continued to bombard the city, and the air was thick with smoke. Because of this, even once they’d arrived they had an awful job finding their way. Also, the German signs had already been replaced with their Russian equivalents and, as they had not a single word of Russian between them, they were at a complete loss to decipher them. Finally, Frieda had the idea to take out their American flag, and that was how they got to the command post where the Russians were expecting them. Frieda and Sutton waved the flag out the vehicle and repeated to incredulous inquisitors who passed that yes, they were indeed “Amerikanski.” This at first caused even more trouble—the crowd closed in on them in a burst of such unconstrained excitement that they weren’t able, after that, to budge a single inch, until Kinsey got out of the vehicle and physically cleared a path.
When, at last, they did manage to reach their destination, their reception was the same. Every time Sutton turned around there was a Russian officer who wanted to shake her hand, and once she had turned around enough times, they wanted to shake her hand again, so there never seemed to be any end to it. Then the toasts began, and there seemed to be no end to them, either. Sutton raised her glass with the rest, repeating what she understood to be the Russian equivalent of “Cheers!” It was many hours before she realized she was simply mispronouncing—like everyone else—the name of the President of the United States.
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