Sweet Caress

by William Boyd

  Our mood ranged from very disgruntled to indifferent. Colonel Bovelander, commanding officer of the 631st Parachute Infantry Regiment, to which we were all assigned, did not like the press. He had kept us well away from all combat, far in the rear, corralled in a series of houses – an abbey, maisons de maître, and now a chateau – as the 7th Army advanced remorselessly on the Rhine. We had been taken to see the mayors of liberated villages present bouquets to various American units. We had visited base hospitals and rear-echelon supply dumps. We had witnessed hundred-lorry convoys passing by; had photographed tank transporters debouching their tanks; we had watched squadrons of P-51 Mustang fighters take off from airbases on ground-support missions. And so on. In short, we had witnessed everything that a modern army did in the field, except fight.

  We had lodged a unanimous protest on behalf of our newspapers and magazines, hence this face-to-face encounter with Colonel Bovelander. Of the six of us, there were two women – me and a veteran reporter for McCall’s named Mary Poundstone (who, I strongly suspected, didn’t much like me. Mary preferred to be the only woman in the team). The four men, three journalists and a photographer from Associated Press, weren’t too unhappy with this boring but easy life. It was Mary and I who had allied to provide the consensus, this united front of free expression, and we were not going to be cowed by Bovelander’s bluster.

  He strode in, accompanied by his public relations officer. Bovelander was thirty-two years old, one of the youngest regimental commanders in the US Army, fair, tall and handsome, and was wearing his trademark, a red bandana tied loosely at the throat. ‘Farm boy,’ Poundstone had sneered when she’d first seen it. ‘Oh, yeah. Nice touch.’

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ Bovelander began without any formalities, ‘your protest has been noted – and rejected. I resent this waste of my time. Anyone who does not follow the precise instructions of Captain Enright here,’ he indicated the PRO beside him, ‘will be arrested and charged.’

  ‘Charged with what, pray?’ Mary Poundstone called out.

  ‘Insubordination. Good morning.’

  He smiled and walked out.

  ‘Well, at least we protested,’ I said.

  ‘I’ve got to get reassigned,’ Poundstone said and went to speak to Enright.

  I wandered out on to the rear terrace that overlooked a long untended garden. The lawns had been churned up by vehicle tracks and at the far end by an ornamental stable block was an advanced dressing station that had a big tarpaulin with a red cross draped over the stable’s tiled roof. I lit a cigarette and wandered over. I knew a few of the medics – they were as far behind the front as we were and seemed to travel with us as we advanced. I saw a young private I knew – Ephraim Abrams – stacking packs into the back of a jeep that had its engine running. I had taken Abrams’ photograph standing by an abandoned 88 mm field gun and developed the print so he could send it back to his parents in New Jersey.

  ‘Where’re you off to?’ I asked.

  ‘Heading up to Villeforte. We cleared it out yesterday.’

  ‘Can I hitch a ride?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘I’ll be two seconds.’

  I ran into my room and grabbed my helmet, cameras and film, and raced back out to the stables. I jumped in the rear of the jeep, pulled my helmet down low and wrapped a scarf around my face as Abrams gunned the motor and we drove out of the yard up a muddy lane towards Villeforte. As usual the traffic was heavy, and going both ways – trucks, jeeps, half-tracks and a long column of German prisoners tramping sullenly back towards captivity – and it took us almost an hour to travel the two miles to the small town. Villeforte showed few signs of fighting. There was a large hole in the roof of the mairie and some of the bigger farms on the outskirts that had been used as strongpoints were pretty much levelled – shattered walls and piles of rubble – but there were no fires burning and the clock in the church tower was telling the correct time.

  Abrams pulled into a supply dump and I hopped off, but not before I had covertly snaffled a red-cross armband that I found on the jeep’s floor.

  ‘When are you heading back?’ I asked.

  ‘In an hour. Give or take.’

  ‘Don’t leave without me.’

  I wandered off, up the road to the town, slipping on my armband, feeling a sudden surge of excitement in me as if I were playing truant. I was certainly disobeying Bovelander; categorically ignoring his explicit order. Fuck Bovelander, I thought and then paused, as I saw a small unit of military police up ahead directing traffic. I turned right down a farm track and as soon as I was out of sight cut across a meadow heading for another road that would lead me to the town centre, aiming for the spire of the church. I climbed over a wooden fence. And stopped.

  The body of a German soldier lay there, his head a battered turnip of blood, bone and hair. He was supine on flattened meadow-grass a few yards from a tall blackthorn hedge. I looked around, feeling a little dizzy. How had he been missed by the corpsmen? I took out my camera and snapped him lying there. My excitement had disappeared, replaced by a hyper-alert apprehension. It was my first picture as a war photographer. I moved on.

  Dead German soldier, Villeforte, November 1944.

  I wandered cautiously into the narrow lanes of Villeforte, all the houses shuttered and locked. Here and there on the streets were groups of soldiers, sitting, lounging, eating, smoking. None of them paid me any attention – my red-cross armband the perfect passport.

  However, I was stopped by a sentry as I tried to enter the main square.

  ‘Sorry,’ the soldier said. ‘We got brass checking out the tank.’

  I backed off and circled round. The tank? From another side street I managed to gain an oblique view of the square and I could see an enormous German tank – the size of a house, it seemed – painted a matt sandy-grey and apparently undamaged, with American soldiers clambering over it. I could hear excited chatter and the odd whoop of elation. I crept forward to a doorway and fired off a few shots. I’d never seen a tank this large – some sort of captured secret weapon? Was that another reason the press were being kept out of Villeforte?

  German mystery-tank, Villeforte, November 1944.

  I looked at my watch. Time to return to Abrams at the supply dump. I headed off down a sloping paved lane – I could see fields at its end. I felt elated, pleased with my initiative at going AWOL like this. I intended to do the same as Poundstone and apply to be reassigned to a different unit with a more accommodating CO. Bovelander wasn’t worth bothering about, he—

  The air was suddenly filled with a curious combination of noise: shrill tin whistles and the ripping of stiff canvas. Then, from somewhere on the edge of town a volley of percussive explosions. I felt the blast sweep through the streets to tug at my clothes. I crouched down. Shouts. Then more shrill whistling and explosions. Within seconds there was a crazed reaction of firing, as if every weapon in Villeforte was being loosed off.

  I ran down the lane to its foot and hugged the wall of the last house before the countryside began. I could see a wide ploughed field and beyond it straggling copses of leafless trees. Peering round the corner I saw a squad of GIs sheltering in a patch of garden behind a waist-high wall. Every now and then one of them would poke his head up and fire off a few shots at some target across the field towards a distant wood. I peered – I could hear some vehicles revving in the scrub by the trees and I thought I saw small figures in green-grey uniforms scurrying about.

  I shouted at the soldiers and ran over, ducking down behind the wall.

  ‘What’s happening?’

  ‘Fuckin’ counter-attack. You a medic?’

  ‘What? Yeah.’

  Artillery shells – ours, I assumed – began to explode in the wood across the field. Great towering billows of chocolate-brown smoke, then the shock wave rocking us. I watched a tree slowly fall – creaking, the tear of timber splitting – then the crash and blustering cloud of twigs and branches. The air was full of the fat-po
pping noise of small arms. Then bits of tile began to fly up in the air on the roof of the house behind us and shards fell tinkling on and around us. We all ducked down. I’m under fire, I thought, so this is what it’s like.

  The man I spoke to had a stubbly beard and a circular patch on his arm with a star in it.

  ‘OK, fellas,’ he shouted. ‘We’re getting outta here.’

  He pointed at the entry to a narrow sunken lane. ‘Let’s get our asses in there. I’ll check it out.’ And he scurried off towards the lane, running in a crouch. Nobody fired at him and he arrived at the entry to the lane, squatting down between its thick banks.

  ‘OK, come on!’ he shouted. ‘One at a time.’

  More roof tiles behind us were hit. The shards fell with a fragile, near-melodic sound like a wind chime. Nobody moved. One of the men was looking at me strangely.

  ‘You a nurse?’

  ‘Sort of,’ I said.

  ‘For fuck’s sake, come on, guys!’ the man in the sunken lane shouted. I rummaged in my kitbag and took out my other camera and fitted a 50 mm lens to it and wound the film on. The photographer in me was thinking: don’t miss this. A counterattack. Under fire. Don’t miss this.

  The man in the lane shouted again but no one seemed very keen to follow the intrepid soldier and run the few exposed yards along the ploughed field, even to the evident security of the lane with its high banks. He waved and shouted once more and then suddenly, there was a boom of an explosion behind him and a great puff of smoke seemed to rush down the lane to envelop him. He fell down and his carbine went spiralling high up in the air to land twenty feet away. He stood up, apparently unhurt, and began to run back towards us, not bothering about his weapon, his pack banging against his hip as he raced for the cover of the garden wall. I peered over the top and took some shots of the wood. I could still hear the firecracker pops of rifles and machine guns but could see nothing stirring any more amongst the trees.

  ‘Get the fuck down!’ the running man screamed at me as he raced towards us. I swung round as he shouted and saw him hit, just a jolt that shortened his stride, and, entirely reflexively, my finger pressed the release button. He fell to the ground and others raced out to drag him back behind the wall. He was completely limp. They pulled him into the cover of the street that led down from the town square, and laid him against a wall, the men huddled round him, fumbling with his jacket and webbing. Click, I took another photo. Just at that moment I saw a half-track lurch into view at the top of the sloping street and I sprinted up towards it, having the presence of mind to thrust my camera back in its bag.

  ‘We’ve got a casualty down here!’ I yelled, and men began to spill out of the half-track and run towards me.

  Colonel Richard ‘Dick’ Bovelander sat behind his desk and looked me over. It was a disdainful stare.

  ‘You know that you have the rank of captain in the US Army,’ he said.

  ‘Yes, I do.’

  ‘So, as you’re attached to my regiment, I am your commanding officer.’

  ‘In theory.’

  ‘In theory I can have my military police arrest you and lock you up pending a court martial.’

  ‘Listen, Colonel, we all know that—’

  ‘No. You listen, Miss Clay. Within minutes of me giving that order you disobeyed it. You could easily have gotten yourself killed.’

  ‘I was just curious.’

  ‘This is a war zone. Not an opportunity for someone like you – some photographer – to take photographs.’

  I closed my eyes for a second. Bovelander was going to exact his pound of flesh whatever I said. However, I had the feeling that at another time, in another place, we might actually have liked each other.

  ‘I want the film from your camera,’ he said, holding his hand out.

  ‘No. Out of the question.’

  ‘Provost Marshal!’

  ‘All right. All right.’

  I had been expecting this. I took my two cameras from my knapsack, rewound the film, opened the rear flaps and handed over the rolls. They were brand new: the two rolls that I had used were snug beneath my armpits, tucked in my brassiere.

  ‘Colonel,’ I began, ‘we, the journalists and the photographers, are not a subversive presence, trying to make your job harder. Your soldiers – sons, fathers, nephews, grandsons – have another army, the hundreds of thousands of their family members back in the US, who care about them and want to know about the lives they’re leading. Your orders are preventing us doing our job. It’s wrong.’

  ‘You’re English, aren’t you, Miss Clay.’

  ‘I am.’

  ‘Maybe they do things differently in the British Army but while you’re under my command you take orders as an American soldier.’ He looked at me in that disdainful way again. I crossed my legs and took out a cigarette. I wanted to rile him.

  ‘Have you a light, by the way, Colonel? Please?’

  ‘Sergeant McNeal will take you to the railhead. If you’re still here in ten minutes you’ll be in jail.’

  I stood. ‘I wish you luck, Colonel,’ I said, and left his headquarters without a backward glance.

  *

  THE BARRANDALE JOURNAL 1977

  Colonel Bovelander was killed in a friendly-fire incident a few months later in March 1945 when Allied artillery shells dropped devastatingly short during Operation Varsity and he and two of his staff were killed in their observation post. He was posthumously promoted to lieutenant general. I would like to record it as an instance of the Curse of Clay but I was sorry to hear the news. I bore him no ill will even though he was a self-important man, albeit a good-looking one – all the same, someone like Bovelander deserved a more heroic demise than a tragic accident.

  My smuggled photograph of the mysterious German tank – some kind of vast self-propelled gun, I learned later – made the cover of Global-Photo-Watch in December 1944, as did my shot of the dead German soldier I’d discovered in the field outside Villeforte. The headline of my issue – as I like to think of it – was ‘Exclusive: First Glimpse of Nazi Super-Tank’. I achieved a certain notoriety in the purlieus of the Hotel Scribe. Cleve was delighted at my scoop and urged me to return to the front line. Easier urged than achieved, as Bovelander had left a scathing and damning report about me and my unreliability, and I found it very difficult to be reassigned. I continued to apply to other units while running the GPW offices with the indefatigable help of Corisande – the French equivalent of Faith Postings – as Cleve had sent Jay Fielding to Guam to cover the Pacific theatre.

  I never published my photo of Private First Class Anthony G. Sasso – until now – whose snapshot I took at the very moment of his death. I learned his name later – he was the only fatality of the futile and quickly aborted counter-attack on Villeforte – and as luck, good or bad, would have it, I was there to preserve the instant of his passing for posterity.

  ‘Falling Soldier’. PFC Anthony G. Sasso at the moment of his death. Villeforte, 15 November 1944.

  When I developed the image and printed it I immediately called it ‘Falling Soldier’ after Robert Capa’s famous photograph from the Spanish Civil War of a Republican soldier. The soldier, rifle falling from his hand, is flung backwards, arms dramatically spread, against a background of rolling scrubby hills. It is one of the most famous war photographs ever taken and it made Capa’s name. Of course, there has been a mass of controversy surrounding the image. Was it faked? A photo opportunity carefully staged? Other questions arrive: do people really die in such a histrionic way when a fatal bullet hits them? Does a rifle or machine-gun bullet fling you backwards like this? I think that’s the problem. Capa’s soldier, falling back, arms akimbo, would not have looked out of place in a Hollywood B-movie western. This soldier seems to be dying ‘on stage’, as it were.

  By contrast, my photo of the death of Anthony Sasso is mundane in the extreme. He has just been hit in the body by a bullet and his face, for a split second, instinctively registers the shock and the re
alisation. The jolt of the bullet’s impact has brought him slightly more erect and his helmet strap is flung forward by the momentary arrest in his run. I discovered later that the bullet entered under his right armpit and tore through his chest cavity. He was dead by the time he hit the ground, half a second later. And I was there. My follow-up photo of his comrades gathered round his body is overexposed and blurry (I was in shock) but it is authentic. Capa’s follow-up shot just adds more queries. The body has been moved. The background is slightly different. Too many anomalies.

  GIs tend to the fallen body of Anthony Sasso. Villeforte, 15 November 1944.

  The key fact that I remember about Sasso’s death is that he just fell forward, crumpled forward. He didn’t cry or scream or throw his arms out wide, he just went down. I remember asking a veteran of the First World War – an old comrade of my father – who had seen dozens of men shot alongside him during attacks on the German line what happened at the moment of bullet impact and death. ‘They just fall forward,’ he said. ‘Don’t make a sound. Thump. They just go down like a sack of potatoes.’ That’s what happened with Anthony Sasso. Thump. Dead.

  *

  I spent the Christmas and New Year of 1944–5 with Charbonneau at the Mas d’Epines where we had made some rudimentary improvements. Rooms had been painted; there was a functioning outdoor lavatory. We had installed a wood-burning stove and range in the kitchen that also heated water so baths could be had (with some effort). There was still no electricity and it was a cold winter of iron frosts, that year, even in Provence. We built great log fires in the main room that we kept going all day, burning vast amounts of wood, until we went – usually drunkenly – to bed.