Read The Race for Paris Online
Authors: Meg Waite Clayton
[I]t was Helen Kirkpatrick who read the maps, charted our course, and drove the lead jeep. She loved to sail along so fast, however, that the Colonel was always in a dither, knowing that before the day was over her exuberant little jeep would disappear into the distance and leave the rest of our convoy far behind.
—Photojournalist Margaret Bourke-White
F
letcher eased our jeep in at the back of a column of tank-destroyer guns, the soldiers dressed in American army garb but wearing red berets and speaking French—some of Leclerc’s French forces. The road was so thick with military vehicles and men and mud and rain that there was no way to continue. Still, when the column stopped and Fletcher stopped with it, Liv urged him on.
Fletcher threw the jeep into park and climbed out. “Why don’t you drive, then?”
Liv climbed from the back into the driver’s seat, shifted into gear and swung wide, off the road and into the mud.
“You coming, Fletcher?” she called back.
Fletcher caught up with us, flipped the windshield down flat against the hood, and climbed into the back.
Liv began to weave through the column, as often as not off the road. We broke free of the olive drab mass and moved up to a still-mobile column of troops. When that column halted we swung wide and surged ahead again. Liv drove swiftly, trying to avoid the worst of the mud and rubble, but with a wildness that was a little frightening.
The tire went again at Cernay-la-Ville, a village that was little more than a road intersection at an ancient stone church. Liv eased us to a stop beside a spire that had stood for centuries but remained as vulnerable to bombs as the ruin at Saint-Lô where they’d placed Major Howie.
“Roebuck Tire and Axle at your service,” Fletcher said, the tension seeping out of him as the air seeped from the tire.
It had stopped raining, at least there was that, and the storm had broken the heat and humidity. We stripped off our ponchos, and Liv cut the patch and handed it to Fletcher, whose easy banter as he pressed the patch and held it to the damaged inner tube eased us all. While they worked, I made notes about the morning: the breakfast, the major in the lobby, the escape in the rain.
“Livvie,” Fletcher said, “I believe there’s a future for you at the Brooklands racetrack—with a clear course and a pit crew.”
She lit a cigarette and inhaled.
He said, “You wouldn’t be dirtying your hands patching tires yourself.”
Liv looked down at her hands, filthy again despite our bath just the night before. “It feels wrong to have clean hands in this damned war,” she said.
I looked down at my own hands, remembering how
Fletcher said Charles had described Liv, as a woman who photographed like a man but didn’t smoke or curse.
We continued through Pecqueuse, Limours, and Forges-les-Bains, running parallel to the main German defensive line and forever approaching a medieval stone turret without ever reaching the thing. It was the castle keep at Montlhéry, one of the French soldiers told us. It had guarded the road to Paris from Orleans for centuries of war.
“The tower, it is where Alfred Cornu measured the speed of light,” the French soldier said, as if the fact of its history gave it strength against the bombs. And perhaps it did. Orly airbase, not far beyond the tower, was seized by the Luftwaffe in ’40, and we’d been bombing the hell out of it since late May, but the Montlhéry tower stood.
The soldier was from Montlhéry himself, and had meant to study physics at the Sorbonne, before the war. I suggested perhaps he would soon, although it was hard to see how any of us could take up the pieces of the lives we’d abandoned.
Off in a field to the left, French guns were firing, and word came down the line that their targets were German antitank guns and mortars. We continued up the road, past a twisted wreck of an antitank gun and a German tank engulfed in flames. Several of the townspeople, so thrilled to see Allied troops that they would not be persuaded to stay in their homes, were killed in the shelling, their bodies lying at the roadside, their expressions stunned.
“All that’s left of the Battle of . . . where the devil are we anyway?” Fletcher said.
Liv consulted the map. “Longjumeau?” she said, mangling the French.
“Longjumeau,” Fletcher said. “‘
Long
’ like ‘long’ in English—it has the same meaning. And ‘
jumeau
’ means ‘twin.’”
Evening came with the swishing sounds of shells lighting the starless sky and news that resistance fighters inside Paris had taken the police prefecture on the Île de la Cité. Charles Luizet, who’d been Leclerc’s roommate at the French military academy, had managed to get a wireless message out that the resistance fighters were at the end of their resources, and Leclerc sent a small plane over the city to drop leaflets urging them to hold on.
“I’d hate to have been that pilot,” I said.
“I’d hate to be in Paris, hoping for armies or at least arms, only to receive a bleeding leaflet,” Fletcher said.
“I’d love to be in Paris,” Liv said.
We declined beds offered us in a cottage that night, wanting to be ever ready. I slept sitting with my bedroll loosely around me in the passenger seat, dreaming I was eating peach ice cream, and woke in the darkness to staccato gunfire and the smell of smoke. Liv woke with a gasp, and I climbed into the small backseat, careful not to wake Fletcher, wedging myself in beside her. She’d been having a nightmare that she’d been arrested, that she was standing in front of a bare metal desk in a dank prison cell, with Mrs. Shipley cackling at her that women didn’t belong in war zones, that she ought to be home tending children. “Then somehow Mrs. Shipley was Charles, and I was back at the field hospital again and Charles was there, hunched over the table under the apple tree, writing and writing. But there was something wrong about it. About the sound of his typewriter. The ding of the bell signaling the carriage return was missing. The zip of the carriage returning was missing as well.”
It happened all at once then: A scream of rushing wind. Ducking low in the jeep. Covering our helmeted heads with our arms.
A boom. The ground trembling. The jeep shaking.
A sharp bite in my left arm.
Liv and Fletcher grabbed their cameras and climbed from the jeep, their shutters snapping at the smoke and the blackened earth just yards away, the remains of an 88mm shell in flames.
Fletcher turned back to me, saying, “Jane?” Then he was in the jeep beside me, pulling out his shirttail.
As calmly as anything, he called, “Livvie!”
I felt as if some part of me were floating up out of my body, hanging in the air just above the jeep.
Liv, barely visible in the light of the flames, turned toward us.
“There’s an emergency medical kit mounted under the dash,” Fletcher told her. “Get it right now please. Put down your camera and get it right now. The electric torch, too.”
He tried to tear his shirttail. It wouldn’t tear.
Liv climbed back into the jeep, on the driver’s side, found the flashlight, and shone it in my eyes. With the blinding light, I was no longer floating. I thought I would vomit.
“The medical kit, Livvie,” Fletcher said. “The tourniquet, please.” Then to me, right in my face, looking into my eyes as if to climb inside me, “I’m here, Jane. I’m going to take care of you. You’re going to be fine.”
Liv dislodged the metal box that was the medical kit from under the jeep’s dash and opened it. She found the tourniquet in a small cardboard box inside the metal one and handed it to Fletcher. He wrapped it around my arm almost at my shoulder and pulled it tight.
He took the flashlight from Liv and shone it over me, fingering my face, my neck, my chest, my hips. Mercifully, he didn’t touch my arm, which burned like the second circle of hell.
“You’ve been hit in the arm, Jane,” he said. “I don’t see
anything else. Do you hurt elsewhere?” He shone the flashlight on my arm again for a longer moment. He went back over the rest of me with the light, then handed it to Liv. She shone it right in my eyes.
“Her eyes look okay,” she said to Fletcher. Then to me, “Your eyes look okay, Jane. Do you feel sick at all?”
She leaned over the seat and put the back of her hand to the bridge of my nose, just below my helmet, then to my cheek. She put two fingers to my neck, feeling my pulse. “She doesn’t seem to be in shock,” she said to Fletcher.
Fletcher said to me, “I believe you’ve taken on a bit of metal, Miss Tyler.”
The sound of his voice soothing. Liv’s touch soothing, too, like when she’d washed my hair.
Liv extracted another little cardboard box from the emergency kit, opened it, and handed Fletcher the scissors I’d used on his hair. He cut away the shredded khaki sleeve of my blouse.
I mustered a weakly voiced “Hey, that’s from Saks.”
Liv said, “Rest in peace, you gorgeous Saks Fifth Avenue blouse.”
Fletcher examined my arm more closely in the beam of flashlight. A piece of metal not much wider than a typewriter ribbon guide protruded from my skin. I started to reach for it, thinking if I just pulled it out, it would stop hurting.
“Don’t touch it, Jane!” Liv said. “Don’t you touch it either, Fletcher. It could still be hot. It could burn you and then we’ll be two men down.”
She handed Fletcher my canteen, and told him to pour water over the wound. She held the flashlight again so he would have both hands free.
Fletcher tipped the canteen.
“Oh oh oh oh oh!” I said. But after he finished pouring the water, the sting of pain was less biting.
Fletcher said, “There you are, you crusty bugger.”
He doused my arm again with the water from my canteen, and I gasped again.
“We ought to get you to an aid station, Jane,” he said.
“You can pull out the shrapnel with forceps,” Liv said.
“Shrapnel wounds get infected,” Fletcher said.
Liv looked at the road ahead of us, the long line of troops. “How do you feel, Jane? Does it hurt a lot?” She focused on me again, intently, like the nurse promising Joey his peach ice cream. “And the pain isn’t anywhere else, Jane? Just that one piece?”
I said, “If y’all keep repeating my name, I’m going to start thinking I’m dying.”
Liv said, “If you say ‘y’all’ again, Jane, I’ll
know
you’re dying.”
She shone the flashlight into the emergency kit and started extracting things from it: iodine, tweezers, gauze, bandages. She handed Fletcher a bottle of hydrogen peroxide, training the flashlight on me again.
“This is going to sting like hell,” she said. “On three. One. Two. Three.”
Fletcher poured some of the hydrogen peroxide over the wound.
“Mary, Mother of God!”
Liv handed Fletcher the tweezers. “On three again,” she said, now with the tweezers.
“Wait!” I said. “Give me a minute.”
I took a few deep breaths, then a few more. I told myself the doctors at the aid stations patched up soldiers in far worse shape than I was and sent them back to the front, but that didn’t ease the pain.
“Liv,” I said, stalling, “Liv, if you reload your camera, you can shoot ‘Operating Room by Flashlight Redux.’”
Liv said to Fletcher, “Don’t listen to her, Fletcher. Jane is such a card.” She smiled a little, and said to me, “Marie is probably back in the US now, with her 4F fiancé.”
She said, “One.”
“Sweet Jesus!” I said.
“You nasty little prat,” Fletcher said to the shrapnel now at the end of the tweezers, a thing the size of a poker chip, perhaps, although I didn’t really know; we’d played for cigarettes and gum.
“What happened to two and three?” I asked.
“I thought it best to have it done,” Fletcher said.
Liv took the tweezers still with the shrapnel caught in its grasp, saying, “I’ll tuck this little souvenir safely away for you, Jane. Someday you’ll show it to your grandchildren.”
She handed Fletcher a piece of gauze and told him to dab at the wound with it.
“It’s hardly even bleeding,” I said.
Fletcher said, “That, love, is the tourniquet. We need to get you to an aid station.”
Liv said, “It doesn’t look too bad, does it?” She put some hydrogen peroxide on a clean bit of gauze, handed it to Fletcher, and directed him to dab at the wound with it. “Gently.”
Fletcher said, “Perhaps you ought to do this yourself, Livvie.”
Liv handed the now-empty tweezers back to Fletcher, saying, “There’s one more little piece, see it?” and pointing. “You can get it with the forceps.”
He pulled it out without even a one-count warning.
Liv gave him the iodine and told him to swab around the wound but not in it.
Fletcher gave her a look.
Liv said, “It says so on the lid of the kit.”
Fletcher started swabbing with the iodine.
Liv said, “Every Saturday night bar-brawl victim was brought to our door and laid out on the dining room table. I’m a decent assistant, but I pass out if I touch. Put a piece of gauze over it, though, Fletcher, and I can wrap a bandage as well as anyone.”
Fletcher repeated to me, “We need to get you to an aid station.”
Liv wrapped the bandage so it kept pressure on the gauze over the wound. It felt good, the pressure, as if everything that was meant to stay in my body might stay there after all.
I said, “I can’t be showing my grandchildren a piece of metal no bigger than a thumbnail and saying this is why I missed the liberation of Paris.”
“A thumbnail from a giant’s thumb,” Fletcher said.
Liv extracted another box from the emergency kit and read the directions on it in the light of the flashlight. She opened the package and dumped out a handful of pills.
“All of these?” I asked.
“Sulfadiazine,” she said. “They’ll help keep the wound from getting infected.”
She handed me her own canteen, since mine was now empty. “Drink as much water as you can with them, and every time you think of it, drink more.”
The tourniquet needed to be released gradually, she said. Loosened just a little every ten minutes or so. I don’t even remember the first adjustment. I don’t remember Liv and Fletcher waking me to tip the canteen to my lips and make me drink. My sleep the rest of that night was exhausted, and mercifully dreamless.