The Girl in the Blue Beret (2 page)

The deep, rumbling sound of a vast formation of B-17s roared through Marshall’s memory now. The steady, violent, rocking flight toward target. The sight of Focke-Wulf 190s—angry hornets darting crazily. The black bursts of flak floating like tumbleweeds strewn on a western highway. The fuselage flak-peppered. Slipping down into the cloud deck, flying for more than an hour unprotected. Over Belgium, hit again. The nose cone shattering. The pilot panicking.

Marshall, the co-pilot, took the controls and brought the
Dirty Lily
down. A belly landing on this foreign soil. There was no time to jettison the ball turret. Only as they were coming down did Marshall see that Lawrence Webb, the pilot, was unconscious. The Fort grazed the top of a tall hedgerow and slid in with a jolt, grinding to a hard stop. The crew scrambled out. Marshall and the flight engineer wrestled Webb’s slack body from the plane. The navigator’s face was torn, bloodied. The fuselage was burning. Machine-gun rounds were exploding at the gun stations. Marshall didn’t see the tail gunner anywhere. The left waist gunner lay on the ground, motionless.

Marshall had been just twenty-three years old then. Now he was nearly sixty, and he had come to see this place again at last. He was crying for the kids in the B-17, the youngsters who had staked their lives on their Flying Fortress. He hadn’t known he had pent up such a reservoir of emotion, even though he probably thought about the downing of the B-17 every day. He willed his tears to stop.

Lucien Lombard had seen the plane come down near the village, and he rushed to help the crew, but Marshall didn’t remember him.

Now Lucien said, “It is like yesterday.”

Marshall toed a weed-topped clod of dirt. “The worst day of my life,” he said. “Some bad memories.”

“Never mind,
monsieur
. It had its part.”

Several people were crossing the field, headed toward them. They had arrived in a gray van with the name of a hardware store on the side.

“Everyone from the village has heard of your visit,” said Lucien. “You are a hero.”

“
Non
. I did very little.” Marshall was ashamed.

Lucien introduced him to the group. They were all smiling at him and speaking rapidly. When Marshall could not follow some of their thickly accented French, Lucien explained that everyone there remembered the crash. Three families had sheltered members of the crew, and Dr. Bequet had treated the wounded.

“I’m very grateful,” Marshall said, shaking the doctor’s hand.

“It was necessary to help.”

More introductions and small talk followed. Marshall noticed two men scanning the ground. Lucien explained that people still found pieces of metal there—bullet casings, rivets, and once even a warped propeller blade. Marshall thought of how he had torn up the field when he came zigzagging down that day.

A man in a cloth cap and wool scarf stepped forward and touched Marshall’s arm.

“
Oui
, it is sad,
monsieur
,” the man said. He regarded Marshall in a kindly way and smiled. His face was leathery but younger than Marshall’s. He seemed familiar.

“You were the boy who helped me!” Marshall said, astonished.

“Oui. C’est moi.”

“You offered me a cigarette.”

The man laughed. His taut, weathered cheeks seemed to blush. “
Bien sûr
. I would never forget that day. The cigarettes I had obtained for my father.”

“That was my very first Gauloises,” Marshall said.

“You were my first
Américain
,” the man said, smiling. “I am Henri Lechat.”

They shook hands, the younger man first removing his glove.

“You warned me that the Germans were coming,” Marshall said.

Henri nodded. “It is true. You had no French then, and I had no English.”

“But I knew. We communicated somehow.”

Marshall’s voice broke on the word
communicated
.

“We will never forget,
monsieur.
”

“You told me to run,” Marshall said, recalling how he had stowed the cigarette in the inner pocket of his leather jacket. Now he felt his tears well up again.

Henri tugged on his scarf. “I told you to hide in the woods, and you comprehended.”

Recalling the boy’s urgency, Marshall tried to laugh. Henri had raced up, calling a warning. Pointing back the way he had come, he cried,
“Les Allemands! Les Allemands!”
Then, pointing to the woods in the other direction, he shouted,
“Allez-y!”
Marshall did not see any Germans, and he would not leave until all the crew was out. The bombardier was wounded in the shoulder, and the navigator had a shattered leg. The tail gunner appeared; he had hopped out easily. The left waist gunner was unconscious and had to be pulled from the fuselage window. Marshall was relieved to see the ball-turret gunner, who was limping toward the church with a man carrying a shovel. Someone said the right waist gunner had parachuted. The pilot was lying on the frozen ground, his eyes closed. Fire was leaping from the plane.

Marshall knelt by Webb, trying to wake him. Nothing. Someone squatted beside Marshall and opened Webb’s jacket.

“Docteur,”
the woman said, pointing toward the village. She pointed in the opposite direction, toward the woods, and said, “Go.”

Marshall stood. The flight engineer appeared at his side. “Let’s go,” he said. “Everybody’s out.”

Several of the villagers were making urgent gestures toward the road. German troops would be here in moments. Marshall knew that they converged on every fallen plane, to arrest the Allied aviators and to salvage the wrecked metal for their own planes. The German fighter that had downed them was circling low overhead. Marshall began running toward the woods.

Had the Germans shot anyone from the village for helping the American flyers?
Marshall wondered now, but he did not want to ask. He had tried to be sure all the crew were out, and then he left the scene. In the years after, he didn’t probe into the aftermath. He lived another life.

“We were so thankful to you,
monsieur
,” one of the men was saying. “When your planes flew over we knew we would be liberated one day.”

Marshall nodded.

A stocky woman with gray, thick hair and a genial, wrinkled face said, “The airplanes flying toward Germany in those days—there were hundreds of them. We rejoiced to see them crossing the sky.”

Henri kicked dirt from his leather boot. “I didn’t know at that age everything that was understood by the adults. But I knew the deprivation, the difficulties, the secrecy. Even the children knew the crisis.”

Cautiously, Marshall asked, “Did the Germans arrest anybody for helping us?”

“Oh, non, monsieur.”
Henri paused. “Not that day.”

Lucien Lombard clasped Henri’s shoulder and said, “The father of this one was killed—shot on his bicycle, on his way home after convoying one of your
aviateurs
across the border to France.”

Henri said, “I had to grow up quickly. I had the responsibilities then for my mother and my sisters.”

Lucien said, “His family hid that
aviateur
in their barn for a time.”

Marshall recoiled. He could see the waist gunner lying motionless across the furrows. He saw himself running into the woods. He saw the boy’s face. The plane was on fire.

Marshall had decided to return to this place finally, knowing it was time to confront his past failure. He had expected to be alone in the field, and he had not thought anyone would remember. The news of the death of the boy’s father jolted him. He had never heard about that. In all these years, he had thought little about the people who had come running to the downed airplane. He had felt such a profound defeat in the war that he had not wanted to return here. During the war, more than anything, he had wanted to be heroic. But he was no hero. He had felt nothing but bitter disappointment that he didn’t get to complete his bombing missions against Nazi Germany. And what happened later, as he skulked through France, was best forgotten, he had thought.

Marshall was a widower. His wife, Loretta, had died suddenly two years before, and the loss still seemed unbelievable, but now he began to feel his grief lift, like the morning fog disappearing above a waiting airport.

2.

D
AZED BY HIS BRIEF VISIT TO THE MUDDY FIELD IN BELGIUM
, Marshall spent the last hours before his flight home walking around Paris. It was a mellow spring day.

He had always enjoyed this city. He bid for Paris flights several times each year, and when he became senior enough, he got them. Climb out of JFK in the evening, fly above the invisible Atlantic during the hours of darkness, and arrive in Paris under a bright sun.

He thought tenderly of Loretta, who had always refused to believe he was anything less than heroic. He wished she could have been with him on this trip.

He watched children on skates zooming alongside the Luxembourg Gardens, near the crew hotel. He thought about the boy in Belgium who had helped him, and he thought about the boy’s father—shot for convoying a gunner from the
Dirty Lily
.

On his layovers, Marshall had rarely gone to museums or tourist attractions, but he enjoyed the bustle and anonymity of a city that still had a feeling of intimacy—unlike New York. Or London. He liked being able to understand conversations he overheard. After the war, he had taken courses in French, and over the years he had become fluent enough to get along. He liked to read novels in French.

By the time he reached the Louvre, he realized that during his walk he hadn’t been seeing Paris as it was now, 1980. He had been resurrecting 1944. Ghostly images overlaid the scene before him. At the Tuileries, his gaze followed the magnificent view through the gardens and on up the Champs-Elysées to the Arc de Triomphe. Over this sight now he superimposed his memories of being there long ago, when there were hardly any vehicles. He saw images from newsreels and photographs: Hitler’s hordes marching in perfect lockstep; later, Churchill and de Gaulle triumphant.

To Marshall’s right, somewhere along the rue de Rivoli, was a Métro stop. He and a brash bombardier named Delancey had stumbled up from the Métro, scared, towering like Lombardy poplars among the crowd of much shorter Frenchmen. If they missed their contact, they would be stranded—lost amidst the Germans, circulating around them in their menacing gray-green uniforms.

She was there. He saw her first, sitting on a bench reading a timetable. There was a quietness to the crowd, as if people were on their best behavior. Marshall had doubted that a mere schoolgirl would be sent as their contact, but there she was, sitting with a book satchel and earnestly consulting a timetable.

The agent’s directions had been precise.
Find the girl in the blue beret. She will have a timetable and a leather school bag
.

Marshall remembered that moment vividly. She was waiting there, her blue beret standing out like a flower against the barren winter gardens of the Tuileries.

There was still a bench in that area. Not the same bench, he thought, but it was in approximately the same place.

But no, he was wrong. When he saw her on the bench, Delancey hadn’t been with him. He and Delancey had first seen her at the train station. Why did he meet her in the Tuileries? Then he remembered.

As he neared the place de la Concorde, he thought of the Concorde—the SST. He wished it would fly over, a happy coincidence, tying history in a knot. Moments of history entwined here—Marie-Antoinette lost her head; the Egyptian obelisk replaced the guillotine; Napoléon dreamed the triumphant arch. Marshall felt his own history emanate from him, as if he been holding it condensed in a small spot inside himself. Reviewing his past was new for Marshall, something that had started as he approached his sixtieth birthday—and retirement. Tomorrow was his final flight.

FOR YEARS, MARSHALL
had dreaded retirement. Mandatory premature retreat, he called it, infuriated at the federal law. He hated being forced out. He was perfectly healthy, and he had stopped smoking ten years ago. Asking a pilot to stop flying was like asking a librarian to burn books. Or a pianist to close the lid forever. Or a farmer to buy a condo in the city. His mind entertained new metaphors every day.

Retirement would be like the enforced passivity he had endured during the war, after the crash landing. Then, he was a caged bird.

The airline didn’t want rickety, half-blind ancients at the controls.
Screw the airline
, he thought now. Roaming Paris, he composed the thousandth rebuttal he would never send in:
Since being let go on account of advanced age and feebleness, I’ve been forced to adopt a new career. Henceforth, I shall guide hikers up Mont Blanc, and on my days off I’ll be going skydiving
.

The pilots Marshall hobnobbed with might talk about investments, or summer homes, or time-share condos, but none of them really cared about anything except flying. One former B-24 pilot golfed, and an ex-fighter jock intended to sail his deep-draft sloop around the world someday, but Marshall thought their pastimes were half-hearted substitutes. He was interested in everything to do with aviation, and he was always reading, but he thought hobbies were silly. Collecting swizzle sticks or crafting model airplanes—he couldn’t imagine. Whenever he thought of what to do with his retirement, he drew a blank. Pushing the throttles forward, racing down the runway, feeling the wings gain lift, pulling the yoke back and aiming high into the sky—that’s what his pilot friends really wanted. That’s what he wanted.