The Race for Paris (22 page)

We strapped our bicycles to the top of the truck and crowded in beside the driver, who set off again, going even faster now to catch up to his convoy. He didn’t slow to read the signs warning vehicles to stay to the middle of the road in uncleared areas, or for the minesweepers off to the sides, or even for the MPs directing the trucks which way to go on the one-way roads. He slowed only once—as we crested a hill in the mostly flat terrain—and only slightly, only long enough to scan the horizon, alert to the possibility of German planes.

Not much later, Liv and Fletcher and I stood with our bicycles atop another hill, where the 743rd Tank Battalion of the American Second Armored Division and the Thirtieth Infantry Division, “Old Hickory,” overlooked the ruins of Tournai, Belgium, bombed to almost nothing by the Germans early in the war.

The gas cans were still being unloaded from the trucks when Fletcher was summoned to see the commanding officer, a dark-haired major general named Hobbs.

“I’ve heard about the work you’re doing, Roebuck, the look you’re giving us at the Germans,” Hobbs told Fletcher. “I’m pleased to have you in our neck of the woods, I don’t mind telling you that.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“You have pictures to get out? Anything else you need?”

Fletcher said he’d get what he needed to send out to Hobbs’s aide, and that he could use some food and film.

“Welcome to my war,” Hobbs said. “We’d have this thing won if we could get supplies. But what’s ours is yours.”

“Thank you, sir,” Fletcher said. “I could use a typewriter ribbon as well, and paper.”

“Could you, now?” Hobbs called to his aide, “Do you have a spare typewriter ribbon for Mr. Roebuck here?”

“What kind of typewriter?” the aide asked.

When Fletcher didn’t answer, Hobbs said, “I don’t give a good goddamn who you’re traveling with, Roebuck. If those ladies want to get themselves killed, that’s their business. But if they endanger my men or my mission, I’ll have them out of here faster than you can cap your lens.”

Fletcher said, “I assure you, sir, Miss Tyler and—”

“Like I said,” Hobbs said, “I appreciate what you do for us, the intelligence you gather. And I understand we’re allowing lady journalists in these parts now, accredited ones, that’s fine. If your traveling companions don’t happen to have their papers in order, well then, I’m sure you’ll have the good sense to keep that to yourselves. Are we clear?”

Fletcher assured him we were, indeed, clear as a well-polished lens.

“You let my aide know about that typewriter ribbon,” Hobbs said. “And you tell your friends I expect them to do my men justice.”

“Yes, sir,” Fletcher said.

We made sixty-five miles the next day, over a gray world dotted with coalfields and slag heaps that reminded Fletcher of Wales. We camped south of Brussels, and made another twenty-five miles on the eighth before again running out of gas. The wait lasted only a day, though. By the tenth of September we were at Fort Eben-Emael, near the border with the Netherlands, hearing rumors of a frantic and confused German retreat, with soldiers as well as Dutch, Belgian, and French Nazi civilians fleeing in trucks and armored vehicles
and even a horse-drawn hearse, and on stolen bicycles and children’s scooters. The roads were reportedly thronged with dazed and disoriented Panzer troops in their black battle suits but without their tanks, with Luftwaffe airmen and Wehrmacht soldiers and even Waffen-SS troops. Trains heading for Germany and barges sailing up the Rhine were crammed to capacity, luggage left behind on station platforms. There were runs on banks all over Holland, and German soldiers were trading weapons for civilian clothes in which to avoid the Allied forces and their own military police.

On the eleventh of September, American patrols crossed the German border near Aachen.

WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 13, 1944

I lose my friends and complexion in my devotion to the rites of flagellating a typewriter—and although the use of everything I send is madly satisfactory in the end, I’ve had time to be depressed to unproductivity, near suicide, or a change of career . . . I want more than anything, to be able to follow this war to the finish over here.

                    
—Vogue photojournalist Lee Miller, in a December 1944 letter

B
y the thirteenth of September, when we moved with Old Hickory over a bridge thrown up across the Maas River to the rolling hills of Holland, I’d come to recognize the hope in Liv’s eyes every time the country was mentioned; she was convinced Holland was where her brother’s mission had taken him. As we drove into Holland, the Fourth Division east of Saint-Vith in the Ardennes drove right through the Siegfried Line—the three-mile-deep band of concrete pillboxes, troop shelters, command posts, and pyramidal concrete “dragon’s
teeth” antitank projections that stretched along the border of Germany and through Holland and Switzerland. They found machine gun emplacements with cement walls a meter thick and roofs three or four times that, all empty. Old Hickory, though, encountered resistance through the fields of wheat and sugar beets we slogged across, and into Eijsden and Gronsveld and the suburbs of Maastricht. Panzer shells disabled three Sherman tanks in our platoon, and those still firing were immobilized, again out of gas. Somehow, the German officers had taken the terrified, fleeing German soldiers and lined them back up.

“The Germans are defending themselves again,” Liv said.

I didn’t correct her. I didn’t say that if they’d meant to defend themselves, they’d have fought in eastern France. We weren’t twenty miles from the German border. What the Germans were defending now were their wives and mothers and children.

I said, “Why are you so sure he’s here, Liv?”

Liv said, “Hobbs is giving Fletcher a courier to run our work back to the nearest press camp. Do you have your piece ready?”

“Your brother,” I said.

She began pulling condom-wrapped film canisters from her bag for the courier. “His last letter, the postscript about the doll. It was a baby doll, a cloth one that I never played with. He said he used the missing shoe as a fishing bobber. I suppose it must have been made of wood. I suppose he was trying to tell me he was going to Holland in a way that would get past the censors and wouldn’t mean anything to anyone else.”

L
iv was dealing cards early that evening when Hobbs’s aide came for Fletcher, saying there was someone the major gen
eral wanted him to meet, and a task he had for him if he was willing. Liv and I slipped with them back to the abandoned farmhouse to find Hobbs in intense conversation with two members of the Dutch underground, big men in underfed bodies from a small town on the Geul River a few miles away. No one gave names—it was safer that way—but I silently filled the void with nicknames: Stewart for the one who was as tall and stoop-shouldered as the movie star Jimmy Stewart, and Bird for his companion with the fluttering hands.

I took notes while Liv photographed their pale, gaunt faces straight on in the dim light of the farmhouse. Fletcher listened but spent no film.

The two resistance fighters conversed in Dutch, their language sharper-edged than the French we’d become used to, more Germanic—as was their appearance. Stewart then addressed Hobbs in English, leaving me wondering where he had learned it, and how Hobbs knew he could trust these two, or if he did.

The town of Valkenburg was nearly empty of Dutch citizens, Stewart said. When the artillery fighting in the woods began and the first bridges were blown, most of the townspeople had moved to safety in caves outside the town. Only a handful of German soldiers watched over the last bridge not yet blown.

I knew I ought to be paying closer attention to the talk of the city and the bridge, the German soldiers, but my attention was fixed on the townspeople living in caves. The caves I’d seen back home, just over the Kentucky border, were as dark as the inside of a cow.

Hobbs nodded at Fletcher and at Captain Sixberry, with whom we’d shared a bit of jenever, a Dutch liquor something like gin, the night before. The three of them stepped aside to confer for a moment.

I asked the Dutchmen if they would tell us about the caves.

Stewart said, “These caves, they are from the marlstone, the castle stone. Many miles of these caves, yes?”

“But the people,” I said. “They live underground?”

Back home, miners wore helmets with carbide lamps on them, helmets that offered little protection when a mine collapsed.

Stewart looked to the remaining men as if trying to understand what to make of me.

“I’m Jane Tyler,” I said. “I write for a newspaper in the United States. And this is Olivia Harper. She’s a photojournalist.” Talking over Bird when the man interrupted.

“Not the names,” Stewart insisted. “We want not the names.”

Bird took my measure, and Stewart watched him, and when Bird nodded almost imperceptibly, Stewart returned his attention to me and spoke slowly, intent on my understanding what he said.

“If you are from Valkenburg, then you live in these caves for days, yes?” he said. “Since the shooting is first, and then the freedom. The freedom, it is no good if you are shot dead.”

“No. No, of course not,” I agreed.

He told us whole families lived hidden in an extensive network of underground caves. When the Germans insisted the mine’s owner take them through it, the owner led them into an unstable section and poked his walking stick at the ceiling so that part of it came down and the Germans turned back.

“If you are American
pilot
,” Stewart said, using his hand and his voice to suggest an airplane crashing, “then you are in these caves for months,
misschien
.”

“A crashed American plane?” Liv said, focusing intently on Stewart. She extracted the photograph of her brother from her pocket and showed it to them. “It’s my brother,” she said.

Bird frowned at her and muttered something to Stewart, the words in his low voice disconcertingly Germanic.

“Geoffrey James,” Liv said. “You could find out if he’s hiding in the caves?”

“
Not
the names,” Stewart said. “
Begrijp je mij?
The names, they make more danger.”

“
Vertel haar over de Joodse mensen
,” Bird said to Stewart—sharp, guttural sounds that suggested Stewart took direction from Bird. “
Vertel haar dat de Joodse mensen hier al jaren hebben ondergedoken.
”

“You are Jew?” Stewart asked Liv.

She shook her head, and he turned to me.

“No,” I said, a fear creeping in:
Holy Mary
,
Mother of God
.

“If you are Jew,” Stewart said, “you hide in these caves for long time, yes? More than four years.”

“Will you take us to the caves?” I said. “Tonight. After it’s dark. I would write about the people living there.”

“You will write the story?” Stewart asked.

He looked to Bird, who nodded slightly just as Fletcher and Hobbs and Captain Sixberry rejoined us, Fletcher asking Stewart where he’d learned to speak English with a note of suspicion in his voice. Bird spoke to Stewart before Stewart could answer. Bird had understood Fletcher’s question but didn’t want us to know it, or didn’t want Stewart to answer, or both.

Hobbs arranged with Stewart and Bird for an American patrol to move into the city early the next morning using the password “Steeplechase” to connect with the Dutch resistance. Steeplechase, as if this were some course to be run by beautiful horses, where one had only to sit in the saddle and hang on.

Liv started to insist on being included, but Fletcher shot her a warning glance. He meant to take us along somehow, and he didn’t want to give Hobbs an opportunity to forbid it.

WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 13, 1944

In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.

                    
—Prime Minister Winston Churchill

A
s a child, I loathed the dark, and I’ve grown no fonder of it since the war began,” Fletcher said as Liv and I gathered our gear later that night, to be ready when Stewart and Bird returned to take us to the caves. I’d always liked the dark: its protective cloak, its heightened sense of sound and smell, touch and taste. Summer nights with my bare arms humid-damp against the seat of the Chrysler.

Liv said, “You ought to have stayed back in Paris, Fletcher, in your warm bed.”

“With Hemingway,” I said.

“There will be a real war to photograph come sunrise,” Fletcher said, “and there will be no light by which to take photographs in these caves.”

Liv slung the Leica strap over her head, then put on her helmet.

“Anything the two of you get will be censored,” Fletcher insisted. “Forever caught up in Washington red tape. We’ll be beyond the front, in German-controlled territory.”

I tightened my chin strap and the lace of my left boot. Maybe Fletcher was right. Maybe nothing we did tonight would make it into print. But what if these people didn’t survive?

“I’m a photojournalist,” Liv said. “This is my job and I’m damned well going to do it. You don’t have to come, Fletcher. I’m not asking either of you to come.”

“Going to the caves tonight was
my
idea,” I said. It was the kind of story that could make a difference, the kind of vivid story that would lodge in people’s imaginations.

But of course Liv was thinking of her brother.

“I don’t even need the kind of light you two do to work,” I said.

“You stay behind if you want, Fletcher,” Liv said. “Jane and I are fine.”

Fletcher muttered an obscenity and went to fetch his gear, to my relief. Everything felt safer with Fletcher. And when Stewart and Bird returned—searching us for weapons before leading us off—Fletcher waded along with us through the fields outside Valkenburg.

Stewart led and Bird followed as we made our way by the light of a hazy moon in a starless sky to a hillside entrance hidden in the brush, like the machine gun emplacements of the Siegfried Line. Within a minute, the world around us was pitch-black and I was creeping uneasily behind Liv, groping for the sides of the cave. They were gritty cold, but anchoring, and slightly less frightening than the smell
of the damp stone and the taste of underground air and the quiet crunch of steps that might be ours alone, or might not.

“Did I tell you how much I loathe the dark?” Fletcher whispered behind me.

I wondered again how Hobbs knew he could trust these two Dutchmen, or if he did. I wondered why Stewart hadn’t answered Fletcher’s question about where he had learned English. I wondered what Stewart’s and Bird’s real names were. I wondered if they were even Dutch.

Stewart lit a dull flashlight, and I was just able to distinguish the outline of Liv a few steps ahead of me, and then the shadow of Stewart. A faint circle of light bobbed on the path ahead of him as we made our way forward and down—for thirty minutes or perhaps more.

A wail sounded in the distance—high-pitched and animalistic. Liv stopped and I did, too, leaving Fletcher bumping into me, his front warm on my back for that short moment, a strand of my hair catching in the stubble of his chin.

I reached for the cold, gritty cave wall. It was utterly dark, even Stewart’s dull flashlight extinguished.

Human. The wail was human, I thought as it sounded again. Someone being tortured. But I wasn’t sure.

Fletcher’s hand touched my shoulder gently, and he stepped in front of me, and in front of Liv.

“It is fine,” Stewart said, clicking his flashlight back on. He offered no explanation for the cry, nor did he sound surprised or troubled by it.

After another minute or two, the Dutchman stopped and said a few words, not in English, and a voice—male, elderly, suspicious—answered, more guttural foreign words that tingled at the back of my neck.

A workman’s boots were caught in the dull circle cast by Stewart’s flashlight.

A few more words were exchanged, and the elderly voice called back to someone behind him, the hard foreign words more brutal in the louder tone.

I inhaled the stink of human sweat over the damp-stone smell and a fainter, more unpleasant smell, too. Urine. Excrement.

A moment later footsteps sounded, coming from deeper inside the cave.

A bright light flashed onto Fletcher, who instinctively raised one hand to shield himself, reaching back with his other hand to protect Liv and me.

The click of a gun being readied to fire.

“
Nee!
” two voices said at once, Stewart ahead of us and Bird behind.

Several less frantic Dutch words followed as Fletcher lowered his arm, still shielding Liv behind him, all of us blinking into the sudden brightness. A stooped old man lowered a pistol, the cave passageway now lit by a bright beam of flashlight trained directly at us, casting frightening shadows back across the old man.

“
Hij moet de vrouwen zien,
” Stewart said to Fletcher. “He must see the others.”

Fletcher stepped aside slowly, and the light beam fell on Liv. She raised her hands slightly: empty. The light moved on to me.

Again, a few words in Dutch, Stewart’s stooped shoulders relaxing as he gave a curt explanation to the old man. I made some sense of a few words I could pick out: “
fotograaf
” and “
camera
” and “
journalist.
” He did not use our names.

The old man tucked his pistol into the waistband of his trousers and turned and began down the passageway, the
single beam of his brighter flashlight lighting sharply cut stone walls—a mine rather than a natural cave, or a cave that had been mined. After a moment, we came to a narrow passageway marked with a black arrow and black letters painted on the stone:
verblyf voor 53 personen
.

“There are fifty-three people living here?” I whispered.

“In this . . . in Dutch, one says ‘
grot
,’ yes?” Stewart answered. “This room, and others.”

“Fifty-three in this cavern and others?” I said, trying to imagine fifty-three people living underground together, even in separate caverns.

“In some larger
grot
, two hundred, yes? In some smaller, ten.”

In another moment, the old man’s flashlight splashed out over a stone chamber. A group of women sitting together blinked into the light, moving their arms protectively over children sleeping stretched out on blankets on the ground beside them. Everywhere, people slept, and those who didn’t were impossibly silent. Fifty-three in one cavern.

The old man called out a few quiet words.

A hushed murmur of relief exhaled from those who were awake, a sound that echoed off the stone. Several of the children stirred.

The single beam of light splashed over an entrance to another cavern across the way. The entrance—marked in the same black writing,
verblyf voor 8 personen
,
with the same black arrow
—
was framed with wood beams, and there were posts supporting the ceiling in both this first room and the far one. I followed Liv’s gaze to a mother with a child, hardly more than a baby, in front of the sign. A faint light seemed to linger behind them even after the old man’s flashlight fell back onto the stone at our feet.

The child might be half German, but the war had come suddenly to this part of the Netherlands, in early 1940 before anyone could even believe what Hitler was doing; there were young men here who had come of age under almost five years of German occupation, who never had a chance to join an army. Stewart himself. Stewart couldn’t be much more than twenty. The mother might be Jewish, too. She might have been living in this cave with her husband for the entire war.

“This is where the people, they wait,” Stewart said to us. “The soldiers, they use the dynamite. It is to fire
de huizen en de stad
—Valkenburg, yes?—but what do these Germans care? They leave Valkenburg and nothing left, yes?”

I wondered if he’d learned English from the American pilot hiding here.

“We have the ration cards, yes?
Gestolen
. Not for us, but we take. Now we can get no more the ration cards. Now the children, they eat first.”

Fletcher, his eyes fixed on the dark shadow of the mother and child, felt in his fatigue pockets for something, but left his hands there.

It was surprisingly temperate in the cavern, warmer than the chill passageways, the body heat of the cave’s inhabitants warming the air. The warmth accentuated the stench of human life lived without access to fresh air or sewage drains.

Another wail filled the air—this time distinctly a woman’s voice, long and high. It came from beyond one of the other entrances, from another chamber. Everyone turned toward the noise, but no one looked startled or even troubled.

Several of the children again stirred, but none woke.

Stewart said something to a stout woman sitting with several others just inside the cave, and she answered with a pleasant smile and a few words.

“
Zij is voor het eerst moeder, yes?
” Stewart said. “She have no baby, but this one, he will be born tonight. Tomorrow,
misschien
.”

“Someone is giving birth here?” Liv asked.

Stewart’s grin revealed bucked front teeth. He looked so kind, suddenly. “The babies, what do they know?” he said. “It is the time to be born even if it is the war.”

Liv, camera in hand now, scanned the room. “May I take photographs?”

“This is why we come,” Stewart answered. “One man, he dies here already. Not dies from the war but dies only from the being old. It is no place to die, yes? In this cave with only the fear.”

I said, “Perhaps we could . . . The mother? If we wouldn’t be too intrusive?”

“The photograph of the child is being born,” Stewart said, “it will make the difference for the Americans?” He nodded, and he spoke a few words to the old man, who uttered a single syllable and disappeared in the direction of the entrance to the eight-person cavern, the light bobbing along beside him. A moment later, he reappeared, signaling with a wave of his free hand to follow him.

A short passageway led to another cavern, this one marked in the same black arrow and writing,
verblyf voor 5 personen
,
and dimly lit by a single candle. A woman lay stretched out on a thick layer of blankets on the ground, panting, her knees up and her legs open. Fletcher averted his gaze, and I knew he was thinking of Elizabeth Houck-Smythe then, and his brother’s baby.

Two older women tended the birthing mother, one running a damp cloth over her forehead, the other at her feet. A fourth woman—a woman almost as pregnant as the one giving
birth—busied herself with something off to the side. She was fair and blond and big-boned. She might have passed for the sister I never had.

The birthing woman wailed, a raw sound.

Liv stood staring, wide-eyed, her camera limp at her side, a single graceful hand touching her own stomach as if trying to absorb some of that pain herself.

“The photograph, it is permitted,” Stewart said. “She say is fine.”

“Okay, then, on three,” Fletcher said to Liv, raising his camera, not looking through his lens but only pointing his flash unit in the right direction.

The pale skin of Liv’s neck flexed and her delicate fingers moved to her chest, her camera untouched.

“Liv?” Fletcher said.

She looked to him, and he nodded at her camera and indicated his.

“If we coordinate the flashes,” he said, “there might be light enough.”

Liv looked down at her Speed Graphic. “Yes,” she said. “Yes, of course.”

“On three,” Fletcher said. “One. Two. Three.”

The light fell back again into the glow of the single candle and the flashlight, barely making a dent in the darkness.

Liv looked at her flash as if it might somehow be coaxed to do more. Even with the larger-format film of the Speed Graphic, the light wasn’t enough.

She opened her musette bag, extracted something, and set it on the floor, not too close to anyone—the ground flare she’d traded a whole box of French cigarettes for earlier that evening, after the Dutchmen had left and before they’d returned for us. The transport truck driver she’d made the exchange
with said she could just have it, but she didn’t like to take it from him without giving him something in return.

“It was what Margaret Bourke-White used to light the Otis Steel Mill; it’s how she made her career,” Liv said. “Hers was magnesium. Bright white. I have no idea what this is.”

She flipped the dark slide over and pulled, flipped, and reinserted the film holder to ready the second shot.

I offered to light the flare, so she could focus on the photographs, and I extracted from my slacks’ pocket the Zippo lighter Fletcher had given us at the inn in Rambouillet.

Stewart explained to the women about the flare so they wouldn’t be startled, his Dutch words sounding rounder now, less threatening.

When the next contraction started, I flicked the lighter and set it to the fuse.

In the longer, brighter light of the flare: the woman’s contorted face, the mucous red of the blood, the twist of hair at the crown of the head that surged just the slightest as she groaned. Liv took shot after shot—images I couldn’t imagine ever being in print anywhere, but maybe I could couch the moment in words that would go down well enough with breakfast even if a photo might not.

Fletcher patted his shirt pocket for cigarettes, then shoved his hand into the pocket of his fatigues where he kept his last chocolate bar. He’d lost his nerve. He turned to the other woman, the pregnant one, and met her brown-eyed gaze, and he pulled the chocolate bar from his pocket and offered it to her.

Liv, watching the exchange through her lens, became so still that she seemed to be her own tripod.