The Race for Paris by Meg Waite Clayton Read Free Book Online

hospital settling into a new field closer to the front. A medic chased two cows through the long grass to uncover trip wires or mines left by the Germans, and gear was strewn everywhere. Not so much as a tent set up in the shade of a moss-covered tree yet, though, and the place stank to high heaven, a dead animal smell.
    “In no time, they’ll have the unit back up again. They just have to clear the area first,” I told Liv.
    Clear the area, as if the nurses were moving rocks and twigs, maybe the occasional rusty plow blade. But the dead animal smell was no run-over ground squirrel. No dead cow like those we heard were everywhere at the front. Liv slid a cut-film holder into her Speed Graphic and focused on a nurse waving over a stretcher crew, then on the crew laying the stretcher in the grass and gently lifting a dead soldier, an involuntary hero who’d made it across the Channel only to end up here with the dice he carried for luck still in his pocket, his Saint Christopher’s medal at his chest. Where his legs ought to have been was a stringy mass of muscle and skin and a sharp shard of thighbone the dirty red-black of dried blood.
    Liv adjusted the bellows but didn’t take the shot.
    “If that boy were my brother,” she said, “I wouldn’t want anyone to photograph him like that. I wouldn’t want anyone to photograph his face.”
    The stretcher crew carried off the dead boy, and the nurse returned to walking the field, looking methodically, mechanically, for the dead. Other nurses and medics dragged a large canvas out over a cleared section of the field, the tent’s red cross in the white circle taking shape, albeit deflated and creased. I left Liv to photograph it while I helped Marie set up our smaller tent, then fetched water for a sponge bath and examined the prior day’s mail: letters from Mama and Tommy, and one with the return address simply “The White House, Washington.” I carefully peeled open that envelope as if it might not really be meant for me, to find a typewritten slip no longer than a bread-and-butter note:
    July 2, 1944
    Dear Miss Tyler,
    Your compassionate portrayal of the nurse helping save the wounded boy in “Operating Room by Flashlight” will surely help convince American women how dearly the auxiliary military services need them. Thank you for writing it.
    Very Sincerely Yours,
    Eleanor Roosevelt
    I tucked the note back into its envelope, wanting someone to assure me it was real and at the same time trying to understand how Mrs. Roosevelt could have been left with the impression that Joey was back home eating peach ice cream. I read Tommy’s letter (a short thing, mostly about how the watermelons at home would be ripe), thinking perhaps the censors had cut the last paragraph of my “Operating Room”piece, or even just the last line. And when Liv and Marie went out to the latrine that night (Marie saying she hated moving forward because the shelling was always worse, but at least we had newly dug latrines), I puzzled over the note one last time before burying it in my rucksack without mentioning it to anyone. I only asked Liv and Marie, as we lay in our cots that night, whether there was ever a scrap of truth left when the censors finished.
    “Never mind that the fellas’ stories are wired off while ours go by carrier pigeons, with the darn birds stopping to party in Brighton and Crawley on the way so our news is old and moldy before anyone reads it,” I said. I felt like a fraud, someone claiming to understand the meaning of this war when all I saw was its wreckage, when even the wreckage I reported was edited into something else. “At least you don’t have a problem, Liv,” I said. “The Signal Corps staff might ruin your film in the darkroom, and the censors might crop a shot or blur a face or censor a photo out of existence, but no one is going to cut pieces out of your shots, paste together what’s left, and put your name to it.”
    Five days and five more