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

“regrets” by the CO later—with just a few days left in Marie’s and my three-week accreditations and not much more than a week in Liv’s—a jeep became available to take us to a nearby landing strip: planes taxiing to a stop, loading litters of wounded boys through their wide double doors, and taking off again for England. Twelve minutes, that was how long it took each plane, not much longer than it took the pilot to smoke a cigarette and all the notice we’d been given about the jeep. When we returned to the field hospital—mercifully the same evening—we resolved to keep our rucksacks always at the ready: a change of fatigues and socks and underthings; a canteen, a mess kit, and a few K ration breakfast boxes; a tin tubeof cold cream, a towel and soap, lipstick and powder; poncho; folding spade and gas mask; notepads and pens. Liv forsook her spade in favor of film and flashbulbs, and her gown and gloves. And as we organized ourselves, Liv began talking about Helen Kirkpatrick’s Herald Tribune piece that had first exposed the German rearmament of the Rhineland.
    “In March of ’36,” she said, her awe communicating an ambition even she wouldn’t voice, that she longed to break a major story like that. Kirkpatrick had left Switzerland for Freiburg, Germany, on rumors of activity along the riverfront, and found German soldiers in the streets and Nazi flags flying everywhere in open violation of the Treaty of Versailles.
    Marie said, “Can you imagine that woman leaving a perfectly good marriage by cabling her husband from Europe simply ‘NOT RETURNING’?” She giggled the way she did, at that rumor which was the truth of how Helen Kirkpatrick had ended her marriage.
    Liv said, “Helen was the sole newspaper representative coordinating the invasion press coverage, and still they won’t let us beyond the hospital camps.”
    Marie said, “For pity’s sake, Liv, you can’t mean to go on and on again about getting to the front.”
    B y the time the CO found us a third jeep, Liv was scheduled to return to London in three days. Marie and I each had been granted three more weeks at the field hospital, but her request for more time in France had been denied. “It wasn’t my call, Mrs. Harper. You’ll have to take it up with your Public Relations Division friends,” the CO had insisted, “or perhaps with the First Lady.” Liv, too, had received a note from Mrs. Roosevelt by then, one dated after mine, which referenced Joey’sdeath—a fact that Mrs. Roosevelt must have come to understand somehow in the days between the two notes. And still I didn’t share my note. It was hard to explain why I’d kept it secret, and I wasn’t sure how Liv would feel to know of the misimpression her photographs had left.
    As we stood with our readied rucksacks, waiting for our jeep—this one to take us to a recently liberated village to meet with a woman sharpshooter who’d trained the French resistance in weaponry—Liv suggested that if we could get our driver out even briefly, we could hijack the jeep to the front.
    I pulled out a notepad and pen and pretended to begin writing a letter. “Dear Mama,” I said, “I know you’ll think I don’t have the sense God gave a goose, but I went AWOL to cover the fighting rather than to run away from it, and now I’m locked up in England, waiting to be put on the next ship home.”
    “We wouldn’t come back, not before Paris,” Liv said. “I could say I think one of the tires is flat, and one of you can agree.”
    Marie said, “You’re such a card, Liv.”
    I laughed uneasily, imagining my mother kneeling at mass the way I’d knelt during the mess tent mass that morning, and knowing her prayers would be for me.
    The sharpshooter—Jeanne Bohec—told us of gunfire at dawn and urgently coding telegrams to London and carrying messages by bicycle, letters that weren’t letters at all. When Germans stopped her, she told them that she was going to visit her