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

grandmother, that she carried a map because she didn’t know the area well. She told us, too, of a last-minute sermon held under a parachute, the look of her camp as it was destroyed by the Germans, the frustration of being able to do nothing to fight back, having been refused a weapon because of her gender even though she’d taught the boys to shoot.
    As we headed back to the field hospital that evening, Liv said the little town reminded her of the first photo her mother had ever shown her, a Margaret Bourke-White aerial shot that ran in the debut issue of Life . The town in the photo wasn’t really similar to the French town disappearing in the distance—houses and fences all the same dull brown-gray—but there was the same sameness about it, the same house after house not much different from the next.
    “My mother told me Bourke-White was a chubby girl who dressed abominably,” Liv said. “She was called Peg, and she wore cotton stockings and no makeup, and she once took a snake to school. ‘And she’s divorced’—you could sure hear Mother’s disapproval on that. But still, she was awed by those photographs.” Liv looked to the pockmarked road ahead. “‘Imagine that, Livvie.’ That’s what my mother said to me as she admired that photograph, and she looked right into me the way she did, and I had no idea what I was supposed to imagine.”
    I touched her arm lightly, sure it was the fact of a woman photojournalist that Liv’s mother had meant for her to imagine, wishing that my mother, like Liv’s, could imagine a life for me that was different than her own.
    Liv said, “Photos of the parachute sermon itself, the gunfire, the bicycle ride—those are the photos I ought to be taking. Not photographs of a woman in a safely liberated French town recalling them.”
    In less than seventy-two hours, Liv was to return to London and perhaps even to the United States, where the head of Immigration and Naturalization, a Mrs. Shipley, would likely pull her passport and give her a devil of a time before giving it back. Mrs. Shipley held that women had no business being in war zones. She and the CO, we liked to joke, must be from the same austere Vermont whistle-stop.
    “Doesn’t it feel like one of the tires is going flat?” Liv said loudly enough that no one could fail to hear her even over the rush of wind in the jeep.
    Our driver glanced in the rearview mirror, then reached up and adjusted it. “It’s not the tires, Mrs. Harper, it’s the road,” he said.
    Marie and I said nothing at all.
    T he jeep-ambulances bringing back the wounded the next morning came with rumors that Saint-Lô was finally being taken. Gerhardt’s Twenty-ninth Infantry had made its way through the German line and taken the high ground a half mile from the city. The road was open. We heard the news from an ambulance driver we’d befriended, a conscientious objector from Colorado Springs named Hank Bend who had the round face and round spectacles of a Bill Mauldin cartoon soldier-innocent. “Gerhardt has a division in the field, one here in the hospital, and one in the cemetery already,” he told us. “God help him today.” And when Hank returned later with another ambulance load, he brought more news: Boston Globe and BBC correspondent Iris Carpenter and Liv’s fellow AP correspondent Ruth Cowan were at Saint-Lô.
    “They can’t be!” Liv protested. “They’re assigned to a hospital like we are, the Fifth General outside Carentan.”
    Hank shrugged and said the story he heard was they got tired of the lizards and the mosquitos, tired of yellow dust all over everything they owned, so they caught a ride on an ambulance to the front. “Story I heard,” he said, “is when they were found thumbing a ride back to file their stories and asked what the hell they were doing—they were war correspondents, weren’t they? didn’t they have jeeps?—Miss Cowansaid yes, they were, but they were ‘just women,’ they didn’t