The leather, as I put my face to the camera’s viewing tunnel, smelled of the Stahlmans’ library back home: the leather chairs I was not to sit in and the leather-bound books Mama quietly slipped out for me to read, books I took up into the magnolia tree where no one would notice me, or into the garden shed where Old Cooper allowed me to read on rainy days.
Through Liv’s camera lens, Marie appeared upside down—her baggy-stockinged legs feet upward.
“Her editors at Ladies’ Home Journal would be appalled!” I said, realizing how silly I, too, must have looked upside down in my helmet and bedroll, underneath my cot.
Liv put her own face to the camera and moved right up to Marie’s baggy-stockinged knees, saying, “‘If your photographs aren’t good enough, you’re not close enough!’” and even Marie giggled.
I suppose I started liking Liv in that moment, with that first glimpse of her humor. Her humor and her mercy, letting Marie and me both off the hook for our cowardice, letting Marie’s charge of indecency stand against her without a word.
“So where, exactly, am I?” Liv asked.
Outside, the rain had let up, the drip on the tent giving way to the chirp of magpies and the rolling whistle of wrens, the peewit of lapwings drawn to the marshes here, even in war.
“You’re a few miles outside of Saint-Lô, the summer home of the German Eighty-fourth Corps,” I said. “Captain Harper, welcome to France.”
Liv went alone to the CO’s office that morning and waited while he signed papers. She listened mutely when he began to speak, his voice full of the life-is-to-be-endured gruffness of small-town Vermont. She didn’t care, really, that there would be no chitchat, that he didn’t give a blink where she was from or why she was here; he just wanted to make sure she was well acquainted with the rules and wouldn’t get in the way of his doctors. She nodded politely, waiting until he had clearly spoken his piece before she said, “If it’s convenient, sir, I’d like permission to go to the front.”
The CO sat back and crossed his arms, his shirt barely creasing as he stared over his reading glasses. “What’s your assignment, Mrs. Harper?”
“I’m assigned to this field hospital, sir, but—”
“And you’ve been here how long? Two hours?”
The day’s first ambulances were arriving outside, the hurried sputter of engines announcing the day’s first wounded.
“In two hours, Mrs. Harper, you’ve covered everything at this field hospital? My doctors? My nurses? The boys who’ve had their legs sawed off or their eyes taken out, who are lucky enough to be on their way home to wives and mothers and kids who are going to back away from them like they’re god-awful freaks?”
“Well, sir—”
“Can you get them all in the time you’ve got here? Twenty-one days and you go back to London. Your accreditation papers are very clear on that, Mrs. Harper, no matter who your husband is.”
“I understand that, sir,” Liv said, the creep of fear returning: that she would be left forever approaching this war, that it would end and she would never have gotten to photograph it, much less gotten to Paris. So many months spent arguing with the War Department, the Passport Office, her own husband, for goodness’ sake. Margaret Bourke-White had already flown over Tunis in a lead bomber to photograph exploding landing strips while Liv couldn’t even get a passport. She imagined Bourke-White already in Paris, flown there on a military plane with the six hundred pounds of luggage and three thousand peanut flashbulbs she’d taken to the bombing of Moscow, men in uniform holding her lenses while military officers worked her extra cameras to get every angle of a shot. Although that wasn’t true, and Liv knew it. Bourke-White had been denied even the three weeks in Normandy Liv was given (“too temperamental”), and no one was in Paris; the troops were not much beyond Charlie, Dog, Easy, and Fox—the code names of sections of the invasion beaches that stretched alphabetically across the French coastline, some sections further divided by color designation: Dog Green, Dog White, Dog Red. Everywhere the word “stalemate” was spoken in hushed tones as Allied troops advanced only a hundred yards a day—progress the medics measured in morphine units dispensed, thirty-two grains per hedgerow.
The CO said, “And you want me to free up a jeep and driver, Mrs. Harper, to take you to a front already so covered up with the press that soldiers are tripping over them?”
“Sir,” she said, thinking, One jeep. She didn’t need a driver. She could drive herself perfectly well. Thinking the troops would never make Paris in three weeks. Thinking there were doctors and nurses and wounded enough to photograph at home.
“Sir,” she repeated, “even General Eisenhower says public opinion wins wars.”
“Is that why you’re here, Mrs. Harper? To persuade the ladies back home to spend a little less time rolling their hair and a little more rolling bandages?” He reached for a document and began flipping pages. “Well, I’m sorry to disappoint you, Mrs. Harper, and I’m certainly sorry to disappoint General Eisenhower, but I can’t spare a jeep today.”
Outside, the ambulances—jeeps fitted with steel frames to carry two stretchers—were stacked three abreast and ten deep. Medics unbuckled the litters and gently unloaded them before the ambulances left again, to return an hour later with more mud on their wheels and more boys with gut or chest wounds, or without legs. Only the worst of the wounded were brought to the field hospitals, boys who might not survive the longer ride to an evacuation hospital farther back from the front, or even the wait for a full ambulance load.
That’s where I found Liv later that morning, standing in front of her Speed Graphic mounted on her tripod, with what looked to be a telegram in her hand. She wasn’t reading it, though. She was looking resolutely at the boys soaking their bandages on litters in the open field as exhausted nurses checked their tags for how much morphine they’d received at the front and gave them sulfa, plasma, antitetanus shots, and sympathetic if hurried smiles.
“Any luck with the CO?” I said, wanting to ask about the telegram—which Liv folded and tucked into her pocket—but not wanting to pry. “I did warn you he’s an old goat, didn’t I?”
She loaded a cut-film holder—two shots—and focused on a wounded German. His knobby wrists extended beyond his outgrown uniform, and he was so rotten with the mud and sweat of having been too long at war that the nurse attending him held her breath.
“They treat Germans here, even before our boys?” Liv asked.
I took out a ration package of Lucky Strikes (“Lucky Strike Means Fine Tobacco”) and offered her one, which she declined. “If they’re closer to dying,” I said.
She removed her dark slide and took the shot—the terrified boy watching the nurse prepare the morphine needle.
“He thinks it’s poison, Liv,” I explained. “Imagine if you were in a German camp.”
Liv and I were working together that night in the “operating room”—a relatively well-lit if not much more sterile area set off by mosquito netting at one end of the surgical tent—when I registered the distant sound of the night’s first shells.
One of the nurses I’d come to know, Annette Roberts from Asbury Park, New Jersey, said softly to a boy whose vein she was testing for an IV, “They’re ours, Joey. Those shells are headed for the Germans. Now I need you to make a fist.”
Her white surgical gown was ridiculous against her muddy boots, as was that of a surgeon who gazed at the tent top and said in a Dracula imitation oddly tinged with a Southern accent, “‘Listen to them. The children of the night. What music they make.’” The Count, I nicknamed him, although Mr. Lugosi was tempting, too.
“M3s,” a boy on another stretcher said. One of the ways soldiers passed time in the foxholes was by identifying the shells by sound.
The Count said, “Y’all can swap out this soldier.”
He smiled at Liv and me then, his eyes between his surgical mask and his helmet suggesting he didn’t mind Liv’s flash or my questions. Some of the surgeons did mind, of c
ourse. Some glared at us as if we ought to start administering morphine or step out of the damned way.
As the shelling continued, boys in various beds called out identifiers for each whoosh. A stretcher crew moved the Count’s patient away, leaving the two sawhorses that formed his operating table to be filled by another wounded soldier’s stretcher. And the rhythm of the room continued against the background percussion of the shells: the doctors asking for scalpels and suction, teams moving the wounded, nurses soothing the waiting.
It seemed the shelling was letting up when one of the boys cried out “A Great Gustaf!” his words barely out before a metallic shriek filled the tent.
The hospital staff hit the ground, Liv and me with them, and Annette, too, Annette holding the IV needle up so it didn’t touch the ground.
A boom sounded and the ground trembled.
Almost before the sound dissipated, Annette was back on her feet, saying, “Don’t worry, Joey. Our tent is marked with a red cross.”
Liv and I stood, too, Liv pulling a fresh flashbulb from her pocket—broken.
“Do you learn all the boys’ names?” she asked Annette as she repositioned her camera to photograph the doctors removing their surgical gloves and putting on clean ones, the staff collecting instruments to be resterilized.
“The ones from home, at least,” Annette said. “Joey here is from Toms River, aren’t you, Joey?” She warned the boy that he would feel a stick, as if the IV needle could possibly cause him more pain than his leg, which no longer had a knee or calf or foot. “I think it makes them feel a little better to be taken care of by a girl from home,” she said to Liv.
Another shell screamed overhead, and we again hit the ground, Annette saying, “Hold your arm still where the needle is, Joey. Hold still and you’ll be fine.”
The roar. The explosion. The lights flickering and then failing while earth pelted the tent walls as if the world outside had shattered. I was still on the ground when Annette’s voice came from above me, calling into the darkness for someone to see about the electrical circuit.
“Good job, Joey,” she said. “Now don’t mind the dark. I’m right here.”
A flashlight shone, and another, lighting the surgeons’ hands as the surgical gloves and instruments were again changed for sterile ones. Liv was left without enough light by which to photograph well. We had that excuse to quit, and we did want to quit; we wanted to run for the relative safety of the slit trenches. But even as artillery fire flared in spots of light through the tent canvas and shrapnel from the antiaircraft guns rained down, the hospital staff continued working by flashlight, pausing only to tighten the straps of their combat helmets or to curse the German planes. And so we, too, carried on. Liv removed her flash attachment so as not to startle anyone in the darkness, and adjusted her shutter speed and aperture. I borrowed a flashlight to hold between my chin and neck while I jotted down notes.
I was watching the Count finger a patient’s intestines for bullet holes and shell fragments in the beam of a flashlight when Liv whispered something about her father.
“Work like this might have saved him,” she said with a longing in her voice that made me think of the telegram, perhaps news of her father. Was her father in this war?
“Might have saved him from what?” I asked, thinking she might want to talk about it now. War does that. The sense of your own mortality can make you want to be known by someone, just in case.
Liv turned her camera on its tripod to face the Count, flipped the dark slide over, reinserted the film holder, and adjusted the lens. She’d heard me, but didn’t want to allow that she had.
The Count, with a nod at the intestines in his hand, said, “Like a moth through a mitten, this one,” and Liv released the shutter, capturing the doctor’s easy manner despite the wounded and the mud, the German fire, the late hour and the limited light. This was why she’d brought the Speed Graphic: its bellows structure made it bulkier and more cumbersome than the Leica and you had to change the cut-film holder for each shot, but the larger-format film captured more detail, especially in low light.
From behind us, Joey asked for ice cream.
“You hang on, Joey!” Annette answered. Then, “I need a doc here! I need a doc!” with an alarm in her voice that hadn’t surfaced even in the worst of the shelling. “You hang on, Joey,” she said more calmly. “We’ll see about some ice cream after the doctor here fixes you up. What flavor do you want? You tell me. Strawberry? Chocolate? We have anything you want, Joey, you just tell me and I’ll get it for you right now.”
“Peach,” the boy said weakly.
“In a cup or a cone, Joey?” Annette said, and it seemed for a moment that she really might get this boy his peach ice cream.
The boy said, “God, I’m so cold.”
Annette started cooing in a frantic way then, saying, “Keep looking at me, Joey, keep looking at me, I’m going to get you peach ice cream and I’m going to get you back to Toms River.” Someone shone a flashlight on them so Joey could see Annette’s face, as close to him as a lover’s. “You’re going to have such a good life back in Toms River with your girl, Joey. You’re going to have five kids and you’re going to eat whole gallons of peach ice cream together every Saturday night if you just keep looking at me. Joey, keep looking at me. Keep looking at me.”
Liv turned her tripod and took the shot, Annette’s face and the boy’s together in the single beam of the flashlight.
A doctor appeared at Joey’s stretcher, barking orders: he was not going to lose this boy who was some poor mother’s son. Liv shot photographs and I took notes as the team worked and worked.
Then they didn’t. They stopped working, and a silence settled over Joey.
The team dispersed, leaving Annette to cover his face. She blinked moist eyes as she whispered, “You have all the ice cream you want now, Joey. You have a cone for me. I’ll have peach, too.”
With my right hand, my pen between my fingers, I made a small sign of the cross over my heart. I couldn’t cry, I reminded myself. I was a war correspondent, a professional. I was to remain stoic lest any emotion I showed add pain to those whose lives I’d been sent to write about. If I couldn’t take it, I was to let my editor know and he’d send someone to replace me.
As a stretcher crew came to move the dead boy out, Liv photographed the end of his stretcher: the single, lonely combat boot.
Back in our tent, Marie was rolled up in her bedroll under her cot but still awake, just returned from the muddy trench behind the tent. Liv and I climbed under our cots, too, as if that would provide any protection at all. I buried my notes from the operating room underneath me lest they be destroyed, and suggested Liv do the same with her film. We both tucked our clothes into our bedrolls, to keep them dry. And while in the distance German bombers droned and American ack-ack answered, Liv said, “I don’t know anything about scalpels or morphine. All I know is shutter speeds, f-stops, angles of light.”
I said, “Most of the soldiers who make it here from the front, they survive, Liv.” But I, too, was having trouble shaking off the sound of the boy asking for peach ice cream, the inadequacy of what I could do even when I did my best. And the best of my words were no more likely to be published than were the best of Liv’s photos. The filthy, stricken, raw, bloodred wounded were too stark a contrast to the fresh-faced American heroes the public imagined. They would never get past the censors, much less newspaper editors focused on sales.
“Charles feels it’s the right thing to do, to stick with photos and stories that will go down well enough with the morning coffee,” Liv said. Her husband was the editor in chief of the New York Daily Press; Liv, who’d gone to work for him after we joined the war, moved to the Associated Press after she became Mrs. Charles Harper. Charles’s paper was in the AP consortium so he could still use her photos, and Liv would never have been accredited as a war photographer if she hadn’t moved to AP.
Marie wondered aloud what her fiancé was doing—a
boy to whom she’d gotten engaged just after Pearl Harbor. He’d gone off to enlist, and she’d been heartbroken, and he’d returned without a uniform and she could neither go through with the wedding nor call it off, and she’d fled; she supposed that’s how she’d gotten to France. 4F. It meant only that her fiancé was disqualified from military service for medical reasons, but medical excuses were drummed up easily enough that 4F carried the stink of cowardice as surely as did Liv’s husband remaining in New York.
“Charles was in Warsaw when the Germans invaded,” Liv said. “He and his photographer stayed even after the lines were cut and they couldn’t get stories or photos out.” She pulled her bedroll more tightly to her throat and shifted her head, awkward in her new steel helmet. “Even when the Polish government fled to Natȩczów, Charles stayed to cover the invasion.”
A clock tower in the next town marked three a.m., an echoing bong, bong, bong followed by silence, the absence of drone and ack-ack, which might last or might not.
“I brought a ball gown,” Liv whispered into the blackness, that late hour when it’s always easier to share the things we hold close.
“A gown?” Marie said just as I said, “Here? To France?”—our voices as soft as Liv’s: a secret revealed, a secret received.
Liv had stuffed the silk sheath in with her gear at the last moment, and evening gloves, too—gloves of soft kid leather that went up over her elbows, dyed the red of the dress.
“The gown folds up to be just a tiny little thing,” she said, and I imagined her gloved right hand in her editor in chief husband’s left, the two of them twirling around a ballroom, drinking champagne and laughing as nobody had laughed since the war began while, just blocks away, a child slept in a crib in the room next to theirs.
I said, “Three children, two sons and a daughter—that’s what I want someday.”
“I want five,” Marie said.
“A Renny and a Charles Jr.,” Liv said, “after the war.”
Liv said, “‘If your photographs aren’t good enough, you’re not close enough’—that’s what Robert Capa says.” Her voice wistful, lacking the force she’d been full of when she’d arrived that morning. “But I’ve been an ocean away. I’m still miles away from the front while Capa and Frank Scherschel and Ralph Morse are already on their way to Paris, making their way with the troops toward the city, to the Eiffel Tower and the Champs-Élysées and liberation, Allied troops marching in to throngs of crowds filling the streets, celebrating what will be the moment of the century. A moment that will make a photojournalist’s career.”