He turned out the flashlight and tucked the letter to Micheleine into his pocket. A letter with no place to send it.
Amiens had been heavily bombed during the winter by the RAF and bore the scars in burned-out buildings, whole sectionsof the city leveled next to others that had survived almost unscathed, in one of those ironies of war.
It was rumored that the prison, held by the Germans, with hundreds of prisoners who belonged to the Resistance, had been the target. Many prisoners had died during the bombings. Many of those who had escaped were rumored to have been recaptured and executed.
The bombing mission months earlier had been considered a success, but it was difficult to understand how successful with so many dead. What was left of the German occupation forces had retreated in the weeks since the Allied landing, while the people of Amiens attempted to reclaim their lives.
Against the leavings of war, women hung out laundry to dry from second story windows. A nun escorted a group of school children past the tumbled ruins of houses. With fuel shortages, horse-drawn carts delivered a load of reclaimed bricks to a hotel that was being rebuilt.
Street after street, block after block, Amiens rose from the ashes. And he took his photographs while Robert Dunnett sat back at the command post that had been set up, typing away on his typewriter, pushing the deadline for the post back to London. In a matter of days, possibly tomorrow, they would be pushing north toward Belgium, joining up with the Americans.
Among the buildings that had escaped relatively unscathed was the thirteenth century Cathedral of Notre Dame. The peaceful silence inside the cathedral was deceptive, the war just outside those massive doors. But here, he could almost believe none of it existed—the bombings, the suffering, the blood, and death.
He took a photo of the transept piled high with sandbags, the center aisle left with chairs for worshippers. At the high altar, the statue of the weeping angel stared down at his camera, the image caught just as the light fell across the angel's face.
Tears. For the suffering, for the dead, for man's inhumanity to man.
He'd attended mass regularly as a child. His mother had insisted on it. But after arriving in London, working long hours, then the war...he didn't remember the last time he attended services.
A sound had him turning around, that reflexive instinct since the landing at Normandy, the way things changed you.
“I did not mean to startle you.” The priest stepped out of the shadows. “We get so few visitors. Those who come, now that they can, come in the morning before starting their day.”
Now that they could—with the Germans gone.
“I'm with the Allied army that arrived last night.”
“Yes,” the priest nodded. “We received word several days ago, praise God.” He glanced at the Leica camera.
“I meant no disrespect, Father.”
The priest shook his head. “Among all the horrible things you must have seen, I think that neither God nor I will object to your photographs in His house, a house of peace. You are a believer?” he asked.
Paul smiled. “I was raised on it. My mother insisted.”
“Ah, yes, mothers are like that. And school perhaps?”
He nodded. “Several years of it.”
“But not recently?”
“I was in London.”
“Yes, the bombings.” The priest gazed skyward toward that magnificent, vaulted ceiling.
“But the people still managed, even in the underground rail stations,” Paul replied.
The priest smiled. “The church is God's house,” he commented, making a sweeping gesture of the cavernous nave with its stained-glass windows.
“But in truth, God will find us, wherever we are, even in an underground rail station.”
Paul smiled. His mother had said something very similar.
“So,” the priest said, “this is your journey.”
A journey?
He'd never thought of it that way before. But he supposed that it was a journey. The photographs were his journey, of places like Amiens and the people, like the good father.
