In small villages and hamlets, resentment ran deep toward the occupiers. There were food shortages. Young men hadgone off to join the Resistance, aligning with the free-French, and other Resistance fighters that slipped into the Allied encampments, and provided information at the risk of their own lives.
How many had paid that price was unknown. But in each town, each village, each encounter with the Resistance, he asked about the young woman who had become almost a folk hero for her daring escapades behind enemy lines, hoping to see her again.
“We're moving out in the morning,” Callish told him, returning from a trip to the latrine, the improvised comfort station at the edge of the encampment.
“We're to join up with the 49th.”
Paul shook his head. “I've been assigned to the press corps.”
“How is the wound?” Callish asked.
He didn't consider it a serious wound, after seeing other wounds, body parts.
“Just a scratch. I've had worse hunting in the Highlands.” That was a bit of an exaggeration but the only one he was going to make. There had been that penicillin shot that hurt like bloody blazes, a fresh bandage by a passing corpsman, and he was back at it.
He'd received the news earlier, about the re-assignment when he'd turned in the latest rolls of film to be sent off to London in the next dispatch.
Callish nodded. “I heard one of the journalists was taken prisoner at Verdun. They executed the poor blighter.”
Paul had heard the same.
“We leave in the morning. They say the Germans are planning a big offensive, a last stand if you will, in the north,” Callish said, lighting up a cigarette.
“The Yanks are pushing after them, and the 49th has joined up for support. Bloody Christ! I didn't sign up for a trip to Germany.”
Had any of them?
But after the bombings in London, U-boats in the North Sea, and the past four years of bombing raids from their airfields, few were naive enough to think it was all just going to go away—bloody lessons from the first World War.
“Keep your head down,” he told Callish. The man was always complaining about something—the weather, cold rations, the lack of toilet paper—they were rationed three squares a day, while the Yanks had it to spare.
They were all in this bloody mess together and they usually got along, talking about familiar places they both knew in London, Callish's studies at university that had been put on hold with the war, and the girl he hoped to marry.
Paul had his position at the Mirror waiting when he returned—if he returned.
The thought of taking photographs of babies and newly wedded couples wasn't his life's ambition. There was more to be seen through the lens of a camera. Stories to be told in those black-and-white images. Hundreds of stories in the expressions of the soldiers who had seen too much, in the stark images of a battlefield barren of every last tree and shrub, the earth scarred by a violent struggle, and the heart-wrenching images in a small town one had never heard of but was somehow like every town where women wept and children begged for food.
All stories needed to be told.
They made their farewells in that way. The words weren't said, but it was there, along with the usual 'I'll be seeing you' and the agreement to meet at Leicester Square after it was all over, with no notion that they would see each other again.
The press corps was a composite of Yanks, Canadians, and Brits, some who had landed with the Allies, others that had been flown in days after the invasion. They all met in a correspondents’ meeting with military command.
There were certain messages that were to be put out, for distribution to radio stations and newspapers, after approval in London. Photographs were to be carefully screened before they were released. They didn't want people back home to be seeing corpses loaded on transports, the wounded in field hospitals, or bodies floating in the surf on those beaches.
“That doesn't mean we won't see it or know about it,” Robert Dunnett of the BBC said, standing beside him in that briefing. “Or write about it later, eh? And who's to say,” he added, “that you send all those rolls of film back to the desk in London?”
Paul had read Dunnett's pieces that appeared from time to time in the London Times, and knew of his work for the BBC. He liked him immediately. Dunnett stuck out his hand.
“My photographer got lost in the shuffle,” he explained, which was a polite way of not saying that the man had either lost his way or ended up a casualty.
“What say we team up? I'll write the articles and you take the pictures.”
An opportunity to work with Dunnett would probably never have happened under any other circumstances. But these weren't other circumstances. He shook Dunnett's hand.
That handshake set him on a difference course, one that took him to the front of the march that was headed north, and an encounter with someone he thought he might never see again from those first desperate days after the Allied landing.
They had reached Lisieux the day before, troop transports churning the dirt roads into seas of mud after days of rain.Ahead of them, the German army was in retreat, laying down mines to slow the armored onslaught, tanks setting up defense perimeters in what was rumored to be the build-up for a brutal offensive near the Belgium border—the Bulge, they called it.
