The Race for Paris Read Online Free PDF Page A

Germans marched into Chichester, he’d do whatever he needed to do to stay alive, too.
    He ought not to accept Madame Hamel’s offer of a bath, he knew that. He ought not to impose. But he imagined his own mother in this position, and he heard voices in the hallway now, too—the censors arriving. So he accepted, asking only if he could get his film off first.
    He asked the younger Madame Hamel when the baby was due, and when she said October, an image of Elizabeth pushing a pram through Hyde Park on a warm October day came unbidden, unwanted.
    “ Félicitations ,” he said, silently hoping for them that their child would be a daughter who would never be sent to war.
    The American corporal offered to show him the way to the darkroom, but Fletcher assured him he’d manage himself. He headed not to the darkroom, then, but rather directly to thecensors’ room, where he found his contact. As he waited for the man to get settled, Fletcher looked out through the wavy windowpanes crosshatched with safety tape to three herons floating in the moat below the window, raindrops plinking on the murky water. The walled pasture beyond the moat, where at Trefoil there was a proper garden, hosted spotted cows like the one Fletcher had shot the day before, there being no bovine ambulance to help the poor wounded beast. Beyond the cows, a charming outbuilding set into the stone pasture wall sprouted radio antennas—Fletcher’s excuse for this interlude from dead cows and dead soldiers and the possibility of dying himself. A booster rigged up here extended the 75-mile transmitter to 190, allowing transmission to London.
    “All right, then,” the censor said, and Fletcher handed him two rolls of film to be developed and transmitted.
    “Uncensored,” Fletcher said. The rest, he said, could be sent by courier.
    “To British intelligence back in England—undeveloped and uncensored,” the censor confirmed.
    Fletcher lowered his voice and asked about the Hamel son.
    “He fought in the French army and spent some time imprisoned by the Germans,” the man answered as he marked the two rolls for processing. “But he was no good to them because of the leg.”
    “The leg?” Fletcher said, registering why the son hadn’t stood to greet him.
    “The Germans released him in the relève , I believe. French workers volunteering to work in Germany in exchange for the release of prisoners. But of course the Germans only released prisoners they couldn’t get work out of anyway. Monsieur Hamel’s good luck, the fact that he will never walk well again. His ticket home.”
    B y the time Fletcher bathed and stopped by the mail room to send off his letters (to his parents, to the evacuee schoolgirls, to Elizabeth), the mess tent in the pasture was filled with correspondents eating a full hot breakfast. Fletcher grabbed a cup of tea (bitter, oversteeped American stuff) and a plate of eggs and bacon and toast, and he joined Matt Halton and Charles Lynch at one end of the table. The two Canadians had brought a basket of carrier pigeons along on the D-Day invasion, meaning to use the birds to send their reports back across the Channel—birds that, when released, headed instead directly toward Germany.
    “Too bad about those Nazi birds,” Fletcher said by way of greeting.
    “Traitors! Damn traitors!” Lynch replied, shaking his fist in the air as he had when the birds had flown the wrong way.
    “Roebuck, you unsympathetic bum,” Halton said. Then to the others, “Careful of this one. He looks like one of us, but he’s a British spy.”
    Fletcher nodded in greeting to the others, saying, “AFPU, actually.” The British Army Film and Photographic Unit. Fletcher had spent the first years of the war photographing bigwigs in England for the British military newspapers, a cushy position his father had arranged, that allowed the respect of a uniform without the danger—what Fletcher had wanted after Poland. It wasn’t until Edward died at Dieppe