The Race for Paris Read Online Free PDF

in August of 1942 that Fletcher had felt his own cowardice, and it was almost two years more before he joined the AFPU’s new No. 5 section, which was being formed to support the Normandy invasion. Fletcher hadn’t volunteered; he’d only agreed to the transfer. He was charged now with getting photographsrevealing the positions from which the Germans best fought, to identify the vulnerabilities of their pillboxes and tanks and planes—photographs that could communicate in a moment’s glance as much information as pages of military reports requiring hours to read, and with an accuracy that eyewitness reports could never match.
    “I’m just a military photographer,” he said.
    Halton said, “And the difference between a spy and a military photographer is what?”
    Fletcher said, “Maybe we should have asked those Nazi birds of yours?”
    Fletcher listened to the resultant laughter, thinking if he had any guts at all, he’d at least use a movie camera; you couldn’t wear a helmet while operating a movie camera because it banged the eyepiece. He’d gone to Poland without a helmet, certainly. But back then he couldn’t quite believe war would actually break out, and he was too young to believe he was mortal even if it did.
    The journalists, as they ate, gossiped about Ernest Hemingway’s wife, Martha Gellhorn, a Collier’s reporter who had hidden in the loo of a hospital ship just after D-Day to become one of a very few correspondents—female or male—to go ashore for the assault on Omaha Beach. When she returned to London, she was stripped of her military accreditation, her travel papers, and her ration entitlements, and confined to a nurses’ training camp. “She hopped the fence and hitched a ride to an airfield,” someone said. “Left a note for Hemingway that she was off to Italy. Some RAF pilot flew her to Naples.”
    Gossip. It was the favorite pastime at the press camps.
    More coffee, more tea. More off-color jokes. “It could be worse,” someone said. “We could be in the Pacific, having our photos intentionally miscaptioned to leave the impression thatGeneral MacArthur is at the front when he’s nowhere near it, or our articles censored out of existence if his military genius is brought into doubt.” And more posturing about which correspondent would do what by when, most importantly who would be the first to report from Paris. Fletcher listened quietly, remembering when he’d been one of this club, when he’d walked away from Oxford with only his camera, in search of adventure.
    “So you’re Fletcher Roebuck,” an American said, a cameraman by his armband, so Fletcher gave him some respect.
    “‘This crazy Brit who will stand up against anything for the photo’—that’s the way Charles Harper describes you,” the chap said. “He likes to tell how prescient you were in Poland, although of course that story makes Charles Harper himself prescient, too.”
    Laughter again, this time at Charles’s expense. The American cameraman laughed the loudest.
    But Charles Harper had saved Fletcher’s life on that street in Warsaw—or, if you believed Charles’s account of the story, then it was Fletcher who’d done the saving, and Charles whose life had been at risk. It had been exciting, Poland had been, but you couldn’t see how close to being killed you were until you arrived home and knew you had survived. And if you had any sense you found a nice girl and settled down to a normal life, like Charles had.
    The cameraman said, “I guess the prospect of fatherhood is making Charles Harper soft, keeping him Stateside.”
    A Stars and Stripes journalist replied, “But I heard Olivia Harper is here, in France.”
    “You think Charles Harper’s wife is his only chance for fatherhood?” the cameraman replied.
    Fletcher frowned as the others again laughed. Even inPoland, Charles had girls, yes. A cameraman he and Charles had met in Warsaw—Julien Bryan—loved to joke with Charles’s