FROM The Girl in the Blue Beret (2011)
CHAPTER 1
As the long field came into view, Marshall Stone felt his breathing quicken, a rush of doves flying from his chest. The landscape was surprisingly familiar, its contours and borders fresh in his memory, even though he had been here only fleetingly thirty-six years ago. Lucien Lombard, who had brought him here today, knew the field intimately, for it had been in his family for generations.
“It was over there beside that tree, monsieur,” Lucien said, pointing toward the center of the field, where an awkward sycamore hovered over a patch of unruly vegetation.
“There was no tree then,” Marshall said.
“That is true.”
They walked through the furrowed field toward the tree, Lucien’s sturdy brown boots mushing the mud, Marshall following in borrowed Wellingtons. He was silent, his memory of the crash landing superimposed on the scene in front of him, as if there were a small movie projector in his mind. The Flying Fortress, the B-17, the heavy bomber the crew called the Dirty Lily, had been returning from a mission to Frankfurt.
“The airplane came down just there,” said Lucien as they neared the tree.
Lucien was elderly—probably in his eighties, Marshall thought—but he had a strong, erect physique, and he walked with a quick, determined step. His hair was thin, nearly white, his face smooth and firm.
“Normally a farmer would not permit a tree to thrive in his field,” he said. “But this tree marks the site.”
Unexpectedly, Marshall Stone began to cry. Embarrassed, he turned his face aside. He was a captain of transatlantic jumbo jets, a man who did not show weakness. He was alarmed by his emotion.
Lucien Lombard nodded. “I know, monsieur,” he said.
In Marshall’s mind, the crumpled B-17 lay before him in the center of the field. He recalled that the plane had been lined up with the neatly plowed furrows.
The deep, rumbling sound of a vast formation of B-17s roared through Marshall’s memory now. The steady, violent, rocking flight toward target. The sight of Focke-Wulf 190s—angry hornets darting crazily. The black bursts of flak floating like tumbleweeds strewn on a western highway. The fuselage flak-peppered. Slipping down into the cloud deck, flying for more than an hour unprotected. Over Belgium, hit again. The nose cone shattering. The pilot panicking.
Marshall, the co-pilot, took the controls and brought the Dirty Lily down. A belly landing on this foreign soil. There was no time to jettison the ball turret. Only as they were coming down did Marshall see that Lawrence Webb, the pilot, was unconscious. The Fort grazed the top of a tall hedgerow and slid in with a jolt, grinding to a hard stop. The crew scrambled out. Marshall and the flight engineer wrestled Webb’s slack body from the plane. The navigator’s face was torn, bloodied. The fuselage was burning. Machine-gun rounds were exploding at the gun stations. Marshall didn’t see the tail gunner anywhere. The left waist gunner lay on the ground, motionless.
Marshall had been just twenty-three years old then. Now he was nearly sixty, and he had come to see this place again at last. He was crying for the kids in the B-17, the youngsters who had staked their lives on their Flying Fortress. He hadn’t known he had pent up such a reservoir of emotion, even though he probably thought about the downing of the B-17 every day. He willed his tears to stop.
Lucien Lombard had seen the plane come down near the village, and he rushed to help the crew, but Marshall didn’t remember him.
Now Lucien said, “It is like yesterday.”
Marshall toed a weed-topped clod of dirt. “The worst day of my life,” he said. “Some bad memories.”
“Never mind, monsieur. It had its part.”
Several people were crossing the field, headed toward them. They had arrived in a gray van with the name of a hardware store on the side.
“Everyone from the village has heard of your visit,” said Lucien. “You are a hero.”
“Non. I did very little.” Marshall was ashamed.
Lucien introduced him to the group. They were all smiling at him and speaking rapidly. When Marshall could not follow some of their thickly accented French, Lucien explained that everyone there remembered the crash. Three families had sheltered members of the crew, and Dr. Bequet had treated the wounded.
“I’m very grateful,” Marshall said, shaking the doctor’s hand.
“It was necessary to help.”
More introductions and small talk followed. Marshall noticed two men scanning the ground. Lucien explained that people still found pieces of metal there—bullet casings, rivets, and once even a warped propeller blade. Marshall thought of how he had torn up the field when he came zigzagging down that day.
A man in a cloth cap and wool scarf stepped forward and touched Marshall’s arm.
“Oui, it is sad, monsieur,” the man said. He regarded Marshall in a kindly way and smiled. His face was leathery but younger than Marshall’s. He seemed familiar.
“You were the boy who helped me!” Marshall said, astonished.
“Oui. C’est moi.”
“You offered me a cigarette.”
The man laughed. His taut, weathered cheeks seemed to blush.
“Bien sûr. I would never forget that day. The cigarettes I had obtained for my father.”
“That was my very first Gauloises,” Marshall said.
“You were my first Américain,” the man said, smiling. “I am Henri Lechat.”
They shook hands, the younger man first removing his glove. “You warned me that the Germans were coming,” Marshall said.
Henri nodded. “It is true. You had no French then, and I had no English.”
“But I knew. We communicated somehow.”
Marshall’s voice broke on the word communicated.
“We will never forget, monsieur.”
“You told me to run,” Marshall said, recalling how he had stowed the cigarette in the inner pocket of his leather jacket. Now he felt his tears well up again.
Henri tugged on his scarf. “I told you to hide in the woods, and you comprehended.”
Recalling the boy’s urgency, Marshall tried to laugh. Henri had raced up, calling a warning. Pointing back the way he had come, he cried, “Les Allemands! Les Allemands!” Then, pointing to the woods in the other direction, he shouted, “Allez-y!” Marshall did not see any Germans, and he would not leave until all the crew was out. The bombardier was wounded in the shoulder, and the navigator had a shattered leg. The tail gunner appeared; he had hopped out easily. The left waist gunner was unconscious and had to be pulled from the fuselage window. Marshall was relieved to see the ball-turret gunner, who was limping toward the church with a man carrying a shovel. Someone said the right waist gunner had parachuted. The pilot was lying on the frozen ground, his eyes closed. Fire was leaping from the plane.
Marshall knelt by Webb, trying to wake him. Nothing. Someone squatted beside Marshall and opened Webb’s jacket.
“Docteur,” the woman said, pointing toward the village. She pointed in the opposite direction, toward the woods, and said, “Go.”
Marshall stood. The flight engineer appeared at his side. “Let’s go,” he said. “Everybody’s out.”
Several of the villagers were making urgent gestures toward the road. German troops would be here in moments. Marshall knew that they converged on every fallen plane, to arrest the Allied aviators and to salvage the wrecked metal for their own planes. The German fighter that had downed them was circling low overhead. Marshall began running toward the woods.
Had the Germans shot anyone from the village for helping the American flyers? Marshall wondered now, but he did not want to ask. He had tried to be sure all the crew were out, and then he left the scene. In the years after, he didn’t probe into the aftermath. He lived another life.
“We were so thankful to you, monsieur,” one of the men was saying. “When your planes flew over we knew we would be liberated one day.”
Marshall nodded.
A stocky woman with gray, thick hair and a genial, wrinkled face said, “The airplanes flying toward Germany in those days—there were hundreds of them. We rejoiced to see them crossing the sky.”
Henri kicked dirt from his leather boot. “I didn’t know at that age everything that was understood by the adults. But I knew the deprivation, the difficulties, the secrecy. Even the children knew the crisis.”
Cautiously, Marshall asked, “Did the Germans arrest anybody for helping us?”
“Oh, non, monsieur.” Henri paused. “Not that day.”
Lucien Lombard clasped Henri’s shoulder and said, “The father of this one was killed—shot on his bicycle, on his way home after convoying one of your aviateurs across the border to France.”
Henri said, “I had to grow up quickly. I had the responsibilities then for my mother and my sisters.”
Lucien said, “His family hid that aviateur in their barn for a time.”
Marshall recoiled. He could see the waist gunner lying motionless across the furrows. He saw himself running into the woods. He saw the boy’s face. The plane was on fire.
Marshall had decided to return to this place finally, knowing it was time to confront his past failure. He had expected to be alone in the field, and he had not thought anyone would remember. The news of the death of the boy’s father jolted him. He had never heard about that. In all these years, he had thought little about the people who had come running to the downed airplane. He had felt such a profound defeat in the war that he had not wanted to return here. During the war, more than anything, he had wanted to be heroic. But he was no hero. He had felt nothing but bitter disappointment that he didn’t get to complete his bombing missions against Nazi Germany. And what happened later, as he skulked through France, was best forgotten, he had thought.
Marshall was a widower. His wife, Loretta, had died suddenly two years before, and the loss still seemed unbelievable, but now he began to feel his grief lift, like the morning fog disappearing above a waiting airport.
CHAPTER 2
Dazed by his brief visit to the muddy field in Belgium, Marshall spent the last hours before his flight home walking around Paris. It was a mellow spring day.
He had always enjoyed this city. He bid for Paris flights several times each year, and when he became senior enough, he got them. Climb out of JFK in the evening, fly above the invisible Atlantic during the hours of darkness, and arrive in Paris under a bright sun.
He thought tenderly of Loretta, who had always refused to believe he was anything less than heroic. He wished she could have been with him on this trip.
He watched children on skates zooming alongside the Luxembourg Gardens, near the crew hotel. He thought about the boy in Belgium who had helped him, and he thought about the boy’s father—shot for convoying a gunner from the Dirty Lily.
On his layovers, Marshall had rarely gone to museums or tourist attractions, but he enjoyed the bustle and anonymity of a city that still had a feeling of intimacy—unlike New York. Or London. He liked being able to understand conversations he overheard. After the war, he had taken courses in French, and over the years he had become fluent enough to get along. He liked to read novels in French.
By the time he reached the Louvre, he realized that during his walk he hadn’t been seeing Paris as it was now, 1980. He had been resurrecting 1944. Ghostly images overlaid the scene before him. At the Tuileries, his gaze followed the magnificent view through the gardens and on up the Champs-Elysées to the Arc de Triomphe. Over this sight now he superimposed his memories of being there long ago, when there were hardly any vehicles. He saw images from newsreels and photographs: Hitler’s hordes marching in perfect lockstep; later, Churchill and de Gaulle triumphant.
To Marshall’s right, somewhere along the rue de Rivoli, was a Métro stop. He and a brash bombardier named Delancey had stumbled up from the Métro, scared, towering like Lombardy poplars among the crowd of much shorter Frenchmen. If they missed their contact, they would be stranded—lost amidst the Germans, circulating around them in their menacing gray-green uniforms.
She was there. He saw her first, sitting on a bench reading a timetable. There was a quietness to the crowd, as if people were on their best behavior. Marshall had doubted that a mere schoolgirl would be sent as their contact, but there she was, sitting with a book satchel and earnestly consulting a timetable.
The agent’s directions had been precise. Find the girl in the blue beret. She will have a timetable and a leather school bag.
Marshall remembered that moment vividly. She was waiting there, her blue beret standing out like a flower against the barren winter gardens of the Tuileries.
There was still a bench in that area. Not the same bench, he thought, but it was in approximately the same place.
But no, he was wrong. When he saw her on the bench, Delancey hadn’t been with him. He and Delancey had first seen her at the train station. Why did he meet her in the Tuileries? Then he remembered.
As he neared the place de la Concorde, he thought of the Concorde—the SST. He wished it would fly over, a happy coincidence, tying history in a knot. Moments of history entwined here—Marie-Antoinette lost her head; the Egyptian obelisk replaced the guillotine; Napoléon dreamed the triumphant arch. Marshall felt his own history emanate from him, as if he had been holding it condensed in a small spot inside himself. Reviewing his past was new for Marshall, something that had started as he approached his sixtieth birthday—and retirement. Tomorrow was his final flight.
For years, Marshall had dreaded retirement. Mandatory premature retreat, he called it, infuriated at the federal law. He hated being forced out. He was perfectly healthy, and he had stopped smoking ten years ago. Asking a pilot to stop flying was like asking a librarian to burn books. Or a pianist to close the lid forever. Or a farmer to buy a condo in the city. His mind entertained new metaphors every day.
Retirement would be like the enforced passivity he had endured during the war, after the crash landing. Then, he was a caged bird.
The airline didn’t want rickety, half-blind ancients at the controls. Screw the airline, he thought now. Roaming Paris, he composed the thousandth rebuttal he would never send in: Since being let go on account of advanced age and feebleness, I’ve been forced to adopt a new career. Henceforth, I shall guide hikers up Mont Blanc, and on my days off I’ll be going skydiving.
The pilots Marshall hobnobbed with might talk about investments, or summer homes, or time-share condos, but none of them really cared about anything except flying. One former B-24 pilot golfed, and an ex-fighter jock intended to sail his deep-draft sloop around the world someday, but Marshall thought their pastimes were half-hearted substitutes. He was interested in everything to do with aviation, and he was always reading, but he thought hobbies were silly. Collecting swizzle sticks or crafting model airplanes—he couldn’t imagine. Whenever he thought of what to do with his retirement, he drew a blank. Pushing the throttles forward, racing down the runway, feeling the wings gain lift, pulling the yoke back and aiming high into the sky—that’s what his pilot friends really wanted. That’s what he wanted.
Marshall wandered down a street of five-story apartment buildings. This was the lovely, proportionate architecture he remembered.
The people who had helped him in Paris during the war would be retired now, he thought. The French retired young. Robert? Rohbehr. Marshall didn’t recall the young man’s last name, but he would never forget him. Robert and his clandestine missions. He remembered Robert appearing in the small hours of the morning with an urgent message. He remembered Robert letting his rucksack fall to the floor, then reaching in like a magician to produce cigarettes or a few priceless eggs. Once, he pulled out an actual rabbit, skinned and purple. From inside the lining of his coat came thin papers with secret messages. Whatever happened to him after the war?
…
CHAPTER 17
Back in his Paris hotel, alternating between insomnia and waking dreams, he could hear Annette Vallon’s singsong French, her playful teasing. During those three weeks in 1944 he thought he saw the soft baby fat of her cheeks grow thinner. Her mother insisted on giving him the largest portions of food. “You are large, monsieur,” Mme Vallon told him. “We do not need so much.”
“I don’t want this,” Annette said, moving a carrot on her plate. “You may have it.”
Perhaps she still needed the nourishment of milk, he thought. She needed meat. The milk ration, for children only, was for her younger sister, Monique. Food had been more plentiful in the country, on the farms and in Chauny with the Alberts.
He remembered the way Annette and her mother hugged so casually. He could see in them a happiness that persisted despite the hardships of wartime. Mme Vallon had embraced him too. She was small, and she had to reach up, but her warmth momentarily blotted out the war. He thought of his own mother, when she was a young woman, before she got sick.
Marshall had hardly ever paid attention to cooking, but in Paris food was so scarce it became a fixation. He watched Mme Vallon practice her art. With a small piece of chicken, a dab of saved butter, and some elaborate fussing with the pots on the wood-stove, she made a terrine, a sort of chicken Jell-O with a yellow layer at the bottom. She flavored it with bits of dried herbs.
“You need your strength for your journey,” she said, giving him a second helping.
He didn’t know when the journey would be, or how.
He offered them some francs from his escape kit. He had two thousand francs, oversized bills like pages from a book. The portrait of the woman in a helmet was Joan of Arc, he learned years later.
They would not take his money. “We do this gladly,” Mme Vallon insisted. “It is our necessity.”
“But you could buy a rabbit and some eggs,” he argued.
One evening she cooked a pot of tripe—the only item the butcher had left, she said. Marshall was revolted when he saw her scrubbing and soaking the hog’s entrails that afternoon. He ate sparingly, but M. Vallon treated the dish as a delicacy, making soft groans of appreciation.
“With more butter and some cream, this would be almost divine,” he said, but everyone knew he was pretending.
Annette nibbled. Monique did not speak at the table. Marshall hardly remembered her. A child of eight or ten?
They spoke English with him. Annette listened carefully when the adults spoke. Then she tried to offset the anxiety in their voices with her own girlish chatter. Her mother indulged her, he thought. He could see in her mother’s face what Annette would become. Mme Vallon wore her hair swept up, with long hairpins holding a pile of it. In the corner of the sitting room she sometimes brushed Annette’s hair, twirling it with her fingers. Annette’s hair was medium length, dark brown with curls framing her face. She wore no lipstick. Her clothing hung loosely on her thin frame. On Sundays she washed and ironed her blue smock for the school week. It was what the girls wore to protect their clothing, she explained, and it was a sort of uniform.
He remembered her sitting at a table, working with the buckles of her cowhide school bag, which she called her vache. She placed her books and papers inside purposefully—like a pilot packing his brain bag, he thought now.
In the morning, Mme Vallon went to the market early, and M. Vallon left soon after for his office. Marshall did not remember now where Monique had been.
“Time for your French lesson,” Annette announced.
The large apartment was cold, and Marshall was wearing three sweaters.
“Pronunciation, s’il vous plaît,” he said. “I’m lost.”
“My English teacher thinks I have a ‘bad’ accent,” she told him. “She tries to teach the way they say in England. Tomato—we say tuh-maht, they say tuh-MAHT-oe; that’s easy. But you say toe-MAY-toe. I have fear that my teacher will recognize where I am getting an American accent!”
She made him a tea of herbs, plentiful because the Germans detested herbs and had not appropriated all of them. She rubbed a piece of leftover bread with some mint and a little oil and warmed it on the stove. He had built a small fire with some chips of coal and paper so that her mother could make coffee, a substitute made of acorns—or perhaps cockleburs and birdseed. Marshall didn’t know.
“Perhaps Maman will bring an egg. I will cook it for you in this fragrant oil.”
“Mais non. You and your mother should have it.”
“No, you have half, and Maman and I share half.” She wiped the pan with a lump of bread she had saved. She smiled. “Perhaps Maman will bring some butter. And cinnamon.”
“And cornmeal.”
She didn’t understand, and when he explained she turned up her nose.
“One doesn’t eat that,” she said. “Food for the animals.”
“Then maybe she will bring some more of those delicious pig guts we had last night!”
“Les tripes! Mmm. Bonnes. Bonnes.”
She made him pronounce all the words they had discussed. The words for corn and cinnamon and butter. Eggs. Bread.
“Perhaps I make us too hungry,” she said apologetically, reaching to pull up her limp white sock that was sagging into her shoe.
“It’s all right to talk about food,” he said. “I think about food every day!” “We should speak of other things,” she said emphatically. “Now, let’s learn flowers.”
“Do I need to know flowers? I was never any good with botany. Botanique?”
“Well, then, trees. It is necessary to know les arbres.” She led him through a list of trees, then some animals. “At our summer house in Normandy, we had geese and chickens. We could have stayed there since the beginning of the war, when everyone suddenly left Paris, but we returned. Maman insisted we were in more danger there than here. My father had to be here, and I must be here to do what I can to help,” she said.
“Do your parents hide many aviators? How do you feed them?” He wasn’t supposed to ask his helpers questions, so the Krauts couldn’t force anything out of him if he got caught.
She shrugged. “We manage.”
“And what do you do?” He knew she went somewhere Friday afternoons after school.
“You are not to know.” She smiled. “The Germans, if they are on the bus, I put my books beside me and occupy as much space as possible. I enjoy making inconvenience for them. Also, it is amusing to drop my books at their feet. In a way they are gentlemen. ‘Oh, mademoiselle, I must assist you!’ and in another way they are ready to make the arrest. But they do not, not the schoolgirls. So they think they are kind and helpful, but we are laughing at them. Every little bit of trouble we can cause, innocently—‘Oh, it is only the schoolgirls’—is a way to express our frustration.”
“Should you be provoking the Germans?” he asked. “It sounds dangerous.”
“I know. But how can one resist?”
Mme Vallon was at the door, with her groceries, mostly rutabagas.
“Your usual catch,” Marshall said, but he could not make the expression understood.
“If this war ever ends, I will never touch another rutabaga!” Mme Vallon said, depositing the bags on the kitchen table.
“Did you find anything else?” Annette asked, poking into the smaller bag.
“I have ten grams of butter—very precious. I have the sugar. We must get along without even ersatz coffee. Tomorrow, they said. No bread, of course. All the farina is going to Germany. Maybe our men working at the factories will get some of it.” Mme Vallon rummaged deeper in the bag. “One cheese ration.”
“Let me imagine,” Annette said. “Tonight, baked rutabaga with cheese. A soupçon of butter.”
“A tiny pinch of sugar with the butter,” her mother said with a smile. “I have some herbs.”
They warned him to stay away from the dining room window, which gave onto the street, but he could watch from a side angle through the lace curtains. He saw only an occasional vehicle—a Kübelwagen or a Mercedes-Benz flying a small flag with a swastika on it. The building was on a corner, and his bedroom overlooked a small side street. The blackout curtains at night cocooned him. He heard few traffic noises. People were out in the mornings and flocking home late in the day, after dark. He watched them, did exercises to keep his muscles from cramping with inactivity, and studied French. For months as a pilot trainee he had studied mechanical manuals: hydraulic pressures, lift angles. In January he had been keeping house in his barracks, writing lovesick letters to Loretta, trying to squelch suspense over the next mission. During the day he attended lectures and flew trial runs, and ten times in two months he had been out on wild sky rides, lugging bombs. A few times he had visited the villages near the base, and once he had been to London. Now, he was trying to talk French and reading Verlaine. He was almost twenty-four years old. He had stepped into an alternate life, like Alice in Wonderland, down a rabbit hole—but without his Bugs Bunny jacket.
There was hardly anything he could do to help Mme Vallon. He envied Robert, the good-humored young guy who came by bringing fresh meat wrapped in paper. He brought cigarettes. Marshall listened for his bicycle, arriving in the downstairs foyer. Robert was slender but powerfully built, with thick hair and dark eyes. He always seemed to be on urgent business. Marshall imagined him as a daring Resistance agent out gathering intelligence or transporting explosives, while Marshall himself sat out the war behind lace curtains.
Annette teased Marshall for lolling around the house while she worked so hard at school. She teased him for his efforts at French, even while she patiently coached him. And she teased him for the rude outfits he had to wear—the layers of old sweaters, the too-short pants, the rough socks, the cloth slippers with the seams loosened to make room for his huge toes.
At the table the family managed to make their meager dinners last for hours, regaling one another with jokes at the Germans’ expense and family stories that Marshall thought must have been often told.
“The wine makes us convivial,” said Mme Vallon. “We forget the difficulties.”
M. Vallon did not speak of his work at the city hall, but Marshall observed that he came home with extra ration books.
“If they fail to account for the number, who is to know?” Marshall overheard M. Vallon say—but in French, so Marshall wasn’t sure.
Once M. Vallon said to Marshall, “I am an honest man. I have always been an honest man. It is for honor, for patriotism, that we take care of the aviateurs.”
“We are not violent,” said Mme Vallon. “But we can do this.”
“The Germans were a people of culture,” M. Vallon said sadly. “I do not permit myself to believe that every German connives in this conquest.”
“We are ancient enemies,” Mme Vallon said.
From time to time, hints of despair broke through the Vallons’ determined tranquility. But they quickly assured themselves that de Gaulle and his Free French troops would liberate Paris soon. Any day the débarquement of the Allies would begin. In the evenings the family played card games and conversed. At nine o’clock, Annette’s parents tuned in to the BBC on the wireless for the news of France. Chut! Shh!
One night, they were awakened by explosions followed by sirens. In the chilly dark they were all out of bed, peeking from behind the curtains.
“It is not far,” said Mme Vallon. “The smoke is across the park.”
“Whatever happens, I will not consent to leave Paris again,” said her husband. “The exodus in 1940 was shameful. We will not descend to that again.”