William Boyd - Sweet Caress

The man I spoke to had a stubbly beard and a circular patch on his arm with a star in it.

‘OK, fellas,’ he shouted. ‘We’re getting outta here.’

He pointed at the entry to a narrow sunken lane. ‘Let’s get our asses in there. I’ll check it out.’ And he scurried off towards the lane, running in a crouch. Nobody fired at him and he arrived at the entry to the lane, squatting down between its thick banks.

‘OK, come on!’ he shouted. ‘One at a time.’

More roof tiles behind us were hit. The shards fell with a fragile, near-melodic sound like a wind chime. Nobody moved. One of the men was looking at me strangely.

‘You a nurse?’

‘Sort of,’ I said.

‘For fuck’s sake, come on, guys!’ the man in the sunken lane shouted. I rummaged in my kitbag and took out my other camera and fitted a 50 mm lens to it and wound the film on. The photographer in me was thinking: don’t miss this. A counterattack. Under fire. Don’t miss this.

The man in the lane shouted again but no one seemed very keen to follow the intrepid soldier and run the few exposed yards along the ploughed field, even to the evident security of the lane with its high banks. He waved and shouted once more and then suddenly, there was a boom of an explosion behind him and a great puff of smoke seemed to rush down the lane to envelop him. He fell down and his carbine went spiralling high up in the air to land twenty feet away. He stood up, apparently unhurt, and began to run back towards us, not bothering about his weapon, his pack banging against his hip as he raced for the cover of the garden wall. I peered over the top and took some shots of the wood. I could still hear the firecracker pops of rifles and machine guns but could see nothing stirring any more amongst the trees.

‘Get the fuck down!’ the running man screamed at me as he raced towards us. I swung round as he shouted and saw him hit, just a jolt that shortened his stride, and, entirely reflexively, my finger pressed the release button. He fell to the ground and others raced out to drag him back behind the wall. He was completely limp. They pulled him into the cover of the street that led down from the town square, and laid him against a wall, the men huddled round him, fumbling with his jacket and webbing. Click, I took another photo. Just at that moment I saw a half-track lurch into view at the top of the sloping street and I sprinted up towards it, having the presence of mind to thrust my camera back in its bag.

‘We’ve got a casualty down here!’ I yelled, and men began to spill out of the half-track and run towards me.

Colonel Richard ‘Dick’ Bovelander sat behind his desk and looked me over. It was a disdainful stare.

‘You know that you have the rank of captain in the US Army,’ he said.

‘Yes, I do.’

‘So, as you’re attached to my regiment, I am your commanding officer.’

‘In theory.’

‘In theory I can have my military police arrest you and lock you up pending a court martial.’

‘Listen, Colonel, we all know that—’

‘No. You listen, Miss Clay. Within minutes of me giving that order you disobeyed it. You could easily have gotten yourself killed.’

‘I was just curious.’

‘This is a war zone. Not an opportunity for someone like you — some photographer — to take photographs.’

I closed my eyes for a second. Bovelander was going to exact his pound of flesh whatever I said. However, I had the feeling that at another time, in another place, we might actually have liked each other.

‘I want the film from your camera,’ he said, holding his hand out.

‘No. Out of the question.’

‘Provost Marshal!’

‘All right. All right.’

I had been expecting this. I took my two cameras from my knapsack, rewound the film, opened the rear flaps and handed over the rolls. They were brand new: the two rolls that I had used were snug beneath my armpits, tucked in my brassiere.

‘Colonel,’ I began, ‘we, the journalists and the photographers, are not a subversive presence, trying to make your job harder. Your soldiers — sons, fathers, nephews, grandsons — have another army, the hundreds of thousands of their family members back in the US, who care about them and want to know about the lives they’re leading. Your orders are preventing us doing our job. It’s wrong.’

‘You’re English, aren’t you, Miss Clay.’

‘I am.’

‘Maybe they do things differently in the British Army but while you’re under my command you take orders as an American soldier.’ He looked at me in that disdainful way again. I crossed my legs and took out a cigarette. I wanted to rile him.

‘Have you a light, by the way, Colonel? Please?’

‘Sergeant McNeal will take you to the railhead. If you’re still here in ten minutes you’ll be in jail.’

I stood. ‘I wish you luck, Colonel,’ I said, and left his headquarters without a backward glance.

*

THE BARRANDALE JOURNAL 1977

Colonel Bovelander was killed in a friendly-fire incident a few months later in March 1945 when Allied artillery shells dropped devastatingly short during Operation Varsity and he and two of his staff were killed in their observation post. He was posthumously promoted to lieutenant general. I would like to record it as an instance of the Curse of Clay but I was sorry to hear the news. I bore him no ill will even though he was a self-important man, albeit a good-looking one — all the same, someone like Bovelander deserved a more heroic demise than a tragic accident.

My smuggled photograph of the mysterious German tank — some kind of vast self-propelled gun, I learned later — made the cover of Global-Photo-Watch in December 1944, as did my shot of the dead German soldier I’d discovered in the field outside Villeforte. The headline of my issue — as I like to think of it — was ‘Exclusive: First Glimpse of Nazi Super-Tank’. I achieved a certain notoriety in the purlieus of the Hotel Scribe. Cleve was delighted at my scoop and urged me to return to the front line. Easier urged than achieved, as Bovelander had left a scathing and damning report about me and my unreliability, and I found it very difficult to be reassigned. I continued to apply to other units while running the GPW offices with the indefatigable help of Corisande — the French equivalent of Faith Postings — as Cleve had sent Jay Fielding to Guam to cover the Pacific theatre.

I never published my photo of Private First Class Anthony G. Sasso — until now — whose snapshot I took at the very moment of his death. I learned his name later — he was the only fatality of the futile and quickly aborted counter-attack on Villeforte — and as luck, good or bad, would have it, I was there to preserve the instant of his passing for posterity.

‘ Falling Soldier’. PFC Anthony G. Sasso at the moment of his death. Villeforte, 15 November 1944.

When I developed the image and printed it I immediately called it ‘Falling Soldier’ after Robert Capa’s famous photograph from the Spanish Civil War of a Republican soldier. The soldier, rifle falling from his hand, is flung backwards, arms dramatically spread, against a background of rolling scrubby hills. It is one of the most famous war photographs ever taken and it made Capa’s name. Of course, there has been a mass of controversy surrounding the image. Was it faked? A photo opportunity carefully staged? Other questions arrive: do people really die in such a histrionic way when a fatal bullet hits them? Does a rifle or machine-gun bullet fling you backwards like this? I think that’s the problem. Capa’s soldier, falling back, arms akimbo, would not have looked out of place in a Hollywood B-movie western. This soldier seems to be dying ‘on stage’, as it were.