‘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.
By contrast, my photo of the death of Anthony Sasso is mundane in the extreme. He has just been hit in the body by a bullet and his face, for a split second, instinctively registers the shock and the realisation. The jolt of the bullet’s impact has brought him slightly more erect and his helmet strap is flung forward by the momentary arrest in his run. I discovered later that the bullet entered under his right armpit and tore through his chest cavity. He was dead by the time he hit the ground, half a second later. And I was there. My follow-up photo of his comrades gathered round his body is overexposed and blurry (I was in shock) but it is authentic. Capa’s follow-up shot just adds more queries. The body has been moved. The background is slightly different. Too many anomalies.
GIs tend to the fallen body of Anthony Sasso. Villeforte, 15 November 1944.
The key fact that I remember about Sasso’s death is that he just fell forward, crumpled forward. He didn’t cry or scream or throw his arms out wide, he just went down. I remember asking a veteran of the First World War — an old comrade of my father — who had seen dozens of men shot alongside him during attacks on the German line what happened at the moment of bullet impact and death. ‘They just fall forward,’ he said. ‘Don’t make a sound. Thump. They just go down like a sack of potatoes.’ That’s what happened with Anthony Sasso. Thump. Dead.
*
I spent the Christmas and New Year of 1944–5 with Charbonneau at the Mas d’Epines where we had made some rudimentary improvements. Rooms had been painted; there was a functioning outdoor lavatory. We had installed a wood-burning stove and range in the kitchen that also heated water so baths could be had (with some effort). There was still no electricity and it was a cold winter of iron frosts, that year, even in Provence. We built great log fires in the main room that we kept going all day, burning vast amounts of wood, until we went — usually drunkenly — to bed.