It turned out to be the longest sustained period that Charbonneau and I had spent together, as a couple living under the same roof, and the time passed agreeably smoothly. The house and its setting helped — even in winter the place was beautiful — but the key factor in our mutual pleasure was that we enjoyed each other’s company, which, banal though it may seem, is the fundamental explanation of any successful and enduring union. Charbonneau was an interesting, amusing and provocative man and I like to think he brought out the best in me, also. Even two minutes in his company provided some comment or observation that would make me laugh or make me violently disagree with him and so those two minutes of my day were well spent as a consequence.
I remember he said he was going to write a memoir of his time in the glittering literary circles in Paris before the war and call it Lettres et le néon. He found this extremely funny and chuckled away to himself. I didn’t understand at all until he said it would make Jean-Paul Sartre very angry — then I got the pun. I asked him if he’d ever read L’Être et le néant and he said he’d tried. What did you think of it, I asked? ‘Ça ne vaut pas tripette,’ he said. What’s ‘tripette’, I asked? ‘It’s tripe,’ he said. ‘It’s not worth little bits of tripe.’ Oh, yes, I replied — in English when something’s really bad we call it tripe, as well. Well, he said, L’Être et le néant is tripe. Then he smiled. ‘Tripe à la mode de con,’ he said — and found this even funnier, laughing out loud at his sally. He chortled away for days. I had no idea what he was talking about.
I made the mistake once of telling him how clever and funny I found him (we were in bed and I was feeling indulgent) and he replied, with annoying self-satisfaction, ‘Now you understand why beautiful women enjoy the company of clever ugly men. On s’amuse.’ Then he corrected himself. ‘Clever ugly poor men. We all know why beautiful women like ugly rich men.’ Then he smiled at me. ‘And if we’re not amused by life we might as well take our cyanide pill now — no?’
My new assignment arrived in February 1945. It was to General Bill Simpson’s 9th US Army, poised in the Rhineland waiting to cross the great symbolic fluvial barrier that would lead the Allied armies into the heart of Germany and bring about its cardiac arrest. I made my way to join the 9th, and was flown up to Geldern, about five miles west of the river.
We journalists and photographers, the radio reporters and the newsreel cameramen attached to the 9th Army — there were a dozen of us — were billeted in a semi-ruined town hall in a village north of Rheinberg. There were three PROs looking after us — a measure of how the army and the mass media were now coexisting and being mutually supportive. Everybody was learning fast.
Bill Simpson’s Army Corps was at the southern end of the massive British and Canadian thrust across the Rhine, Operation Plunder. We heard the artillery barrage begin on 23 March and waited until our time came to be ferried up to the front to see what had happened. To be honest, I was beginning to tire of being herded and controlled by the PROs. At some briefing I met Mary Poundstone again and asked her what unit she was attached to. ‘I’m not attached to a unit, my dear, I’m attached to a general. It makes all the difference.’ She was having an affair with Lieutenant General Edson Carnegie. If she needed a plane to return to Paris a plane was provided. If she wanted to rove the Allied front unchecked she did so. If she found herself in trouble she simply called Carnegie so she could be extricated without fuss or demanded transport back to his headquarters. It wasn’t an option open to me.
My crossing of the Rhine in the aftermath of Operation Plunder, March 1945.
Thirty-six hours after Plunder had begun we were driven up to the Rhine. It was at least 500 yards wide where we crossed on a Bailey bridge — already constructed — and we were duly impressed.
Once over, the mood was jubilant amongst the troops we encountered. The war, it seemed, was nearly at an end. Thousands of German prisoners were being shepherded back to holding pens and it was both striking and disturbing to see how young they were — teenagers in the main, wispy adolescent fuzz on their chins and cheeks, all in uniforms that seemed far too large for them, borrowed from men.
German POWs, March 1945.
We were shown to our billets in an intact farmhouse a mile or so from the town of Wesel. Wesel had been bombed flat on the night of 23 March before it was taken and secured by the British 1st Commando Brigade. Our PRO told us that we were on no account to go near the town as it was still being searched for snipers and crazed last-stand defenders. It sounded exactly the sort of place I should visit.
I bribed a motorcycle courier (sixty cigarettes) to take me to Wesel as his pillion passenger. He dropped me off at a lorry park and I hitched another ride in a four-ton, six-wheeled flat-nosed truck delivering various types of ammunition to the forces in the town. I jumped out when we stopped in the centre and slipped on my ‘PRESS’ armband. The air was full of the choking smell of masonry dust and only Wesel’s cathedral seemed to have partially survived the carpet-bombing — insofar as it could still just be recognised as a church of some sort. Every other building was a shell, a few walls standing, teetering, roofless, girdled with banks of broken bricks and shattered stonework.
There were soldiers everywhere, clean, recently arrived soldiers, curious, poking about the ruins, evidently there to occupy rather than fight. I took some photographs around the cathedral and wandered down a bomb-cratered road to what must have been a park with a boating pond. All the trees were splintered stumps and the shallow pond was filled with floating objects, some of them once human beings, I thought. I wondered if I might find better images in the park — the world had seen too many ghost cities, grey lunar ruins — tortured nature might deliver something more striking. I walked round the boating pond, keeping my distance, not wanting to look too closely at what was floating there and then came upon a group of men, a hundred or so, sitting around the twisted remains of a bandstand.
They were soldiers, British soldiers — I recognised the shape of the tin helmet — though they might have been troglodytes or some race of miners allowed up from underground, after weeks of toil, so filthy were they, almost black with dirt and sweat and mud. They were sitting quietly, smoking, eating rations, swigging from canteens, but their conversations, such as they were, were muttered, hushed, almost inaudible. I moved closer, carefully. They looked as if they had suffered some collective trauma, survivors of an earthquake or some other natural catastrophe. Their blackened faces were drawn and gaunt from awful shared experience, it seemed to me.
A tall man rose to his feet and intercepted me as I drew near. He was wearing an old darned V-neck sweater, moss green, a civilian sweater, over his battledress shirt. His trousers were tucked into heavy, caramel-coloured brogue ankle boots of the sort you go deer-stalking in, and he had a revolver in a canvas holster hanging from his right hip. He was bareheaded and a lock of his greasy black hair hung over one eye. He had deep creases in his cheeks and had a lit cigarette in his hand.
‘What do you want?’ he said. His voice was ragged and patrician. I might have been a housemaid who’d barged in on a bridge game.
‘I’d like to take some photographs,’ I said, pointing to my armband. ‘If I may.’