I jumped in. The water was cool, thigh deep. I wore an olive-drab combat uniform, webbing with a water bottle attached and a tin helmet. I had painted PRESS across the front of this in three-inch-high white letters. A huge, envelope-sized Stars and Stripes had been badly stitched onto my left sleeve. I held aloft the pack containing my camera, film and rations. As I waded ashore I sensed the water was strangely viscous and unyielding against my thighs. I looked down. Dead fish. Inches thick. Red mullet, gray mullet, monkfish, whitebait, thousands of what looked like sardines, formed a thick piscatorial crust on the water. I sloshed out of the water and clambered across the rocks, following a furious Loomis to where we should have landed. Loomis was a young man, ludicrously proud of his role as a leader of men. He had a snub nose and soft fleshy lips, which made him look oddly effeminate and sat oddly with the constant martial frown that knitted his brows.
Along the length of the cracked, smoking beach to our left we could see the other LCIs depositing their men among the mess of tangled metal anti-invasion fortifications placed just above the tide mark. Now, from somewhere distant I could hear the pop-pop of small-arms fire. Loomis assembled his company and waited for the engineers with their mine detectors to lead us off the beaches. I wandered off through a gap in a screen of umbrella pines to urinate. The cold water had stimulated my bladder and now that the fear of opposed landings seemed groundless I had to relieve myself.
Beyond the pines was a clear patch of sand and some old yellow beach cabanas, rather knocked about by the preinvasion barrage. A sign read TAHITI PLAGE. I pissed up against this and was just buttoning up my fly when a handsome man in a beret, white shirt and blue shorts emerged from behind one of the cabanas. He carried a German submachine gun.
“Hey-oh, Américain,” he said. “What’s new?”
He shook me by the hand and told me in French that his name was Luc, that he was with the resistance and he was going to guide us to St.-Tropez. Then I heard Loomis shouting.
“Todd! Where the fuck are you?”
I led Luc back through the pines to Loomis. He was enraged.
“There’s fuckin’ mines everywhere, asswipe!” he shouted at me.
Luc shook his hand and said, “What’s new?”
Later I took a photograph of Luc, the cabanas and the TAHITI PLAGE sign. I liked to think that I had personally liberated this tranquil bathing beach from the German Army.
Eventually, after taped pathways had been marked through the minefields, the 17th RCT left the beachhead and moved across the scrub and pine copses of the St.-Tropez Peninsula in the direction of the town. The day became very hot. Overhead a Piper Cub spotter plane buzzed annoyingly. By ten-fifteen all firing seemed to have died away. In the woods the air was shrill with the sound of cicadas. From time to time a break in the trees or a rise in the ground afforded a view of the Gulf of St.-Tropez with the Monts des Maures in the background. In the bay sat the vast fleet, the still gray ships with the sun dancing prettily off the silver barrage balloons tethered above them. The rumble of artillery duels came across the gulf from Fréjus and Ste.-Maxime. Thin clouds of smoke rose into the air from burning buildings. I thought that it may not have been the most exciting invasion of the war, but it was certainly the most agreeable. Perhaps I had been lucky after all.
I had never got to London, you see. At the offices of the North American News Association in New York I had requested that I be sent to Normandy. I was initially dismayed when I found that I was instructed to proceed to Ajaccio, Corsica, via Casablanca and Palermo to join the U.S. Seventh Army. I traveled there on a boat filled with dynamite accompanied by two other NANA journalists, Sam M. Goodforth — so his card informed me — chief reporter of the Fort Worth Bugle, and Elmore Pico from the Hearst newspaper chain. Pico, thin and neurotic, later died on the beach at St.-Raphaël. Camel Force, to which he was assigned, saw the fiercest fighting of Operation Dragoon. Pico told me why we were going to Corsica.
“Because we don’t write for friggin’ Life, or Collier’s or McCall’s. We’re not famous; we’re not fuckin’ novelists. We don’t have important friends. All the big guys get to go to Normandy. They go by air. Us schmucks wind up in stinkin’ Corsica!”
He moaned all the way to Casablanca, where he caught dysentery. Goodforth and I reached Corsica in July. Pico caught up with us at the beginning of August. I filed reports for the Dusenberry papers regularly from Casablanca and Salerno, but later I learned they had all been spiked as too boring.
My disappointment over being assigned to the Mediterranean theater was short-lived. As I had hoped, my new job provided me with the peace of mind I had been seeking. It was enough to wear a uniform, to own a tin helmet again. I felt, in a strange way, that the step I had taken had the effect of voluntarily submitting myself to the contingencies of the universe once more. I had stopped trying to steer a course; I was content to be carried by the current. Even dark embittered Pico with his relentless bitching did not irritate me unduly.
By midafternoon of August 15, St.-Tropez was cleared of Germans, most of whom had either fled or surrendered. I stood in the ruined port with Luc and a rather attractive girl called Nadine wearing a revolver in her belt, and watched the prisoners being assembled ready to be marched off to the beach. In front of us was a large group of about 120 men. They were in Wehrmacht uniforms but they looked more Arabic than German. I asked Nadine who they were.
“From the Ost Legion,” she said. “Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia. They don’t even speak German.”
“We’ve got plenty Poles here too,” Luc said. He offered me a cigarette, a French one. I lit it and the sour tobacco reminded me suddenly of Annecy and the first days of my affair with Doon. All at once I was very happy to be back in France, in Europe. We went to a bar and drank pastis. Luc and Nadine were intrigued to learn I was a film director. We took our drinks and sat outside. The bar was in one of the narrow streets back from the port. We sat in shade but the late-afternoon sun burned strongly on the faded-pink, tiled roofs of the buildings. I took big gulps at the aniseed liquor. Nadine had thick curly hair held back from her face with tortoiseshell clips. She was dark-skinned and wore a blue-and-white print dress with neat canvas shoes on her feet. I wondered if she and Luc were lovers. I felt suddenly very sexually attracted towards her, perhaps because she had a gun. I looked at her hand that held her cigarette. Her nails were short and dirty. The way she was sitting caused her right breast to bulge gently over the butt of the revolver thrust in her belt. I at once saw these images as if they were projected on a cinema screen. Her dark mobile face as she pouted skepticism to some point Luc had raised. The careless way she drew on her cigarette; how she raised her chin and kept her eyes fixed on Luc to blow smoke sideways. The pale-yellow paper of the cigarette. The pale-yellow drink. Her breast. The gun. Just for a second or two — the slightest movement of the camera — so much hinted, so much implicit. I remembered Hamish’s friend Kurt, and what he had said to me. I knew then that The Confessions was not over.
I took a photograph of them both and then left them to return to Loomis at company HQ, which was now established in an old villa on the outskirts of town. My kit was there and my typewriter. Loomis had allowed his frown to relax and passed on new instructions, namely that I was to motor up to a place called Le Muy, some miles inland, to cover the effects of the air- and glider-borne landings.