A friend once told me that Montmartre sits up just high enough to look down on the rest of the city of Paris. I had no idea he was being more than figurative until I climbed up the endless stairs to Sacre Coeur. Up there, peering down on the city and the hordes of tourists, gypsies and pickpockets sliding through the streets below I felt myself for the first time in that City of Light.

Paris, I had heard, was beautiful. One friend suggested I walk down the Champs Elysee alone one morning and take it all in. Another told me my love of history and art and architecture would cause me to fall deeply in love with the city. I entered with high hopes.

I am still confused about how I feel about the city.

Montmartre seethes with people. The seething starts out slowly. Visit the area before the shops open and you’ll find empty, quiet streets with locals going about their daily lives. Within just a few hours, however, the place throbs with cars and people and even animals. They seem to materialize out of the ether. Perhaps it’s because Montmartre’s streets are narrower than those of Paris proper, or that the area seems much more working class, but there amongst the shopkeepers and immigrants and, yes, the pickpockets, you finally feel as though you are walking in reality. As though here people do more than simply look chic.

Paris, that beautiful place full of wide avenues and perfect white buildings, feels like a fairytale in comparison. Everything seems a little too lovely, a little too manicured. Maybe it comes from having grown up in Appalachia, but I need grit. Grime. Dirt. I need to feel a place is lived in to feel wholly comfortable there. Paris just doesn’t feel lived in to me. Which is strange, given that so many of the people seem like they’ve lived a million lives to my simple one.

There was a waiter, at the Café Esmeralda, who caught my eye. I don’t know his name, but given I visited the café twice I got a good chance to watch him. He had the kind of obvious good looks you expect to find in a Parisian, but unlike the city’s buildings there was nothing shiny about him. He seemed dark and grounded. The tattoos on his forearms and the cigarettes he chain-smoked hinted at a life more troubled than his sunny waiter’s persona would allow.

Or perhaps that’s me creating a fairytale of my own.

Then there was the woman who came upon me as I was examining a metro map. I had left part of my bag unzipped, there was nothing in there except a map and some chapstick, the good stuff was hidden in a deep virtually inaccessible part of my bag. This woman didn’t know that, though. She came up to me, told me to be careful and helped me figure out which metro line would get me where I was going the quickest.

Looking at her, this older woman with gray hair and lined face, I wondered what sort of life she must have lived to reach out to a stranger this way. To be sure, wandering around with an open bag in pickpocket heaven was not the smartest thing for me to do, but she could have simply walked by without saying anything to me. At that moment, more than anything, I wanted to sit down with a cup of good French coffee and hear this woman’s story. But, too soon, she left me and my taste of something real slipped away.

My time in Montmartre, there above Paris, was all too short. The long morning spent sipping coffee and watching people burnt away as the sun moved ever higher.

If I ever return to Paris, and I would like to, I want to spend more time in Montmartre and all those other places outside the pristine downtown. Explore the real city. The one that dreams and, at the same time, watches those dreams die. The city that produces waiters with tattoos and kind old ladies who reach out to strangers. I want to get away from the pristine picture postcard Paris and delve much more deeply into the Paris that lives and breathes.

My time in Paris, the central part of the city, was a bit like one of those pretty Laduree macaroons – sweet and delicious and lovely but in the end, leaving you wanting more.

Photo by Tim Street

During some free time this morning, groups of students spent time exploring Paris on their own. The groups visited places including Sacre Couer, Notre Dame and the Louvre. The Louvre’s famous glass pyramid, designed by I.M. Pei (who also designed the IU Art Museum) is shown here.

Our last day in Paris and what a lovely day it was.

Professor Johnson gave us the morning to visit sites in small groups, so I and another grad student, Nicole Roales, headed up to Sacre Coeur in Montmartre. The area is the section of the city where artists like Vincent van Gogh and Toulouse Lautrec once spent hours debating perspective and art itself. It’s a part of Paris I’ve always wanted to visit.

One major bit of advice to pass along first – don’t take the stairs. Nicole and I decided that after the elevator in the Eiffel Tower, we were done with elevators that seem to go sideways–which the funicular that takes you up to Sacre Coeur does. So, we walked up the stairs. It seemed doable until we were halfway up and I suddenly realized my legs do not like stairs that much. Not endless stairs anyway. But, once I was up there I told my legs to stop complaining.

The view from Sacre Coeur might actually have been more enjoyable for me than that from the Eiffel Tower. You’re closer to the city, but still far enough away to get a good idea of its size and beauty. The basilica itself is one of the prettiest churches I’ve ever seen. The white stone against the green grass and blue sky is almost ethereal. Inside, rainbows danced on the church walls as the sun shining through the stained glass windows moved across the morning sky.  

Later on Nicole and I met up with the rest of the group back at the hotel and it was time for our walking tour of WWII Paris. Our guide was an American named Mike who studied psychology and seems to have an endless knowledge of the city. We saw a lot of the big sites in the city, including the Louvre, the Hotel de Ville and the Champs Elysee. My favorite part of the tour came at the beginning. 

Photo by Tim Street

Brannon Smith near Paris’ Police Headquarters, which was an important site for the French Resistance movement in WWII.

We met Mike at a bridge joining the Ile de la Cite, where Notre Dame lives, with Paris itself. Then he took us over to the memorial to French citizens deported by the Nazis during WWII. He told us it was "avant-garde" and similar to the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington, D.C.

"I like it because it’s abstract," he said. "You make of it what you will."

Like the Vietnam Memorial, a hush falls over you as soon as you walk into the thing. Unlike the Wall, though, this memorial is white. Clean, clean white. In one area there are what appear to be large black abstract knives or bayonets sticking out of the wall. In a few other spots empty rooms are closed off by iron bars. What got me were the rows and rows of white stones in one section of the memorial. You don’t get close to them, you simply look through more bars, but the effect is the same. You are overwhelmed by their beauty and by how many stones there are. Thousands of them, representing all the people the Nazis deported to work camps from Paris.

In fact, I’ve found all of Paris overwhelming in a way that I never found London to be. This city is beyond beautiful. But there is another side of it I can’t quite get my head around. Not necessarily a sadness, but there are centuries of history here. Awful things happened. Beheadings. The Nazi occupation. The tug-of-war of history and beauty makes my head spin. The what-ifs and what-might-have-beens seem to hang heavy over the Seine.

Photo by Tim Street

John Morris shares with the Ernie Pyle class in his Paris home.

He calls photographer Robert Capa his "Hungarian brother," says he should have died in the bombing of Saint Lo and shared a tent with Ernie Pyle – but John Morris is surprisingly down-to-earth.

Friday morning, all 30 of us descended on Morris’ home near the Bastille. He kindly agreed to talk with us even though he was about to leave for a meeting in Brussels. Morris was a photo editor for Life magazine during WWII; he said he only picked up a camera and shot news photos when a photographer didn’t show up for an assignment.

In the Ernie Pyle class we’ve been hearing a lot about the lives of foreign correspondents during World War II, of course focusing on Pyle himself. I haven’t spent too much time thinking about what life must’ve been like for photographers at the time. So, it was interesting to hear how that side of things worked. In this digital era, the idea that entire of rolls of film, film a journalist risked his life for, were simply lost, dropped in the sea or ruined in a photo lab accident, is in a way very foreign.  That second one happened to Capa.  

Photo by Tim Street

John Morris

The only photographer to get images showing any real action during D-Day, Capa ran out in front of the advancing American troops and photographed them as they came ashore. I’ve seen the photos on numerous occasions, but I hadn’t realized until today that only 11 of the images Capa shot (including 4 rolls of 35mm) were publishable. A lab tech ruined the others as he rushed to develop them for the censors.

I asked Morris what Capa’s reaction had been when he found out the film was lost. Morris laughed, said he’d been asked that question a lot, but he wasn’t quite sure.

"I’m sure he was disappointed, but he never said anything to me," Capa said.  "Capa wrote to his mother about his disappointment when he lost the film, but he didn’t really react much at the time."

Although Morris shared a tent with Ernie Pyle, they rarely saw each other.  But, on the day Morris decided to head back to his editing post in London he said Pyle took the time to wish him well and say goodbye.   

Just before Morris had to say goodbye the issue of ethics came up, as it had in London when we visited with John Burns. One of the students asked Morris what he saw as the major ethical issues facing photographers.  He mentioned the problems of deciding how to shoot something and whether to run a photo or not.  But there was another thing he thought was more important.

"For me the bigger problem is the things we don’t photograph," Burns said.  "There are a lot of things that just don’t get covered that should."

Photo by Tim Street

Tracie Ortman on Omaha Beach, site of 2,500 American deaths on June 6, 1944.

Forgive me if I get tongue-tied.  I’m not sure I have the words to fully communicate my thoughts.

Today was our tour of Normandy. We also visited Bayeux and Arromanches, but someone else will write about that part of the tour. I will focus on the morning. Focus on the bit of the day which, for me, was the most personal: Omaha Beach and the American Cemetery.

My grandfather fought during World War II. He was an infantryman in the U.S. Army and served in Italy at Anzio Beach – a place Ernie Pyle visited and wrote a good deal about. It’s also where my grandfather became shell-shocked. During his months at Anzio he saw several friends killed and several more gravely injured.

Photo by Tim Street

Audrie Garrison watches as Beka Mech writes her grandfather’s name in the sand at Omaha Beach.

The war destroyed my grandfather, who was eventually reassigned to the Philippines. Were he not reassigned there, he may very well have been on Omaha Beach on D-Day.  

Driving to Omaha Beach, we passed through the village of St. Laurent sur Mer, a town which was destroyed during D-Day and the Battle of Normandy. It’s since been rebuilt and is just lovely. There are stone houses with thatched roofs, the greenest grass and the volatile beauty of the English Channel.

It was difficult to be there amidst all that beauty and to think of all those dead. 2,500 Americans died on Omaha. It was all I could think of – the dead. Dead Ernie Pyle saw, and wrote about.

"The strong, swirling tides of the Normandy coastline shift the contours of the sandy beach as they move in and out. They carry soldiers’ bodies out to sea, and later they return them. They cover the corpses of heroes with sand, and then in their whims they uncover them."*

I walked down onto the beach, as did all of us, and saw it full of men. Young men with dreams and hopes. The tide was low but was beginning to move forward. Then, as now, my mind went empty. Not of feeling but of thought. I think it was the only way my mind could make sense of the awfulness of what happened on June 6, 1944, and the simply serenity of the beach claims now.

The emptiness followed me to the American Cemetery.

Photo by Tim Street

A handful of the 9,386 grave markers at the American Cemetery at Colleville-sur-Mer in Normandy.

At the cemetery, there is a sculpture – "The Spirit of American Youth Rising from the Sea" –- as well as maps of the D-Day assault and European campaign and the Wall of the Missing. Those are the first few things you see upon walking into the cemetery. Then there are the graves. Row upon row of white tombstones, crosses and Stars of David, blooming out of the verdant field.

While walking among the graves, John McCrae’s poem "In Flanders Fields" kept running through my head. Although that was about World War I it seemed to ring true there among the dead of the Second Great War.

"We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields."

Photo by Tim Street

Inside the Wall of the Missing, looking at the memorial that contains the sculpture "The Spirit of American Youth Rising from the Sea" and maps of Normandy and the European theater.

Among the stones I found a soldier from my home state of Ohio. There was no hometown and no date of birth on PFC Laurence P. Mauser’s gravestone. Simply his name, rank, army division, what state he was from and the day he died. That was all. I suppose it should be enough.  He could have been one of those slumbering under the simple phrase "Here rests in Honored Glory a Comrade in Arms, Known but to God". At least PFC Mauser has his name.

At the beach I picked a daisy I saw growing in the grass, planning to press it and place it in an album with the photos I took on Omaha Beach. Instead I found myself placing it on Mauser’s stone. I don’t know why; it just felt like the right thing to do at the moment.  

My time at Omaha Beach will forever be imprinted on my mind. It certainly seemed imprinted on Ernie Pyle’s.

"But there are many of the living who have had burned into their brains forever the unnatural sight of cold dead men scattered over the hillsides and in the ditches along the high rows of hedge throughout the world. Dead man by mass production … Dead men in such monstrous infinity you come almost to hate them."**

I can’t hate them.  But I certainly can’t forget them.    

*From Pyle’s column "A Long Thin Line of Personal Anguish," published June 17, 1944
**From Pyle’s unpublished column "On Victory In Europe"

Photo by Tim Street

New York Times London Bureau Chief John Burns with students in front of the Frontline Club.

The first thing you notice about John Burns is his height. The second, his hair. The New York Times London Bureau Chief spoke to our group this morning at the Frontline Club – a restaurant and club where foreign correspondents frequently gather – after braving the British monsoon. (We had a nasty bit of weather with strong winds.) And, although soft spoken, Burns was anything but timid when talking about his life as a war correspondent.

"I just feel being a reporter is so exhilarating," Burns said. "I don’t think it’s just thrill seeking … but it gives a kind of sharpness to life that’s hard to duplicate."

The Pulitzer Prize-winner has been living his life in war zones since joining the Times in 1975. On September 12, 2001, he hopped on a plane and headed for Afghanistan. His next leap was to Iraq, where his coverage of Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship earned him the label of "most dangerous man in Iraq." He earned this label because he reported what he saw; he told us he wasn’t worried about being kicked out of Iraq if he angered Hussein’s government. He just wanted to do his job.

To me, the time Burns spent in Iraq post-Hussein’s fall actually sounded more dangerous. He talked with us candidly about the New York Times’ fortifications in Baghdad, including concrete blast walls and armored vehicles, and about how the paper hired a small militia to protect its staff. He also talked about his kidnapping. In October 2005, he was traveling with a small group to what he thought was going to be an interview with Shia leader Moqtada al’Sadr. Instead, the group was ambushed by insurgents on a bridge and taken to the desert. Though their captors discussed killing them, they didn’t. Instead they took Burns and his colleagues to a house and left them there.

"I wasn’t really scared," Burns replied to a student who had asked if he’d been. "When you’re in a position of power, of authority, you learn that if you’re anxious you can’t let that show. You have to be resolute."

Burns’ resolution came, in part, from the fact his group had decided not to try to overpower their guards. When it became clear American forces knew where they were, Burns and his staff were released.

Burns also talked about the American forces in Iraq, and told us they were men and women we should be proud of. That led to the question of embedding. And Ernie Pyle.

"Ernie Pyle was embedded," Burns said, referring to the fact Pyle traveled with soldiers during World War II. "They didn’t call it that then, but it’s what it was. He was given rations, a uniform."

And it was an accepted way of doing things. Burns said he’d like critics of the current practice of journalists embedding with the military to not be so ready to condemn.

"Many of the critics of embedding lack an historical perspective," Burns said. "And the American military have placed no restraints on me. I’ve been able to do the things I wanted to do."

And Burns encouraged all of us to do the things we want to do, telling many of us as we left the Frontline Club to "be journalists."

Photo by Tim Street

The dome of St. Paul’s Cathedral.

After that, it was off to St. Paul’s Cathedral, Sir Christopher Wren’s masterpiece. I had visited the cathedral before and had forgotten just how massive it is. It looks large from the outside, but it’s only when you are swallowed whole by that mammoth bit of stone that you realize the enormity of the place. And, for all its size, it still feels airy and light inside. There are gilt angels and saints peering down on you as you walk through the endless nave. There also are the ornamented roses and clear windows you can find in St. Bride’s, only on a much larger scale.

The Brits came very close to losing St. Paul’s during the Blitz of 1940. One night, a bomb destroyed the area behind the High Altar. When it was rebuilt in the 1950’s, the British people dedicated it to the Americans who lost their lives defending Britain – the same Americans Ernie Pyle became so adept at portraying in his columns.

Pyle and St. Paul’s Cathedral have a relationship that’s born out in his columns, as well. It was Pyle’s article on the bombing of December 29, 1940 – in which that the London night was "stabbed and ringed by fire" – that catapulted him into a kind of superstardom in the States. That was the night the Nazis hoped to bomb the Brits into submission, and their main target was St. Paul’s.

Throughout the blitz of London, Prime Minister Winston Churchill was operating underground in his Cabinet War Rooms – and that was where we were off to next. This was an individual experience. We were handed personal audio guides that look like large telephones and walked through the warren of rooms at our own pace.

There was the Map Room, where men poured over large maps of the world, monitoring where the Allied Forces were as well as tracking the movements of the Axis. There were rooms where Churchill and his staff would meet to hammer out the war plan. There were offices that served double duty as sleeping quarters. To me, the idea of living in this dark place seemed like a kind of nightmare. Spending even one night there would seem too much. But, when bombs are falling overhead, I guess you want to be as far from them as possible, and a reinforced complex underground seems like a pretty safe place. Though, as safe as it seemed, I read something on one of the walls in the bunkers that said there’s reason to believe that had the place been hit directly during the Blitz, it may have been destroyed.

Tomorrow we travel to France via ferry from the "White Cliffs of Dover." I’ve always wanted to cross the English Channel on a ferry. We touch French soil in Calais and then drive down to Caen. Wednesday we tour Normandy.

Photo by Tim Street

Melanie Woodworth, Jaymie Ocker and Hilary Robinson read the bulletin at St. Bride’s church.

To say the music at St. Bride’s is ethereal might seem a cliche, but so be it. This morning, after an English breakfast and trip via the tube, we found ourselves outside the journalists’ church here in London. St. Bride’s was designed by Sir Christoper Wren (who also designed St. Paul’s Cathedral) in 1672. It garnered its reputation as the house of worship for journalists because of its location on Fleet Street, the traditional home of the British media (although they’ve all since moved away thanks to a certain international media mogul). It’s also rumored that the tiered spire of St. Bride’s is the inspiration for the tiered wedding cake (see the inset picture). 

St. Bride’s is not a church with a lot of room, at least on the outside. There is a lovely courtyard full of benches and weathered stone that gives the building some breathing room, but otherwise, the antique church and the newer business buildings are separated by what seems like mere inches. In fact, it’s fairly difficult to get a good view of the main entrance of the church because it’s so closely surrounded. Once inside, however, there’s a much different feel.

Photo by Tim Street

The steeple of St. Bride’s Church.

The vaulted ceilings, the large, clear windows and the white stone all lend the church a feeling of lightness. Of openess. There is a bit of gilt ornamentation on the ceiling, the altar and some of the woodwork, but compared to sibling St. Paul’s Cathedral, St. Bride’s comes off as a bit austere – but a good austere.

One of the more interesting things I saw, as far as journalism goes, were the plaques along the walls, and some of the benches recognizing media outlets and journalists dead and alive. Some of the earliest remains of London were discovered underneath the church when a wartime bomb tore apart a section of St. Bride’s during WWII. Remains of both Roman construction and a Saxon church are still preserved in the Church’s crypt – but unfortunately, we were unable to see them, as a Sunday school class was taking place.

For me, the highlight of our time there was the choir. We were allowed to listen to the choir practice. It was strange to listen to a piece of music progressing, only to have it cut off by the director so the group could work on a particular phrase or passage, but even with the breaks it was beautiful and calming. The small group of about ten singers filled the church with the sound of a choir much bigger.

After leaving St. Bride’s we walked to Trafalgar Square, where a group was gathering to celebrate Kosovo’s independence. It was a bit chilly, but bright, and from where I sat on the steps you could see all the way down to Big Ben. With the way the light was hitting Nelson’s Column, as well as the big clock, it could have been a scene from a painting.

Next it was the Imperial War Museum. Which, I didn’t know, is housed in what used to be Bedlam — London’s infamous mental hospital. I suppose it makes an odd kind of sense though, that a museum chroncling war be in a place once called Bedlam. It was also odd to see children climb all over weapons in the building’s main exhibit, a courtyard full of the machinery of war. There were tanks, boats and guns wherever you looked.

Photo by Tim Street

A German V2 rocket.

Our guide told us a little about each of the large pieces in the room, including the German V1 rocket that devastated so much of London during WWII. The V1 looks almost cartoon-like. It’s basically a huge oblong bomb with wings. The Nazis would fire them from inclined launch pads, and after flying the programmed number of miles, the rocket would simply plummet to the earth. When flying, the rockets made a strange sort of hum, but as they began to fall, they went silent. The next thing a Londoner would hear was the explosion. The only thing worse than a V1 rocket was the V2 rocket (pictured) – developed and implemented by the Nazis near the end of the war in Europe. It was nearly twice the size of the V1 rocket and didn’t require an inclined launch pad to fire, meaning it could be fired from special railroad launch pads. Unlike the V1 rocket, the V2 rocket traveled a set amount of time, instead of distance.

Speaking of booms, at the museum you could go through the "Blitz Experience" You sit in a replica air raid shelter, listen to what a bombing sounds like and then walk through a recreation of a destroyed street. was rather claustrophobic.

Our guide, by the way, said he didn’t know much about Ernie Pyle until he found out he was going to be leading us through the museum. Before our tour officially began he pulled out a copy of Pyle’s "Brave Men" and thanked us for introducing him to Pyle’s writing. He said, "He writes so simply – makes you think you could write like that. Which is the genius of it."

Photo by Tim Street

The group listens to the tour guide talk about the tradition of keeping ravens at the Tower of London. Six ravens live at the tower, and legend says that if they all leave, the tower – and the British empire – will fall.

Tomorrow it’s off to the Frontline Club to meet the New York Times’ Pulitzer Prize winning John Burns, a visit to St. Paul’s itself and then a swing to Churchill’s Cabinet War Rooms. That is, if the weather behaves. We’re supposed to get gale winds and rain here.

Sorry you didn’t get an entry yesterday. We all had a pretty long day but held up rather well. After dropping our bags off at our hotel we took a four hour bus tour around the city. We stopped by St. Paul’s and the Albert Memorial (in memory of Queen Victoria’s husband) before spending a couple of hours in the Tower of London. Which, by the way, does have a WWII connection: During the war the Brits planted vegetables in the former moat in an effort to shore up the food supply.