Bastille Day by Greg Garrett

Author:Greg Garrett
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Paraclete Press
Published: 2023-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

11.

Nice

July 15, 2016

Friday

At 9 a.m., I was in the city of Nice walking the Promenade des Anglais, the long avenue adjoining the Mediterranean Sea. It was mostly deserted except for news trucks, and police still working it as a crime scene, and sad ragged bits of human debris—bloodstains, baby carriages, clothes, shoes, and brand-new memorials of flower, ribbon, and paper. I was following the trail of the 19-ton cargo truck one Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel had driven through a crowd the night before, the city on my left, the seawall, beach, and sparkling sea to my right. A team of four French soldiers in camo, assault rifles at the ready, walked in front of us down the wide promenade, a classic case of locking the gate after the cow has decamped.

We had gone first to the hospital in hopes of getting some comments from wounded or their families. The Pasteur Hospital, where many of the victims had been taken, was a madhouse, the emergency room stacked to the ceilings, and you could hear people crying, both back in the emergency bays and in the waiting room, where some of the less badly injured still waited to be seen.

I walked up to a number of people, asking them in French, Arabic, and finally, English, if they could tell me anything about the attack. Most of them didn’t even look at me. One looked at me, made an obscene gesture, and turned away. But a couple were willing to say something on background, an old man and a young woman. They were both very clear that they did not want to be on television. Both were French, both visiting Nice for the holiday, both had brought their families to enjoy the fireworks, and now one or more of the people they loved were fighting for their lives in the bays behind us.

The stories they told me were about chaos in the dark, people running and screaming, a white truck weaving back and forth, cutting people down like a scythe. The young woman’s husband had pushed her to safety, lifted her up over a fence or retaining wall of some kind. He had been hit before he could follow. His pelvis and four ribs were shattered.

“It is funny,” she told me, in French. “At first, I could not stop weeping. Now I cannot seem to remember how.”

The old man told me he had been separated from his family in the press and knocked over the seawall onto the rocky beach. His face was scraped and bruised from his fall, but when I asked if he needed medical attention, he looked at me as though I were crazy. “My son and grandson,” he said. “They are hurt. I am not hurt.” He indicated himself, shook his head. He could not be hurt. Not when those he loved were so much more badly injured.

It was a relief to be away from there now, to be outside in the sunshine, a long way from that chaos in the dark.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.