We had lost two more hours in the course of the night, so it was only seven-thirty when we swooped down at Orly field, half an hour from Paris. It was a beautiful morning and the sun was so bright that it took us a few minutes to get accustomed to the glare. As we walked over to the airport office, we had our first glimpse of war damage at close range—bombed-out hangars and, scattered about the field, the wreckage of German planes. But the airport was being repaired rapidly. Trim new offices had been built and additional barracks were nearing completion. Craig and I booked places on the afternoon plane for London and then climbed onto the bus waiting to take us into Paris. Thanks to various delays in getting out of Washington, we had missed the Paris celebration of VE-Day by a margin of three days. So we were about to see the wonderful old city at the beginning of a period of readjustment. But a peaceful Sunday morning is no time to judge any city—least of all Paris. Everything looked the same. The arcades along the right side of the Rue de Rivoli and the gardens at the left were empty, as one would expect them to be. We turned into the Rue Castiglione and came to a halt by the column in the Place Vendôme. After we had checked our bags at the ATC office, we walked over to the Red Cross Club on the Place de la Concorde. We shaved, washed and then had doughnuts and coffee in the canteen. Our next move was to call Lieutenant Colonel Geoffrey Webb, the British officer who was head of the MFA&A Section at SHAEF headquarters in Versailles. Before the war, Colonel Webb had been Slade Professor of Art at Cambridge. I explained to him that Smyth and I had arrived but that our orders directed us to report first to Naval Headquarters in London—ComNavEu—and that as soon as we had complied with them we would be back. That was all right with the colonel. He said that Lieutenant Kuhn, USNR, his deputy, was away on a three-day field trip and wouldn’t be returning before the middle of the week. And we were primarily Charlie Kuhn’s problem.