The Caves of Perigord

by Martin Walker

“I have not decided. But one of the new things that you must consider is that I may not have much choice. The Keepers may be disturbed, but the hunters and the fishermen and the flint men-all seem to welcome the new ways, and to welcome the power of the man who brought them.”

  “But you are her father. Nobody would go against your decision in this.”

  “No, but these are strange times. Fathers can fall sick or have accidents. Young suitors can meet with mysterious deaths. These are dangerous times, Deer.”

  CHAPTER 12

  Perigord, 1944

  They had walked all night loaded down with the remaining explosives. The new recruits carried the ammunition in sacks, staggering-over the heavy ground along the hills that flanked the north bank of the river Vezere. Now they were shivering in a shallow cave, unable to light a fire, and not nearly as far north of Les Eyzies as Manners had wished. He was more tired than he could remember being, and more dispirited than he had ever been in the desert, even fleeing from Rommel’s tanks amid the wreckage of a broken army. At least then there had been a sense of refuge, a strong base on the Nile where his unit could regroup and refit, the promise of a bath and a square meal.

  It was the meal that was making him guilty, an omelet of fresh eggs and a glass of wine and a handsome woman sitting across the table, with Jean Sablon singing “Vous, qui passez sans me voir” on the windup gramophone that needed a new needle. He had not heard the song since his schooldays, on holidays with his parents at Cap d’Antibes. The waiters would sing it late at night as they stacked the chairs on the tables. He had told Sybille about that, falling in with her own mood of nostalgia for another time, before the war.

  He should never have gone with her. She could be shot just for sheltering him in her home. And an officer should not eat until he had taken care of his men, far less relax in a comfortable room with curtains at the front window and the sight of a small garden through the French windows at the rear. He could taste the omelet now, the garlic and the butter, and hear Sybille’s casual comment, “A vet never goes hungry-the farmers see to that.” He had stayed no longer than it had taken him to eat and smoke a cigarette, but he had felt the lure of peacetime stealing over him, a reluctance to rise and go.

  Sybille had been matter of fact, in a way that intrigued him. He thought of self-confident girls back in England before the war, and the nervous ones who came out to Palestine and India looking for husbands. The fishing fleet, they called them. And he thought of the nurses and secretaries and coding clerks he had seen on the arms of staff officers when he was back in Cairo on leave from the front. Sybille was like none of them, with their instant gaiety and relentless energy for tennis and horses and dances. And she wasn’t like the women of wartime London with their brittle hunger for fun and parties, and the haunting way they sobbed in cinemas. Sybille had simply cooked, and ate, and asked him about his family and put another record on the gramophone. It was Charles Trenet, singing “Je Chante,” which he remembered from Haifa before the war.

  “When I can, I live in the times before the war,” she had said when he was leaving. “But I seldom can. Under Vichy it was not too bad, but now that the Germans are here, they won’t let us live in the past. And their presence has brought the Resistance and people like you and now the war is everywhere. I just want it to go away.”

  It was that damned sense of nostalgia that was getting him down, that taste of a little normality that had made it so hard to ride back and creep around a darkened countryside and sleep in caves with his head on a pack that stank of plastic explosive. He was a professional soldier, dammit, not a guerrilla. Every time he set an ambush he found himself thinking how he would guard against it, how he would react and bring his men through if he were wearing a German uniform. He checked himself. That was the desert war, when there had been no civilians, and the Germans had fought clean. Like all of the Eighth Army, he respected the Germans of the Afrika Korps, and like a lot of them, felt he had more in common with Rommel’s chaps than he did with some of the so-called Allies. No, that was unfair. McPhee was first-rate. He couldn’t hope to fight this damned guerrilla war with a better comradeinarms.

  It was the bloody anarchic nature of this war that was dismaying him, he realized, the lack of familiar rules, of that comforting routine of batmen and tea and a pressed uniform and even parades. It was the reversal of the knowledge that had been so natural to them all in the desert, that the Afrika Korps abided by the same kind of rules. Prisoners would be taken and treated decently. The wounded could be left in the knowledge that the other side would look after them, if possible. He missed the sense of organization that came with being part of a battalion, a brigade, a division, an army. And he fretted under the knowledge that he was utterly responsible for the safety and food and supplies for the almost demoralized pack of French boys around him who had not the slightest sense of a discipline he could rely on. And he was also responsible for the reprisals the Germans would take, the burnings of farms that fed them, the shooting of men and women who helped him.

  He had known about this, even been trained for it. But what Manners never expected was that the sense of a modest victory over the German train networks and their patrols should now strike him as so hollow, a success that would unleash upon him only the new pressure of reprisals and German reinforcements. The better he did, the worse it would get. And there would be no Afrika Korps rules here, no prisoners taken, and no wounded could be left for the Gestapo to torture. He didn’t even feel much confidence in the other trained members of the team, despite the way Francois had staged the ambush. Francois had been late to the rendezvous, and was now snoring beside him, one arm flopping casually on the captured German machine gun. He should wake him. There was much to do. They had to meet Berger today, contact the radio operator, arrange another parachute drop, organize some food for the men, and then march again all night to hit the railway line that connected Brive and Perigueux. A good twenty miles north of the last attack, it would serve to spread the German search.

  “We should have been ten miles north of here by now,” said McPhee, sitting up and shaking his head from his brief sleep. “The Germans will be all over these roads tomorrow.”

  “Today, you mean,” said Manners. He shrugged. “Untrained troops, a night march. You can’t expect too much. The boys are cold and hungry and frightened.”

  “They’re not the only ones,” grunted the American. “How much plastic we got left?”

  “About twenty pounds. Enough for one good attack on a junction or a lot of little rail breaks.”

  They watched the first glow of dawn through the cave mouth, the sudden gleam of a lazy curve in the river, the silvering frost on the grass. Behind them, the click of a petrol lighter, a sudden soft glow, and the whiff of tobacco. Francois had woken.

  “You’ll kill us all, with those smokes of yours,” grumbled McPhee, standing up to stamp his feet and rub some warmth back into his arms. “You just lit up the whole cave. Half the German army just pinpointed us.”

  “I lit it under my jacket,” Francois said reasonably. “And there are no Germans here.”

  “No food either.”

  “But breakfast is just over the hill-a farm I know well.” Francois went outside to piss, standing with his back to them, his arms braced on his hips, puffing plumes of smoke into the lightening sky as he released a long stream to salute the dawn. Manners shivered, as some thought suddenly ran through his head that he had seen this sight before, that men had stood at the mouths of caves and pissed into the dawn light since the days when they had first come down from the trees and learned to stand. It was eerie, as if someone had walked on his grave. These caves were spooky places.

  “We can’t all go to your farm. There are twenty of us now,” objected McPhee. “Too many of us to feed.”

  “You don’t know the Perigord,” Francois grunted over his shoulder, and turned, buttoning his trousers. “They’ll feed us all, warm milk straight from the cow, some chestnut bread
and goat cheese. But we don’t all go at once. We three go first with Frise, then Manners and I go on to meet my brother and the radio operator. McPhee, you and Frise then take back some milk, and bring the boys to the farm, no more than four at a time. Then we all meet tonight at the big Rouffignac cave. I know that area. There are good plateaus for parachute drops, a lot of woodland to train the boys in the Barade forest, and not enough roads for the Germans.”

  “What about food?” Manners asked.

  “A lot of small farms. We’ll be fine,” said Francois. “Now let me have one more cigarette and then let’s get that milk.”

  “What are the chances that someone among those small farms will tell the Germans, or the Milice?” McPhee broke in. “Just because you know the area, Francois, that doesn’t mean you can trust everybody.”

  Francois looked at the two men for a long moment, than came and squatted in front of them. “A year ago, I would not even have taken the risk of coming back here, to my own chateau, my own district, where I was brought up with half the boys and was taken fishing with their fathers, and fed tartines by their mothers.”

  “But that was last year,” he went on. “Before the RAF started sending a thousand bombers every night against Hamburg and the Ruhr. Before the Germans were beaten at Stalingrad, before we threw them out of North Africa, before we knocked Mussolini out of the war and put our armies back into Italy. And when that happened, Hitler dropped this pretense of southern France being run by Vichy and sent his armies down here too. So now we see the Boche trucks and soldiers, and watch them take our food and chase our women and arrest our young men to send them to Germany to work in their factories. Now we are occupied, and so the only people who might betray us are those too committed to Vichy to change their coats.”

  “That’s still a lot of Frenchmen,” said McPhee grimly.

  “True. A year ago, to be honest, I’d have said most Frenchmen either supported Vichy or weren’t prepared to do anything against it. Most people want a quiet life, and so long as there were no German troops down here, people could fool themselves that the war didn’t much concern them. But now only a fool thinks the Germans have a chance of winning, and anybody with any sense wants to make sure they are on the right side when this war is over.” He stopped to duck his head under his jacket and light another cigarette, and emerged to blow a thick plume of smoke into the cave. “Your war may be decided. Ours isn’t. I keep telling you the big question is whether the right side will be the Communists or the Gaullists.”

  “Where the hell do you get all the smokes?” McPhee said. “They’re supposed to be rationed.”

  “They are. It’s a system they call the decade. Every ten days, an adult is entitled to two packets of twenty, or some rolling tobacco. But every adult includes a lot of nonsmokers. My brother has a friend who’s a gardener in a nunnery. Eighty nuns and none of them smoke. So the gardener gets their ration, and gives most of them to my brother for his boys. And then this is the Perigord. The best tobacco in France is grown here. Come on; let’s get moving.”

  The B Mark II transmitter was a feeble but cumbersome beast. It was two feet long, weighted thirty pounds, required an aerial seventy feet long, and could transmit its dots and dashes of Morse at no more than twenty watts. Berger had already lost one radio operator in Bergerac when the Germans started using the trick of turning off the power in one subsection of the city after another to see when the signal died. Now he refused to use main current at all and had rigged up a small dynamo that could be powered by a bicycle, maintaining that the risk of shifting the transmitter from place to place around the woods of Perigord was less than that of detection.

  Francois and Manners drafted their message, and Berger took the back wheel from one of the bikes to rig the dynamo, and the radio operator pulled off the top silk sheet from his one-time pad and began to encode. Manners checked the coding, and they left him alone to transmit; another of Berger’s security rules. They had cycled about an hour down the woodland tracks and came to the brink of a steep hill where the track wound down to a road. The embankment of a railway loomed up behind it, and the stately arches of a viaduct bridging a steep valley on the far side of the road. Just before the viaduct a small building stood beside the rail track, the raised red-and-white bar of a level crossing beside it, ready to seal off the small road that disappeared steeply into the valley. A red signal flag was tied to the base of the bar.

  “Miremont-Mauzens,” said Berger. “It’s a railway halt. That’s where we meet them. The flag means it’s safe.” He turned to his brother. “Francois, you stay here with the bikes. They know where you’re from. You’d just annoy each other, get into an argument.”

  Francois shrugged and lit a cigarette. “Don’t worry, my dear brother. I am getting quite good at staying out of arguments. Just ask our English friend how polite I am being to our grumbling American, difficult as it is.”

  “McPhee’s all right,” Manners said. “He was just cold and tired and irritable this morning. So was I.”

  “That I understand,” said Francois. “Let’s hope that is all it is. But I get the feeling that he likes needling me.”

  “So do I,” grinned Manners, to take the sting out of the remark. “So would anybody who knows you. You’re rich, a famous writer, handsome, and a war hero. Don’t be surprised if the rest of us mere mortals try to take you down a peg or two, Francois. If you were as dumb and ugly as me and Berger here, you’d have no trouble.”

  “You see why I like this cunning Englishman?” Francois smiled at his brother. “Even when he disciplines me, he flatters me.”

  “He didn’t flatter me,” said Berger flatly.

  “Well, you haven’t seen him fight yet. I did, in North Africa. He has our French elan, and their German thoroughness. We’re lucky to have him on our side.”

  “We had good teachers,” said Manners, making a joke of it. “We’ve been fighting you bloody Frenchmen since 1066.”

  Berger and Manners walked down the path to the road and crossed the rails to use the cover of the trees to reach the building. They had fifty yards to go when Berger stopped and turned and looked grimly at the Englishman.

  “He calls himself Marat, and I don’t trust him very far,” said Berger quietly. “He used to be a railway man, but went off to fight in Spain with the Communists. He came back to France in 1939, and then disappeared. If you ask me, I think he went to Moscow. He came back in late 1941, after Hitler invaded Russia. He claims to have men everywhere, in Brive and Perigueux and Limoges, even Bordeaux. I think what he has mostly is his old friends on the railways and in the rail unions. And a lot of Spaniards, refugees from Franco who fled here when the fascists won. His information has been good on the rail system and convoys. He wants arms, but there’s no sign of their using them against the Germans. On the other hand Hilaire said I had to take you to him and arrange supplies. So I follow orders. I won’t speak much.”

  “He and Francois are old enemies?”

  “He and Francois have never met. They just hate each other on principle. If they met, they’d start to argue. Francois calls himself a socialist-they hate the Reds more than anybody. They’d probably try to kill each other.”

  “Does this Marat have access to a radio?”

  Berger shrugged. “Not one of ours. He always dealt with your F Section, that special French section of SOE you used to deny having, the one that deals with Communists and others who oppose de Gaulle. I presume he got supplied by one of their networks in the north. You probably know more of this than I do.”

  “So why does he want to meet me?”

  “Because he wants more arms and explosives, to stockpile for his precious revolution. And you heard Hilaire back at the chateau. London wants the Communists supplied. But they are not using my drop zones nor my people. Anything you want to set up for them, you have to do it alone.”

  “So why have you set up this meeting? If you wanted to keep me away from him, you just had to say the meeti
ng place was unsafe.”

  Berger eyed him steadily. “You don’t know much about the secret world, do you?”

  “I suppose not.” Manners felt very small and rather lost, as if the war he had been fighting had taken place in some altogether different dimension. But he put his question again. “Why are you helping me to meet him?”

  “First, Hilaire told me to do it, and I trust Hilaire. Second, if any arms are going to the Communists, at least I’ll know when, where, and who has them. Third, even if this Marat won’t use his supplies against the Germans, more and more of his people will know he has them and will want him to use them. Some of them are French first, Communists second.”

  “This is a vipers’ nest you people have built for yourselves.”

  “True, but we had some help from Hitler. And from Stalin.” Berger closed his eyes and grimaced. When he opened them his eyes were clear but curiously empty. “It’s time you met Stalin’s representative in this part of France.”

  Marat was of average height, thin and balding, wearing round spectacles and smoking black tobacco in an old and much-charred wooden pipe. A beret and scarf and cloth shopping bag were on the battered table at which he sat reading a book as if he were just another local waiting for a train. He looked up as Berger steered Manners inside, and peered at the Englishman.

  “Are you the one that helped pull the fireman from that train you blew up?” he began. Manners nodded.

  Marat rose and shook him by the hand. A surprisingly strong grip. “Then I thank you for that in the name of the railway men’s union. And I congratulate you on a busy start. Le Buisson will be out of action for weeks. Your Winston Churchill should be pleased.” From the shopping bag, he pulled a dark bottle and three glasses.

  Berger interrupted. “I’ll go outside and watch. You don’t need me for this conversation.”

  “I think, for reasons of mutual confidence, it might be better if you stayed,” said Marat. He had an attractive voice, and spoke a precise, formal French. He might have been a railway worker, thought Manners, but he was a well-educated one. “I know we have some problems between our two organizations, but we only have one enemy. And the fact of these new arrivals from London means that we are getting ready for the invasion at last. Then we can start fighting Germans together, my dear Berger.”