The Caves of Perigord

by Martin Walker

  It was duty that called him back to himself. Or at least that part of it which was composed of guilt. Even as he thought of safety, he thought of his men, wounded and frightened and scurrying through the night with Germans on their heels. His men weren’t safe. And every code he had lived by, every lesson he had learned in eight years as an officer and nearly five years of war, warned that he had no right being safe when his men were in danger and demoralized without him. Alone in the blackness, he confronted himself and rolled to his feet, stretched his hand out to the rock and directed his feet firmly downhill through the tunnel to the tangled roots that made it so easy to climb back into his duty and his war.

  “Here’s Lespinasse,” said Francois, his voice wary and uncertain.

  “Right, Lespinasse. Any other men turn up? No? Very well. Take me back to the spot where you first saw me. The exact spot, mind you. And then we creep slowly downhill, looking at every single tree for two knife slashes I made. Understand? Francois, Berger, you get those containers loaded into a cart. That will make it easier. When we come back, I’ll lead you to the best hiding place in France. Then we go and look for our wounded.”

  He followed Lespinasse back down the road, the trudge farther than he had thought. Afraid of speaking, Lespinasse clutched him and pointed to himself and the spot where he had been waiting. Then he led Manners to the place he had first seen him. Manners nodded, stayed on the same southerly side of the road and began walking slowly, scrutinizing each tree. Ten meters, twenty, fifty, a hundred. His eyes were seeing spots with strain when Lespinasse tapped his shoulder. Manners looked back. There were his blazes on the tree. He had missed them. He slapped Lespinasse on the back and told him to stay right there.

  Into the trees and up the slope, as straight as he could, trying to remember how far it had been. It would be the very devil to haul those containers up here. But they had men enough and straps, and necessity to spur them. He felt supremely confident that he would find it again, as if repeated bouts of terror at the hands of German mortars was finally being repaid by this one that had resolved to serve his purpose. Again, the fallen tree came to his aid, as he had been sure it would, and he blundered into the thin leaves and branches of its toppled crown. He skirted it, following the trunk until he came to the giant clod of earth and the knotted roots, and there was his hole.

  Back down to Lespinasse, telling him to stay exactly there, moving not one inch. He strode with increasing vigor back up the road to la Ferrassie, turned in at the bloody silly sign, and found them loading the fifth container onto the cart. He helped them with the sixth. Six men, it was easy.

  “Follow me,” he said. No further explanation seemed necessary. He picked up one of the shafts, put his weight into it, and felt it start to move as the others joined him. “Francois, get a bough to brake the wheels,” he said over his shoulder, and led them out onto the road, sublimely convinced that there would be no patrols to interrupt them.

  It took them until almost dawn, heaving those heavy containers up the hill, the leather straps knifing into their shoulders as their hands groped for trees and branches and even spiked brambles as they fought to stay upright and maneuver the damn things through the undergrowth. The others cursed and groaned and sobbed with effort but never complained, carried along by the sheer assurance of his will. It seemed an inevitable part of the way his luck had turned that just as they laid the last container beside the tangle of roots, they heard the plod of horses’ hooves and there was Little Jeannot, in perfect time to take the empty cart back to the barn.

  He went down first with Francois. The others took the straps from their aching shoulders and spat on their hands to take the straps in a firm grip and ease the containers down the sloping ramp of earth as if they were so many coffins being lowered gently into a grave. Pierrot and Florien came down to help them haul the containers up the tunnel. As the sky lightened and the first birds began to sing, Manners looked at the last container and stared for the first time at the stenciled markings on its side.

  “Load D,” he breathed, as if in the presence of a miracle. Load D, the rarest and most marvelous of gifts. Load D, with its four bazookas and twenty-four rockets for each one. And 154 pounds of plastic explosive, 8 Bren guns, 10,000 rounds of ammo, and 234 field dressings with medical kit. He had six containers, which meant half a load. It was still a miracle. He opened the first container, took out the medical kit, and went off to look for his wounded.

  CHAPTER 19

  Time: The Present

  Clothilde’s parents lived in what at first seemed to be a small house when they parked by the river and climbed up the narrow street of Limeuil. But the gate opened onto a broad and sunny courtyard where an old man sat reading Sud-Ouest and the sound of a radio and clattering pots came from a large kitchen. An elderly but still handsome woman came out beaming and wiping her floury hands on an apron as Clothilde kissed her stepfather. Lydia braced herself for a difficult encounter, but Clothilde had insisted that she come along. “If only to drive the car when I start crying,” Clothilde had said.

  “I never knew there was so much money in what you do,” said Clothilde’s mother, when they were settled around the courtyard table with drinks and a plate of olives. “A million francs reward, they said on the radio, for one of those rock paintings of yours. Some announcement by the President.”

  Lydia pulled out the photograph from her bag and showed it to them while Clothilde explained. Then she worked out the currency conversion. A million francs was about $130,000. Heavens!

  “I looked up those things you wanted about the Resistance,” said her stepfather. He looked like a scholar, with wispy hair and clear blue eyes that twinkled over his reading glasses. “Not much about caves being used, except for Bara-Bahau and Rouffignac, and you know about them. But there’s a fair bit about these tensions with the Communists.” He opened a fat book at a page he had marked.

  “This is Guy Penaud’s Histoire de la Resistance en Perigord, and he cites the Armee Secrete report on the Communists’ refusal to join the attack on Bergerac on June seventh: ‘The Communists of Bergerac would not move, and when several days later they were asked to return the weapons entrusted to them, they refused to give them up. I believe this defection was the result of an order from the Party, received at the last minute. The Communists, it cannot be doubted, sought to build an army under their own control …’ Blah-blah-blah … There’s quite a lot like that, of the Communists refusing orders, stealing arms and keeping them for their own purposes,” the old man went on. “There was one called Marat, who was a particular offender, according to the Armee Secrete. Your father was attached to one of the units he ran out of Perigueux.”

  Clothilde leaned forward at the mention of her father, swallowed hard, and was about to speak when Lydia quickly broke in: “We’re trying to find out what exactly happened to Marat. He seemed to disappear.”

  “Fate unknown. Old Lespinasse told me before he died that he’d seen Marat killed somewhere in the confused fighting between Brive and Perigueux. He couldn’t remember where. But there was quite a battle at Terrasson, where the Germans had all the men lined up in the main square and were going to shoot them. The mayor managed to distract the German commander with a bottle of wine. Sturmbannfuhrer Kreuz, the German’s name was. And it turned out it was his wedding anniversary, so he let the men go to try and put out the fires instead. But in Mussidan, after the Germans fought their way into the town, they just lined up all the men against the walls and shot them down, forty and fifty at a time.”

  “The Germans claimed later that they were acting in retaliation for some atrocities against them, but they always said that. They said it about Oradour, after one of the commanders was captured and shot by the Maquis.” He turned to Lydia. “You know about Oradour, mademoiselle?”

  “Was that where the SS forced all the women and children into the church and then set fire to it?” Lydia said.

  “Yes, Sturmbannfuhrer Otto Dickman’s First B
attalion of the Der Fuhrer Panzergrenadier regiment of the SS Das Reich division. They deliberately burned alive over four hundred women and children. When they tried to escape through the vestiary door, the Germans poured in machine gun fire and grenades. I suppose those who died that way were the fortunate ones. June 10, 1944.

  “At their trial for war crimes, after the surrender, some of the SS men said they were told that a high German official had been captured and was to be burned at Oradour. Others said they made a mistake, they were supposed to be taking reprisals against another Oradour some distance away, where the Communist FTP had been shooting German prisoners. Others claimed that were angry because they had seen German corpses desecrated. Castrated. They said anything that they thought might save their lives.”

  “Could any of it have been true?” asked Clothilde.

  Her stepfather shrugged. “It was war, and guerrilla war at that. The SS had no qualms about gunning down women and children, not just in Oradour, but near here, at Carsac, Rouffillac, Gabaudet. No doubt some of the Maquis were not prepared to take prisoners in such circumstances. And there were some units-like Marat’s Spaniards-that were known for being haters. One of Marat’s men was captured at the ambush of a train, and the Germans fed him into the locomotive’s furnace. They were not inclined to be merciful after that. Old Lespinasse told me that Marat had a reputation for shooting Germans in the stomach and knees, and leaving them to die slowly.”

  “And you say that was the unit my father was in?” asked Clothilde quietly.

  “No, not the Spaniards. They had all come from the war in Spain, where Marat had also served. Marat was a kind of commissar, a political rather than military chief, and there were several FTP bands under his orders. Marat even had some escaped Russian prisoners of war serving under him. He was supposed to have learned to speak Russian in Moscow. Your father was in a group led by Hercule, around Terrasson.”

  Clothilde looked at her mother. “There’s some new information come up about my father, which is very worrying,” she said. Her mother sat very still, then looked across at her husband. Lydia held her breath.

  “What do you mean?” her mother asked, her hand straying to her throat. “What information?”

  “A German war diary from the Brehmer Division. It mentions my father as a collabo-a collaborator with the Germans.”

  “You mean about his being forced to give information to stop your mother being hauled off to a concentration camp?” said the old man, gently. His wife bent at the waist and gave a hard, dry sob, as if about to retch. He reached across and put his hand on her shoulder. “Your mother told me about it the night I asked her to marry me. I told her it showed how much he loved her. I’d have done the same, Clothilde. I’d do the same for your mother now. The evil was the Germans, using a pregnant woman in that way. Using love in that way. They were beasts, Clothilde. Unspeakable beasts. Remember Oradour. Your mother and father did what they must to save your life, Clothilde.”

  Her mother sat up and looked at Clothilde, stricken, as Clothilde put the palms of her hands flat against her face and her eyes. Lydia felt incapable of movement, but this awful tableau had to be broken. She reached over and rested her hand on the back of Clothilde’s neck, and the Frenchwoman put her hands down and reached her arms out to her mother. Lydia quietly let herself out of the courtyard and leaned against the gray stone wall, looking down the sloping street to the grassy bank with its picnickers and pizza stall and the confluence of the two rivers beyond it. The meeting of the Dordogne and the Vezere, as lovely a place as any in France, and the valleys that said more about the ancient history and glorious achievement of humankind than any other spot on earth. And just as much about the evil that humans could wreak upon each other. Those older humans had been more civilized than those of this century, Lydia thought. But perhaps only because they left so little trace of anything but their achievements. It took a different kind of civilization to leave records of its wickedness.

  “So in the end, they were saved by love,” Lydia told Manners after dinner that evening. “Clothilde’s stepfather was right. The Germans had used and abused the love of Clothilde’s parents for their wicked ends. And that dear, wise man, her stepfather, showed us all this evening that love was the only redemption. The love Clothilde’s parents had for her. The love he had for Clothilde’s mother, even after she told him of what she had been forced to do. And finally, the love of Clothilde for her mother.”

  “So in the end, love does conquer all,” said Manners pensively. They were dining alone at a simple restaurant that overlooked the Vezere. “It’s a very moving story, Lydia, and you tell it marvelously well. I feel almost as though I had been there, but in a way I’m glad I wasn’t. Clothilde seems such a formidable woman, it must have been a shock to see her in such a raw moment.”

  “It’s not something that we often see, in peacetime.” She gestured vaguely at the river, the placid calm of it all. “It’s a shock to learn what happened here, in these picturesque villages, within living memory.”

  “It was a shock in Northern Ireland, to see all that hatred taking place in streets that had Woolworth’s and Barclays Banks and familiar British cars,” he said. “It was that kind of furniture, the streetscapes, the advertisements, the sound of the BBC, that made you think you were at home when you weren’t. Horror amid the familiar and normal things is the worst horror of all.”

  He paused and filled her glass. “And I must confess that there were times, when I was called out to see what had happened to one of my patrols in Ulster that had been blown up by a land mine, or saw one of my men shot down by a sniper in Bosnia when he was trying to keep the peace, when I felt that blind, terrible fury that probably consumed the Germans here. It needed all my training, all the codes of decency and discipline that a professional army tries to live by, to stop myself from reacting like a beast, like some SS thug.”

  Lydia looked at him solemnly, feeling that she had just been privileged to hear a very rare and private confession, and she admired him for it. This was not a man who would ever want to admit that his self-discipline had ever come close to bending. It was not something she would ever care to admit herself. Normally, their reticence was something she liked in the English, and she felt touched that he had chosen to break it with her. She nodded in sympathy.

  “As often as not, that barbarism is what they’re trying to provoke you into doing.

  Vengeance is self-defeating.” He learned back and took a photocopy from his jacket pocket. “Let me tell you what I mean.”

  “Listen to this. It’s from Horst’s research file, a message from the commander of the Das Reich division, General Heinz Lammerding, to his commander at 58th Corps. He sent it from quite near here on June tenth, the day he had initially been expected by the British and Americans to arrive with his tanks in Normandy. I’ll translate it as I go. ‘The region Souillac-Figeac-Limoges and Clermont-Ferrand is in the control of tenacious and well-armed bands, totally in the hands of terrorists. German outposts and garrisons are cut off and in many cases besieged, often reduced to a single company of effectives, and French government forces have been totally paralyzed by the terrorists. The paralysis of the German positions is absolutely scandalous. Without a brutal and determined repression, the situation in this region will become a threat whose scale has not yet been comprehended. A new Communist state is being born here, a state that governs without opposition and that coordinates its attacks. The task of eliminating this danger must be transferred to locally based divisions. In their fifth year of war, the armored divisions are too good for that.’ General Lammerding sent that message just a few hours before his men burned Oradour.”

  “He certainly delivered his brutal and determined repression. And he actually said that his armored divisions were too good for such a job?” Lydia inquired. “Good God.”

  “Yes, he did. And he was right. It wasn’t their business to go round chasing guerrillas or burning women and children in churches. Th
eir job was to get to Normandy and throw the Allies back into the sea. So here you have an experienced general, knowing what he should do, and then through anger or vengeance or sheer frustration, he fails to do it. General Lammerding wastes time and energy. His tanks don’t leave Perigueux until June fifteenth, eight days after he was first ordered to Normandy. Some of his units don’t get there until June thirtieth. One of the best military formations in Europe arrives piecemeal, and is thrown into the battle in dribs and drabs, patching a hole here, filling a gap there, instead of being used to punch a single armored fist into the invasion forces. It was a military disaster for the Germans.”

  “And thus it was a military victory for the Resistance of the Dordogne,” said Lydia.

  “Yes. Although won at monstrous cost.”

  “It’s odd,” said Lydia, as the bill came and Manners paid. “We came here expecting to concentrate on the history of seventeen thousand years ago, and we have been caught up, consumed I suppose, by what happened just a few decades ago. And it’s all connected. The one leads to the other. This same river where men died stopping German tanks was the same river where ancient artists drank and fished. They even used the same caves.”

  “And we still have our own cave to find,” said Manners. “Come on, I’ll walk you along this lovely riverbank as the sun sets.” She looked at him thoughtfully. She’d enjoy a walk, but there was something in his tone that alerted her. Twilight, riverbank, romantic setting. Brace yourself, my girl, she told herself. I do believe the man is girding himself to make a move.

  “You’re determined to go on?” Lydia asked, taking his arm as they strolled down the steps by the bridge and onto an embankment that ran along the river’s edge. “You don’t want to give up now Malrand has advertised his reward.”

  “No, not even with his security man snooping round to keep an eye on us. I want to finish this. How about you?”