Martin Walker - The Caves of Perigord

“No, and many are troubled by this.”

“And yet this is the man to whom you would entrust Little Moon?”

“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.”

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.