Martin Walker - The Caves of Perigord

Perigord, 1944

As the spring days lengthened, Manners found himself experiencing moments of pure happiness, even beyond the snatched hours with Sybille. They came when he was alone, usually when he was cycling to a training session or meeting or just going to reconnoiter a likely ambush site, and they were always associated with a sense that he had been magically transported into a time of peace. This was not Sybille’s melancholy fantasy, he knew, but his own. It was composed of English folk songs rather than the chansons of Paris boulevards, of flat and bitter beer rather than rough wine, of Cheddar rather than goat cheese. He had never felt more English than during this time in France.

Still, the illusion of a peaceful English countryside was as captivating as it was plausible in these quiet forest track ways and along grassy country lanes where lambs staggered to their feet and peasants sowed seed by hand now that there was no fuel for tractors. He was sleeping warm and dry in a borie, one of the circular stone huts with a thick slate roof that the shepherds and woodsmen had dotted through the remote countryside. Food was sufficient, if not plentiful, and the streams were no longer forbiddingly cold and his clothes were dry. Even in the old farmhouses on an evening, as he gave lectures on the art of organizing arms drops and the correct way to fold up the fallen parachutes, the placid faces of the old peasants over their pipes and glasses of pineau took him back to that distant time before the war. He loved the way the farmers’ wives would always blush and throw their aprons over their grinning faces as he warned them against saving the parachute silk to make lingerie as the Germans were known for checking under women’s skirts.

Above all, his forged papers were good. London had equipped him with an identity card that showed him born in Quebec of French parents, who had returned to Brittany in 1937. That would account for his accent. And they had given him a certificat d’exception to excuse him from military service on grounds of bleeding ulcers. Sybille had come up with the work papers, listing him as a vet’s assistant in training, which gave him the perfect excuse to be roaming the countryside on the rare occasions when he was stopped by the SOL, the Service d’Ordre Legionnaire, the volunteer police that Vichy had formed.

But he knew it was an illusion of peace, even though the only Germans he had yet seen were those he had shot from afar or blown up as they rode the sandbagged trolley at the front of the train. The Milice he had seen too often for comfort and the paramilitary GMR; the Groupes Mobiles de Reserve staged irregular and nervous sweeps in lorry convoys along the roads that paralleled the railways. They had ambushed one, and fled from another when Malrand’s captured Spandau had run out of ammunition. McPhee had destroyed two of the precious radio direction-finding trucks and damaged another in an ambush outside St-Cyprien Manners had arranged five successful parachute drops, and Berger’s band had now swollen to forty men, and had spawned a separate group of twenty led by Frise, which was based in the forest near Bergerac. All of Frise’s men, and most of Berger’s, had learned simple demolition, and Marat’s men had been given London’s approval for some arms.

There were six Bren guns, twenty-seven Sten guns, thirty-six rifles, and forty Mills grenades in the standard drop of twelve containers, along with some twenty thousand rounds of ammunition. Marat had been promised a third of the drop, but there had been a nasty moment when Francois had shouted a warning and the two of them had guarded the containers with their own Sten guns to ensure that Marat’s men did not take more than their share.

McPhee had resolved the standoff, putting his own gun down, opening a container, and pulling out one gun at a time. He laid them down in separate piles and chanted, “One for you and one for me.” He made a childish game of it, and got the men grinning, although Manners saw he was careful to leave the ammo unpacked. Then McPhee walked across to Marat to drape a fresh new Sten gun, slick with oil, over the man’s shoulder. Marat had taken to his American “Red,” and his men were delighted to have a real Yanqui to themselves. Communists seemed to like Americans, while assuming that all the British were capitalists and agents of the Bank of England. He was the first of these mythical transatlantic allies they had ever seen, and they were charmed by his insistence on wearing his uniform and his astonishing haircut. Manners had heard they would go to extraordinary lengths to find McPhee new razor blades to keep his scalp trimmed.

But the mission was being fulfilled. The railways, telegraph, and telephone links were in a constant state of disruption. For a three-day period, McPhee’s and Marat’s men had blown all the rail lines into Perigueux, and the next week Manners had done the same to Bergerac. London and Hilaire were both pleased with them, but Manners was waiting for the inevitable German counterattack, the coming of the Brehmer Division of which Marat had warned him. They had begun to arrive in Perigueux and Bergerac, or at least the heavy units. There was a battalion of armored cars, mostly the half-track SPW troop carriers with mortars and machine guns, and some of the eight-wheeled Panzerspahwagen with the 20mm cannon that he remembered from the desert. He had yet to see them, but had heard that each of the Brehmer Division units carried a big arrogant B painted on the sides of their vehicles. There was a company of combat engineers, and another of the Feldgendarmerie military police, and roadblocks and armored patrols were now constant hazards. But General Brehmer was still waiting for his four battalions of infantry before starting offensive operations.

As soon as he heard from Marat that they were on their way by train, Manners planned to shift his base deeper into the hills and move the attacks toward the rail network that spread out from Brive. Berger had agreed to go to ground, while Frise would head west to his family in the vineyards of Pomerol, and start blowing rail junctions nearer Bordeaux. The golden rule of the mission was to hit where the enemy was most dispersed, to disappear when they concentrated, and to keep training, training, and training the young recruits who were now flooding to the Resistance.

Which left him the problem of Soleil, one of the least disciplined but most active of the Resistance leaders. Nominally a Communist, but dismissed by Marat as an unreliable thug and black marketeer, Soleil ruled the district around the old fortified hilltop town of Belves. By persuasion or by menace, almost the entire countryside had been recruited to his effort. Farmers hid his trucks and fuel supplies, fed and housed his men, and kept their anguish to themselves when the Groupes Mobiles convoys darted in to burn a barn or farmhouse in a reprisal raid after one of Soleil’s ambushes. He was too dedicated to raiding banks and tobacco stores for Manners’s comfort. But he had succeeded in intimidating the semi-trained contingent of old men of the German 95th security regiment who now stayed huddled in their barracks in Sarlat, catching malaria from the fetid swamp on which the town was built. Malrand always claimed that one of his first postwar missions would be to drain the swamp and eradicate the mosquitoes.

Manners had never much thought about after the war. He had schooled himself to avoid any thought of such an improbably distant future, in the superstitious hope that by assuming that he would not survive the conflict, he might have a better chance of doing so. But Malrand talked of the future constantly in the shelter at night, the need for a revitalized France that would nationalize the big industries and defeat communism and modernize the country under the benign leadership of de Gaulle. He seemed to assume that Britain and France would fulfill that plan of a union that Churchill had briefly floated in the darkest days of the French collapse in 1940, with all the smaller countries dutifully following along.