Martin Walker - The Caves of Perigord

He bent forward to offer his hand to Manners, while Clothilde tried to embrace him on both cheeks, and Lydia hovered, her hand half-outstretched. Manners opened the file.

“You read German, and German script, my dear Major?”

“I can make a stab at it. NATO courses, you know,” said Manners vaguely, skimming through the sheaf of photocopied pages and stopping at a passage where the margin had been lined in red ink.

“There are several references to Resistance actions,” said Horst. “The first one came even as they were first deploying by train, just outside the village of la Farde, about fifteen kilometers north of Perigueux, just after the track crossed the small river Beauronne. The usual reprisals were inflicted, and the unit intelligence report claimed that they were a Communist band led by an American Red Indian and a mysterious Englishman-that would seem to point to your father, Captain Manners. There is a cross-reference to Gestapo records, which have not survived for this region in the archives. But I think that means the information was obtained by torture.”

“Two dead, four wounded, one truck destroyed and one armored car damaged. Not much of an ambush,” said Manners, skimming the casualty report.

“That was because the Brehmer Division had not yet taken formally under command some battalions of auxiliary troops, Russian refugees. They report only their own casualties from the armored car unit. There’s an appendix on the auxiliary casualties-forty-two dead and over a hundred wounded. It was quite an ambush, and the Red Indians, as the Brehmer Division called them, then became the unit’s top priority. The unit intelligence officer was a Hauptmann Karl-Heinz Geissler, a former panzer officer who had been badly wounded in the Kursk salient in the summer of 1943, and after convalescence, was transferred to antipartisan duties. That’s where he joined Brehmer. He was obviously a clever man and kept good records. He was killed in the Battle of the Bulge.

“The really interesting reference comes on the sweep operation the Brehmer unit staged after Geissler brought some brains to bear on the problem. He backtracked over all the most recent guerrilla actions and arrested and interrogated a large number of villagers from le Buisson, where there had been a demolition of the railroads and a couple of associated ambushes. They found three villagers with relatives who had joined the local Maquis. Geissler, using the routine developed on the Eastern Front, systematically arrested all the other family members, starting with those who lived on farms, on the assumption that they would be providing food to the Resistance. One from each family was shot in front of the others, and the survivors were then questioned in the usual vicious way. As a result, one arms dump and a Maquis camp were found on the plateau of Audrix, near a well-known cave called the Gouffre de Proumeyssac.”

“I know it well,” said Clothilde. “But it’s a tourist cave with stalagmites and stalactites-no art at all.”

“But this arms dump was found in another cave, which the intelligence report says was marked on no known maps. It goes on: ‘The arms cache was booby-trapped, but surveillance reported no subsequent guerrilla action in this district.’” Horst looked up. “That’s one place to start looking. There are a couple more. First, apparently there are catacombs under Belves that link it to some older caves.”

“No, I know them quite well,” said Clothilde. “They grew mushrooms there. Well searched, and no cave art.”

“O.K., what about Rouffignac? Geissler says the Red Indians put up ‘a fierce resistance’when they sent a column to search the cave there. They found a base camp, some food supplies, but no arms dump. Geissler had the cave searched, and kept a couple of companies there for a week, just looking.”

“We’ve thought of Rouffignac. We’ll look again, but it has been well searched.”

“All right. I saved the best for last. You know Perony’s famous site at la Ferrassie, where he found the burials?”

“Yes, I know it well. I worked on Delporte’s subsequent dig there in 1973, when we found the skeleton of the two-year-old. But that’s not a cave, it’s an overhang. And it was Mousterian period, maybe as much as fifteen thousand years before Lascaux.”

“In the hills above it in May 1944, on a flat plateau near a small village called Cumont, the Brehmer Division managed to interrupt a parachute drop. They captured a couple of farm carts and the parachutes and some containers and a lot of British guns, and under interrogation, one of the captured carters said he knew they were taking the guns to a secret place near la Ferrassie. An Englishman was in charge of the operation. That’s it. He died under interrogation. They searched high and low but found nothing.”

“I know of no caves around there,” said Clothilde. “None at all.”

“The carter was not a local. He was a railway man from Normandy called Marcel Devriez who was working in Perigueux and the Milice records listed him as a suspected Communist. Under interrogation, he said he was only driving the cart because the farmer who was supposed to drive it was shot when the Germans opened up, and he was trying to get it away. He was unmarried and had no surviving family in the region. The Gestapo raided his home address in Perigueux, and found it empty. But they did find a lot of anti-Nazi propaganda in both French and Spanish.

“From the Resistance records in Bordeaux, I traced Devriez. He’s on the Perigueux war memorial for 1944, and was listed in Bordeaux as a member of the FTP, the Francs-Tireurs et Partisans, who were mainly Communists. He was in a group run by a shadowy man called Marat, who was one of the aides to the famous Colonel Georges of the Limousin, and very definitely a Communist. Marat disappeared in the summer of 1944, according to the few available FTP records, possibly killed in the attempts to attack the SS Das Reich Division.”

“Surely all those bodies were recovered and identified,” said Manners. “That’s how the names got on the war memorials.”

“Not Marat’s body, along with eight more of his men, and possibly some more who are simply listed as ‘Spanish comrades.’ Marat was last seen in Brive on the eighth of June, trying to persuade the Gaullists and other Resistance groups to join the general uprising on the day after the British and Americans landed at Normandy. He was turned down flat. The Resistance, which took its orders from London, had been told very firmly to get involved in no such foolhardy adventures. The FTP archives assume that Marat and his men were among those killed in the fighting in Tulle, or in the German reprisals. A lot of buildings were burned down, with bodies inside, and that seems the most likely explanation why they were never found. The Limoges command of the FTP was one of those that sent out in May 1944 the order to launch the national insurrection as soon as the Allies came ashore on D-Day, whenever that would be. Limoges was Marat’s base. The order probably came from him, or he felt bound by it. Anyway, despite all the pleas from London and from the Gaullists, the FTP went ahead with this mad plan to seize control of the district, starting with Tulle and Brive. Tulle alone proved too much for them, and the German garrison held out until some panzer reinforcements came from the Das Reich division. They smashed their way through the FTP guerrillas, and starting hanging the prisoners.

“That’s it.” Horst sat down again, looking drawn. Clothilde came and sat down beside him, and put her hand on his.

“That’s brilliant, Horst,” said Lydia, making herself busy with the roses, looking for vases. “You look shattered, you poor man. But really very well done. It just shows what a professional scholar, a true researcher, can do.” Roses in one hand, she thrust the unopened champagne bottle at Manners. “Here, make yourself useful.”