Martin Walker - The Caves of Perigord

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 Battalion 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.