The Caves of Perigord

by Martin Walker

  “We beat Rommel,” Jack said calmly. “We beat the living daylights out of Rommel and his panzers. You know that, Francois, you were there. But first we had to learn his lesson.”

  “I know. Train hard, fight easy. Train together, never fight apart. I learned it, too, even before you. We had Rommel and his 7th Division coming at us and through us in 1940.” The last words were torn out of his mouth by the wind’s rising howl. Francois stood up, slapping his hands together, spitting out his cigarette, shouldering the pack, and preparing to move off. “And we held him off for a week at Bir Hakeim, even with those silly little antitank guns you gave us.”

  “You’re forgetting something,” said the Englishman. Francois shrugged and knelt to pick up the glowing ember of the cigarette, squeezing out the glow with his hardened fingers, then shredding the tobacco into the wind, screwing up the tiny shred of paper and stuffing it into a pocket. No traces. They marched on down the hill toward the loch, the ground getting steadily wetter, both men scanning the shore and the dead ground for signs of ambush. There would be one, somewhere before the end of the exercise.

  Jack Manners needed no reminding. That was when they had met, in that dreadful summer of 1942 when Rommel’s Afrika Korps had broken through the British lines south of Tobruk, and destroyed the Free French at Bir Hakeim with day after day of tank and Stuka bombardment. Jerry had picked off the undergunned and underarmored British tanks in his usual style and rolled them all the way back to El Alamein. Jack, on leave in Cairo, had suddenly been called in as a French-speaker to help organize a reception for the pitiful remnants of General Koenig’s Free French garrison. Francois had got out on a German motorbike, a BMW he had taken from a dispatch rider in an ambush, and ridden north to join the British and keep on fighting. That was the meeting, Jack supposed, that made this partnership and this posting and this blisteringly bloody training course in Argylle inevitable. But if he were honest with himself, he’d have volunteered for SOE anyway.

  Special Operations Executive, fulfilling Churchill’s orders to “set Europe ablaze,” was how the lecturers told it. They hadn’t done much in the past three years. A few escape lines to get downed RAF pilots out of Occupied France and into Spain, a few sabotage operations, some intelligence tapped out on wireless by frightened operators waiting for the German direction-finding trucks to track them down. He would never have volunteered for that. But this new operation of the Jedburgh teams was going to be different. Training the French Resistance, bringing in the arms that could let them fight, and then leading them into battle behind the German lines to destroy the bridges and the communications that would otherwise bring the panzer divisions that would throw the Allied invasion force into the sea. No spying, no skulking about the French countryside in some shabby civilian clothes. He would wear his uniform and fight as a soldier. That was a mission worth training for. Suddenly he felt Francois’s hand close tightly on his arm.

  “Over there, opposite the island,” the Frenchman breathed. Jack peered into the darkness. The man had eyes like a cat. Maybe there was something, a bulky shape, perhaps some movement. It looked like a lorry. It was hard to tell. “We go round behind them,” Francois said. “We ambush them.”

  “Careful,” said Jack, his tiredness and his fever quite gone. “It is a favorite trick they use. The tethered goat. They show us a target that looks easy, tempting us to ambush them, when they have the real ambush set up to catch the ambushers. You go right. I go left. We meet on the loch shore. If we see no signs of ambush, then we hit the lorry from the back. If one of us sees an ambush, take it out with a burst from the Sten, and the other rushes the truck. If one of us gets caught, he sets off a Thunderflash to warn the other. See a Thunderflash, then get out of here and back to camp. Hear a Sten, rush the truck.”

  They separated, moving swiftly down the hill, almost instinctively avoiding the loose shale that would betray the sound of their footsteps, skirting rocks that were light enough for a silhouette to stand out. The three-week course had taught them a lot. Jack felt the ground start to flatten beneath his feet, and knelt to stretch out his hand, feeling for a trip wire before the inevitable track that follows the loch shore. Nothing, but he felt the sudden absence of heather, and ridged mud and flint beneath his fingers. This was the track.

  He paused, listened, and then crawled across. No trip wire on the far side. He could see the lorry more clearly now against the water, about fifty yards to his left. No sign of movement. If he were setting up the ambush, it would be straight ahead, one man facing the truck to see any sign of movement against the water, another facing this way to watch the track. The wind was still strong enough down here to cover the sounds of his movement. He leopard-crawled along the slight ditch by the track, aiming to get thirty yards to the flank. Grenade-throwing distance. Cautiously, he parted the thin grass to peer through. A minute passed before he saw the movement, a fleeting blur that could have been a man’s head.

  He slipped the Sten from his shoulder, pulling the bolt back as he rose, and then sprayed the ambush point with a short burst of blanks as he charged it. He changed direction to his left and fired another burst, dropped and rolled to the right, and fired again. Rose and half-darted, half-staggered the last few yards to the ambush and jumped into the depression, to see an outraged sheep scamper complainingly away. A blaze of lights from the truck caught Francois, charging upon it from the loch side, as two Commando sergeants brought their hands together in slow, ironic applause.

  “Not bad at all, laddie,” came a cheerful Scots voice from his rear. “If Jerry starts putting sheep on duty, you’ll have them cold. But he’s not that short of men, yet.”

  The instructors slept in comfortable rooms in the grim, granite country house. At least, Jack assumed they were comfortable from his own billet in the Nissen hut, a semicircle of corrugated iron that ran with water on warm days and grew a sheen of ice on cold ones. The tiny iron stove in the center of the hut could toast one side of anyone standing over it, while his back froze. His clothes were always damp. There was room to hang only socks above the stove. He and Francois had been the first of the Jedburgh teams to arrive, and had grabbed the lower bunks closest the stove, and put their kit on a third, to reserve it for the American officer who was supposed to join them.

  “The Americans are always late,” said Francois. He was lying on his bunk, smoking, as Jack tried to secure his socks so that they would not drop onto the stove and burn. “Three years late in 1914, two years late this time. So they are improving. Maybe our American will turn up next week, bringing us tinned peaches and Lucky Strikes.”

  “At least they brought us some decent tanks in the desert,” Jack said. The socks looked secure. He’d already lost one irreplaceable woolen sock to that damn stove, and even his mother’s dedicated knitting could hardly keep on unraveling old cricket pullovers to make him new ones. Maybe if the Americans could bring as many socks as their troops were distributing stockings to the English girls … He damped down the uncharitable thought.

  “Ah yes,” mocked Francois. “One wonders how we foolish Europeans ever managed our wars without them. Marlborough, Napoleon, Bismarck-if only they had had American tanks.”

  “Bismarck was no general. He was a politician,” said Jack, reasonably.

  “So he did more damage, perhaps. The politicians are the enemy, Jack. The ones who tell us what we are supposed to be fighting for, beyond the obvious logic of defending our countries and our women. Beware the politicians. They lost France, nearly lost England, and will probably lose Europe even if we do win this damn war. You are right, my friend, about the Americans and their wealth. They have ensured that we will win this war with their bombers and their tanks and their factories. But I do not think they have understood that the most important war will be the one that comes next, the one against the Communists.”

  Jack shrugged; Francois was always talking about Communists. There was no point to telling him that Uncle Joe Stalin and the Red Army were
holding down two hundred German divisions on the Eastern Front when the British had been fighting just four of the bastards in Africa. One war at a time was Jack’s motto, and he’d count himself lucky if he got through this one.

  “You will see, my friend, when we get to France,” said Francois, lighting yet another Players from the stub of the one he had been smoking. “Today it looks as if the Communists are the main part of the Resistance. But the moment we start rallying men to ambush the German columns and blow up the bridges, the Communists will disappear with their weapons. They will disappear and watch us Gaullists die with our patriots, and then they will creep back out from their cellars and use the guns we fly in to take over what is left of France. They will do the same in Italy, in Belgium, and Holland. The next war has started already, my dear innocent Englishman. And the Americans will be late for that one too.”

  The door of the Nissen hut opened, and a gale blew in. It was followed by a large green kit bag, a curse, and a very wet young man in an almost white belted raincoat and a small pointed forage cap, which seemed designed to steer the rain straight down his face and neck. A big round metal helmet hung from the strap of the gas mask haversack that was slung over one shoulder, and bumped rhythmically against the rifle that hung from the other. He was also burdened by a pistol holster, a map case, an electric torch, and another haversack on his back.

  “Do you always carry all that?” inquired Francois politely, in his precise English.

  “Only when I’m traveling light. You ought to see me drop in by parachute,” said the American, dumping his burdens one by one and spraying water over the bunks as he flung open his raincoat to approach the stove. Jack stretched out a hand to save one of his socks from falling onto the top of the stove. The other had been spattered with the rain that the American was shaking from his oddly cut dark hair. His head was shaved, except for a wide strip that ran proudly from front to back.

  “Captain James Tecumseh McPhee, U.S. Rangers, at your service, gentlemen. Don’t ask about the Tecumseh, I get touchy. And I’m so hungry and so wet that I’m touchy enough. Just let me hug this stove and get some warmth into these godforsaken bones, and if one of you guys wants to look inside that big haversack he’ll find a bottle of Johnnie Walker’s finest, which my ancestors invented specially in order to survive this fucking climate.” He put his hands within a millimeter of the glowing stove lid and sighed deeply. Suddenly he broke into French. “We all need one drink, and I need three, and I’m sorry about knocking down the sock.”

  “They stopped serving dinner about two hours ago, I’m afraid,” said Jack. “But I’m sure the cookhouse can do you a SPAM sandwich.”

  “SPAM,” grunted the American. “As my great-grandfather’s old commander once said, war is hell.” He turned from the stove to the haversack, pulled out a bottle of scotch, a large can of ham, three oranges, a bottle of Martell brandy, and a smaller can that he tossed at the recumbent Frenchman.

  “Foie gras,” said Francois, in tones of worship. “I have not seen foie gras since 1940.”

  “It’s my last can. The reason I volunteered for this crazy assignment was that I reckoned it was about the only chance I’d get to find some more.” He pulled out another can of ham, and then took a complicated knife from his pocket, prized out a can opener, carved his way efficiently around the rim, and brought out some oatmeal biscuits. He tossed the can opener to Francois and opened the scotch.

  “When my great-grandfather heard General Sherman make his celebrated remark, he thought to himself that war could be made pretty tolerable so long as one kept lots of good friends in the commissariat, a pearl of wisdom that he passed down through the family. I have made bosom buddies of the modern equivalent, the ferry pilots who bring the B-17s over here. A doting mother, a moderately considerate father who was too bad at making money in the twenties to lose any in the Wall Street crash, combines with regular transatlantic flights and a decent scotch ration to permit me to test great-grandpa’s theories to the limit. And once we get to France, I guess we live off the land for as long as our livers can take it. Gentlemen, here’s to war,” and he passed around the scotch.

  “You wouldn’t happen to have a Sherman tank hidden in that magnificent haversack, old boy?” inquired Jack as he took the bottle. The American’s eyebrows lifted, and he smiled sunnily, waiting for Jack to continue. “If we’re going to live off the land, as you say, we might find one comes in rather useful.”

  “The land,” intoned Francois, inhaling the scent of the foie gras on his biscuit, “is not what it was, since the Boches have been at it. But we shall conduct ourselves in the spirit of your admirable great-grandfather, and no doubt we shall get by. And if starvation threatens, we can always count on our intrepid English colleague to catch himself another sheep. After our last exercise, I can tell you that he is very good at hunting sheep.”

  “Better than foxes, I guess,” said the big American around a mouthful-of canned ham. “At least you can eat them.”

  In the three weeks remaining of their fieldcraft training at Arisaig and Loch Ailort, the American showed that he had little to learn. Fit and fast, and fresh from parachute training and Rangers school in the States, he won grudging praise from the instructors and the affection and respect of the English cavalryman. Francois, who had already accepted Manners as a comrade of the desert war, was more guarded with the American. It began when McPhee said casually that he had read Francois’s book about the war in Spain, and asked if he had ever some across a college friend who had volunteered for the Lincoln Brigade. Manners had no idea what they were talking about, and had never heard of the book. Nor had he known that Francois had written one.

  “You didn’t know our little partner here was a glittering light of the French intelligentsia? College girls back home would buy his book and moon over that sexy photo in the frontispiece even if they couldn’t understand a word of it,” he explained. “Francois is the European civilization we’re all fighting for, Jack. We’re just the rude mechanics, you and me.”

  “Your Lincoln Brigade were all Communists,” said Francois. “They did what Moscow wanted, not much for Spain.”

  “Well, I guess some of them probably were,” McPhee said lazily. “But the guy I knew, he just wanted to stop fascism. He got back, too. He’s in the Marines now, in the Pacific theater. But a lot of British guys went to that International Brigade, Jack. Maybe even some guys you knew.”

  “Barely knew there was a war on, old boy. I was in Palestine at the time, putting down an Arab rising, and then India, playing polo at Quetta.” Jack laughed. “Great training for tank warfare, polo. The old regiment hung on to the horses as long as they could, then they put us into armored cars. Never could understand why the wretched things didn’t go when I tried to feed them oats. The only chap who seemed happy with the conversion was the farrier. He said there wasn’t much difference between horseshoes and tank treads.”

  “You have just been introduced to the subtlety of English humor,” Francois explained. “Jack here fought his way back and forth across Africa two-or was it three? — times. Against the Italians, all the way to Benghazi until Rommel’s panzers pushed them back to Egypt. And then back again to Benghazi until Rommel pushed them back to Egypt again.”

  “See, I told you.” Jack laughed again. “Just like polo. We called it the Benghazi handicap.”

  “A simple soul, our Jack,” said Francois. “No politics in the desert. Just war as a kind of cricket.”

  “Why aren’t you flying, Francois?” the American wanted to know. “You flew in Spain, shot down a few fascists as I recall.”

  “The Allies are not short of pilots in this war,” Francois replied. “But there are not enough Frenchmen ready to go back and work with the Resistance. The war in the air is simple. The war on the ground in France will be complicated, at least for me if not for you two. You are just fighting a war. Like all Frenchmen, I have the peace to think about.”

  When they were posted so
uth to Stevenage for the demolition course, just as the Allies took Sicily and the Italians pulled out of the war, McPhee had the more to learn. He seemed confused between the use of plastic explosives in cutting charges to take out pylons and railway lines, and the ammonal for the lifting charges to destroy bridges. Manners came up with the memory trick that seemed to help him. P for plastic and for precision; A for ammonal and to annihilate. But when they moved on to Huntingford for the course in industrial demolition, the American seemed to get confused again.

  “Not too good on destroying things, fellas,” as the doctored lubricant grease with the grit that would grind away at industrial bearings smeared itself onto his clothes and face. “I guess it goes against the grain.”

  They lived in one another’s pockets, always training together, given weekend leave passes at the same time. Once, they went back to the Manners family home in Wiltshire, a small country house with one wing that had been rebuilt after the Parliamentarians had destroyed it in the English Civil War. “You would always be a Royalist, Jack,” Francois had laughed, as McPhee shook his head in disbelief at the age of the place and the deferential pleasure of an elderly serving man and the even older cook at the return of the young master. His father, the general, was somewhere in India. His mother appeared for meals, but was otherwise in her garden.

  “I guess we know what you’re fighting for, Jack.” McPhee grinned as they took the train back to London, ready to start the black propaganda course at Watford. “For the King-Emperor and the old landed estate.”

  “Did you not know, McPhee?” Francois interrupted. “This was a farewell visit. The house has been requisitioned to become a brigade HQ for American troops. Her ladyship will be moving out into the lodge, from which redoubt she will try to protect her garden against your gallant countrymen.”

  “I didn’t know Mummy had told you about that,” said Jack. “But it won’t be for long. We get the old place back, once the invasion goes in and the war is over.”