The Caves of Perigord

by Martin Walker

  “Of course,” said Francois. “We used them whenever we could capture one in the desert-much better than those little Bren guns you British gave us.” He looked down at the coiled bandoliers. “I have more than enough ammo, but I’ll need two men to carry it. I’ll take the Marine and the sergeant. They can both use a rifle.”

  “We rendezvous at the Gouffre-it’s about two miles through the hills from that stretch of rail track,” said Berger. “Francois, you had better go with Manners to agree about your firing point and his ambush point. Manners, you’ll need some men to give you covering fire after you blow the train. McPhee, you go back with the rest of the men to the Audrix camp.”

  “What about him?” McPhee jerked his thumb at the wounded veteran, who was swigging wine from the bottle Berger had brought. The vet patiently took the bottle from him, and finished bandaging the leg.

  “Sybille?” called Berger. “Comment va-t-il? How is he?”

  “He’ll have to stay here, unless there is a warm place nearby where he can go. I’ll have to take the bullet out today, and I’ll need boiling water,” she said.

  “O.K. There is old Boridot’s farm in the next valley. He’s a taciturn old buzzard, but he fought in the Great War. He’ll help, but I will have to come along to talk to him. McPhee, you and your men come with me and the vet to carry him, and then you head off for Audrix. All agreed? Any questions? Right, leave that food here for another time, pack up those guns, and let’s get moving.”

  There were no points along the stretch of single-track line, only culverts. It took five pounds of plastic to blow a culvert, and Manners couldn’t spare them. So he used the culvert as cover and decided on a simple charge to blow the track. He only had fifty meters of detonator cord and one detonator box. He tested the box, leaning down hard on the handle, and the little clockwork dynamo produced a spark. That would do. He took a handful of icy mud from the bottom of the culvert, and smeared it over his charge. The fumes of the 808 explosive had started his headache again.

  He felt terribly exposed. The railway ran alongside the road, and three times he had to duck into the culvert when traffic came by. There was a priest on a bicycle, then a German truck preceding a staff car, and then a gasogene, one of the civilian cars converted to run on gas generated by charcoal because of the petrol shortages. The gas bag was draped over the roof, and the things were so underpowered that they had to be pushed up steep hills. But for wartime France, it was often the only civilian transport on offer.

  He checked his watch. Almost four, and the sun was going down. He put his ear against the rail-no sound of a train yet. He peeked over the rails at the road. It was clear in both directions. He looked back up the hill and waved to where the three boys were installed, ready to give him covering fire if he needed it. His detonation point was as well concealed as he could make it, behind a big tree and a fallen log. He took the metal mirror from his shirt pocket and flashed it over toward the copse where Francois waited with the Spandau. He got an answering flash, and then sent the quick burst of Morse to say that he was ready. God knows what they would do for signals when there was no sun.

  His head was almost bursting with pain. He darted across to the road on top of the riverbank, and clambered down to dunk his head into the icy water. He held it below the surface, counted to ten, and came out gasping. That was better. The road was still clear. One last quick check of his charge, and he tidied the site, smoothing out the hollow in the gravel where he had knelt. So much easier to work in daylight. He put his ear to the rail again. Still nothing. No, perhaps a faint vibration somewhere deep in his head. He lifted his head, shook it to clear the water from his ears, and lowered it again. Yes, definitely a vibration. He clambered back up the hill to his detonating point and squatted behind the old log, smoothing his wet hair back with his hands. That was a foolish indulgence. He’d probably catch a cold, and he had nothing to use to dry his hair. He took off his leather jacket and used its woolen lining to soak up the worst of the water. That was better, and the warmth of his body would soon dry out the lining. Now he could hear the train.

  It took a very long time in coming along the level track, but the sound of the laboring steam engine was bounced back from the slope of the hillside. Certainly a freight, and heavily loaded. It must be the repair train, and if it weren’t, it would still block the line until they could get a crane in.

  He saw the smoke first, and then something came into sight. Not a locomotive, but a flatcar, piled high with sandbags protecting a machine gun post. Then the locomotive, and the gantry behind it for the big winch and pulleys. That was the repair train, and the poor undertrained fools were so unaccustomed to ambush that they didn’t know that they had played into his hands. Thank God they weren’t veterans from the Eastern Front battles against the partisans. The timing was always tricky when trying to derail a train with a single charge. But now he could detonate it beneath the flatcar, and the sandbags would contain part of the force of the explosion to rip an even bigger gap in the rail. And take care of the machine gunners. But what if they had another machine gun car at the rear? Oh Christ, he hadn’t thought of that. But no time for that now, and he pressed down on the detonator handle just as the flatcar reached his charge, and ducked his face deep into the leaves.

  The explosion was a hugely satisfying thud that sent the fallen log trembling, but when he raised his head to look, he couldn’t see a thing. Sand everywhere, falling into his damp hair, getting into his eyes, drifting down through the savagely shorn trees. It formed a great dust cloud made thicker by deep gouts of black smoke from the stricken locomotive and the sharp hiss of escaping steam mixed with the terrible scream of grinding metal as the rest of the train derailed.

  Slowly his vision cleared, as he heard his Maquis shrieking with joy from above. There was no sign of the machine gun or the soldiers, and the flatcar was folded almost in two where the locomotive had pushed it against the trees as it slumped from the gapped rail and toppled sideways to plow along the hillside. The repair train itself had jerked the other way, off the rails and across the road, and the gantry with the pulleys and the flatcars with their spare rails and the freight cars with their precious spare points had all toppled down the bank of the river where he had bathed his head only minutes beforehand. Down the track, two more freight cars lay on their side, but the last one was still on the rails. No sign of more Germans. Movement below him, where the driver was clambering out of the side of his wrecked train and bending to help haul something out. The fireman … Christ.

  “There may be some Germans left. Keep a watch here and at the far end of the train,” he called up the hill to his men, and he slid and staggered down and around the front of the train to help the engine driver. The steam was coming out so fast that he felt sure the boiler wouldn’t burst, but the smoke was everywhere, and the side of the engine was too hot to touch. His pulled his hand inside his leather sleeve, used that to get a purchase, and then he could put his hand under the fireman’s armpit and haul. They got him out and onto the road. The driver was too dazed to do anything but fall to his knees and vomit copiously. Manners went back to the crushed flatcar. No sign of the machine gun, and only the naked trunk of a single German soldier, his helmet still on his head but his legs gone. Then he saw another German, a bundle of clothing that had been blown into the cutting. Almost unconsciously, he tugged at the buttons on the blouse, pulled out a pay book and a wallet. It should tell him what units the Germans were using, he thought, stuffing them into his blouse.

  He clambered up the hill toward his men, the mud easier now with the fine layer of sand to give his boots a grip. The boys were standing in full view, their weapons hanging loosely by their sides, enthralled by the sight of the wrecked train. One threw his arms wide open to embrace Manners and the others began spontaneously to applaud. But there was no time for that. Manners bundled them up the hill, away from what was now an ambush site for Francois. They had to be well clear before the German patrols arriv
ed from le Buisson. Christ, they’d be angry. This line would be out for days, and a whole freight car of replacement points had fallen into the river. Maybe they could do something to make sure they could not be salvaged. Perhaps if he booby-trapped the door …

  Lungs heaving, their hands and faces scratched from the climb through the woods, they got to the ridge in time to see the German trucks coming along the road from le Buisson. God, they were badly trained. They should have been spaced at least two hundred yards apart in this country, and there should have been an armored car to lead them or at least a couple of motorcyclists. Had they no fear of an ambush?

  Francois waited until the trucks slowed to take a sharp bend in the road where it crossed the railway line, still almost a mile from the train crash. And then as the lead truck turned and rumbled across the crossing and down the slope, Francois had a perfect head-on shot with no deflection and he held his aim as the first short burst hit the road just ahead and the truck rolled into it. A sustained burst and the truck slowed as if it had hit a wall, and careered off the road and into a ditch. The second truck drove into the same burst of fire, drove through it and failed to make the bend and rolled into the river. Francois paused, switched his aim, and raked the last truck, now stopped just before the level crossing. The two trucks stuck in the middle were trying frantically to turn, soldiers leaping out into the trees. The last truck exploded as the petrol tank blew up and ammunition began to cook off. Long raking bursts into the trees, and then the sound of single shots as the rifles began firing at the soldiers. Francois would have to change the machine gun barrel soon. Another two bursts into the two middle trucks. More single shots. Now the Germans were firing back, but firing anywhere, Francois’s position still unspotted. Time to go. His Frenchmen were capering with joy behind him, the fools. They’d attract bullets. He pushed them down the slope beyond the ridge toward Audrix. His headache had quite disappeared.

  Boridot’s farm looked deserted and ramshackle and the small vineyard was thick with weeds. But the vegetable garden was well kept and blooming with early radishes and some of the fattest cabbages Manners had ever seen. There were some chickens pecking in the yard, and two dogs chained to rings in the stone wall. They came barking at Manners until their chains yanked them back as he pushed Berger’s bicycle through the sagging gate. It was held closed by a piece of old rope that looked as if it had come from the same batch that now served Boridot as a belt. The old farmer wore a faded red handkerchief on his head, the four corners tied into tiny knots to keep it in place, and wooden sabots instead of shoes. And his teeth gripped the aged pipe between his teeth with the same determination as his hands kept the gleaming shotgun pointed at Manners’s chest.

  “I have come to see the wounded man, the one who was shot in the thigh,” said Manners, suddenly conscious that he did not know the wounded man’s name, that he sounded foreign, and that a German might be asking the same sort of question. The barrel of the shotgun looked very big indeed. He scoured his mind for something reassuring to say. Had not Berger said that old Boridot too was a veteran? “You will remember from the Great War that it is the rule in the British Army that an officer must see to the comfort of his wounded men.”

  “It is all right, Grand-pere. This is the English officer,” said a woman’s voice, and the vet he had seen the previous day appeared in the doorway wiping her hands on a towel. She was wearing a full gray skirt and a white blouse, buttoned neatly to the neck, with her fair hair tied up in a large knot. Even wearing the same sturdy boots, she looked far more fetching than she had dressed in baggy pants as a hiker. “I know him. Berger introduced us.”

  “Is he really your grandfather?” Manners asked her as the shotgun was lowered and the craggy old man came forward to shake his hand.

  “No, I just call him that. I’ve known him all my life,” she said, coming forward to be kissed on both cheeks. It was a French greeting Manners always enjoyed, although it made him slightly uncomfortable, and he did it clumsily with an abrupt jerk of his head. She carried a scent of faded lavender, like the bowl his mother kept in her sewing room. He remembered her name was Sybille, and there was amusement in her eyes as he stepped back.

  “How is your patient?”

  “I’ve known worse, but not since the last pregnant cow whose calf was turned in the womb,” she said. “I’m glad to see you, because you must tell London to start sending medical supplies in the parachutes. Not just those field dressings, which will get us all arrested and shot if the Germans find them. We are short of everything, even aspirin. But the new sulfa drugs, can you get London to send some? And plain white bandages? And scalpels and gut for sewing wounds?”

  “I’ll try, Sybille. But I think they are more concerned with inflicting wounds than treating them.”

  “Well, come and see the old goat. Perhaps you can order him to stop trying to put his hand up my skirt.”

  “Shows he’s better,” grunted Boridot. “A little apero, to take the heat from the day?” He led the way inside, which smelled as gamy as a badger’s den. There was a huge cheese made from ewe’s milk on the table, and an earthenware dish containing a fat pate beside it. On an old couch, whose broken fourth leg had been replaced by a large stone, lay a middle-aged man with a clean bandage on his thigh and a half-filled glass in his hand.

  “My own pineau,” gestured Boridot proudly, and took his handkerchief off his head to wipe it around a cloudy glass. He filled it with a reddish-brown liquid from a liter bottle, and handed it to Manners. He poured himself another glass, and Sybille picked up the drink she had been sipping before she came to the door. The ration of four liters a month did not seem to be affecting this farm.

  “How goes it?” Manners asked the recumbent man. He looked half-drunk, and sounded even drunker when he said he felt well enough to fight some Germans again. Manners reached into his blouse to give him a packet of English cigarettes. Alongside the Players, he found the dead German’s pay book. Feldgendarmerie, Military Police-that told him nothing. He opened the leather wallet and found, to his surprise, a traveling chess set, with flat pieces that fit neatly into slits in the leather. No name or identification on it, so it might be useful to help the boys pass the time. He closed it, slipped it into his breast pocket, and then handed the cigarettes to the wounded man.

  “Do you want to get us all killed?” Sybille asked dryly. “The Germans find those, and we’re all dead.”

  “The Germans find a wounded man with a bullet hole in his thigh and we’re all dead anyway,” he replied neutrally. “Besides, old Boridot would blow them away.”

  She looked at him, just a bare hint of a smile on her face. No makeup hiding that fine skin, good eyes, he thought, the catalog forming in his mind by reflex. But somehow she seemed to want to make herself look plain. Tiredness, perhaps, too many years of war and occupation. With enemy soldiers around, he could understand an attractive woman wanting to look drab.

  “I want to thank you for taking care of him,” he told her formally. “I understand the risks you must be taking.”

  “I’m the one taking the risk, with that glamorous horse doctor,” belched the man on the couch. He lit a Players, looked at it suspiciously, and then handed the packet around.

  “It’s the best care you’re going to get, so treat her with respect. Otherwise, she might saw your leg off next time,” Manners said firmly, lighting Sybille’s cigarette. “May I pay your fee, madame? We are well supplied with currency.”

  “This cigarette will more than repay me. Besides, I’ve known this dirty old man since he used to watch us coming out of school to run home to our lunch. There’s not much to buy, anyway. Now if you had some coupons for clothes, or some of that parachute silk…. My husband sometimes smoked these, before the war. We went to London for our honeymoon,” said Sybille, and held up the glowing cigarette to watch the way the smoke curled. “God, I’ve almost forgotten what it tasted like.”

  “Buckingham Palace, Tower of London, Houses of P
arliament,” chanted the drunk on the couch. “Not very romantic.”

  “We’ve all forgotten a lot of things from peacetime,” Manners said. He wondered where her husband was now.

  “Is your husband a vet as well, madame?” he asked.

  “He was a vet. He was killed in 1940, somewhere near Calais with an artillery regiment which was wiped out holding the town to let the English escape from Dunkirk. Horse-drawn artillery, against panzers.”

  “The Germans have horse-drawn artillery too,” he said quietly. “And nearly a hundred thousand Frenchman got out with us at Dunkirk.”

  “I’m not blaming the English, monsieur. I blame the Germans, and that rotten government we had, and the whole foul, political mess of the prewar days. Communists, fascists, royalists, socialists, radicals-I spit on all of them.” She smoked her Players. “I think these things are very bad for the health. But not as bad as war.”

  “Well, I blame Hitler,” said Manners.

  “If not him, the Germans would have thrown up some other arsehole. They always do. Hitler, the Kaiser, Bismarck,” said Boridot. “We should have finished the job back in 1918. If we’d marched on to Berlin, Jacquot, and stayed there? That would have done it.”

  “We were both glad to get home, and you know it,” said Jacquot. “I thought I’d had my share of German bullets, last time.”

  “You’re just going to have to remember how to dodge them, Jacquot,” said Manners, relieved to have a name for the man. “I rely on the old soldiers like you to teach the young ones how to do it.” He put his empty glass on the table, thanked Boridot, and turned to go. Sybille rose too, and in automatic courtesy, he asked if he could escort her anywhere.

  “You seem determined to get me arrested, monsieur,” she laughed, as he helped her don a thick jacket of black wool. “Yes, I’d be pleased if you rode with me. But if we see any Germans, you have to promise to jump over the hedge.”