The Caves of Perigord

by Martin Walker

  “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.”

  “This has been very difficult for me. I had not done this kind of research before, and I am sickened by what I found,” Horst said to Clothilde. “I knew, you see, what had happened here in theory. But I didn’t really know until I started going through those war journals and intelligence reports. All in clipped, official language.”

  “I know what you mean, my dear fellow,” said Manners. “I’ve written some of those things myself. Terrible language, trying to be as flat as possible while writing about terrible things. Like writing back letters to the wives and mothers of men who have been killed under your command. Grim stuff.” He went into the kitchen, and with the skill of an old campaigner immediately found the cupboard where Clothilde kept her glasses, and came back and started to pour. “Tell me, Horst, did you come across the name of Malrand in your researches?”

  “Just that formal report that Lydia gave me in Bordeaux. Nothing in the FTP or German military archives. but quite a lot about his brother, Berger. I’ve read his memoirs, of course, about getting captured and then being imprisoned in Toulouse.”

  “What about a chap called Soleil, code name for a Resistance leader in Belves, real name Rene Coustellier or another fellow called Lespinasse?”

  “Soleil, yes there is a lot about him in the Geissler reports, when they staged a big raid on Belves. Soleil got away. And Lespinasse was the name of one of the families from le Buisson who were interrogated because a son or nephew had run off and joined the Resistance. Their farm was burned and some family members deported. It’s all in the file.”

  Horst fell silent and remained so throughout the meal, but he drank a great deal, and smoked Clothilde’s cigarettes between courses. They told him about their day with Malrand, the new reward offer, and his rejection of Clothilde’s proposal for a scientific search for new caves. Each time, he only grunted. The wine they had so enjoyed buying went down without comment or pleasure. Manners, still poring over the research file Horst had brought, didn’t even get a reaction when he detailed the connection between Malrand and his father. The three of them kept up a lame conversation, trying without success to bring Horst into it. Finally, pushing aside his cheese, Horst asked for brandy, lit another cigarette, and reached for Clothilde’s hand.

  “One more thing in those files,” he said. “I wasn’t going to tell you, but you’ll find it anyway when you read it. Another name I came across in Geissler’s intelligence reports. It was Alfonse Daunier, your father. He was listed as the only source Geissler had inside the Resistance. He was the one who gave Geissler the parachute drop.”

  He poured out another glass of brandy and pushed it toward Clothilde. She took it without a word, her eyes fixed on his, her face suddenly bloodless.

  “It wasn’t what you think,” Horst went on slowly. “He wasn’t a collaborator. It was your mother. She was pregnant and Geissler brought pressure through her. He had her arrested, threatened her with a concentration camp, and then released her. He called it ‘the usual measures.’ Your father fed them information through her, to save her. And to save you, I suppose.”

  “Does it say how he died?” she asked flatly.

  “No, the Brehmer Division was transferred in late May. Geissler’s final report said he had handed on her file, as a source, to the Gestapo.” He gripped her hand, tightly. “It needn’t be true, Clothilde. Intelligence officers make up sources all the time, just to have something to tell their superiors.”

  “So it’s a lie, what they put on the war memorial-‘fusille par les Allemands’-shot by the Germans. The Resistance records are a lie.”

  “No, they’re not. He was killed at Terrasson when the Das Reich division stormed through to open the road to the railhea
d at Perigueux. The Resistance records are clear, the date, and the place. The body was found, Clothilde. You know that. Your father was shot by German troops, trying to fight them. The war memorial is true.”

  “It’s just the rest that is a lie, then,” she shot back. She poured herself another brandy, and pushed the bottle over to Lydia. “Whatever am I going to say to my mother?”

  Lydia decided to announce that she was giving up and going back to London when they all met the next morning at Clothilde’s museum at Les Eyzies. Clothilde had drunk her way down the bottle until her head sagged, and Lydia had thrown the two men out and bedded down on the couch, after putting Clothilde to bed and washing up the dishes. She had woken early, made coffee, and felt her spirits steadily droop as the watched the morning mist hang dully over the river. The sky was gray and it looked like rain. She took the small photograph of Manners’s rock from her bag and looked at it reproachfully. What a mess it had caused. She roamed through Clothilde’s bookshelves, pulling out Leroi-Gourhan on Lascaux, and a monograph by Clothilde on bone tools and their uses. Desultorily, she glanced through the pictures, read Clothilde’s conclusion while barely comprehending a word of it, and then turned to a picture book for children about life in the Neolithic age. That was more her level, she told herself glumly.

  Even after her shower, there seemed little point in her staying. Malrand’s big new reward would probably get the rock back. Horst was far better at the archive research than she would ever be. Manners was clearly more interested in Horst’s damned old archives than he was in her. And the whole project had become thoroughly depressing. She didn’t even feel so interested in Manners anymore, she told herself, as her hangover thumped steadily behind her eyes. Still, she was a lot better off than Clothilde, who looked like death when she rose, gulped the coffee Lydia had made, and disappeared into the bath for nearly an hour. She emerged, drank more coffee, lit a cigarette, and came out to the terrace to put her arms around Lydia and hug her tightly.

  “Thanks for staying. I’m very glad you did.” Smelling marvelous, Clothilde was dressed with her usual dash. She looked as if she had made a miraculous recovery. Lydia wished she could.

  “This is the kind of day when I ought to go to Paris and buy myself a new pair of shoes,” Clothilde said. “You look as though you could use the same therapy.”

  “I’m not sure why I’m still here,” said Lydia. “The whole thing has become very upsetting. For you, for Horst, and I’m feeling wretched. I think I’ll go back to London.”

  “And leave your handsome major to me?” laughed Clothilde. “Don’t be silly. These things that happened in the war happened to other people, not to us. They lived in an impossible time and had to do impossible things. We live in a time of possibilities. There are things we can do, people we can interview now we know so much more. There are geological maps we can look at, places to be searched on the ground. We can find this cave, Lydia, and teach Malrand a lesson.”

  “Where on earth do you get your confidence?”

  “From you. Last night was a disaster for me, and you rolled up your sleeves, took care of me, cleaned the place up, and fed me coffee this morning. You were confronted with a problem and you tackled it. Thank you. And while you had to wait for me, you carry on researching.” She gestured at the open books.

  “Now we have another problem to tackle, finding that cave. I’m not going to let you go back, Lydia. Your friendship is one of the good things to have come from this whole drama that has been launched upon us. We have all been conscripted into this, and we have to see it through.”

  She went into the kitchen, made toast and boiled two eggs, and forced Lydia to eat. They went out to the car, and Clothilde put the hood down, handed Lydia a headscarf and tied another around her own ginger curls, and raced off down the narrow back road to Les Eyzies. They had climbed the long stairs to the old ch‚teau tucked into the rock ledges above the town, the building site of the new museum busy below them, and found Horst and Manners already there, poking amiably around the exhibit of tools made from reindeer bones and antlers.

  “Did you know that I’d have to kill thirty reindeer to make you a necklace like this?” Manners said to Lydia by way of greeting. “Worth every terrified moment. You do look a treat, both of you. Poor old Horst and I had to nurse our hangovers with lots of coffee and croissants. You two look as if you’re fresh from the beauty parlor. Don’t know how you do it, but I’m very glad you do.”

  Horst did indeed look grim, but Manners’s cheerful babble got them across the embarrassments of the previous evening, and a determined Clothilde marched them into her office and started spreading very large-scale maps across her desk. Her office was small and neat, with a spectacular view across the river, but she quickly bustled them into action.

  “That’s the map for Cumont and la Ferrassie, where the parachute drop took place. And that’s the geological survey map of the same district. Major, find some drawing pins and stick them up on that corkboard on the wall. Horst, you know the geology. See what you find, and then you and the major can go and tramp the ground. He’s a soldier. If anyone can identify the kind of place his father would have picked to hide guns, he can. I suggest we meet back here just before the museum closes at five, have a drink, and compare notes.”

  “What are you two going to do?” asked Horst.

  “Well, we can’t go surveying the ground dressed like this. If you find anything worth a closer look, we’ll dress for it tomorrow. Today, Lydia and I have some old Resistance men to interview. Or we may decide we need to shop for a new pair of shoes.”

  “In which case,” smiled Lydia, “We’ll call you from Paris to put off our drinks.”

  The first two men they called on were also on the list that Manners had been given by Morillon back in Bordeaux. The railway man from le Buisson was called …tienne Faugere, and his memory was sometimes precise, sometimes vague. He lived with his married daughter, who made them coffee as they sat in the neat little garden to talk. He remembered Malrand, and a trade union organizer called Marat, and remembered being beaten up by Russian soldiers in German uniform while a French Milice tough he had been at school with asked him question after question.

  “I shot him the day the Allies landed,” the old man said proudly. “The local police decided it was time to change sides, arrested the local Milice types, and brought them to the square beside the cinema. There wasn’t much of a trial. But I told what he had done to me, and the chief of police gave me his revolver, so I went up and spat in his face and shot him in the head. He was crying. I had to shoot him twice. Your mum was there in the crowd, Clothilde, with all the women. Some of them came up and kicked the body. He’d been a devil with the women, that one, particularly the ones whose husbands were off in Germany. Then we went off to Tulle, and spent two days shooting Germans till they sent the tanks against us. I got away, but a lot didn’t.”

  “Is that where Marat was killed?” Clothilde asked.

  “Marat? He wasn’t at Tulle. I saw him at Brive, just before we all went up to Tulle. All the commandants had this meeting at the monastery of St-Antoine, trying to decide what to do, who would go to Tulle. There was a big row between our lot in the FTP and the Gaullists who said they had orders from London not to go. But Marat stayed behind, with those Spaniards of his. No, I got to see most of the lads at Tulle because they had me taking round ammunition, what little we had. I was a strong young lad in those days. Marat wasn’t there. I’d have known.”

  “Do you remember meeting an English officer or an American?”

  “I heard about the American. We called him the Red Indian because he had one of those funny haircuts. I never met him. I saw the Englishman one night, when they’d blown up the junction at le Buisson. I heard all these explosions and gunfire and went to the window and saw him getting away. I told the Germans that, when they beat me up. I had to tell them something. I couldn’t tell them about Marat and the way we got him all around the place on the tr
ains. We had this tool chest on the trains below the coal. We never used it because we always rigged up hooks so the tools we needed were in easy reach. Two meters long but very narrow. We hid him in there. I couldn’t tell them that.”

  They thanked him and left, and took the road for Audrix, to the next name on the list. Albert Escarmant had been one of the youngest of Berger’s group, the son of a farmer who had started by helping with the parachute drops. Now he ran the farm with his sons, who took the milk and butter and yogurt they made down to the local markets. Clothilde said she always bought from them, and knew the old man well. As they pulled into the muddy farmyard, Clothilde grinned at Lydia and said, “Remember those new shoes we talked about? Well, these aren’t new, but they are different.” And she pulled two sets of rubber boots, one very old and one quite new, from behind her seat, and handed Lydia the new ones.

  Old Albert remembered the English officer, le Capitaine Manners, and the crazy American, and Berger and his brother, whom he called “young Francois.” He remembered the night the Germans had roared into the parachute drop at Cumont, their guns blazing.

  “We wanted to scatter, but le capitaine wouldn’t let us,” he recalled. “He got us down into cover and firing back, and then ran among us, getting some to go round and take the Germans in the flank, and some more to try and help him creep up on the armored car with a Gammon bomb. It was one of those big ones with eight wheels. He didn’t get it, but he got us enough time for young Francois to get most of the guns away. Young Francois got me to cut the dead horses loose so we could get the carts. I finished up pushing mine and it was a nightmare. I had to jam a bough into the wheels to stop it running out of control. But the Germans didn’t get it.”

  “Where did you take the guns, Albert?”

  “I took mine down that track that goes past la Farge, and then down the hill to that dip just before you come to the ruined old windmill on the road that goes over to Rouffignac. That was the rendezvous point. We always had a rendezvous prepared. Then Berger sent me back up the hill to help with the horses, but it was all over by then and I was on my own. So I went the other way, across the ridge toward Limeuil, and swam the river to get back to the old camp we had by the Gouffre. The Germans had found that one, but I knew a place to hide before I tried to get back to the lads.”