The Caves of Perigord

by Martin Walker

  They came back dragging the gutted bodies of the deer and her fawn on two frames that Deer had cut with his ax. Two long saplings lashed together at one end with creeper, and then a crossbar lashed to the other ends to make a long, thin triangle. Another crossbar and then the two frames were complete for the long haul back down the valley. The rocks above their camp would be too steep, and Deer wanted to avoid the long route by which they had come. So they tried to find a path down the head of the valley, but brush and sudden cliffs and gullies forced them farther and farther off their route.

  Finally they came to a group of rocks with a short drop to a stretch of grassland below that led to the stream. Deer sent Moon down the rock and taking the weight of the straddled legs of the first frame, pushed its apex down toward her, rested the width of the frame on the lip of rock, and then scrambled down to join her. They lifted the rest of the frame down, and he scrambled back up for the second, heavier frame that carried the doe. It was then that he saw the dark mouth of the cave between the rocks, as tall as he and perhaps twice as wide. First, they brought down the second frame, and then Deer threw a stone into the cave and listened to hear if he had disturbed any creature within. Silence. He took Moon’s spear and stepped into a short tunnel, dry underfoot and rising gently. He waited for his eyes to grow accustomed to the darkness after the sunlight outside and crept forward.

  Beyond the tunnel, the cave widened and the roof rose and he was in a chamber that seemed almost light from the whiteness of the chalk that formed the walls. He reached out to touch it, as smooth as the walls of the cave he had known so well, a canvas that cried out for his skill. Feeling with his feet, he felt no dung, no signs of habitation, and there was a cool blandness in the air of the place that suggested no living creature had lived here.

  He called for Moon to join him, and she came, her arms and face wet from where she had been rinsing the dried blood from her limbs in the stream that ran down the rocks. Her eyes grew big with wonder as she entered the broad cavern, and she said, “We hardly need your lamp.”

  They explored farther, and found another much lower tunnel at the rear of the cave, where the chalk walls gave way to a browner stone. They heard the trickle of water ahead, sounding muffled as if by an echo, and he had a sense of great space but now there was too little light to see and the ground began sloping steeply under his creeping foot so he turned back. It was then that he saw, below the chalky walls, the glint of smooth, almost polished stone. He bent and tugged, and a fist-sized chunk of flint came away in his hand. There were more stones along the base of the wall, and as he went to the tunnel to show Moon, the light made the flint in his hand almost green.

  She had left the cave and was studying the site, the rocks behind them, the running stream and the stretch of meadow that reached down to the stream below. They could see the rock where their camp lay, but the place where they had slept was fringed by trees. They could see far down the valley to the bend beyond which lay the great river.

  “This is a good place,” she said, and took his hand. He showed her the flint, and she nodded, as if such bounty was always meant to be. He left her building a fire, and he went down across the stream and through the trees to their old camp, to bring the rabbit from its cache and carefully brush away all signs of their earlier fire. But he spent a long moment looking at the grass where they had first lain together, at the sheltering overhang under which they had slept. There was another rabbit in his trap, and he came back to her burdened and then moved at the fittingness of it, his woman skinning the deer they had caught by their fire, the shelter of the cave behind her, and the promise of walls for his craft.

  CHAPTER 18

  Perigord, May 1944

  The ambush site was not perfect, but it was the best Manners could do. They were far enough from a road or track to delay any counterattack from the armored cars. And McPhee was stationed at the only possible approach route with ten men, three Bren guns, and enough Gammon grenades to fashion a mine that could blow the wheels or tracks from any vehicle that tried to use it. Manners had left him checking the rag stoppings in the Molotov cocktails.

  The cutting was old and shallow, and ended in a curve that ran alongside a stand of old timber. Some of the oaks were fifty feet high, and the woodmen had sawn their trunks more than half through, supported the gaps with wedges, and pushed mud into the fresh scars in the trees to disguise them. Lacking water, they had all pissed into the earth to make the mud. Manners had rigged belts of plastique around each trunk. Once the armored train had passed, he intended to blow the trees to prevent it from coming back to bring its guns into the fight. He had placed another camouflaged charge at the entrance to the cutting, to prevent the target train from reversing out of danger. The escape routes were planned, the ammunition was checked, the Mills grenades had their fuses in place. And on the far side of the cutting, Malrand’s Spandau was well dug in and carefully camouflaged. Manners had walked the cutting twice, his foot sore but just about healed, to check if the ambush could be seen.

  He was more than nervous. This was the most ambitious operation they had tried. Sixty men and four trucks hidden in the woods, two of them on loan from Soleil. If this went wrong, it would undo almost all that his team had achieved since they landed, and cripple the Resistance in this part of France. But it was worth the risk, and not just because of the importance of the target. This was an operation that had Berger’s Gaullists working hand in hand with Marat’s Communists of the FTP. Getting those two to put aside their differences and work together was a crucial part of his mission. And crippling the Brehmer Division before it became operational made military sense. He bit down the thought that the reprisals against the local civilians would be savage. If half of what Marat said about the Brehmer troops was true, they’d be burning and killing their way across Perigord whether he fought them or not.

  And when the armored train came into view at last, he understood just how viciously the Brehmer Division intended to fight this war. The first thing he saw, being pushed along in front of the locomotive, was a flatcar loaded with French civilians. God, they had children there, too, with machine guns trained on them! No Frenchman would be able to detonate a mine under the front of that train. Thank the Lord his plan didn’t call for that.

  The armored train passed slowly, that dreadful flatcar, then the locomotive, the coal tender, and the steel boxes with loopholes on each side. Then the sandbagged flatcar with the twin 37mm antiaircraft cannons, and another steel box. Then the gap, and the second locomotive came into the head of the cutting, one of the familiar local trains with a long line of passenger carriages, the usual sandbagged machine gun posts at front and rear.

  The timing would be crucial now. The armored train began to take the bend, picking up speed as it left the cutting, the antiaircraft guns about to disappear around the curve when he fired the detonator. The five explosions came almost as one, a long, deafening ripple, and the great oaks jerked and began to lean. Oh, Christ, that first one was falling to the side where it would block the others. No, the second one swayed slowly, ponderously into it and gathering speed they both crashed down the slope and onto the antiaircraft gun and the last armored carriage of the locomotive. There was the deep, clanging sound of a great bell being rung, and as the dust rose he saw a great heaving barrier of wood and boughs and leaves that were still whipping back and forth. And the Spandau began ripping at the thin wooden sides of the passenger cars on the second train.

  The noise was deafening as the Bren and and Sten guns joined in from his side of the cutting, and Manners watched the sparks rising frantically from the locked wheels of the second train as it tried to brake. But with slow, inevitable grace, it ground on, thrusting the sandbagged flatcar before it into the tangle of fallen trees. Soldiers jumped and scrambled from doors and windows as the flatcar upended and twisted to one side and the locomotive plunged like a blind bull into the crushed ruin of what had been the last carriage of the armored train.

&n
bsp; The shriek of escaping steam almost drowned out the sounds of firing and Manners saw rather than heard the flashes of grenades being tossed down onto the train as its carriages seemed to bounce and then sag their way off the tracks. But the Germans were fighting back, the machine gun post at the rear of the train spraying the ridge of the cutting through the great spray of sand and dust that showed Malrand’s Spandau was trying to suppress their fire. More grenades dropped, and Manner’s saw one of Marat’s men beside him tumbled back with his jaw torn away by a bullet, the moistened towel around his Sten suddenly soaking bright with blood.

  Manners ducked beneath the skyline and darted along to the trench where Lespinasse and three of Berger’s men were waiting to ambush any flank attack that might come from the troops who had been in the front of the armored train. The fools, they were out of the trench and over by the tree stumps, craning their necks to see the damage. He pushed them angrily back into position behind the Bren. He had to be sure this flank was secure.

  Back to what was now a firefight, and it was getting time to leave. Earth was kicking up constantly from the edge of the cutting as the Germans began to reorganize, and there was too much dust to see where the third train might be. He looked around desperately for his detonator boxes. The ground that had come to seem so familiar in the hours of waiting was now unrecognizable after the disappearance of those landmark trees. He clenched his eyes shut and concentrated. The tree stumps were there, so he had been here. He edged to his right and looked again. He was on the lip of the little hollow where he had waited. The boxes were less than a yard from his hand. He scurried down and pressed the handle on the second detonator to fire the charge that would blow the tracks behind the ambush, half expecting a failure. Any stray bullet or excited boot could have cut the wire. But no, a crashing explosion that even his ringing ears could hear.

  He took the whistle from his pocket and began blowing long, regular-blasts, the signal to disengage. No firing from Lespinasse’s team on the right. No sounds of battle from McPhee’s post back at the track half a mile behind him. Still blowing his whistle, he bent to the crumpled man with the shattered jaw whose hand clutched at his throat, trying vainly to stop the pumping jets of blood from his artery as he stared in dying desperation at the English captain. Manners turned away and trudged along the line, blowing his whistle and telling his men to pull back and disperse. He could count on Malrand’s Spandau to hold off any counterattack from the third train. He could always count on Francois.

  Sybille’s gramophone served the useful purpose of blanketing the sound of the radio, when he listened to the personal messages that were read over the French service of the BBC. And at six-thirty one evening, as he strained to hear over the sound of Maurice Chevalier’s “Valentine” from the parlor, Manner’s heard the alert message. “La fee a un beau sourire.” The fairy has a lovely smile. He smiled and forced himself to listen to the mystifying remainder about the panda being a bear and the camel being hairy and the carrots being ready to cook, and then leaped in the air, turned off the radio, and spun Sybille into a brief, twirling dance.

  “The invasion. It’s coming,” he said, beaming at her and kissing her boisterously. “That’s our alert.”

  “What? Tonight?” she gasped, squeezed too tightly in his arms.

  “A week, ten days. But it’s coming. They’re on their way.” He threw his head back and closed his eyes, hardly aware of her stiffening.

  “If they are on their way, then so will you be,” she said quietly, not looking at him. Her eyes were shadowed with tiredness. Up half the night at Boridot’s farm for a dying sow, and then out again to St-Alvere tending two boys with stomach wounds who had been shot when the Germans raided a training camp. She looked as if she had not slept for days.

  “I suppose I should thank you,” she said, almost angrily. “I am out of my hibernation, out of my little sheltered space where I could tell myself there was no war, no Germans, no great drama sweeping us all away into causes and passions. You pulled me back to this anguish we call living, living for the moment.”

  “Berger pulled you back, Sybille. I only met you when the war had already pulled you back to life,” he said in a tone so reasonable that he knew it was a mistake as soon as he spoke. Her eyes blazed and she pulled back her hand as if to slap him, then her shoulders slumped and she seemed to soften, turning the threatened blow into a nervous plucking at his arm, and then lifted her hand to stroke his cheek.

  “Soon you will go,” she said dully, and came into his arms.

  “But then will come the Liberation, and I’ll be back,” he said. He looked at the room, the heavy furniture and faded carpet, a little Godin stove that glowed almost red in winter, the chaise longue where they had made urgent love when Francois brought him back from the kennels. The scent of lavender was familiar to him now, mixed with the antiseptic from her surgery. And he wondered whether he would see it all with the same fond eyes after the war.

  “Another soldier promised me that he would come back,” she said against his chest. “In this very room. I don’t want to lose a second man. I have given enough to this war already.”

  “It’s almost over, Sybille. The invasion is coming. The war will be over by Christmas.”

  “They said that in 1939. And they said it in 1914. They always say it and it’s never true. Your invasion could be thrown back, or frozen in four more years of trench warfare.”

  “That’s why I have to go now. Down here in Perigord, all over France, people like us listened to the radio tonight and are getting ready to make sure the invasion doesn’t fail. The more Germans we fight here, the fewer there will be on the beaches.”

  Dry-eyed and unsmiling, she took him up the stairs to her bed and took off her clothes as if she were undressing for a bath. He watched her fold them carefully and lay them on a chair. And then with more determination than passion, she took him to her, and for once her eyes remained closed throughout. With so little response from her, he felt wooden and almost mechanical, his flesh urgent and pumping but his mind remote and concerned. He slowed and kissed her neck, her cheek, her closed eyelids.

  “I cannot leave you like this, Sybille, but I cannot stay,” he murmured.

  “Don’t go,” she said, her arms tightening around him, and she began to move beneath him, her hips rising gently to press him in a rhythm that she controlled. It was slow and insistent, like the rocking of a boat in the tug of the tide, and it surprised him with her strength. A part of his mind was still detached, observing, as she seemed to make love to him and to pleasure herself by an act of pure will. Her urgency released a great wave of tenderness in him that swept him almost peacefully away, until his breathing slowed again and the room came back into focus and he saw that her face was wet with tears.

  “I’ll come back, Sybille,” he said. “I’ll always come back. This is my home now, with you.” With a final, lingering kiss, he rose and dressed and was washing his face at the kitchen sink when the soft rapping came at the back door.

  It was Lespinasse, looking grim and frightened. “There’s bad trouble at Terrasson,” he said. “Young Francois has a car.”

  This was a strange new period for Resistance work, both safer and more dangerous at the same time. The Germans and the Vichy forces had both started concentrating their troops in order to mount big sweeps and searches to attack the growing numbers of Maquis bands. But it meant they had withdrawn posts from the smaller towns, and there were hardly any small patrols, so it was safer for the Resistance to move around and to steal and requisition cars and trucks. The gendarmes who remained at their small local posts were siding, more or less openly, with the Resistance. So Manners, who had started on foot and then progressed to a bicycle, was now accustomed to racing around the countryside by car. If they did meet the enemy by accident, it probably spelled disaster because the Germans now traveled in big and well-armed columns. And there were no more soft targets on the rail networks.

  “It’s that bast
ard Marat with those guns you let him have,” Francois spat, when Manners joined him on the road above the cemetery. “He took his men into Terrasson last night, probably with the agreement of the gendarmes. He blew down their door, took their pistols and rifles, robbed the post office, and then shot the local legion chief and some woman they accused of informing.”

  “So?” said Manners. “This must be the ninth or tenth time he’s pulled something like this. That’s the FTP strategy. What’s the fuss? And did you hear the message from London, the alert?”

  “Yes, I heard about the invasion. I’ll believe it when I see it. But I’m angry because Marat told the townspeople that he was acting on your orders, and the English capitaine and the Gaullists had guaranteed that there would be no reprisals. Terrasson is supposed to be under your and my personal protection.”

  “Will they believe that?”

  “They believe the fact that McPhee was with him. Everybody in Perigord knows about the Red Indian from America. McPhee is the living proof that Marat is obeying our orders, and McPhee is fool enough not to stop him. And they’ll believe the fact that he didn’t shoot the gendarmes. Don’t you see what Marat is trying to do, the trap he is laying for us? He tells the people that he’s acting under our orders and that we will protect them, and then we fail, and what’s left of the town turns Communist because they’ll never trust us again. This is what I warned you he would do all along. It’s the Communist way,” Francois said urgently.