The Caves of Périgord (19 page)

Berger’s vaunted team of Maquis had turned out to be one tough old sergeant from the colonial army, an even older veteran of the Great War, a wiry corporal from the Alpine troops, and fourteen hungry and dispirited youths, who had taken to the hills rather than be conscripted for forced labor in German factories. Apart from one Marine deserter, only three of them had any kind of military training, and one had been a mechanic in the Air Force. They could fire a rifle, but had never fired or stripped a submachine gun, and there was no point in wasting ammunition by giving them revolvers. Berger had wanted to boost their morale with a gigantic explosion, something big like a bridge. Gently, François and Manners had dissuaded him. There was a limit to their stocks of explosive, and the bridges that mattered were well guarded.
Better to start small, to give the best of the young Maquis a taste of action against a relatively soft target. And the coeurs d’aigulles, the points that allowed a train to switch from one line to another, were complex pieces of casting. A single destroyed stretch of rail could be repaired within a day. A network of points could take a week to replace, plus another few days to repair the signals.

Ahead of Manners, the line had stopped. McPhee signaled him to come up to the front. At least there were no hedges in this country to be pushed through or skirted. He slogged forward, ignoring the distant growling of a heavy engine. Too far away to worry about.

“That was the German patrol truck, heading back to Belvès. That gives us a couple of hours before they are due back,” said McPhee. “We’re about two hundred yards from the station. You can see the railway line there on the right. I’m going to stake out the Milice hut with the sergeant. You take the boys and start laying the charges. I’ll give you thirty minutes, then I’ll put the grenades in.”

Manners waved the Frenchmen on, as McPhee and the squat little sergeant from the colonial wars began a running crouch toward the station. Manners put Frisé in the lead; the one they called Curly. He at least had seen some action in 1940, in the Corps Francs, which took patrols out from the Maginot line, and felt very proud of being promoted to corporal. He had also seemed to be the fastest at grasping the basics of demolition when François and Manners had shown the group how the detonators worked. It was a straightforward fuse, and they all had lighters. Just so long as they remembered to stuff the charges into the V of the points.

It was a very small town, and the station was almost on the outskirts. Frisé took them quickly past darkened houses, over a narrow road, and past a squat war memorial from 1914-18 until they reached the level crossing. The rails and their crucial points spread out in the starlight like a great fan. Manners opened his rucksack, gave each of the Frenchmen two charges, and pushed them toward the rails. Just as he
began placing his fourth charge deep into the points, there came the sound of distant gunfire. Automatic bursts, then single shots. It wasn’t McPhee—the wrong direction. The German patrol! But they were still miles away.

“Finish your work,” he snapped at Jean-Claude, who had stood up and was staring around wildly, a charge still in his hand. The Frenchman bent again to his task. Manners had two charges still to place, and then came a flash of red light at the station fifty yards down the line, and the crack of a grenade, then the burst of a Sten as McPhee hit the Milice hut.

“Finished,” called Frisé, shepherding the other young Frenchmen back to the level crossing. Manners scampered across the rails, taking out his shielded red torch to check on each charge. He had placed his own by touch alone. There was more firing from the station. Then from far up the road, the unmistakable ripping sound of a belt-fed MG-34, a German machine gun. François was in trouble. A distant, flat boom. François was using his Gammon grenades, homemade bombs that eked out their pitiful arsenal.

“O.K.” He waved them back to the rails. “Ignition now.” He had given each of them a “Tommy” lighter, more reliable than matches in wind—as long as they could get the petrol. His own sparked and flared. He had six to light, the Frenchmen only two each. He didn’t have enough fuses to link them all together to a single firing point. The fuses caught. They now had just over a minute to get clear. McPhee was on his own. François was on his own. The rule was that they each had to make their own withdrawal to the agreed rendezvous. Back at the level crossing, he slapped the chattering Frenchmen on the back, more to be sure they were all there than from any sense of congratulation. One, two, three.

“Now, move.” He led them back past the war memorial, skirting the main street where they held the market each Friday. No point in cautious creeping. They were running now. He heard windows being
opened and furious French whisperings, and the explosions came in sharp, metallic cracks as he pushed the boys up toward the hills that rose above the river. He counted them—ten, eleven—no number twelve. No more firing from the station. McPhee was either dead or escaped. Another explosion. Twelve. All the charges had worked. The French boys had done well. No more sounds from the Belvès road. As he pounded up the frosty hillside, his rucksack felt curiously light.

McPhee and the colonial sergeant were already waiting for them at the rendezvous, a sagging ancient barn in the hills behind the hilltop village of Limeuil. The sergeant was cleaning his Sten carefully. McPhee had taken watch outside, and once he and Manners had exchanged passwords, the American solemnly shook each of the young Frenchmen by the hand.

“I heard all the explosions,” he said. “Well done.”

“Any trouble with the Milice?” Manners asked.

“Piece of cake. I think they were asleep, but then the firing started and as one of them opened the door, I tossed a grenade in. One of them survived long enough to start firing a rifle through the window, but the old guy got him with a Sten burst. We went in, got two Lebel rifles and their ammo, and an old revolver, and ran for it as your charges went off.”

Manners congratulated the old sergeant, and moved to the back of the barn. On an earlier visit, they had found some rusty lengths of corrugated iron, put them together as a low lean-to, to make a place shadowed enough to light a tiny folding Tommy cooker without the light showing. He put some water on to boil and poured in the jar of concentrated soup he carried. It was bitterly cold, and now that the boys had stopped moving and their adrenaline surge had passed, they would need hot food. Without being asked, Frisé took a loaf of the yellowish
chestnut bread from his pack and began sawing thick slices. The colonial sergeant took the guard duty outside.

“You heard the machine gun?” Manners asked McPhee as they crouched over the little pebble of solid fuel, its chemical fumes stronger than the smell of the soup.

“I don’t think our French buddy’s going to make it,” McPhee grunted.

“Don’t write him off that easily. He has a way of getting out of tight spots.”

“The truck was going away. So they wouldn’t have ambushed it, there’d have been no point. The Krauts must have spotted them first. François was the only one among them who’d ever been in action. If the Krauts were any good, it would have been like potting rabbits.”

“He had a couple of men who knew what they were doing, the chap who was in the French Marines and the Great War veteran. And they had a lot of cover.”

“Yeah, but they didn’t have a Spandau. That thing rips out bullets like I never heard.”

They dipped their enamel mugs into the soup, and Manners took one out to the sergeant. Nothing, he said. No explosions, no firing, no sound of trucks yet. The Germans would probably wait for daylight before sending out a damage assessment squad with a strong patrol. Manners sent him back inside to drink his soup and took the watch. Inside the barn, the sounds of excited conversation died away as the boys settled down to sleep in the straw. The stars were brighter than ever, almost as bright as they had been in the desert. He traced the handful of constellations he knew, Orion’s belt and the plow, which led him up to the Pole Star. It was a good night for parachute drops, and he wondered how many more tiny knots of frightened, excited men were out in this cold French countryside, how many stripped-down bombers were lumbering back to England after dropping the arms and supplies they used as pinpricks against the million-man army the Germans kept
in France. Seventy divisions, Von Runstedt was supposed to have. Seventy divisions, and two thousand tanks. And Rommel had kept a British army on the run in North Africa with just two divisions and less than four hundred tanks. The invasion was going to be a nightmare. But if he and the Maquis could keep Army Group G tied down here in the south, that was almost a third of the German forces who would not be driving the Allies off the beaches.

It was nearly dawn before the survivors came. Manners heard them coming through the woods long before he heard the whispered password “Laval.” No Vichy or German troops would ever dream that the Maquis would use the name of the Vichy political boss as a password. Nor the reply, “Pétain,” although the Frenchmen liked to make it sound like “
putain
”—whore.

They were shivering with cold in shirtsleeves and pullovers. They had taken off their jackets to make an improvised stretcher for the Great War veteran who had taken two bullets in his thigh. There was a whiff of French tobacco in their air, and François arrived, nonchalantly bringing up the rear with a Spandau over one shoulder. The men putting down the stretcher clinked from the belt bandoliers around their shoulders.

“You got the gun,” Manners marveled.

“Got the gun, the ammo, the truck, and eight Boches. And two Schmeissers. A successful night. We heard your explosions.”

“So how did it start? Did they spot you”?

“It started by accident. We had a tree all ready to roll onto the road in case the patrol came back, but we lost control of the thing in the dark and it rolled out on its own, just as we heard the truck coming from le Buisson.” He lit another cigarette from the stump of the one he had been smoking, his hand trembling. “Get my boys some food, can you? And take a look at that leg. He could walk a bit, but the tourniquet needs loosening. He’ll need a friendly doctor.”

Back in the barn, as McPhee made more soup and the colonial sergeant
began loosening the tourniquet in the light of Manners’s red torch, François continued with his tale.

“There was no time to move it, so we had to ambush the truck right there, as soon as it stopped for the log. It didn’t look suspicious, still half on the bank, and only blocking about half the road. So the truck stopped, and we opened up. One of them got off a burst with the machine gun from the roof of the cab, but luckily he was firing the wrong way and the Marine threw a Gammon bomb, and that was it. We shot two of them trying to scuttle down the road. We lost one dead, and the old man was hit.”

“Was the truck a write-off?”

“We pushed it off the road and burned it, took the guns and came back this way. It was easier than I thought, except for burying poor little Jeannot. I don’t think he even fired a shot.” He lit another cigarette. “The boys behaved well. They trust their guns now, and the Gammon bombs. And us. They’ll be even better next time.”

“Next time won’t be so easy. The Germans aren’t idiots. There’ll be no more single-truck patrols, and they’ll start trying to ambush us.”

“I know. But I have an idea.” The Frenchman went across to fill his tin cup, puffing on his cigarette between swigs of soup. “What is the most vulnerable but essential part of our operation?”

“The radio, no question.”

“Correct, and the big danger is their direction-finding trucks, right?”

“Right.”

“How many do they have, for this part of France?”

“I don’t know, but they’ll be a special unit, corps troops, probably assigned to the Gestapo. No more than a company for this region. Say eight or ten trucks at the most.”

“And they always hunt in threes?”

“They have to, to triangulate the bearings on the transmitter.”

“So with three successful ambushes, we close them down.”

“You mean we use the radio as bait? Can we afford to take that risk?”

“We take that risk every time we transmit. Might as well take advantage of it. The thing about the trucks, they are stuck to moving on roads and decent tracks. So we pick our spot, somewhere near a road the trucks must use. And we hit them. It’s not just the specialized trucks; it’s the personnel. Those guys take a lot of training.”

“Let’s be smart about this. We have to set the trap somewhere outside the area we normally use, because after an attack like that the Gestapo will scream blue murder until the army sends in reinforcements to hunt us down.”

“Fine, we’ll go east, into the Massif, somewhere the far side of Brive. It’s nearly empty country, not like round here. But we’ll need some more parachute drops, both here and over in the Massif. That will mean one of us going across there to scout out drop zones, probably me, because we’ll have to liaise with the local Maquis. My brother knows the FFI types in Brive, but most of the guys over there are Communists.”