The Caves of Périgord (48 page)

God help him, but he might be able to slow them by offering the helpless targets of the French civilians he was supposedly here to help. To do his best, he had to make the SS do their worst. So, take no prisoners. Butcher their wounded. Desecrate their corpses and leave them on the bridges. Hang them from trees over the road. Madden the Germans with rage. Nobody had given him such orders, and nobody in his army ever would. Nor would they ever forgive an officer who broke the code by doing so. But a cold dread spread through him as he realized that this was the battle he had been sent here to fight. He reached for the bottle of eau-de-vie and looked for places where he might commit atrocities and for men ruthless enough to help him. He had to find Marat.

The fog of war, Clausewitz had called it, and an utter density of uncertainty, ignorance, and impotence had closed around Manners. He had never felt so helpless. The Germans had moved far faster than he had thought possible, and he had been forced by accident and disaster into virtual immobility. And finally now that he had found them, he had neither men nor arms nor plan, not anything at all with which to meet them. Far less stop them.

The little village of Cressensac had grown up around the junction where the main
route nationale
from the bridge across the river Dordogne at Souillac to the south was joined by the road from the medieval hillside shrine of Rocamadour, and then the combined road went north to Brive. There was a church, two hotels, and two cafés all lined up along the main street.

“Not a bad place for an ambush,” said McPhee. “If they had a tank trap, an antitank gun to command that long road, and a swarm of bazooka gunners in the houses.”

“Well, we haven’t. We’re just observers,” Manners replied, as the apparently sleepy town erupted in a long burst of machine gun fire. A
column of soft-topped trucks, motorbikes, and staff cars had suddenly appeared coming at speed over the slight rise in the road beyond the town. The day was clear and the visibility perfect. They could see the kicks of earth in the ground where the bullets hit. There was a moment of shock as time slowed, and Manners was reminded, not of the static quality of toy soldiers but of the clockwork train set he had been given as a boy. A tiny and artificial landscape in stillness save for the whirling movement of the train. Then a truck and staff car collided and German soldiers in camouflage smocks rather than the usual field-gray scrambled out.

“Are these Krauts insane?” marveled McPhee. “No patrols out ahead. No armor up front. Rommel would have knocked every officer back to private if any of his units had ever been so stupid. Maybe the French have a chance.”

There was chaos on the road, as trucks reversed, swung to the side, stalled, and just remained blocking the road as their drivers jumped for cover. Now the French machine gunner had a target, dozens of targets, and rifles and Stens opened up.

“Oh, Christ, if we had a mortar platoon,” said McPhee. Or even the bazookas, thought Manners. Then they could have done the bastards some damage. He looked at the ground to left and right. Some cover, and there were other roads coming into Cressensac. This would not take the Germans long. A standard flank move, covering fire, and that would be the end of this small firefight. Time to go. He nudged McPhee, turned, and prepared to take the long straight road back to Brive, but could not resist a last look at the brave, doomed Frenchmen who had taken on an armored division.

Even as they watched, they heard the growl of a big engine and the clatter of metal treads chewing up tarmac as a Mark IV accelerated over the rise like a maddened bull. Its short-barreled 75mm gun fired into the houses on either side of the village as it simply knocked aside the clutter of trucks and drove on. A half-track loomed quickly behind
it, and then another, which stopped at the brow and began the fast punching of its cannon. An antitank gun appeared beside it and opened fire. There went the church tower and the hotel, and then the lead tank stopped and turned at the end of the village and began pumping shells into houses. A sudden flower of fire flashed on the road, well short of the tank. Somebody must have tried throwing a Molotov. Tiny figures began running from the backs of the houses toward the trees, and then went skidding as the machine guns started hunting them. It had taken less than twenty minutes, and there was only one other roadblock before Brive, just as flimsy and ill armed as this one. It was 4
P.M.
, and the Germans would be in Brive within the hour, where half the Resistance leadership of the region was going to be rounded up and arrested unless he could warn them in time. That would simply put the cap on his twenty-four wasted hours of disaster. He and McPhee jumped into the Citroën and raced away.

It had begun the previous evening at Siorac, a town where the local butcher with the nickname “Le Bolshevik” ran the Resistance. There had been a flimsy roadblock, with only Sten guns to hold it. But they directed him to the station where he found a railway man who knew Marat, and the old lady who ran the
Postes et Télégraphes
began calling every other switchboard she could reach. Marat had been at Limoges. He was expected at Périgueux, at Brive, at Bergerac. Manners left messages at each place, and sent more by the railway men’s network, for a meeting at Brive the next morning. He went back to his truck and his driver had gone, the empty bottle still propped on the seat. Dismayed, he looked in the back. Empty. The dynamite had gone. He tapped the petrol tank. Just as empty. He had no transport, no explosives, no allies, and no communications. He found the genial Bolshevik in the church, where his men were taking weapons from their hiding place in the roof, and traded his empty truck for an ancient motorbike and an extra can of the oil and petrol mixture it needed.

It took him two hours to reach the Hôtel Jardel as night fell, by the
bridge over the Dordogne that led north. Trees had been felled across the road every few hundred yards, but there were no guns to cover them so the armored bulldozers of the German combat engineers would simply push them out of the way. They slowed him a lot worse than they would the Germans. The small village of Grolejac lay just down the road, and there was not a roadblock to be seen. There was, however, a
Tricolore,
so he warned the two men he found in the bar, who looked at him with bleary-eyed lack of interest, as if an angry British officer was a common event. And as he took the road over the bridge and north to Brive, he had the first puncture. He rode until the tire shredded, and continued on the metal wheel, every bone in his body feeling as if were being slowly, methodically broken, and then the wheel seized. He continued on foot in the pitch dark and was nearly run over by a truckful of FTP men coming from Sarlat. He persuaded them to take him back to the town, where they left him at a small command post and raced back toward the river to reinforce Grolejac. He found a man he had taught how to run parachute drops, and at 3
A.M.
was sleeping in the back of a commandeered car and being driven to Brive. Then they ran out of petrol, but his escort thought it unreasonable to wake the famous English capitaine who was obviously so exhausted. They woke him shortly after dawn with a fresh omelet, and a glass of wine, and the news that a horse had been sent from the nearest farm to find some petrol. He was too tired to weep.

Manners finally reached Brive just after midday, too late for the meeting he had called with Marat. The town was prematurely celebrating its liberation, despite the desultory sniping at the Germans besieged in their command post at the Hôtel Bordeaux. More time lost. He finally tracked Marat down at the monastery of St-Antoine, where an angry meeting was under way and a couple of hundred well-armed Resistance fighters lounged outside, some of them drinking, some striking poses for the local girls. Marat’s Spaniards were grilling sausages around a pair of trucks with “Madrid” chalked on one tailgate, “Teruel” on the other. Manner’s face widened into a smile as he saw McPhee among them.

“What’s going on?” Manners asked, shaking him warmly by the hand and steering him away from the truck to talk in private.

“The commanders are all inside, arguing about who’s in charge and what they should do,” shrugged the American. “The Gaullists want to fight for the river crossings. The Communists want to reinforce the attack on Tulle, where a full German garrison is supposed to be on the point of surrender. The rest want to hold Brive as a fortress.”

“A fortress? The damn fools—it’s not even a sandcastle. What do you think?”

“Well, since they have left me cooling my heels for the past couple of hours, I’ve worked out three answers to that question. The military one is the easiest. They haven’t got the heavy weapons to hold the bridges, and somehow I don’t see these guys making a Stalingrad out of Brive,” said McPhee. “That leaves Tulle. It doesn’t make a lot of difference. We aren’t going to stop an armored division.

“Then there is the political answer. Our dear François, who is one smart guy, is trying to manipulate the Communists into holding Tulle and Brive because he thinks the Germans will kill them more efficiently than he ever could. François has worked this out, but the other Gaullist chiefs don’t understand it yet, and François dares not tell them—at least not in public. Fighting for Tulle and Brive will wipe out the Reds in this part of France, and leave it open for the Gaullists. I’m sitting here wondering how to get that lesson into Marat’s thick head. And that brings me to the third answer, also political, which is that the French aren’t listening to us foreigners anymore. They won’t even let you in the door.”

The armed guards on the door were respectful but firm. They had orders to admit nobody. Manners suddenly realized, and he supposed he should take a certain pride in it, that his job was virtually done. This was now a French battle, being fought and run by Frenchmen. Finally one of them understood his urgency and went in. After a few minutes, he came out with François, who was wearing a British Army battledress
with a
Tricolore
on his sleeve, a Cross of Lorraine on his chest, and the rampant eagle on his shoulder that gave him the rank of colonel. Manners raised an eyebrow and grinned. “Congratulations on the promotion.”

“This will go on for some time,” said François blandly. “Marat is making a speech.”

“You haven’t got much time. There’s not a roadblock worthy of the name between here and the river. The panzers could be here tonight.”

“We are assured the panzers are taking the road to Tulle, to relieve their garrison.”

“Assured by whom?”

“It’s the one thing on which the Communists and we agree. We’ve both had reports from our men at Figeac.”

“Well, get me a car and an escort and I’ll drive down to Souillac and come back within the hour with an eyewitness report because I think they’ll be coming up this road too.”

“Wouldn’t you do better to drive back to the cave and get the bazookas?”

“Not until we know where best to use them. I don’t think you’re going to stop them at Brive, but the rails are all blown north of here. I think they’re going to have to head for Périgueux and go north by rail from there. When we know, we throw everything we have at them. But we have to know where the hell they are, and right now we don’t.”

“Agreed.” François waved across to an elderly police sergeant and told him to give the
capitaine
some transport, and went back inside. The sergeant looked baffled, so Manners looked inside a sleek black Citroën
traction-avant,
and saw that the key was in the ignition. He climbed in.

“You can’t take that. It belongs to Colonel Malrand,” shouted the outraged sergeant, as Manners fired the engine and turned the car with a squeal of tires. He braked to a halt beside McPhee, leaned across to open the door, and yelled at the American to jump in.

Thus they had got to Cressensac, and had seen the tanks and armored cars coming straight up the road that the Germans were supposed not to be taking. They had raced back to the monastery, the horn blaring nonstop, and this time François was already outside and waiting. Manners forced himself to climb out sedately and walked up to the gate. Never show panic before the men. Then he gave François a crisp salute.

“They’ve just come through Cressensac, destroying it on the way. McPhee and I saw it happen. It’s certainly the Das Reich. They had Mark IV tanks, self-propelled guns, and half-tracks full of panzergrenadiers in camouflage smocks. They were right behind us, and there’s one roadblock at Noailles that won’t last ten minutes. If you don’t end this meeting now and get dispersed within the next twenty minutes, they’ll round up the lot of you. And that’s the end of the Resistance for this part of France.”

“Come with me,” said François, and they went into the monastery where he told the story all over again. By the time he came out and jostled his way through some Spaniards to climb into Marat’s car, they could hear the German artillery. The escaped Russian prisoner of war who had appointed himself Marat’s bodyguard thrust a Schmeisser into Manner’s neck.

“Spokoyno,”
Marat growled. The Schmeisser was lowered.