The Caves of Périgord: A Novel

before the war. He loved the way the farmers’ wives would always blush and throw their aprons over their grinning faces as he warned them against saving the parachute silk to make lingerie as the Germans were known for checking under women’s skirts.
    Above all, his forged papers were good. London had equipped him with an identity card that showed him born in Quebec of French parents, who had returned to Brittany in 1937. That would account for his accent. And they had given him a certificat d’exception to excuse him from military service on grounds of bleeding ulcers. Sybille had come up with the work papers, listing him as a vet’s assistant in training, which gave him the perfect excuse to be roaming the countryside on the rare occasions when he was stopped by the SOL, the Service d’Ordre Légionnaire, the volunteer police that Vichy had formed.
    But he knew it was an illusion of peace, even though the only Germans he had yet seen were those he had shot from afar or blown up as they rode the sandbagged trolley at the front of the train. The Milice he had seen too often for comfort and the paramilitary GMR; the Groupes Mobiles de Reserve staged irregular and nervous sweeps in lorry convoys along the roads that paralleled the railways. They had ambushed one, and fled from another when Malrand’s captured Spandau had run out of ammunition. McPhee had destroyed two of the precious radio direction-finding trucks and damaged another in an ambush outside St-Cyprien Manners had arranged five successful parachute drops, and Berger’s band had now swollen to forty men, and had spawned a separate group of twenty led by Frisé, which was based in the forest near Bergerac. All of Frisé’s men, and most of Berger’s, had learned simple demolition, and Marat’s men had been given London’s approval for some arms.
    There were six Bren guns, twenty-seven Sten guns, thirty-six rifles, and forty Mills grenades in the standard drop of twelve containers, along with some twenty thousand rounds of ammunition. Marat had been promised a third of the drop, but there had been a nasty moment when François had shouted a warning and the two of them had guarded the containers with their own Sten guns to ensure that Marat’s men did not take more than their share.
    McPhee had resolved the standoff, putting his own gun down, opening a container, and pulling out one gun at a time. He laid them down in separate piles and chanted, “One for you and one for me.” He made a childish game of it, and got the men grinning, although Manners saw he was careful to leave the ammo unpacked. Then McPhee walked across to Marat to drape a fresh new Sten gun, slick with oil, over the man’s shoulder. Marat had taken to his American “Red,” and his men were delighted to have a real Yanqui to themselves. Communists seemed to like Americans, while assuming that all the British were capitalists and agents of the Bank of England. He was the first of these mythical transatlantic allies they had ever seen, and they were charmed by his insistence on wearing his uniform and his astonishing haircut. Manners had heard they would go to extraordinary lengths to find McPhee new razor blades to keep his scalp trimmed.
    But the mission was being fulfilled. The railways, telegraph, and telephone links were in a constant state of disruption. For a three-day period, McPhee’s and Marat’s men had blown all the rail lines into Périgueux, and the next week Manners had done the same to Bergerac. London and Hilaire were both pleased with them, but Manners was waiting for the inevitable German counterattack, the coming of the Brehmer Division of which Marat had warned him. They had begun to arrive in Périgueux and Bergerac, or at least the heavy units. There was a battalion of armored cars, mostly the half-track SPW troop carriers with mortars and machine guns, and some of the eight-wheeled Panzerspahwagen with the 20mm cannon that he remembered from the desert. He had yet to see them, but had heard that each of the Brehmer Division units carried a big arrogant B painted on the sides of their vehicles. There was a company of combat engineers, and another of the Feldgendarmerie military police, and roadblocks and armored patrols were now constant hazards. But General Brehmer was still waiting for his four battalions of infantry before starting offensive operations.
    As soon as he heard from Marat that they were on their way by train, Manners planned to shift