The Caves of Périgord: A Novel

that if you could hear it, your tank had not been hit. But you had no more than five seconds to get under cover before the next round. The other sound was the mortars. The Sobbing Sisters were the worst, six-barreled beasts that moaned eerily as they fell. They could demolish a platoon or even a tank squadron if they caught the men outside the tanks and in laager. But any mortar was bad, a closerange mobile artillery that every German infantry company seemed to carry with it as a matter of course. And they got them firing so fast. Just as soon as the machine guns made you take cover, the mortars blew you out of it. It was like being sniped with high explosive.
    He reached the trees, running wide to avoid the mortars. German machine guns were firing steadily, but from a long distance. Another armored car had joined the first, and was firing steadily as crew members milled about forming into a line. He saw the glint of a towing hawser in the moonlight. His Gammon must have hit a wheel. The mortars were increasing their range, stalking their way across the field, and he saw the old tractor wrecked and burning. Then he saw movement, a jolting, jerking movement and an appalling noise of pain. An old farm horse, its haunches on the ground, was trying to haul itself away from the madness by its two front legs, its neigh a scream as the weight of the cart kept it flailing uselessly. The cart must be loaded.
    He told himself it was the horse that made him do it, running out from his cover toward the cart, and firing a short burst into the poor beast’s pitching head. But he’d already thought it through. The cart had to be still for what he wanted to do. There was no possibility of saving the guns; they had to be destroyed. He took the first Mills bomb from his pouch. No, there was a better way. He removed the pin, keeping tight hold of the lever, and felt into the back of the cart. He jammed the grenade between two of the parachuted containers. He managed to push the second bomb between a container and the cart’s side.
    Then he turned and half-fled, half-fell down the slope into the woods, his gun held high before his face to protect him from the branches, until he slammed into a tree and seemed to bounce dazedly off it down the hillside. Tumbling and disoriented, when he finally came to rest his mouth was full of blood and he had lost his gun. He groped vainly in the dark until the mortar shells seemed to be hunting at random down the slope toward him, and he was nearer to panic than he had been since he came to France. The sickening sense of defeat and disaster unmanned him. He had no idea where he was, where his men were, how many were left nor where the rendezvous point might be. And the Germans were not finished yet. He heard himself sobbing as he scrambled like an animal to get away from the still-searching mortars, wondering how many men they’d lost, and which of them was the informer.

    When his boots felt the crunch of the road, Manners began to come back to his senses. He took out his knife and made two diagonal slashes into the bark of the nearest sapling to mark the spot. Then he stepped forward out of the tree cover, and into the faint lightness of the stars. Just enough light to see the blazes he had made in the tree. The moon was down, but there was the blessed, familiar Plow, with its two stars of the blade pointing forever north to Polaris. His sense of direction came back. The slope had brought him down to the Rouffignac road, which wound its way uphill all the way to the ridge above Savignac. Knowing he’d be safer in the hills than taking the road down to the river valley, he moved to the soft verge and began to trudge uphill. He paused every few moments to listen for the inevitable German patrols that would soon be sweeping this and all the other roads around the drop zone.
    The mortaring had stopped, but odd shots still thumped faintly in the distance, and then came one bigger, rippling explosion followed by an endless crackling of gunfire. He began to move again when it stopped, but had gone no more than five yards when a whispered “Laval” came from behind him.
    “ Putain ,” he replied automatically. And stood still, his arms by his sides.
    “ Capitaine? ” It was Lespinasse, his whisper urgent. Thank God the lad had made it.
    “This way, Capitaine .” His arm was grabbed and he was pulled off the road and felt the loom of rock, the movements of other people. “Were you