The Caves of Périgord: A Novel

the small boy darted up to him and asked, “Where’s the rest of you?”
    “Coming,” he said. “Coming soon,” and the crowd cheered and started shouting “Winston Churchill,” and breaking into the “Marseillaise” when he waved wearily to them and tried to explain that they should throw the rails into the river.
    But as the truck jerked away, he thought it was a very good question. There was something frighteningly premature about this local mood of liberation, with the Allied armies still coming ashore on the beaches four hundred miles to the north. And there were an awful lot of German troops between them and Manners, and an entire armored division heading straight for him and all those flimsy roadblocks and kids with their French flags and Churchill V-signs. And for Sybille. When they got to le Buisson, and saw the dead Milice men in the square and a fat man with his trousers around his ankles hanging grotesquely from a lamppost, he felt even more worried.
    “Cheer up,” said the driver and broke off half the ham sandwich that someone had given him at le Bugue. The bottle was between his knees. “Have something to eat. This eau-de-vie is the real thing. And there’s lots of dynamite left.”
    “I know, but too many road bridges,” said Manners, chewing appreciatively. “Take the road along the river to Siorac and then Souillac. I want to know what chance we have of stopping the bastards now they can’t come by train.”
    He had four bazookas back in the cave, the only weapons he had with a chance of slowing the German armor. Something like two hundred tanks and self-propelled guns that were almost as good. Being SS, they’d probably be equipped with Mark V Panther tanks, which were a generation ahead of anything he had faced in the desert. A bazooka wouldn’t even dent the frontal armor of a Mark V. All he could hope to do was slow them, force them to stop and deploy, organize standard attacks with artillery and infantry. He might delay them for a few hours if he was lucky. Twenty thousand men, and over two thousand vehicles. They would have to disperse against air attack. At fifty yards between vehicles, which was the minimum the British Army decreed for armored units, the Das Reich division would cover fifty miles of road. They would use at least two roads, probably three if they could. Still ten to fifteen miles of vehicles on each road, a big traffic jam if it had to stop and bring forward heavy weapons. They would put a reconnaissance battalion in the lead, with motorbikes and armored cars and a company or two of Panzergrenadier infantry with mortars. Maybe a couple of self-propelled guns if they were expecting trouble. Could he let the reconnaissance battalion pass, and then ambush the soft-skinned vehicles behind? No, that would have to be a simple hit and run, and he needed sustained fire if he were going to force them to halt and deploy. He would have to try and stop them head-on.
    They were coming from Montauban, just north of Toulouse. They would have to come through Cahors and Figeac, and then their route to Normandy would be through Brive or Périgueux. The question was, where would they cross the rivers? They were the only choke points he had. His map showed fifteen bridges across the Dordogne, and he had just four bazookas. He had to work out which road they would take and use the remaining dynamite to demolish the main bridge, and then ambush their alternative crossings. It was hopeless, and probably lethal for any of the Maquis who manned the ambushes with him. But he had to try.
    There was only one glimmer of a chance. If his pinpricks were relentless and frequent enough, if the great armored beast were stung so hard and so often, it might just forget about its charge to Normandy and stop long enough to lash out at all the little hornets that were tormenting it. It was not what he would do, and not what any professional soldier would do. Normandy was the crucial battlefield for an armored division, not the soft belly of the Périgord. But the SS were not always coldly professional soldiers. They were political soldiers, driven by their mad creed. They might just be provoked into the stupidity of reprisals. With quickening excitement, he realized that they could even be driven into losing the one thing they did not have: time.
    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