The Caves of Périgord: A Novel

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