The Caves of Périgord: A Novel

Resistance leader in Périgord along with his brothers. The fictional country home of President Malrand is based on the Ch‚teau de la Vitrolle, near Le Bugue, which during the Liberation was briefly the secret HQ of Malraux and the British and U.S. officers on his team. Malraux was wounded and captured by the Germans, imprisoned in Toulouse, and released when the city was liberated by a Maquis force that had been organized, armed, and led by a British agent of SOE, the Special Operations Executive known as Hilaire . His real name was George Starr, and he indeed became a deputy mayor of a French commune, ran the Wheelwright network, and is deservedly honored here. One of the most petty acts in General de Gaulle’s career was to expel Starr from France in September 1944, apparently for no better reason than affront at the central role an Englishman had played in the Liberation of a large part of France.
    Three other real figures from the Périgord Resistance have blended their way into the characters of François Malrand and Captain Jack Manners. One is the former playboy aristocrat Baron Philippe de Gunzbourg, code names Edgar and Philibert, an SOE agent who cycled some fifteen thousand miles around southwestern France organizing parachute drops and sabotage operations. The second is Commandant Jack, code name Nestor, whose real name was Jacques Poirier. Although French, he was widely taken for an English officer, and most of the arms with which the Resistance tried to slow the movements of the SS Das Reich division were supplied through him. The third is George Hiller, who attended the original banquet in the ch‚teau organized by the redoubtable Soleil, René Coustellier, which concluded some time after midnight with a lecture on the Sten gun. Soleil was indeed at different times sentenced to death by the Communist Franc-Tireurs Partisans and by the Armée Secrète, and remains a controversial figure in the Périgord to this day, although his charismatic leadership and courage, like his heroic defense of Mouleydier, are beyond question.
    The factional rivalries and thefts of arms among Communist, Gaullist, and other wings of the Resistance are a matter of historical fact, as is the meeting and the arguments at the monastery of St-Antoine on the outskirts of Brive on June 8, 1944. Despite the honorable intentions of most of the rank and file, who thought they were all fighting the same battle, it proved desperately difficult to rally Communists and Gaullists under a common command. The report on the role of the Communists in Bergerac that is cited in the text is a historical document, authored by Maurice Loupias, code name Bergeret, who was the regional commander of the Armée Secrète . Preparations for a Communist seizure of power as the Germans departed were forestalled by the return from Moscow of the exiled French Communist leader Maurice Thorez, who was under orders from Stalin to squash any disruption in France while it remained the crucial logistic base of the Western front against Nazi Germany.
    The dreadful march of the second SS armored division, Das Reich, in June 1944, from Toulouse in southern France to the Normandy invasion front, is a central element of this novel and every effort has been made to describe it correctly. All German orders and reports cited in the book, including the one by the Das Reich commander, General Heinz Lammerding, are genuine. Its strength and units and composition, its route through the Périgord, the insurrection in Tulle, the brief battle of Cressensac, the tragedy of Terrasson, and the appalling atrocity of Oradour were all very much as described here. There is no historical evidence for my fictional suggestion that in the absence of heavy weapons, Resistance leaders were prepared to provoke the Germans into reprisals in order to delay them. During their postwar trial for the Oradour massacre, German veterans claimed that they had been angered by reports of the killing and abuse of their captured comrades. They carried little credibility. But it remains a startling and unprofessional dereliction of military duty that the German Army allowed one of its premier armored divisions to spend time hunting down the Maquis when it was desperately needed to fight the invasion in Normandy. M.R.D. Foot, in his magisterial official history, SOE in France, concludes: “The extra fortnight’s delay imposed on what should have been a three-day journey may well have been of decisive