The Caves of Périgord: A Novel

difference between horseshoes and tank treads.”
    “You have just been introduced to the subtlety of English humor,” François explained. “Jack here fought his way back and forth across Africa two—or was it three?—times. Against the Italians, all the way to Benghazi until Rommel’s panzers pushed them back to Egypt. And then back again to Benghazi until Rommel pushed them back to Egypt again.”
    “See, I told you.” Jack laughed again. “Just like polo. We called it the Benghazi handicap.”
    “A simple soul, our Jack,” said François. “No politics in the desert. Just war as a kind of cricket.”
    “Why aren’t you flying, François?” the American wanted to know. “You flew in Spain, shot down a few fascists as I recall.”
    “The Allies are not short of pilots in this war,” François replied. “But there are not enough Frenchmen ready to go back and work with the Resistance. The war in the air is simple. The war on the ground in France will be complicated, at least for me if not for you two. You are just fighting a war. Like all Frenchmen, I have the peace to think about.”

    When they were posted south to Stevenage for the demolition course, just as the Allies took Sicily and the Italians pulled out of the war, McPhee had the more to learn. He seemed confused between the use of plastic explosives in cutting charges to take out pylons and railway lines, and the ammonal for the lifting charges to destroy bridges. Manners came up with the memory trick that seemed to help him. P for plastic and for precision; A for ammonal and to annihilate. But when they moved on to Huntingford for the course in industrial demolition, the American seemed to get confused again.
    “Not too good on destroying things, fellas,” as the doctored lubricant grease with the grit that would grind away at industrial bearings smeared itself onto his clothes and face. “I guess it goes against the grain.”
    They lived in one another’s pockets, always training together, given weekend leave passes at the same time. Once, they went back to the Manners family home in Wiltshire, a small country house with one wing that had been rebuilt after the Parliamentarians had destroyed it in the English Civil War. “You would always be a Royalist, Jack,” François had laughed, as McPhee shook his head in disbelief at the age of the place and the deferential pleasure of an elderly serving man and the even older cook at the return of the young master. His father, the general, was somewhere in India. His mother appeared for meals, but was otherwise in her garden.
    “I guess we know what you’re fighting for, Jack.” McPhee grinned as they took the train back to London, ready to start the black propaganda course at Watford. “For the King-Emperor and the old landed estate.”
    “Did you not know, McPhee?” François interrupted. “This was a farewell visit. The house has been requisitioned to become a brigade HQ for American troops. Her ladyship will be moving out into the lodge, from which redoubt she will try to protect her garden against your gallant countrymen.”
    “I didn’t know Mummy had told you about that,” said Jack. “But it won’t be for long. We get the old place back, once the invasion goes in and the war is over.”
    “I sure hope the guys take care of it,” said McPhee, embarrassed. “Maybe I’ll know somebody in the brigade, tell them to look after it.”
    “A pity you do not know somebody among the Germans who have been occupying my house since 1940,” said François.
    In the silence that followed, as François smoked and McPhee stared out of the train window, Jack realized that a pattern had been established. The Frenchman needled the American, even when he did not mean to. There was a constant irony in everything that François said, and a bitterness that he did not bother to conceal. Jack took it equably. He had come across far odder types in the desert, and had learned to tolerate eccentricities in the regiment.
    They were comrades in arms, bound together by duty and by a common mission, and he admired the Frenchman’s brains and grit even if he didn’t follow the chap’s obsession with politics. But the American seemed in his own way as clever and as well read as François, just as attuned to the political minefield they were heading into, but somehow less nimble than François in discussing it.
    “I never asked you, Jack,” François broke in. “How do you speak French so