The Caves of Périgord: A Novel

British spoke of the American troops and airmen flooding into their country. Overpaid, oversexed, and over here. That was the phrase. And the British still had all the pride that came from never have been invaded, from never having given up. For a Frenchman, living with the defeat of 1940 and the shame and guilt of surrender, and seeing German troops occupying their land, it must be a thousand times worse.
    “McPhee,” he interrupted. “Calm down. Remember what these chaps have been through, what they put up with day after day. To have survived this long, they know what they’re doing.”
    Christophe didn’t even glance at the Englishman, nor did he seem to notice McPhee’s half-apologetic shrug. He just carried on talking with cold control, like a teacher handing out punishments to a schoolboy.
    “From here, you will be taken to a house where there is the meeting with your man Hilaire. Then you will go east, into the hills of the Massif, to meet your first Maquis. Your radio operator is already on his way there, as you would have been except I was ordered at the last moment to arrange security and facilities for your meeting. This has not been easy. I have not slept for three nights because of this. And if you think I am suspicious, wait until you meet those frightened young scarecrows who have just wanted to escape this war. I don’t think many of them are going to be too eager to use those weapons of yours, at least not until the invasion comes and they can see that you mean it. What you will find is a handful of men that I trust, and who will listen to you and train with you because I tell them to and they trust me. Most of them have known our family and me all our lives. Most of them are old soldiers, some from the Great War and a few from 1940. They know the country and they know how to fight. They need you only to bring them weapons and explosives, and to show them how to use them. As far as they are concerned, and as far as I am concerned, this is a French battle, with French leaders, French blood, and French objectives. You may think we are all on the same side. In my view, we simply happen to share a common enemy.”
    “Lest an impure blood pollute our thresholds,” mocked McPhee, half-singing the line from the “Marseillaise.”
    “Shut up, McPhee, and grow up. Please,” Jack interrupted. He was feeling sick again. He also felt that all McPhee’s protests had missed the most important single feature of the night’s events. The flurry of activity and unloading as they had landed had left all the guns and all the explosives in the hands of Christophe’s men. And he knew that they would stay under Christophe’s control, with carefully rationed items made briefly available for educational purposes only. Any shooting or demolition that would take place would be at Christophe’s behest. So what?—so long as they killed Germans. And he was going to have to learn to call the man Berger. The American was looking at him aggressively. Jack reached across for the brandy bottle. “This war’s going to last a long time.”

    They knew that Hilaire’s network was a legend, one of the biggest of the SOE’s networks in France and one of the most productive. They had been told no more by Baker Street, for what they did not know they could not betray. But there was always gossip at the training camps, where someone had said that the agent known as Hilaire had been promoted again, to lieutenant colonel, the highest rank of any SOE officer in France. And there was more loose talk from the RAF boys at Tempsford, who told them of two RAF aircrew from a downed bomber walking in uniform into a certain bar in Toulouse and asking a stunned waiter in schoolboy French for help. The waiter dropped the tray in astonishment on top of a table occupied by plainclothes Gestapo, and Hilaire himself had spirited them out and away in the confusion, and got them over the Pyrenees. It was one of the RAF pilots who had dropped the name Starr. And it had been François who had said casually one evening that Monsieur le Maire had originally landed by boat in southern France, and got to Lyon just as the circuit known as Spruce was being broken up by the Gestapo, and decided to move to Gascony.
    “Monsieur le Maire?” Jack had asked.
    “Starr’s cover is so good that that he has been made deputy mayor of some little commune,” François had said, shrugging as if everyone knew that. Jack had shivered at the looseness of