The Caves of Périgord: A Novel

Jedburgh teams arrived much later, with the invasion in June. But one or two of the earliest trainees were reassigned to SOE and were sent in early, where there was a particular problem of local organization. My father’s team was the earliest of them all. They were assigned to a network called Digger, and did a lot of demolition work before the invasion. My father got a DSO and a Croix de Guerre for operations against an SS panzer division. He then got his Légion d’Honneur for helping to liberate Toulouse in July, which is a long way south of Périgord. By October 1944, he was back in England and assigned to the team setting up the military government in Germany. That was the end of his French adventure. So whatever he did here took place between January and October of 1944. Nine months. People can have a baby in that time.”
    “Well, that all fits with what I found out,” said Lydia, who had eaten as much as she dared, with a fish in beurre blanc to follow, no fitness center in sight, and a presidential informal lunch looming menacingly on the horizon. “Your ravioli are getting cold. You eat, my turn to talk.”
    “The Digger network was run by Malrand’s brother, Christophe,” she said, “as a kind of subsidiary of a much bigger network called Wheelwright that was one of the great triumphs of SOE, the British effort to help the Resistance. Wheelwright was run by a man called Starr, one of the top agents of the war. He used the cover of a Belgian mining engineer who retired with his loot from the Belgian Congo. He settled into France so well that he was elected deputy mayor of a tiny place called Castelnau-sous-l’Auvignon, which gave him the right to issue all sorts of genuine identity papers and ration cards and petrol coupons. For the Resistance, this was like a bank robber having the keys to the Bank of England. Starr was, in fact, a star. He held the highest rank of any SOE man in France, and was one of the very few who was able to combine Communists and Gaullists into a single network without friction. At least until de Gaulle showed up, well after the liberation, and had a huge row with Starr. De Gaulle insisted that he be evicted from French soil within twenty-four hours. But of course by then, the French civil war with the Communists was well under way.
    “Starr was the uncrowned king of southwestern France,” she went on. “He got more arms and supply drops than anyone else, over two thousand of them, and lost hardly a one. He built a private army of nearly ten thousand Maquis guerrillas, which your father helped train, and together they liberated the city of Toulouse. You’ll see why that’s important in a moment. But what I hadn’t realized was what an extraordinary job they did. I made a note of one German report I came across. It was from Field Marshal Von Runstedt, the German Supreme Commander in the West.” She pulled out a notebook and began to read aloud, “‘The HQ of Army Group G near Toulouse was at times cut off—he’s talking about late 1943 and early 1944, six months and more before D-Day,” she interjected. “‘It was only with a strong armed escort or by aircraft that they could get their orders through to the various armies under their command. The main telephone lines and power stations were frequently out of order for many days.’ How about that?”
    “Very impressive indeed—I had no idea the Resistance was that effective before the invasion.”
    “Anyway, back to the smaller Digger network. It was based around the city of Bergerac and the Périgord, and operated all the way to the remote uplands of the Massif Central. Malrand himself was part of it, until he was wounded and captured in a German ambush not long after the invasion. Led by your father, Resistance fighters from brother Christophe’s network rescued Malrand from the prison in Toulouse, as the Germans were pulling out to the north. Your father saved the life of the current President of France, which is presumably why he came to the funeral.”
    “That’s amazing, Lydia. You have done well.”
    “No. It’s all in the published record, in the official history and Malrand’s irritatingly oblique memoirs. And the bad news is that it is only context, more than the kind of detail we need. Apart from the names of Starr, Malrand, and his brother Christophe, and a few radio operators who are all dead, I have found absolutely nothing that will tell us more about your father’s time in Périgord.