The Caves of Périgord: A Novel

Frenchmen by the hand.
    “I heard all the explosions,” he said. “Well done.”
    “Any trouble with the Milice?” Manners asked.
    “Piece of cake. I think they were asleep, but then the firing started and as one of them opened the door, I tossed a grenade in. One of them survived long enough to start firing a rifle through the window, but the old guy got him with a Sten burst. We went in, got two Lebel rifles and their ammo, and an old revolver, and ran for it as your charges went off.”
    Manners congratulated the old sergeant, and moved to the back of the barn. On an earlier visit, they had found some rusty lengths of corrugated iron, put them together as a low lean-to, to make a place shadowed enough to light a tiny folding Tommy cooker without the light showing. He put some water on to boil and poured in the jar of concentrated soup he carried. It was bitterly cold, and now that the boys had stopped moving and their adrenaline surge had passed, they would need hot food. Without being asked, Frisé took a loaf of the yellowish chestnut bread from his pack and began sawing thick slices. The colonial sergeant took the guard duty outside.
    “You heard the machine gun?” Manners asked McPhee as they crouched over the little pebble of solid fuel, its chemical fumes stronger than the smell of the soup.
    “I don’t think our French buddy’s going to make it,” McPhee grunted.
    “Don’t write him off that easily. He has a way of getting out of tight spots.”
    “The truck was going away. So they wouldn’t have ambushed it, there’d have been no point. The Krauts must have spotted them first. François was the only one among them who’d ever been in action. If the Krauts were any good, it would have been like potting rabbits.”
    “He had a couple of men who knew what they were doing, the chap who was in the French Marines and the Great War veteran. And they had a lot of cover.”
    “Yeah, but they didn’t have a Spandau. That thing rips out bullets like I never heard.”
    They dipped their enamel mugs into the soup, and Manners took one out to the sergeant. Nothing, he said. No explosions, no firing, no sound of trucks yet. The Germans would probably wait for daylight before sending out a damage assessment squad with a strong patrol. Manners sent him back inside to drink his soup and took the watch. Inside the barn, the sounds of excited conversation died away as the boys settled down to sleep in the straw. The stars were brighter than ever, almost as bright as they had been in the desert. He traced the handful of constellations he knew, Orion’s belt and the plow, which led him up to the Pole Star. It was a good night for parachute drops, and he wondered how many more tiny knots of frightened, excited men were out in this cold French countryside, how many stripped-down bombers were lumbering back to England after dropping the arms and supplies they used as pinpricks against the million-man army the Germans kept in France. Seventy divisions, Von Runstedt was supposed to have. Seventy divisions, and two thousand tanks. And Rommel had kept a British army on the run in North Africa with just two divisions and less than four hundred tanks. The invasion was going to be a nightmare. But if he and the Maquis could keep Army Group G tied down here in the south, that was almost a third of the German forces who would not be driving the Allies off the beaches.
    It was nearly dawn before the survivors came. Manners heard them coming through the woods long before he heard the whispered password “Laval.” No Vichy or German troops would ever dream that the Maquis would use the name of the Vichy political boss as a password. Nor the reply, “Pétain,” although the Frenchmen liked to make it sound like “ putain ”—whore.
    They were shivering with cold in shirtsleeves and pullovers. They had taken off their jackets to make an improvised stretcher for the Great War veteran who had taken two bullets in his thigh. There was a whiff of French tobacco in their air, and François arrived, nonchalantly bringing up the rear with a Spandau over one shoulder. The men putting down the stretcher clinked from the belt bandoliers around their shoulders.
    “You got the gun,” Manners marveled.
    “Got the gun, the ammo, the truck, and eight Boches. And two Schmeissers. A successful night. We heard your explosions.”
    “So how did it start? Did they spot you”?
    “It started by accident. We had a tree all ready to