The Caves of Périgord: A Novel

in this.”
    “No, but these are strange times. Fathers can fall sick or have accidents. Young suitors can meet with mysterious deaths. These are dangerous times, Deer.”

CHAPTER 12
Périgord, 1944
    T hey had walked all night loaded down with the remaining explosives. The new recruits carried the ammunition in sacks, staggering-over the heavy ground along the hills that flanked the north bank of the river Vézère. Now they were shivering in a shallow cave, unable to light a fire, and not nearly as far north of Les Eyzies as Manners had wished. He was more tired than he could remember being, and more dispirited than he had ever been in the desert, even fleeing from Rommel’s tanks amid the wreckage of a broken army. At least then there had been a sense of refuge, a strong base on the Nile where his unit could regroup and refit, the promise of a bath and a square meal.
    It was the meal that was making him guilty, an omelet of fresh eggs and a glass of wine and a handsome woman sitting across the table, with Jean Sablon singing “Vous, qui passez sans me voir” on the windup gramophone that needed a new needle. He had not heard the song since his schooldays, on holidays with his parents at Cap d’Antibes. The waiters would sing it late at night as they stacked the chairs on the tables. He had told Sybille about that, falling in with her own mood of nostalgia for another time, before the war.
    He should never have gone with her. She could be shot just for sheltering him in her home. And an officer should not eat until he had taken care of his men, far less relax in a comfortable room with curtains at the front window and the sight of a small garden through the French windows at the rear. He could taste the omelet now, the garlic and the butter, and hear Sybille’s casual comment, “A vet never goes hungry—the farmers see to that.” He had stayed no longer than it had taken him to eat and smoke a cigarette, but he had felt the lure of peacetime stealing over him, a reluctance to rise and go.
    Sybille had been matter of fact, in a way that intrigued him. He thought of self-confident girls back in England before the war, and the nervous ones who came out to Palestine and India looking for husbands. The fishing fleet, they called them. And he thought of the nurses and secretaries and coding clerks he had seen on the arms of staff officers when he was back in Cairo on leave from the front. Sybille was like none of them, with their instant gaiety and relentless energy for tennis and horses and dances. And she wasn’t like the women of wartime London with their brittle hunger for fun and parties, and the haunting way they sobbed in cinemas. Sybille had simply cooked, and ate, and asked him about his family and put another record on the gramophone. It was Charles Trenet, singing “Je Chante,” which he remembered from Haifa before the war.
    “When I can, I live in the times before the war,” she had said when he was leaving. “But I seldom can. Under Vichy it was not too bad, but now that the Germans are here, they won’t let us live in the past. And their presence has brought the Resistance and people like you and now the war is everywhere. I just want it to go away.”
    It was that damned sense of nostalgia that was getting him down, that taste of a little normality that had made it so hard to ride back and creep around a darkened countryside and sleep in caves with his head on a pack that stank of plastic explosive. He was a professional soldier, dammit, not a guerrilla. Every time he set an ambush he found himself thinking how he would guard against it, how he would react and bring his men through if he were wearing a German uniform. He checked himself. That was the desert war, when there had been no civilians, and the Germans had fought clean. Like all of the Eighth Army, he respected the Germans of the Afrika Korps, and like a lot of them, felt he had more in common with Rommel’s chaps than he did with some of the so-called Allies. No, that was unfair. McPhee was first-rate. He couldn’t hope to fight this damned guerrilla war with a better comradeinarms.
    It was the bloody anarchic nature of this war that was dismaying him, he realized, the lack of familiar rules, of that comforting routine of batmen and tea and a pressed uniform and even parades. It was the reversal of the knowledge that had been so natural to them all in the desert, that the Afrika Korps abided by the same kind of rules.