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. Prisoners would be taken and treated decently. The wounded could be left in the knowledge that the other side would look after them, if possible. He missed the sense of organization that came with being part of a battalion, a brigade, a division, an army. And he fretted under the knowledge that he was utterly responsible for the safety and food and supplies for the almost demoralized pack of French boys around him who had not the slightest sense of a discipline he could rely on. And he was also responsible for the reprisals the Germans would take, the burnings of farms that fed them, the shooting of men and women who helped him.
He had known about this, even been trained for it. But what Manners never expected was that the sense of a modest victory over the German train networks and their patrols should now strike him as so hollow, a success that would unleash upon him only the new pressure of reprisals and German reinforcements. The better he did, the worse it would get. And there would be no Afrika Korps rules here, no prisoners taken, and no wounded could be left for the Gestapo to torture. He didn’t even feel much confidence in the other trained members of the team, despite the way Francois had staged the ambush. Francois had been late to the rendezvous, and was now snoring beside him, one arm flopping casually on the captured German machine gun. He should wake him. There was much to do. They had to meet Berger today, contact the radio operator, arrange another parachute drop, organize some food for the men, and then march again all night to hit the railway line that connected Brive and Perigueux. A good twenty miles north of the last attack, it would serve to spread the German search.
“We should have been ten miles north of here by now,” said McPhee, sitting up and shaking his head from his brief sleep. “The Germans will be all over these roads tomorrow.”
“Today, you mean,” said Manners. He shrugged. “Untrained troops, a night march. You can’t expect too much. The boys are cold and hungry and frightened.”
“They’re not the only ones,” grunted the American. “How much plastic we got left?”
“About twenty pounds. Enough for one good attack on a junction or a lot of little rail breaks.”
They watched the first glow of dawn through the cave mouth, the sudden gleam of a lazy curve in the river, the silvering frost on the grass. Behind them, the click of a petrol lighter, a sudden soft glow, and the whiff of tobacco. Francois had woken.
“You’ll kill us all, with those smokes of yours,” grumbled McPhee, standing up to stamp his feet and rub some warmth back into his arms. “You just lit up the whole cave. Half the German army just pinpointed us.”
“I lit it under my jacket,” Francois said reasonably. “And there are no Germans here.”
“No food either.”
“But breakfast is just over the hill-a farm I know well.” Francois went outside to piss, standing with his back to them, his arms braced on his hips, puffing plumes of smoke into the lightening sky as he released a long stream to salute the dawn. Manners shivered, as some thought suddenly ran through his head that he had seen this sight before, that men had stood at the mouths of caves and pissed into the dawn light since the days when they had first come down from the trees and learned to stand. It was eerie, as if someone had walked on his grave. These caves were spooky places.
“We can’t all go to your farm. There are twenty of us now,” objected McPhee. “Too many of us to feed.”
“You don’t know the Perigord,” Francois grunted over his shoulder, and turned, buttoning his trousers. “They’ll feed us all, warm milk straight from the cow, some chestnut bread and goat cheese. But we don’t all go at once. We three go first with Frise, then Manners and I go on to meet my brother and the radio operator. McPhee, you and Frise then take back some milk, and bring the boys to the farm, no more than four at a time. Then we all meet tonight at the big Rouffignac cave. I know that area. There are good plateaus for parachute drops, a lot of woodland to train the boys in the Barade forest, and not enough roads for the Germans.”
“What about food?” Manners asked.
“A lot of small farms. We’ll be fine,” said Francois. “Now let me have one more cigarette and then let’s get that milk.”
“What are the chances that someone among those small farms will tell the Germans, or the Milice?” McPhee broke in. “Just because you know the area, Francois, that doesn’t mean you can trust everybody.”
Francois looked at the two men for a long moment, than came and squatted in front of them. “A year ago, I would not even have taken the risk of coming back here, to my own chateau, my own district, where I was brought up with half the boys and was taken fishing with their fathers, and fed tartines by their mothers.”
“But that was last year,” he went on. “Before the RAF started sending a thousand bombers every night against Hamburg and the Ruhr. Before the Germans were beaten at Stalingrad, before we threw them out of North Africa, before we knocked Mussolini out of the war and put our armies back into Italy. And when that happened, Hitler dropped this pretense of southern France being run by Vichy and sent his armies down here too. So now we see the Boche trucks and soldiers, and watch them take our food and chase our women and arrest our young men to send them to Germany to work in their factories. Now we are occupied, and so the only people who might betray us are those too committed to Vichy to change their coats.”
“That’s still a lot of Frenchmen,” said McPhee grimly.
“True. A year ago, to be honest, I’d have said most Frenchmen either supported Vichy or weren’t prepared to do anything against it. Most people want a quiet life, and so long as there were no German troops down here, people could fool themselves that the war didn’t much concern them. But now only a fool thinks the Germans have a chance of winning, and anybody with any sense wants to make sure they are on the right side when this war is over.” He stopped to duck his head under his jacket and light another cigarette, and emerged to blow a thick plume of smoke into the cave. “Your war may be decided. Ours isn’t. I keep telling you the big question is whether the right side will be the Communists or the Gaullists.”
“Where the hell do you get all the smokes?” McPhee said. “They’re supposed to be rationed.”
“They are. It’s a system they call the
The B Mark II transmitter was a feeble but cumbersome beast. It was two feet long, weighted thirty pounds, required an aerial seventy feet long, and could transmit its dots and dashes of Morse at no more than twenty watts. Berger had already lost one radio operator in Bergerac when the Germans started using the trick of turning off the power in one subsection of the city after another to see when the signal died. Now he refused to use main current at all and had rigged up a small dynamo that could be powered by a bicycle, maintaining that the risk of shifting the transmitter from place to place around the woods of Perigord was less than that of detection.
Francois and Manners drafted their message, and Berger took the back wheel from one of the bikes to rig the dynamo, and the radio operator pulled off the top silk sheet from his one-time pad and began to encode. Manners checked the coding, and they left him alone to transmit; another of Berger’s security rules. They had cycled about an hour down the woodland tracks and came to the brink of a steep hill where the track wound down to a road. The embankment of a railway loomed up behind it, and the stately arches of a viaduct bridging a steep valley on the far side of the road. Just before the viaduct a small building stood beside the rail track, the raised red-and-white bar of a level crossing beside it, ready to seal off the small road that disappeared steeply into the valley. A red signal flag was tied to the base of the bar.
“Miremont-Mauzens,” said Berger. “It’s a railway halt. That’s where we meet them. The flag means it’s safe.” He turned to his brother. “Francois, you stay here with the bikes. They know where you’re from. You’d just annoy each other, get into an argument.”
Francois shrugged and lit a cigarette. “Don’t worry, my dear brother. I am getting quite good at staying out of arguments. Just ask our English friend how polite I am being to our grumbling American, difficult as it is.”
“McPhee’s all right,” Manners said. “He was just cold and tired and irritable this morning. So was I.”
“That I understand,” said Francois. “Let’s hope that is all it is. But I get the feeling that he likes needling me.”
“So do I,” grinned Manners, to take the sting out of the remark. “So would anybody who knows you. You’re rich, a famous writer, handsome, and a war hero. Don’t be surprised if the rest of us mere mortals try to take you down a peg or two, Francois. If you were as dumb and ugly as me and Berger here, you’d have no trouble.”
