others had already been there, and while guards stood along the cliffs in case a walker happened by, the villagers were given the chance to see it one time.
Her father toted her on the steep parts of the climb, but he was holding her more tenderly than before, talking to her along the way, telling her she was going to see pretty pictures in the dark.
She remembered the hissing sound of the kerosene lamp and the colourful animals prancing in the darkness and the huge bird man who the grown ups said would scare her, but he did not.
And she remembered her mother holding on to her dress to prevent her wandering off the edge while the men built a dry wall of flat stones to hide the mouth of the cave and close it for ever.
She was a rebellious child. Some girls easily fell into the rhythms of village life and went with the flow without question. Not Odile. Early on she discovered books and magazines, one of the few village children who took to the printed page. There were snickers about the black-haired Canadian who had wandered into Ruac some nine months before Odile was born. Hadn’t he been some kind of professor? What ever happened to him? At that, the men would make snorting sounds and turn the conversation to Duval’s fat pigs and Canadian-flavoured rashers.
When she was eighteen, just before her initiation was to occur, she ran away to Paris, to live, to be free. She had a strong sense that once initiated, freedom would be as elusive as a butterfly winging over the cliffs. Her father, Bonnet, and his best friend, Edmond Pelay, the village doctor, went looking for her, but the city was too vast and they had no firm leads. Besides, trouble was brewing and they had to suck up their worries about Odile’s loose tongue and return to Ruac to deal with the coming storm.
Nobody knew exactly where the fire would spark, but all of Europe was dry tinder, with shifting alliances, land grabs, boiling anger and mistrust. As it happened, on 28 June 1914, Gavrilo Princip, a Bosnian-Serb student assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria in Sarajevo. If that hadn’t started the war, it would have been something else. There was a sad inevitability to it.
Odile fell in with a bohemian crowd of artists and writers in Montmartre and when the young men in her circle went to war, she moved into the grimy studio of an older painter with a bad leg and a worse drinking habit who supported himself fitfully by driving a taxi. It was a time of danger and foreboding. The Germans were on the offensive and Paris was in their sights. Still, for a country girl from an insular village in the Perigord, the urban chaos was exhilarating and she drank the excitement like wine.
By the end of August 1914 the French Army and the British Expeditionary Force had been forced back to the Marne River on the outskirts of Paris. The two main German armies that had just polished off Belgium were advancing towards the capital.
On 6 September, the Germans were on the verge of breaking through the beleaguered ranks of the French Sixth Army. The word went out to the garrisons of Paris that reinforcements were needed at Marnes. The 7 th Division was at the ready but all military transport vehicles had been pressed into service and the rail system was choked to the point of paralysis. Then the military governor of Paris fatefully declared, ‘Why not use taxis?’
The call went out across the taxi ranks of Paris and within a few hours a convoy was forming at the Esplanade des Invalides. Odile heard the call. Her boyfriend was in the midst of a bender, blind drunk at the time. She jumped into action; the hell with him! The Germans were coming and she knew how to drive a car – that much she’d learned from her miserable beau. The red Renault taxi with its yellow-spoked wheels, one of the more beaten-up specimens on the streets of Paris, was at the ready so she jumped behind the wheel and joined the convoy.
She may or may not have been the only female driver that day; she liked to think she was an army of one. The column of taxis made their way empty to Dammartin where at dusk, at a railway siding, they met the infantrymen reinforcements who clambered five at a time into each taxi and took off in the dark without auto lights.
The boys who pulled Odile’s taxi, hooted and hollered at their good fortune all the way to the front. She kissed each one goodbye, let one of them squeeze her breast and began to turn back for another round trip when a volley of German artillery shells rained down.
There were ear-splitting booms and flashes of light. A spray of wet dirt landed in her open cab, covering her clothes and hair with a sticky mess. She looked down. There was a bloody palm in her lap and when she picked it up it was like holding a boy’s warm hand on a date. She threw it onto the ground, prayed it didn’t belong to one of the lads she’d just dropped off, and headed back to Paris for a second run.
That night, the taxis of Marnes delivered four thousand reinforcements who turned the tide and saved Paris and, for all anybody knew, France.
Odile wanted Luc to know.
After that night, Odile stayed at the front for weeks, helping the nurses, doing whatever she could for the wounded boys. She stayed until some kind of fever almost killed her. Exhausted and shocked by the calamities of war, she limped back to Ruac and allowed her mother to tuck her into her old bed, where under the soft covers she sobbed for the first time in years.
Her father came to talk to her when he was assured she wouldn’t break down. He wasn’t one for feminine emotions. He had only two gruff questions for her: ‘Are you ready to join us now? Are you prepared to take the initiation?’
She’d seen enough of the outside world to last a lifetime. Ruac was far from the madness of the trenches.
‘I’m ready,’ she answered.
War came again soon enough.
This time the Germans were more successful invaders and as occupiers of all of France the villagers of Ruac couldn’t avoid them. Bonnet was now the mayor. His father, the previous mayor, had passed away as the Second World War began.
The new mayor wrote out his father’s death certificate with the old man’s thick fountain pen, falsifying the date of birth, as the previous mayor had done for generations. And his father was duly buried in the village plot, which had surprisingly few stones considering its antiquity.
Furthermore, comporting with their custom, the stones had the name of the deceased only. There were no chiselled dates of birth or death, and since the plot was tucked away, down a lane through a private farm, no one seemed to notice the oddity.
Ruac village formed its own maquis group, which was under the Resistance umbrella but loosely so. De Gaulle’s staff in Algeria tried to inject some order into the effort and assigned the code name Squad 70 to Bonnet’s gang and passed coded messages to them from time to time. In the dead of night, they would meet in their underground hideout where the mayor would preside and Dr Pelay would act as his deputy. Bonnet would always repeat: ‘These are our priorities: Ruac first, Ruac second, Ruac third.’ And one person would always draw a laugh by concluding, ‘And France fourth.’
Odile’s experience in the previous war put her in good stead with the maquisard and her father reluctantly allowed her to participate in some of their raids alongside her brother, Jacques. Both of them were strong and healthy, quick and athletic. And if Bonnet hadn’t given his permission, Odile would have run off and joined another maquis band anyway.
Bonnet and Dr Pelay made a good pair. Bonnet was a man of few words, but decisive. Pelay was more of a talker, and the people in the village knew that when they went to his surgery he’d chew their ear off. Their maquis soon had a reputation for effectiveness and complete ruthlessness. They were said to engage the boche with an almost superhuman ferocity and cruelty. Squad 70 was known to turn their Nazi victims into unrecognisable hunks of bloody flesh and the SS Panzer Division Das Reich, which was tasked with suppressing the Dordogne, feared this particular maquis group above all the others.
In one of their more notable escapades, Bonnet got it in his head that his band would be responsible for the retaliation for a massacre of French civilians from the nearby village of Saint-Julian. A Panzer unit had surrounded the town looking for maquis elements suspected to be hiding in the surrounding forests. All the men in the village were rounded up and gathered into the grounds of the village school. Information on collaborators was demanded. When none was given, all seventeen men, including a fourteen-year-old boy holding his father’s hand, were executed with bullets to the back of their heads.
Two weeks later, a group of eighty-two Germans were captured by the maquisard fifty kilometres west of Bergerac and were transported en masse to the Davoust Military Barracks in Bergerac, a Resistance stronghold.
