Perigord, 1944
They 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 Vezere. 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. 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 decade. Every ten days, an adult is entitled to two packets of twenty, or some rolling tobacco. But every adult includes a lot of nonsmokers. My brother has a friend who’s a gardener in a nunnery. Eighty nuns and none of them smoke. So the gardener gets their ration, and gives most of them to my brother for his boys. And then this is the Perigord. The best tobacco in France is grown here. Come on; let’s get moving.”
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.”
“You see why I like this cunning Englishman?” Francois smiled at his brother. “Even when he disciplines me, he flatters me.”
“He didn’t flatter me,” said Berger flatly.
“Well, you haven’t seen him fight yet. I did, in North Africa. He has our French elan, and their German thoroughness. We’re lucky to have him on our side.”
“We had good teachers,” said Manners, making a joke of it. “We’ve been fighting you bloody Frenchmen since 1066.”
Berger and Manners walked down the path to the road and crossed the rails to use the cover of the trees to reach the building. They had fifty yards to go when Berger stopped and turned and looked grimly at the Englishman.
“He calls himself Marat, and I don’t trust him very far,” said Berger quietly. “He used to be a railway man, but went off to fight in Spain with the Communists. He came back to France in 1939, and then disappeared. If you ask me, I think he went to Moscow. He came back in late 1941, after Hitler invaded Russia. He claims to have men everywhere, in Brive and Perigueux and Limoges, even Bordeaux. I think what he has mostly is his old friends on the railways and in the rail unions. And a lot of Spaniards, refugees from Franco who fled here when the fascists won. His information has been good on the rail system and convoys. He wants arms, but there’s no sign of their using them against the Germans. On the other hand Hilaire said I had to take you to him and arrange supplies. So I follow orders. I won’t speak much.”
“He and Francois are old enemies?”
“He and Francois have never met. They just hate each other on principle. If they met, they’d start to argue. Francois calls himself a socialist-they hate the Reds more than anybody. They’d probably try to kill each other.”
“Does this Marat have access to a radio?”
Berger shrugged. “Not one of ours. He always dealt with your F Section, that special French section of SOE you used to deny having, the one that deals with Communists and others who oppose de Gaulle. I presume he got supplied by one of their networks in the north. You probably know more of this than I do.”
“So why does he want to meet me?”
“Because he wants more arms and explosives, to stockpile for his precious revolution. And you heard Hilaire back at the chateau. London wants the Communists supplied. But they are not using my drop zones nor my people. Anything you want to set up for them, you have to do it alone.”
“So why have you set up this meeting? If you wanted to keep me away from him, you just had to say the meeting place was unsafe.”
Berger eyed him steadily. “You don’t know much about the secret world, do you?”
“I suppose not.” Manners felt very small and rather lost, as if the war he had been fighting had taken place in some altogether different dimension. But he put his question again. “Why are you helping me to meet him?”
“First, Hilaire told me to do it, and I trust Hilaire. Second, if any arms are going to the Communists, at least I’ll know when, where, and who has them. Third, even if this Marat won’t use his supplies against the Germans, more and more of his people will know he has them and will want him to use them. Some of them are French first, Communists second.”
“This is a vipers’ nest you people have built for yourselves.”
“True, but we had some help from Hitler. And from Stalin.” Berger closed his eyes and grimaced. When he opened them his eyes were clear but curiously empty. “It’s time you met Stalin’s representative in this part of France.”
Marat was of average height, thin and balding, wearing round spectacles and smoking black tobacco in an old and much-charred wooden pipe. A beret and scarf and cloth shopping bag were on the battered table at which he sat reading a book as if he were just another local waiting for a train. He looked up as Berger steered Manners inside, and peered at the Englishman.
“Are you the one that helped pull the fireman from that train you blew up?” he began. Manners nodded.
Marat rose and shook him by the hand. A surprisingly strong grip. “Then I thank you for that in the name of the railway men’s union. And I congratulate you on a busy start. Le Buisson will be out of action for weeks. Your Winston Churchill should be pleased.” From the shopping bag, he pulled a dark bottle and three glasses.
Berger interrupted. “I’ll go outside and watch. You don’t need me for this conversation.”
“I think, for reasons of mutual confidence, it might be better if you stayed,” said Marat. He had an attractive voice, and spoke a precise, formal French. He might have been a railway worker, thought Manners, but he was a well-educated one. “I know we have some problems between our two organizations, but we only have one enemy. And the fact of these new arrivals from London means that we are getting ready for the invasion at last. Then we can start fighting Germans together, my dear Berger.”
“You haven’t done much about fighting them yet,” Berger said flatly. “And I don’t feel comfortable without someone on watch.”
“That’s already taken care of. My sentry has been watching you since you came down the hill.” He turned and rapped twice on the window. As Manners watched, a young and dark-haired woman in a shapeless gray overcoat slipped into view from the trees, with her hand inside the shoulder bag that hung at her side. Marat went to the door, and spoke to her briefly. She nodded and merged back into the trees.
“I have some information for you,” Marat said, coming back to the table to open the bottle and pour out some drink. “But first, some Calvados, liberated from the supplies the Germans ship back to their fat wives.” He pushed the glasses toward them, ignoring the way Berger’s hands remained firmly clenched by his sides. “They are bringing a second repair train from Bordeaux, but this one will be well guarded. They are also bringing in a special unit, the Brehmer Division, to scour the area for the new nest of terrorists. They have armored cars, their own radio-direction teams, and they work very closely with the Gestapo. So, I drink to your good health and also to your good luck. You’ll need it.” He drained his glass, and grinned at Manners, who found himself rather liking this Marat.
“We know this, because they are bringing the armored cars by train from Metz, where they have been active in the Lorraine, and we see their transport orders,” Marat went on. He sat down again, and pushed out a chair for Manners, ignoring Berger. Manners sat and caught a glimpse of the book Marat had been reading. Michelet’s History of France. Manners had never read it.
“Be warned, this Brehmer unit learned its business fighting Russian partisans. They are ruthless and good, and you should be ready to leave this area within a week, or even less. They will be based at Perigueux, and they have to choose whether to start with you or to tackle Colonel Georges and his Maquis in the forests near Limoges. In your place, I’d head south for Cahors or east to the hills. But don’t stick around for them to catch you. I can give you a couple of days warning of their arrival at Perigueux.”
“So, there are my cards on the table before you. What I need from you is guns for my boys. Guns and grenades and something to use against tanks. Don’t send those British PIATs of yours. They’re useless. We want the American rocket launchers, the bazooka. And Sten guns and Bren guns and ammunition. And those silenced pistols so we can assassinate German sentries and those Gestapo bastards. And we need a drop this week, before this Brehmer Division gets here. I have two drop zones for you to approve, both in the forest of Lanmary north of Perigueux.”
“Why ask me?” said Manners. “You have already been getting supplies, and you have access to a radio.”
“Yes, the Stationer network.” Marat smiled at Manners’s surprise. “It is a good network, but careless. They have been using the same drop zones too long. That is not a risk I want to take. I need to secure my line of communications, as the generals say.”
“You won’t get bazookas. London wants you alive as guerrillas, hitting and running, keeping the Germans on the move and off balance. They won’t give you weapons that fool you into thinking you can stand and fight. Not against tanks.”
“With bazookas we can ambush tanks as they pass though the narrow streets of our towns and villages,” Marat bridled.
“You can do that with Molotov cocktails. Have you ever seen a bazooka fire? It shoots out a great tail of flame and smoke. Every German in sight opens up. Bazooka men don’t last long. They can’t even kill tanks with a frontal shot, the armor is too thick. They can immobilize them by knocking out a wheel or a track, or penetrate the engine compartment at the rear. That’s if they are lucky. You can do better with a Molotov. But my advice is when you see a tank, hide your guns and run. Believe me, I’ve fought German tanks. I had artillery and fighter bombers and antitank guns and our own tanks to fight with, and they could still beat us. With just guns and grenades and bazookas, you’ll just end up dead.”
Marat nodded coolly. “Well, at least you aren’t making promises you can’t keep. But you will get us the guns and ammunition?”
“I cannot guarantee anything,” said Manners. “I send requests to London, not orders.”
“A request will do. One more thing. I need as much abrasive paste as you can deliver, the stuff we can put on wheel bearings that makes them seize up and lock solid. It’s a lot less dangerous than explosives and more effective in the long run. Tell London that the real weakness of the Boches is that they need low flatcars to move their tanks. The usual flatcars are too high for the tanks to pass through our tunnels. If we can sabotage the low flatcars-and there aren’t many of them-then not a single German tank will get through France by train.”
“What do you want the guns for?” Berger interjected. “You say your Colonel Georges has six hundred men up in the Limousin, and he hasn’t done much with them so far.”
“To assassinate your precious de Gaulle, of course. To kill priests and capitalists.” Marat laughed, showing bad teeth. “That’s what you think, no? Preparing for the great day when the Red Army marches in to liberate the groaning French proletariat. You are a fool, Berger, dreaming up your own nightmares and then choosing to live in them. Even if I wanted to turn my guns on to Frenchmen, how many of my boys do you think would be prepared to follow me? It’s hard enough to get them to kill Milice.”
“I thought the party prided itself on iron discipline.” Berger mocked.
“Maybe in Russia, where the workers already run the state. Maybe in Germany, because even if they are Communists they are still Germans. But this is France, Berger. Iron discipline is not in our nature. Steely courage sometimes, yes. Muddling through usually, yes. But discipline? You ought to attend a few of our party meetings, then you’ll see how little discipline we’ve got. You Gaullists probably do better. But my boys will be there when the invasion comes, if they have anything to fight with.”
“Thanks for the information. I’ll forward your request to London, and if they say yes I’ll come and approve your drop zones,” said Manners. He liked this man.
“Will you come and help my people with the training or should we request extra?”
“Training is what we are here to do. But London will decide. My time is getting very stretched, but there’s also an American with us.” Manners suddenly saw the opportunity to kill two birds with one stone. Marat’s men needed training, and it would be a good idea to keep McPhee and Francois apart for a time.
“An American? My boys will like that.”
“Wait till you see him. He insists on wearing his American uniform and he looks like a Red Indian. It’s a strange haircut they wear.”
“Even better-an American Red.” Marat laughed. “Perhaps you’ll join me in a final drink to the revolution? Or if that offends you, let’s just drink to victory.”
“We have a long ride ahead of us,” said Berger. “But thanks.” He turned to go.
“Wait,” said Marat, and turned to rap on the window again. “If Mercedes doesn’t get my signal, you’ll be shot as you leave.”
“Mercedes?” said Berger levelly, waiting by the door. “One of your Spaniards?”
“The revolution knows no frontiers, my friend.”
“That’s one of the things I don’t like about Hitler. He knows no frontiers either,” Berger retorted, and walked out of the door without looking back as Manners shook Marat’s hand.
“The Dunlop tire factory at Montlucon,” said Marat, keeping hold of his hand. “Your RAF bombers got it last September. I hear it will be in production again next month. One kilo of plastique in the right place and we can knock it out again before it starts. Will you help?”
“Montlucon-that’s some distance.”
“I can get you anywhere by rail. We have ways, hiding places.”
“How do we stay in touch?”
“Through Berger. Otherwise, he’ll never trust you again. But if you must arrange something fast, go to the Cafe de la Place in Perigueux, just behind the cathedral. You saw Mercedes, standing guard outside? She’s the waitress. Good luck, Englishman-and here.” Marat handed him the book he had been reading. “I know about secret work. One part acute terror, nine parts total boredom. You might enjoy a good book.”
The acute terror came quickly, when the demolition of the points at the shunting station of St-Felix went badly wrong. Young Oudinot, on his first mission, lit the fuse at the wrong place; the charge blew up in his face and took his head with it and the Milice post opened up with a machine gun. Two more men went down. Manners took a bullet through the heel of his boot as he came out from cover to help little Christophe get away from the killing ground of the railway lines, and then used his only handkerchief to make a tourniquet above the lad’s shattered elbow. There was no sole left on his boot but he felt no pain as he bundled Christophe over the cinders and then through the brambles and onto the hill above the village. His own charges went off, giving some cover as the Milice carried on firing bursts so long that they must be close to melting the barrel. They had cut the phone lines before moving in to place the charges, but the Germans would have a patrol here before dawn, and the rendezvous point was on the other side of the village. He had to get across, with Christophe.
He was limping now, his foot a mass of pain and Christophe an almost dead weight, as he ducked into the shelter of the churchyard and nerved himself to cross the main street. It was dark and silent, the locals knowing too well not to stir with all the firing, but he felt a thousand pairs of eyes watching him, and imagined Milice gun barrels trained on the pavement. This would never do. He slung Christophe’s good arm around his shoulder, and they hopped and tripped across, and up the side street by the shuttered bakery, and down to the stretch of waste ground near the old garage.
“Laval,” he whispered urgently. “Laval.”
“Putain,” replied Francois coolly, as if they were meeting on some Parisian boulevard. Heaven bless the man but he had got a van, a battered Renault with solid tires that stank of fish as they bundled Christophe into the back where another man lay groaning and clutching his stomach, blood on his chin.
The Renault refused to start. Francois swore as he worked the starting handle and Manners cocked his Sten and kept watch. Francois tried again, and with a noise as loud as the Milice guns, the engine coughed into a rough beat. Manners limped to the passenger door, which refused to open. He slid back the window and found the handle inside.
“The Germans like their fish fresh,” said Francois, settling behind the wheel and lighting a cigarette. “So the fishmonger gets a petrol ration. What’s wrong with your foot?”
“I can walk on it,” said Manners, and passed out.
He woke to the furious sound of barking, and clutched his Sten and looked groggily around for the tracking hounds and Germans that must be hunting him. But he was still in the van, the engine off, a darkened farmhouse looming close, and this monstrous din of dogs.
“It’s a kennel,” said Francois. “They raise and train guard dogs for the Milice. It’s the best cover I know.”
A man came to the door in a nightshirt and carpet slippers, exchanged a few words with Francois, and ducked back into the house. He and his wife then appeared in old raincoats. Manners fell out of the van, gasping with the flash of pain as his foot hit the ground. Then he hauled himself up and helped carry the two wounded into the barn beyond the line of kennels. They settled them on straw, and he fell again. Francois looked at his foot and pursed his lips. The farmer gave Manners some eau-de-vie that tasted of pears and he slept, his Sten gun still clutched fiercely to his chest. When he woke, Sybille was bathing his foot with a rag that came away sodden with blood.
“It’s very badly bruised, but the cuts are all superficial,” she said briskly, dressed as a nurse in a white jacket that buttoned to her long neck. It was tight around her breasts, and he blushed as she watched him stare at her. “You walked a long way barefoot on rough ground. Christophe said you carried him.”
“I didn’t feel much,” he lied. He looked down at his foot. Where the blood had been washed away, it was blue-black with the bruising.
“Perhaps the bullet stunned the nerves. I don’t know much about bullet wounds. The shock of it must have twisted your knee. It’s badly swollen, but not too serious. Keep on pouring cold water onto that bandage I’ve strapped around it. I want to keep it damp and cool. I’m treating you as if you were a horse, and I’m good with horses’ knees. You won’t walk for a week or so. Now brace yourself, this is going to hurt.” She dabbed iodine on the sole of his foot and he bit his lip against the unbearable sting.
“Jesus,” he breathed, tears leaking from his eyes as the pain dulled into a steady throb. “I could get interested in this medicine on humans,” she said casually. “The hardest part of being a vet is the way animals react so badly to pain, even when you’re trying to help them. People like you seem able to manage it better.
“It’s as well you’re here,” she went on. “The Milice are very keen on their guard dogs. I can come and go here as I wish, so it’s the nearest thing we have to a hospital. And thanks to the last parachute drop, I finally have some medical supplies. You must have been persuasive when you radioed London to send them.”
“How are the others?”
“We buried Maxim this evening. I can’t do much about stomach wounds. And I’m about to amputate Christophe’s arm at the elbow. I’ll have to do it here. You’ll have to help with the ether. Look.” She showed him the wire frame, shaped like a cup, and the gauze that fitted over it, and then showed him the tiny pipette with the rubber bulb that looked as if it had once been used for eyedrops. “I’ll give him the initial dose to knock him out, and then you must put two drops onto the gauze every twenty seconds, and make sure he keeps breathing. If he stops, take the mask off his face. Let him take two or three good breaths, and then put the mask on with another two drops. Understand?”
“I understand. Does Christophe know you’re going to take his arm off?”
“Yes, but we’ve got him drunk. And that’s not the worst. You left two men dead at St-Felix. They identified Valerien, and the Gestapo went to his parents’ home with the Milice, and shot his father and his uncle. They left the corpses in the square at le Buisson and made the whole town file past the bodies. They can’t identify Oudinot because he didn’t have a head, but they took five hostages to Perigueux. All of them children. They say they’ll send them to the camps in Germany unless the English capitaine gives himself up.”
There was nothing he could say, and they stared wordlessly at each other for a long moment. Her hair was pinned up again, with loose tendrils spilling down. She dropped her eyes, and began to bandage his foot. She swallowed, and he understood the effort she was making to speak lightly. “When I’ve finished this, you can give me one of your English cigarettes, and then it will be time for Christophe.”
“Have you ever done an amputation before?”
“Not on a human being. But I read the textbook. The principles seem the same.”
She came back every day, and was cool and brisk with Manners, except when she was helping him learn to use the crutch. He had been embarrassed at having to be held up by the farmer when he wanted to go outside to piss and crap. Sybille had brought him an old chair that lacked a seat. She placed a chamber pot beneath it, and he practiced until he could hold the chamber pot in one hand and grip the crutch in the other as he lurched his way out to the dung heap without spilling a drop. It seemed a great achievement, and he was disappointed when Sybille treated it as a matter of course. But she was motherly with young Christophe, holding his one remaining hand and telling him how proud the girls would be to walk out with a hero of the Resistance. After the war.
“And the capitaine will come back from England in his luxurious automobile and take you and your ladylove to the finest restaurant in Perigord, and he will tell her how brave you were,” she said, smoothing the boy’s hair.
“I’ll have to get into training first,” said Manners jovially. “The way Christophe drinks, I’ll be under the table before I can tell her he saved me from the ambush. With my bad foot, I’d never have got away without Christophe helping me. It must be all that eau-de-vie he drinks. Never seen anybody who could hold his drink like Christophe.”
When the boy slept, she told him that the fishmonger had been shot after the Milice reported his van had been used in the escape, and his eyes surprised him by filling with silent tears for a man he had never known.
“It’s all part of the madness,” she said, and smoothed his cheek, as if for the first time he had aroused that tenderness she displayed to Christophe. His tears kept flowing. “We just have to survive it. We will survive it. There will be restaurants after the war, and you will take Christophe to a glorious, drunken dinner.”
“And I will buy you lingerie in Paris,” he said, forcing a smile. “From Lanvin.”
“Now I know you’re getting better,” she laughed, and left him. When she came back the next day, she brought him a collection of Mallarme’s poems, dressed his foot quickly, and said she had to leave. He felt desolated.
“I’m sorry, but you come way behind a pregnant horse in my priorities just now,” she said, ruffling his greasy hair, and then wiping her hand in a matter-of-fact way on her smock.
When she left, he took the scrap of soap, limped out to the yard, stripped and bathed himself from head to foot under the pump. He came back with a basin full of water, and washed Christophe’s hair as well. Then he took his Rolls razor from the small tin case that had been with him since Palestine, stropped it to sharpness, and shaved Christophe and himself.
Francois came later the same day, with cigarettes and a collection of De Maupassant’s short stories, and a bottle of cognac that he claimed had been liberated from a German canteen. There had been another parachute drop, and Marat had provided them with information about an ammunition train that they had derailed. They did not talk about the fishmonger, nor about the German reprisals. The war was going very well without him, said Francois, and when he left, he took Christophe with him, to shelter on a cousin’s farm.
Sybille did not come for two days, and when she did she was angry with him. “You have been trying to walk on this foot,” she accused him. “The cuts have opened again.”
“Not walking,” he lied. “I was using the crutch and I fell.”
“You’re a fool,” she said coldly, reaching for the iodine. “To think that you can fool your doctor.”
“That’s just it,” he gasped through the pain. “I don’t think of you as my doctor.”
“Because to you I’m just a vet,” she flared.
“Because you’re a woman.” He leaned back and closed his eyes, relishing the warm touch of her hand on his foot. He felt her hands stop their work. “Because you are beautiful and I want to be in your house watching you cook and listening to Jean Sablon on your gramophone.” There was a long silence, and she continued changing his dressing.
“You just say that because you enjoy my omelets and my music. You like to relax in my little fantasy world of the time before the war,” she said, her tone too forced to be light.
“No. I want it in the time after the war,” he said tiredly, despairing of ever reaching that deep melancholy within her. “Before the war, you belonged to someone else. I want you to belong to me. In the war, after the war, I don’t care. I want to belong to you.”
He opened his eyes and stared at her, and reached out to take her hand, not knowing if she would leave or dismiss him with a joke. Instead, her mouth worked as if she were about to cry but she left her hand in his. Suddenly he knew, and he felt a great tenderness as the conviction gripped him, that there had been no other men since her husband. And the private sanctuary of her room and her gramophone, which she had shared with him, was already a privilege.
“Seize life, Sybille, while we have it,” he said, knowing as he said it that this was what he believed in most of all.
“You are a fool of an Englishman. It isn’t that at all,” she said softly. “I am feeling very, very shy.”
“So am I,” he said. “Like a very foolish young boy.”
She put her hand to his mouth to silence him, gazing at him with a kind of fascination as if he had told her an extraordinary secret. Her hand moved to his cheek, became a caress, and she leaned down to kiss his lips. The kiss lingered and he stroked her hair, feeling the soft mass of it. She sat up briefly, and her breasts thrust forward against her white coat as she put her hands to her head to loosen some pins and the hair tumbled down. He stroked her breasts through the cloth; she shook her head to send her hair dancing loose about her face, and her face softened into a very secret smile and she helped him undo the buttons.
“Not before the war, and not after the war,” she said finally as they lay, spent and entwined, sharing one of the English cigarettes Francois had left him. “Just now. That’s all there is. Just a little time for us.”