The Caves of Perigord_ A Novel - Martin Walker [115]
“I know it well,” said Clothilde. “But it’s a tourist cave with stalagmites and stalactites—no art at all.”
“But this arms dump was found in another cave, which the intelligence report says was marked on no known maps. It goes on: ‘The arms cache was booby-trapped, but surveillance reported no subsequent guerrilla action in this district.’” Horst looked up. “That’s one place to start looking. There are a couple more. First, apparently there are catacombs under Belvès that link it to some older caves.”
“No, I know them quite well,” said Clothilde. “They grew mushrooms there. Well searched, and no cave art.”
“O.K., what about Rouffignac? Geissler says the Red Indians put up ‘a fierce resistance’when they sent a column to search the cave there. They found a base camp, some food supplies, but no arms dump. Geissler had the cave searched, and kept a couple of companies there for a week, just looking.”
“We’ve thought of Rouffignac. We’ll look again, but it has been well searched.”
“All right. I saved the best for last. You know Perony’s famous site at la Ferrassie, where he found the burials?”
“Yes, I know it well. I worked on Delporte’s subsequent dig there in 1973, when we found the skeleton of the two-year-old. But that’s not a cave, it’s an overhang. And it was Mousterian period, maybe as much as fifteen thousand years before Lascaux.”
“In the hills above it in May 1944, on a flat plateau near a small village called Cumont, the Brehmer Division managed to interrupt a parachute drop. They captured a couple of farm carts and the parachutes and some containers and a lot of British guns, and under interrogation, one of the captured carters said he knew they were taking the guns to a secret place near la Ferrassie. An Englishman was in charge of the operation. That’s it. He died under interrogation. They searched high and low but found nothing.”
“I know of no caves around there,” said Clothilde. “None at all.”
“The carter was not a local. He was a railway man from Normandy called Marcel Devriez who was working in Périgueux and the Milice records listed him as a suspected Communist. Under interrogation, he said he was only driving the cart because the farmer who was supposed to drive it was shot when the Germans opened up, and he was trying to get it away. He was unmarried and had no surviving family in the region. The Gestapo raided his home address in Périgueux, and found it empty. But they did find a lot of anti-Nazi propaganda in both French and Spanish.
“From the Resistance records in Bordeaux, I traced Devriez. He’s on the Périgueux war memorial for 1944, and was listed in Bordeaux as a member of the FTP, the Francs-Tireurs et Partisans, who were mainly Communists. He was in a group run by a shadowy man called Marat, who was one of the aides to the famous Colonel Georges of the Limousin, and very definitely a Communist. Marat disappeared in the summer of 1944, according to the few available FTP records, possibly killed in the attempts to attack the SS Das Reich Division.”
“Surely all those bodies were recovered and identified,” said Manners. “That’s how the names got on the war memorials.”
“Not Marat’s body, along with eight more of his men, and possibly some more who are simply listed as ‘Spanish comrades.’ Marat was last seen in Brive on the eighth of June, trying to persuade the Gaullists and other Resistance groups to join the general uprising on the day after the British and Americans landed at Normandy. He was turned down flat. The Resistance, which took its orders from London, had been told very firmly to get involved in no such foolhardy adventures. The FTP archives assume that Marat and his men were among those killed in the fighting in Tulle, or in the German reprisals. A lot of buildings were burned down, with bodies inside, and that seems the most likely explanation why they were never found. The