The Caves of Perigord_ A Novel - Martin Walker [168]
He raised his glass in salute to the mound. “To them, our ancestors, whoever they were,” he said, and drank.
Author’s Note
This is a work of fiction, which seeks to remain faithful to the little that is known of Neolithic culture some seventeen thousand years ago and to the far better known history of the Resistance of the Périgord region of France in 1944. The connections between the two go far beyond the simple coincidence of geography. The Resistance frequently took advantage of caves in which to sleep, shelter and store weapons, caves that in some cases had been inhabited almost continuously for thirty millennia. In the course of researching this book, I learned that “Berger,” the Resistance name of the celebrated writer and future Gaullist minister André Malraux, boasted during a visit to the cave of Lascaux in 1969 that he had stored weapons there, even leaning his bazookas against the famous sketch of the eviscerated bison and the slain man with the head of a bird. Like many of Malraux’s reminiscences, this seems to have been rather too cavalier with the truth.
André Malraux and the late President François Mitterand, whose complicated politics included a period of apparent adherence to the Vichy regime before he joined the Resistance, are the joint inspirations for my fictional character François Malrand. André Malraux, who wrote ambitious and grandiose novels of love and revolution and fought in Spain in the 1930s, was a Resistance leader in Périgord along with his brothers. The fictional country home of President Malrand is based on the Ch‚teau de la Vitrolle, near Le Bugue, which during the Liberation was briefly the secret HQ of Malraux and the British and U.S. officers on his team. Malraux was wounded and captured by the Germans, imprisoned in Toulouse, and released when the city was liberated by a Maquis force that had been organized, armed, and led by a British agent of SOE, the Special Operations Executive known as Hilaire. His real name was George Starr, and he indeed became a deputy mayor of a French commune, ran the Wheelwright network, and is deservedly honored here. One of the most petty acts in General de Gaulle’s career was to expel Starr from France in September 1944, apparently for no better reason than affront at the central role an Englishman had played in the Liberation of a large part of France.
Three other real figures from the Périgord Resistance have blended their way into the characters of François Malrand and Captain Jack Manners. One is the former playboy aristocrat Baron Philippe de Gunzbourg, code names Edgar and Philibert, an SOE agent who cycled some fifteen thousand miles around southwestern France organizing parachute drops and sabotage operations. The second is Commandant Jack, code name Nestor, whose real name was Jacques Poirier. Although French, he was widely taken for an English officer, and most of the arms with which the Resistance tried to slow the movements of the SS Das Reich division were supplied through him. The third is George Hiller, who attended the original banquet in the ch‚teau organized by the redoubtable Soleil, René Coustellier, which concluded some time after midnight with a lecture on the Sten gun. Soleil was indeed at different times sentenced to death by the Communist Franc-Tireurs Partisans and by the Armée Secrète, and remains a controversial figure in the Périgord to this day, although his charismatic leadership and courage, like his heroic defense of Mouleydier, are beyond question.
The factional rivalries and thefts of arms among Communist, Gaullist, and other wings of the Resistance are a matter of historical fact, as is the meeting and the arguments at the monastery of St-Antoine on the outskirts of Brive on June 8, 1944. Despite the honorable intentions of most of the rank and file, who thought they were all fighting the same battle, it proved desperately