The Caves of Perigord_ A Novel - Martin Walker [85]
“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,” François said reasonably. “And there are no Germans here.”
“No food either.”
“But breakfast is just over the hill—a farm I know well.” François 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 Périgord,” François 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 Frisé, then Manners and I go on to meet my brother and the radio operator. McPhee, you and Frisé 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 François. “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, François, that doesn’t mean you can trust everybody.”
François 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 château, 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