Read The Caves of Périgord Online
Authors: Martin Walker
The Caves of Périgord (51 page)
“Well, a toast to your dear father, and may he rest in peace, along with yours, Lespinasse,” said Malrand, sipping and surveying the grass, the trees, the sky, as if it were simply marvelous to be alive on such a day.
“You were going to tell us the second thing you wanted, François,” said Lydia, her curiosity too insistent to be silent.
“Yes, I was,” he said slowly. “I spent a lot of time dreading that this tale would come out, and now it has, I’m not sure it will be so bad after all. And above all, I think I want to look at the portraits of our ancestors, that first Frenchwoman and Frenchman, those first children of Périgord, once again before I die.”
He strolled over to the grassy mound and rested his hand against the leaning tree.
“I particularly want to see her again, the woman of the cave. I have carried a great
tendresse
for that woman since 1944. So did my English friend, your father. And the older he got, as we sat up late at night and talked about it all, the more he seemed to confuse her with his Sybille. Or the more they seemed to come together in his mind. And you can appease an old man’s vanity by confirming or refuting something that has nagged me for over fifty years. Something your father said, Lespinasse, about the portrait of the man looking rather like me. I’d feel very honored if it were true.”
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 difficult to rally Communists and Gaullists under a common command. The report on the role of the Communists in Bergerac that is cited in the text is a historical document, authored by Maurice Loupias, code name
Bergeret,
who was the regional commander of the
Armée Secrète
. Preparations for a Communist seizure of power as the Germans departed were forestalled by the return from Moscow of the exiled French Communist leader Maurice Thorez, who was under orders from Stalin to squash any disruption in France while it remained the crucial logistic base of the Western front against Nazi Germany.
The dreadful march of the second SS armored division, Das Reich, in June 1944, from Toulouse in southern France to the Normandy invasion front, is a central element of this novel and every effort has been made to describe it correctly. All German orders and reports cited in the book, including the one by the Das Reich commander, General Heinz Lammerding, are genuine. Its strength and units and composition, its route through the Périgord, the insurrection in Tulle, the brief battle of Cressensac, the tragedy of Terrasson, and the appalling atrocity of Oradour were all very much as described here. There is no historical evidence for my fictional suggestion that in the absence of heavy weapons, Resistance leaders were prepared to provoke the Germans into reprisals in order to delay them. During their postwar trial for the Oradour massacre, German veterans claimed that they had been
angered by reports of the killing and abuse of their captured comrades. They carried little credibility. But it remains a startling and unprofessional dereliction of military duty that the German Army allowed one of its premier armored divisions to spend time hunting down the Maquis when it was desperately needed to fight the invasion in Normandy. M.R.D. Foot, in his magisterial official history,
SOE in France,
concludes: “The extra fortnight’s delay imposed on what should have been a three-day journey may well have been of decisive importance for the successful securing of the Normandy bridgehead.”
Details of rationing under Vichy, the organization of Vichy security forces (including the notorious North African unit), the location of German Headquarters, and the texts of BBC messages are as accurate as current research can make them. The Centre Jean Moulin in Bordeaux is an imposing and helpful library and a memorial to the Resistance. I am indebted to André Roulland’s
La Vie en Périgord sous l’Occupation,
to Jacques Lagrange’s
1944 en Dordogne,
to the memoirs of René Coustellier in
Le Groupe Soleil,
and to Guy Penaud’s magnificent
Histoire de la Résistance en Périgord
. I also sought within the limits of fiction to base my accounts of sabotage and military operations on reality. Readers of George Millar’s
Maquis,
one of the outstanding books to emerge from the Resistance, will recognize my debt to him. I must also cite my reliance on Max Hastings’s
Das Reich,
an admirable work of research and reconstruction.
I was introduced to the Périgord by my friends of three decades Gabrielle Merchez and Michael Mills, whose kindness and welcome kept bringing me back. My friend Jean-Henri Picot, son of the renowned
Compagnon de la Résistance
Paul Picot, opened for me his family archive and recounted his boyhood reminiscences of being able to eat eggs and chicken daily in the Périgord countryside in 1942-44. Other friends and neighbors in the Périgord were generous with their dinner tables, their time, and their memories. I have borrowed some of their names, some of their personalities, and tried to recapture some of
their warmth in this novel. Jean-Louis and Kati Perusin introduced me to the songs of Charles Trenet. And I am indebted to Jo and Collette da Cunha, and their invaluable personal library. It was Jo who first acquainted me with the local
pineau,
which he makes himself, and whose charms ensured that this book took rather longer to write than expected.
Anyone who has seen the extraordinary paintings of the Lascaux caves has probably asked themselves why artists of such genius limited themselves to the paintings of horses, bulls, deer, ibex, and bear, and did not seek to depict their landscapes and settings, or indeed themselves. Art and humanity are so closely entwined that the urge to portrait, whether in the statues of ancient Greece or in the paintings of the Renaissance, seems to be a logical and even inevitable part of the artistic process. But there are prehistoric images of the human form, in statuettes and in the caricatures of faces engraved at a Marche, near Poitiers. The lifestyle I ascribe to the people who created Lascaux, which seems to have borne great similarity to that of the North American Indians and Siberian tribes like the Evenk, is based on the fractional achaeological and anthropological evidence. The work and theories of l’Abbé Breuil and of André Leroi-Gourhan, allowing for fictional embellishment, are much as I describe. Without their efforts, we would know far, far less than we do, and M. Leroi-Gourhan, and Arlette Leroi-Gourhan, and Brigitte and Gilles Dellux have been, along with Ann Sieveking’s
The Cave Artists
and the museum at Les Eyzies, my constant guides.
Finally, there is nothing outlandish about my suggestion that there remain undiscovered caves that could contain artistic riches to rival Lascaux. Two or three new caves are discovered, or rediscovered, in southwestern France each year. In 1994, cave explorers in the Ardeche region of France discovered what is now known as the Chauvet cave, containing over four hundred paintings and engravings that are at least thirty thousand years old. And in the year 2000, another magnificent cave gallery of
engravings dating from a similar period was discovered at Cussac, near le Buisson, within strolling distance from the house at which this novel was being written. The Cussac cave, some 900 yards long, also contains some silhouettes of women, and erotic designs. Who knows what might emerge next in this cradle of humanity that the people of Périgord call the
Vallée de l’Homme?
It remains the small, enchanting part of Europe that has known the longest continuous human habitation. And anyone who knows its climate, its geography, its food, its people and their generous welcome will understand why after over thirty thousand years it is still going strong. And as the English learned in the fifteenth century, the Germans in the twentieth, and successive governments based in Paris have always known, the people of Périgord have an admirably tenacious disinclination to be run by anybody but themselves. It has been a privilege to get to know them, and to admire the courage of people who tried to stop a panzer division with nothing more than guns, grenades, and petrol bombs. As M.R.D. Foot has suggested, they may have decided the outcome of the D-Day invasion and thus of World War II. And as far as we know, their ancestors at Lascaux were the first to assert the extraordinary creative potential of humankind.
Martin Walker
Périgord, 2000
Table of Contents
CHAPTER 2 The Vézère Valley, approximately 15,000 b.c.
CHAPTER 3 Arisaig, Scotland, 1943
CHAPTER 5 The Vézère Valley, 15,000 B.C.
CHAPTER 6 The Audrix Plateau, Périgord, 1944
CHAPTER 8 The Vézère Valley, 15,000 B.C.
CHAPTER 11 The Vézère Valley, 15,000 B.C.
CHAPTER 14 The Vézère Valley, 15,000 B.C.
CHAPTER 17 The Vézère Valley, 15,000 B.C.
CHAPTER 20 The Vézère Valley, 15,000 B.C.