The '44 Vintage

by Anthony Price

  The jeeps ahead were starting to move, and not before bloody time, thought Butler.

  “Ye-ess …” Audley was also regarding him thoughtfully. “You were remarkably quick off the mark back there in the river, Corporal.”

  “I heard the mortar, sir.” The lie came out automatically; lying was a reflex like any other, once the right stimulus was applied.

  The jeep moved forward smoothly.

  But Audley was still watching him. “You did? I could have sworn you were reaching for that Bren even before I heard it, you know … and I also could have sworn Corporal Jones wasn’t on that boat-thing of the sergeant’s—there were just the three Americans and Colonel Clinton when I drove onto it.”

  Sergeant Winston nodded. “That’s the way it was.”

  Suddenly Butler knew how tired and wet and frightened he was. And he was aware also that the weight of fear and knowledge—knowledge that he didn’t understand and which made no sense to him—was greater than he could bear.

  “No, sir—he wasn’t,” he said. “And those weren’t Germans who machine-gunned us, either.”

  CHAPTER 10

  How Master Sergeant Winston joined the British Army

  THEY TRAVELLED half a mile along the road before Butler realised that they weren’t on the proper bank of the Loire at all, but on another flood embankment matching the one they’d crossed on the friendly northern shore.

  Which wasn’t friendly any more, with what he’d left behind him half-buried in the sand for the next passer-by to see …

  He thrust the foul memory into the back of his mind before it could panic him and concentrated on his new surroundings: this was enemy country at last, in which every piece of cover might conceal a German, and he must keep his wits about him.

  The jeeps were turning sharply, one after another, onto a narrow track which twisted off the embankment road down its landward side. Sergeant Winston swung their vehicle after the jeep ahead of them, spinning the wheel with a skill Butler envied. At the bottom of the track they passed a small farmhouse shuttered like the ones on the far bank, its ancient paint flaking from the woodwork. Whatever the French were like, they weren’t house-proud like back home, where a scrubbed step and a well-polished door-knob mattered more than a threadbare coat and a patched elbow.

  It didn’t surprise him that there was no sign of life to be seen: the rattle of those machine guns and the thump of the mortar bombs would have sent sensible civilians into their cellars, to pray that they hadn’t drawn the card in the lottery that decreed which house should be smashed to rubble and matchwood and which should be left without a scratch.

  The jeep turned again sharply, manoeuvred between two more blankly shuttered houses, and set off down a long, straight road in a dead flat countryside of small fields and lines of poplar trees. It was like the landscape he had glimpsed in the misty half-light on the nightmare side, only now he could see that the strange dark balls in the trees weren’t bee swarms at all, but some sort of parasitic vegetation … and the fields—vines and vegetables and orchards—were as well tended as gardens: it was funny that the houses should be so unkempt but the land so cherished.

  Audley swivelled in his seat. “All right, Corporal,” he said conversationally, “talk.”

  “Yes, sir …”

  But when it came to the ultimate point, he found he didn’t know what to say, or even how to start.

  I’ve got this trouble with my foot, sir—

  “Come on, Corporal—they weren’t Germans? Well, who the hell were they, for God’s sake?”

  That was the end of the story, not the beginning of it. But where was the beginning?

  “I don’t know how to start, sir,” he said.

  “Just tell it like it was, man,” said Sergeant Winston.

  Butler gritted his teeth. “I’ve got this trouble with my foot, sir—it’s called ‘athlete’s foot’, sir—“

  “What?” said Audley incredulously.

  “Let him tell it his way,” said Sergeant Winston.

  He started to tell it like it was.

  The jeep in front slowed down again and finally pulled in alongside others parked on the edge of a small copse.

  Sergeant-major Swayne came down the road towards them, accompanied by a soldier Butler didn’t recognise.

  The sergeant-major stopped beside Audley. “Main road ahead, sir. When we’re sure it’s still clear we’ll be going across.” He looked across at the American. “You keep your foot down when we start moving— understand?” he said.

  Sergeant Winston studied him for a second or two. “Okay.” The soldier had continued on past them.

  Butler heard the crunch of boots on the road behind them and Sergeant Purvis appeared.

  “You wanted me, Sergeant-major?” Purvis found time to give Butler a friendly nod.

  “You take over point section, Sergeant,” said the sergeant-major. “Hobbes and Macpherson are out ahead of you.”

  “Taffy not turned up then?” Purvis shook his head in disbelief. “I’d never have thought it of him—I always thought he was born to be bloody hanged.”

  “Harrumph!” grunted the sergeant-major disapprovingly.

  “What happens after the main road, Sergeant-major?” asked Audley.

  “Two miles of open country, sir. We take that at the double if the road doesn’t throw up the dust … Then there’s good wooded country, sir.” The sergeant-major straightened. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, sir—“

  “Carry on, Sergeant-major.” Audley smiled at the American as Swayne marched away, carrying Sergeant Purvis in his wake. “You’ve just heard my favourite command, Sergeant Winston. It’s the only one I can rely on not to get me into trouble. At least until now.”

  “Is that a fact?” Winston turned towards Butler. “But I think I’d like to hear you say ‘Carry on, Corporal’ right now.”

  Butler looked over his shoulder, then back at Audley. Of all the bandits, Sergeant Purvis was the only one he would have been inclined to half-trust. But the villainous-looking replacement in Purvis’s jeep was another matter.

  “I think we’ll just wait a minute,” said Audley, evidently coming to the same conclusion. “When we get on the road again …”

  Far away behind them there came a whining snarl of distant engines; not the steady beat of the aircraft which had circled above them at the river, but a sharper and more malevolent sound.

  “Limejuice,” whispered Audley, staring back into the pale bluish morning sky. “Limejuice!”

  “Huh?” said Winston.

  “Typhoons.” Audley searched the sky. “If there are any Germans left back at the river, then God help the poor devils.”

  “Jee-sus!” murmured Winston, looking in the same direction. “The stubby bastards with the rockets—Typhoons?”

  Audley’s mouth twisted one-sidedly, as though the sergeant had touched his bruised shoulder. “That’s right.”

  Winston whistled softly. “Man—I saw some of their handiwork at Mortain. But how’d they get here so quickly?”

  “Standing patrol in the air. The major must have put them up before dawn, just in case.”

  The American looked around him. “Just for … you guys? A standing fighter-bomber strike on call?” His eyes came back to Audley. “You’re not joking?”

  Audley shook his head. “No joke.”

  Engines burst into life ahead of them, drowning the sound of those other more powerful engines away to the north just as their note changed.

  “No joke,” muttered Sergeant Winston. “Then let’s get to hell out of here, like the man said.”

  They’d just reached the road junction when the sound behind overtook them. The jeep ahead bounced into the air as it roared up the incline of the minor road onto the major one, warning Butler to hold on for dear life. He felt the bazooka and the C rations lift under him as the distant crash of the exploding rockets and the ratde of cannon fire passed over his head. He wondered how the little shuttered homes b
eside the embankment had fared.

  He glimpsed a long, straight road, and a fairy-tale house with round towers topped by conical roofs of smooth blue-black slate. Then they were over the junction and racing down another narrow tree-shadowed road like the one they’d just left, the jeep lifting in anotiher stomach-sickening bounce as they did so. Something flicked past them away over the fields to his left, a mere blur of movement flashing on and off between the trees so fast that it mocked their own furious pace. Then, with a tremendous surge of power, an RAF Typhoon rose across the funnel of sky ahead of them in an almost vertical climb. The sun glinted for a fraction of a second on its cockpit hood before it curved out of Butler’s sight, turning it into a diing of beauty in the instant of its disappearance.

  “He’s going to make another pass,” shouted Audley.

  “Don’t mind me if I don’t stay to watch,” Winston shouted back at him.

  The land started to rise gently under them. They passed another shuttered farmstead with no sign of life around it except a goat tethered to a pear tree in a parched orchard. The goat had huge udders— Butler had never seen a goat with such big udders. Come to that, he thought, he had only once before seen a goat.

  Then the trees thickened on each side of them and their speed came down to a more comfortable level.

  “Go on, Corporal,” said Audley. “What did the major say then?”

  Kill him with the others—

  They listened in silence right to the end—or at least to the edited end Butler found himself fabricating, with that one unendurable fact omitted.

  And then for what seemed an age they continued in silence, until he began to feel a different fear spreading within him over the hard lump of panic that already constricted his chest.

  They didn’t believe him …

  Finally Audley turned towards him again.

  “Jones tried to stab you … you were kneeling, and he told you to turn round. But you jumped him, and you knocked him cold—that’s right?”

  Butler nodded wordlessly. Put like that—and put like that after his report of the conversation between the major and the sergeant-major—he hardly believed himself.

  “And you had a fight with Jones the night before—that’s last night?” said Sergeant Winston.

  “Yes … but—“ Butler saw with horror how those two separate but connected events could be rearranged to make a very different story. “But that was why they wanted to—to kill me,” he said desperately.

  “Uh-huh.” Winston nodded at the road ahead. “And just how cold did you knock this guy Jones? Very cold, maybe?”

  Butler looked wildly at Audley. “Sir—he tried to stab me—he did stab me—I felt him stab me—“

  “Well, you sure as hell don’t sound stabbed to me, man,” said Winston.

  Butler looked down at himself disbelievingly, his hands open.

  Audley stared at his left hand. “No blood … not unless you’ve got purple—“ He stopped suddenly, the stare becoming fixed on Butler’s midriff. “Just a moment though … let’s have a closer look at you, Corporal.”

  He reached down and lifted one of Butler’s ammunition pouches up so that he could see the bottom of it. ‘Well, well!”

  “What is it?” asked Winston quickly.

  Audley dropped the pouch back into place. Butler seized it and tried to twist it, but the Sten magazines inside prevented him from seeing what Audley had stared at. All he could make out was the beginning of a dark purple stain on the edge.

  “He’s got a one-inch slit on the bottom of the pouch,” said Audley. “And …”

  “And … ?”

  “This webbing of ours is extremely tough, Sergeant. It takes quite a lot of force to go through it.”

  “Like a knife, huh?”

  “Like a knife. And then a couple of Sten mags and a bottle of what’s-it …” Audley looked into Butler’s eyes. “Well, well!”

  Winston glanced quickly at Audley. “You’re thinking maybe … ?”

  “I’m thinking a lot of things, Sergeant.”

  “Like what?”

  Audley didn’t reply. Instead he rubbed his hand over his face as though he was wiping cobwebs from it. As he reached his mouth his hand stopped.

  “Like what?” Winston repeated.

  “Like … like limejuice was pretty quick off the mark this morning just now… . We used to reckon on ten minutes at the least, and that was one hell of a lot closer to their forward landing strips than we are here.”

  “But they got a standing patrol, you said.”

  “So I did. But he said he wasn’t expecting any trouble at the crossing —it was going to be a piece of cake.”

  “He could be just careful?”

  “That’s exactly what I’m thinking—he could be just very careful indeed. As the corporal said, he could prefer certainties to odds, Sergeant.”

  This time Sergeant Winston didn’t reply.

  “And there was something damn queer about the way he acted back there …” Audley’s hand rubbed his stubbly chin. “When we were jumped on the river … by a German patrol—when you made that memorable observation of yours. ‘Horseshit’ was it?”

  Winston grunted. “He had his goddamn patrols out, for Christ’s sake.”

  “That’s right. And if there’s one thing about this crew of desperadoes it’s that they’re highly professional at smelling out Germans. Because they’ve been keeping one jump ahead of them for months in Jugoslavia.”

  “So they fouled this one up, you mean?”

  “Or maybe they didn’t foul it up—also as Corporal Butler says… . Or maybe they did foul it up, at that!”

  “I don’t get you now, Lieutenant. They didn’t—and they did?”

  “That’s right. They were laying it on for us, the colonel, the corporal and me—three birds with one stone—the birds who weren’t wanted any more en voyage. And then the corporal messes things up with his quick reflexes and his Bren gun: they were expecting sitting ducks, and they got thirty rounds rapid just where it hurt.” Audley’s thin lips twisted. “Naughty Corporal Butler!”

  Winston rocked in his seat uneasily. “Hell—but how d’you know they weren’t Germans? That guy had an MG 42—and that was an MG 42 firing at us, I’d know that goddamn noise anywhere!” He shook his head. “I heard that first time on Omaha Beach and I’m not ever going to shake that out of my head, Lieutenant, you can believe that for sure.”

  “They’ve got all sorts of guns with them,” said Butler.

  “That’s right.” Audley nodded at him. “These people are weapon specialists. The job they had in Jugoslavia was instructing the partisans in weapon training. The major’s second in command—Captain Crawford—was explaining to me last night … half the men Marshal Tito has don’t know one end of a gun from the other, they’re shepherds and schoolboys, and they have to fight with what they can get—not just our weapons, but German and Italian … and Russian too, now. And the marshal asked our people for a squad to train his chaps, and these are one lot of them. They’re a sort of mobile musketry school.”

  They stopped again.

  This time the woods were all around them, thick and silent. Friendly woods, Butler told himself: friendly and concealing woods where no enemies were, and the feeling of unease and watching eyes all around him was just the town-bred boy’s unfamiliarity with anywhere away from bricks and mortar and stone and slate, and straight ordered lines and sharp angles of houses and walls and roofs.

  But he knew he was deceiving himself now, and that the enemy was all around him, much closer than what might lie hidden behind the green tangles.

  Major O’Conor was striding towards them again, the ashplant swinging nonchalantly for all the world as though he was a country gentleman walking his acres.

  “Ah, David!” The major waved the stick. “Limejuice to your liking, eh?”

  “Yes, sir. B-b-b …”—Audley fought the word—“better them than us, sir.”

  The major
laughed a quick, mirthless laugh. “I couldn’t agree with you more. I had a bit of that in 1940—and another bit in Crete in ‘41. So I’m quite content to see them on the receiving end, I can tell you, by jiminy.” His eye swept over Butler. “No Germans to smell here, Corporal…” The eye came to the American sergeant. “Bit short with you back there by the river, Sergeant, but not much time, you understand—Germans and all that… But welcome to Chandos Force, anyway.”

  “Major, sir”—Winston gripped the wheel with both hands—“I’m sure we’ll get along just fine.”

  “That’s the spirit!” The eye roved over the jeep. “Sergeant-major! Get this bazooka out of this jeep—and the projectiles too. I want that up front in Cranston’s jeep. He knows how to use the damn thing.” The major’s golden smile showed. “They can carry some more petrol instead.”

  “Sir!” shouted the sergeant-major in the distance.

  The major tapped the bonnet of the jeep. “Another main road two or three miles ahead, David,” he said conversationally. “All being well, we’ll hop that in the next stride. Then we should be right as rain for quite a way … my chaps know the drill backwards. Just follow instructions and you’ll have no trouble.”

  Audley nodded. “Righty-ho, sir… how’s the colonel, sir?”

  “Hah! Lost a bit of blood, but nothing serious. Fleshy part of the arm, that’s all—orderly’s got him nicely wrapped up. Good night’s rest and he’ll be as right as rain too.”

  Butler surrendered the bazooka and its ammunition to a couple of bandits in exchange for jerrycans of petrol. It was hard to equate this major, all friendliness and businesslike confidence, with the coldblooded bugger he’d overheard under the bank of the island beside the Loire. He glanced at Audley to reassure himself that he wasn’t dreaming: the subaltern was watching the major with a strangely blank look on his face, as though he too found the adjustment beyond him.

  “Jolly good!” The major lifted the ashplant in farewell, and strode back up the road.

  The American sergeant watched him go for a few seconds, and then turned towards Audley. For another two or three seconds the Englishman and the American stared at each other.