The '44 Vintage

by Anthony Price

  “Bahnen Sie die Strasse,” hazarded Butler.

  “Bahnen Sie die Strasse,” repeated Audley to himself.

  Winston started to turn the wheel, then straightened it instantly. A second later Butler saw why: the side road was jammed with horse-drawn transport—and with more Germans. And, what was worse, at the head was a group of jack-booted officers pouring over a wide-spread map held between them. In the second that it took to pass the turning one of them looked up to stare directly into Butler’s smiling face. At least, it was the nearest he could get to obeying Audley’s command—he could feel his cheek muscles drawn back.

  They were past the turning. A shop door opened just ahead and two soldiers stepped blindly into the road, their arms filled with long French loaves.

  Audley half rose from his seat. “Bahnen Sie die Strasse!” he shouted. “Achtung! Achtung!”

  There was a shout behind them, and the sound of another motor engine.

  “The other jeeps,” said Audley. “Let’s go, Sergeant.”

  “Yes, sir!” Winston stood on the accelerator.

  As the engine roared there came a single shot from the rear, then a burst of firing. One of the loaf-carrying Germans dropped his load and threw himself backwards, upsetting his comrade. The jeep’s tyres screamed and skidded on the cobbled road surface. Butler had a fleeting, confused impression of men scattering in the last lorry interval to his left; dead ahead of them there were more men scattering—men who had been sitting on the steps of the church. Winston swung the steering wheel to the right, then to the left, flinging Butler from one side of the jeep to the other.

  They were into a narrow passage—so narrow that the jeep barely fitted between its walls and the sound of its engine filled his senses.

  “Shoot, Butler!” screamed Audley.

  For a moment Butler didn’t understand the order—there was nothing he could see ahead of them to shoot at. Then he realised that anyone firing down the passage at them from behind could hardly miss.

  As he twisted in his seat there was another burst of gunfire behind them, followed by a grinding crash of metal on metal which ended in an explosive crash.

  The passage was empty—

  “Shoot!” Audley shouted again.

  Butler loosed off the Sten at nothing—he couldn’t have hit anything if it had been there, with the jeep bucking under him.

  “More!”

  He put another burst down the empty passage and saw dust and chips of stone fly from the walls of a house as the bullets ricocheted from one side to another.

  “On the right—there!” shouted Audley.

  “I can see it—hold tight!” Winston shouted back.

  The jeep braked hard. Just as the Sten magazine emptied there came a single shot from the far end of the lane and in the same instant a bullet cracked over Butler’s head. The jeep swung sharply to the right, un-sighting him.

  “Holy God!” said Winston. “It’s a dead end!”

  Butler turned. They had travelled no more than two or three yards down a passage almost as narrow as the alleyway they’d left behind. But now directly in front of them was a pair of heavy wooden doors.

  Audley sprang out of the jeep and ran to the doors. For a second he rattled the iron handle on one of them, then he hammered desperately on them with his fists.

  “Open up, open up! Ouvrez, for God’s sake—ouvrez les portes!” He turned back towards them. “It’s no good—they’re locked … We’ve got to ram the bloody thing … Butler—hold off the Germans.”

  Butler ran back up the passage, fumbling in his ammunition pouch for a fresh magazine. There was no time to take a preliminary look out, he could already hear the hammering of iron-shod boots.

  One thing at least, he thought as he snapped the magazine home: a left-facing corner gave better cover than a right-facing one—he could fire round it without showing the whole of his body.

  The jeep’s engine roared again, and an instant later there was a loud crash from behind him.

  He stepped half into the open, swinging the Sten into the firing position.

  The enemy—

  They were there in plain sight, thirty yards down the alley, but even before he could fire they seemed to vanish into convenient doorways—he marvelled that human beings could move so quickly as he opened fire on the emptiness.

  Another crash behind him.

  “It’s no good,” shouted Audley. ‘They’re too strong!”

  Something sailed through the air from down the alley to bounce off the wall of a house two yards below him. He shrank back round his corner, pressing himself flat against the wall behind him. The house shook with a sudden deafening concussion.

  They were all going to die here—

  He sprang out into the alley again and emptied the Sten into a cloud of dust.

  “Come on, Butler,” Audley shouted at him. “We’re making a run for it—“

  The jeep was jammed up close to the wooden doors. Sergeant Winston was nowhere to be seen—Butler looked around stupidly.

  There was a strong smell of petrol—

  “Over the gates—on the jeep and over the gates,” Audley urged him.

  Butler leapt onto the bonnet of the jeep and threw himself over the top of the wooden doors. As he did so he had a vision of a great white angel with high folded wings stretching out its arms to welcome him. Then he landed with a bone-jarring thud beside Sergeant Winston, who was crouched beside the gates slopping petrol out of a jerrycan.

  Audley dropped beside them.

  Another grenade exploded behind them somewhere.

  Sergeant Winston clicked his cigarette lighter in the puddle of petrol, which ignited with an explosive whumppp.

  “Let’s get the hell out of here,” said Winston.

  WHUMPPP!

  The wooden doors shook and a great tongue of orange flame rose above them.

  “Holy God! Come on, Corporal!” said Winston, dragging at Butler’s arm.

  “Steady on.” Audley took Butler’s other arm. “That first grenade almost got him, I think—come on, Butler … it’s time to be moving, old lad.”

  Butler had been staring at the beautiful white angel, whose arms were still raised in welcome. He felt himself being lifted and swivelled —now there was a great white cross in front of him.

  Something stung his cheek.

  He was in a monumental mason’s yard, just like the one in Inkerman Street, which he’d passed a thousand times on his way to school.

  “Sorry.” He shook his head. “I’m all right, sir.”

  “Well, you won’t be for long,” said Winston. “If we don’t get out of here soon we’re gonna have to find a real good excuse for disturbing the peace—“

  They were running.

  White blocks of marble … a door in a wall—Sergeant Winston kicked it open … a vegetable garden—rows of French beans—Butler giggled at the sight of them, because if there was anywhere in the world where there ought to be rows of French beans it was in a French vegetable patch … and beetroot, with red-veined leaves, and fine big savoys, better even than in the general’s garden.

  The garden ended in a trim little hedge: Audley went through it as though he still had a tank around him. Butler followed him and found himself in a dusty little lane, with an open vineyard on the far side of it. The sky above him was blue and cloudless and for the first time he felt the warmth of the sun on his face.

  “Come on, man!”

  He blinked at the sun. Audley and Winston were already pounding down the lane ahead of him.

  “Come on!” Audley was shouting at him.

  He started to run again. His head seemed to be spinning, but his legs worked independently—it was like running downhill when the hill was so steep that the only way to keep upright was to run faster and faster.

  There were trees now along the roadside, and he followed the other two off the lane into their shadow on the field’s edge. The going was harder on the crumbly soil and he felt
enraged with them that they should thus slow him down unnecessarily when he’d been running so well—

  Audley pulled him down into the field between the vines.

  “Crawl.” Audley pointed at the American’s backside, which was disappearing down the leafy avenue of the row. “Crawl!”

  Butler crawled as best he could, with the Sten banging backwards and forwards and sideways on its strap round his neck.

  “Faster!” urged Audley from behind. “Go on, go on, go on!”

  Butler’s heart was pounding on his chest now, but he drew reserves of strength from the anger within him—he wasn’t quite sure who or what he was angry with, but he certainly didn’t intend to let any bloody tank officer, or any bloody American, outcrawl him. Marching, running or crawling, no one could beat a rifleman—

  Suddenly his legs were jerked from under him and Audley was pressing him down into the dirt.

  “Quiet!” Audley hissed into his ear.

  All he could see was endless vine bushes, the stems of which were gnarled and knotted as though the vines had grown slowly and painfully out of the soil over many years.

  He was also aware that his head ached—there was a hammer inside it which grew louder and louder … and then faded.

  “We’ll crawl some more now … can you crawl some more, Corporal?” Audley’s voice in his ear was solicitous.

  Butler raised himself on one elbow. “Yes, sir.”

  “I’ll take the Sten,” said Audley.

  “That’s all right, sir—“

  “I’ll take it,” Audley insisted.

  “Yes, sir… I’d better put a fresh mag in then.” He fumbled for another magazine and rearmed the gun. “There we are then, sir.”

  Audley was looking at him strangely. “You sure you feel okay?”

  “Sir?” Butler frowned. “Why shouldn’t I feel okay?”

  The strange expression changed to one of surprise. “Don’t you know you’ve been hit?”

  “What?”

  “Corporal …” Audley reached forward and touched the side of Butler’s head. “Let’s just have a look—“

  “Ouch!” The subaltern’s fingers stung like fire. He brushed them away and touched the same spot. “Ouch!”

  His own fingers were covered with blood.

  “Phew!” Audley breathed a sigh of relief. “It’s only a flesh wound, I think—but you look as if half the side of your head has been blown off … yes … I can see where it creased the side of your skull and clipped your ear: it just dazed you a bit, that’s all.” He grinned at Butler. “It’s only blood, that’s all—that’s a relief.”

  Butler looked down at his hand in horror. It was his blood.

  There was a rustle among the vines ahead of them.

  Sergeant Winston crawled into view. ‘We better shift our asses out of here before those motorcyclists come back,” he said.

  Motorcyclists?

  “You okay, Corporal?” Winston addressed Butler. He sounded remarkably casual in the circumstances, thought Butler.

  “Yes,” he said sharply.

  “Great.” Winston nodded encouragingly at him. “That’s head wounds for you—you can walk, you’re alive. You can’t walk, you’re dead. So let’s crawl instead, huh?”

  They crawled.

  The field went on and on forever, and Butler felt sicker and sicker, and angrier and angrier.

  Then the hammering returned which had seemed before to be inside his skull, but which now came from the lane they had left. Only now it was also a long way away.

  They hugged the earth until it had faded.

  “They got better things to do than look for us,” said Winston hopefully. “Come to that, the way the jeep went up, maybe they think we’re still riding in it, with a bit of luck.”

  “True. But they could be looking to see whether there are any more of us,” murmured Audley. “Which there won’t be.”

  Butler stared at him. He was beginning to remember the confused events of their passage through Sermigny in greater detail.

  “The other jeeps didn’t get through,” he said.

  “Correction,” snapped Audley. “The other jeep—singular.”

  Butler stared at him for a moment. Then he knew suddenly why he had been so angry—why he was still angry—and why he was going to remain angry until the score was evened.

  “That treacherous bugger Purvis!” he whispered.

  “And O’Conor,” agreed Audley. “In fact—O’Conor first and last Purvis merely set us up. He merely directed us.”

  “Holy God!” said Sergeant Winston.

  “Yes,” said Audley. “’I’ve had a look-see myself—take it nice and easy, and don’t run over any kiddies’—we let ourselves be taken, and he took us. Two little birds with one stone, and he even got someone else to throw it.”

  “But… the other jeep?” Butler raised his hand to scratch his scalp, which was itching, and then thought better of it. The bleeding seemed to have stopped of its own accord; he didn’t know why it had stopped, only that was no more surprising than the fact that he couldn’t remember when or how it had started. But it was better left alone, anyway.

  “His own men, you mean?” Audley nodded thoughtfully. “Yes, that was pretty average cold-blooded—even by O’Conor’s standards… . But then there’s no reason why the whole of Chandos Force should be privy to the major’s little scheme for liberating His Majesty’s property on his own account … in fact, when you think about it—the more you think about it, the less likely it is that anyone except his inner circle knows what he’s planning.”

  “Why not?” Butler had a feeling that Audley was right, but after Sergeant Purvis’s appalling treachery nothing was certain any more, and he felt that everyone was guilty until proved innocent.

  “Why not? Well … because loot has to be divided, for one thing, so the fewer there are, the bigger the shares. And the fewer there are, the safer the secret is—and I don’t think even Major O’Conor could have assembled an entire platoon of gangsters like himself.” Audley turned towards the American. “What d’you think, Sergeant?”

  Winston grunted. “Well, those two guys in the jeep behind us certainly weren’t in on the deal, that’s for sure.” He raised himself cautiously above the vines. “But if you want to know what I think—I think we ought to put some more distance between us and those krauts while we can.”

  “Can you see anything?”

  Winston lowered his head. “Nope. There’s a column of smoke back there—looks like we started quite a fire, so maybe that’ll keep them occupied some.”

  “There is, is there?” Audley lifted himself to peer over the leaves. “So there is, by jiminy! Now that’s very promising …”

  “Promising?”

  “Yeah—how?”

  Audley sank down again. ‘If those chaps weren’t ‘in on the deal’ … I was just wondering how the esteemed sergeant—what was his name?” He looked at Butler.

  “Purvis,” spat Butler.

  “Purvis, yes—how Sergeant Purvis will have reported our disappearance to the rest of them—including Colonel Clinton.”

  Winston frowned at him. “Hell, Lieutenant… that’s no problem. I can just see that smiling sonofabitch explaining how we took the wrong turning and ran into the village before he could stop us.”

  “Exactly. They may even have heard the firing in the distance.”

  “So what?”

  “So what will the major do, then?”

  Winston frowned more deeply, his forehead creasing. “He’ll shift his ass—?” He stared at Audley. “He’ll … ?”

  “Limejuice,” said Butler.

  “That’s right.” Audley gave Butler a twisted non-smile. “He’ll do what he’d do if it was a genuine accident—he’ll cover his tracks and spread alarm and confusion among the enemy with an air strike. He’ll have to do it to keep up the pretence—and I rather think he would have done it anyway. Because it makes good sense.”

  Th
is time Butler frowned—and discovered in doing so that it hurt to frown now. “Good sense … sir?”

  “Ye-ess … a downy bird … Because even if there weren’t any Germans at the Loire crossing when we came over they’ll be wondering what the hell happened there by now, with that limejuice strike. So now he’s given them the answer—which was us blundering into Sermigny.” Audley paused, staring up at the blue sky above them and listening to the stillness for a moment. “And now … if he’s the downy bird I take him to be … he’ll ram the answer home with another drop of limejuice.”

  They all listened, but there was only an empty silence. “What d’you think, Sergeant?” said Audley finally.

  “Lieutenant”—Winston gave the silence another five seconds—“I think the sooner we crawl our asses out of here the better.”

  They crawled again.

  But this time they crawled more steadily, and without the hampering Sten, Butler was able to fall into the rhythm of it, timing the movement of his left hand to his right knee, and that of his right hand to his left knee until they became automatic.

  Ahead of him the American sergeant moved just rhythmically down the narrow avenue of vines, with their clusters of small green grapes and odd-shaped leaves. He had never imagined grapes growing on small bushes like these, but rather on high trellises like in the Kentish hop fields; nor did the grapes look anything like as juicy as the ones he remembered from Christmas before the war, when they had been one of the extra-special treats—though a treat not in the same class as the orange in the toe of his stocking.

  More strange than the grapes were the American’s boots, which were queer, high-laced things that reminded him of pictures of Edwardian ladies’ boots; and they had no metal studs on their soles—that was why the American Army marched so unnaturally silently, of course—

  The boots slid sideways suddenly.

  “There’s a wood just up ahead,” said Winston.

  Audley crawled up alongside them, breathing heavily—that was the difference from being encumbered by the machine-carbine, which outweighed its lightness with its awkwardness, thought Butler charitably.

  “Okay. Let’s get into it,” said Audley.

  “And then where?” asked Winston.