The '44 Vintage

by Anthony Price

  That was the question which had been looming in the back of Butler’s mind all the time as he had crawled, beyond the immediate problem of surviving.

  What were they going to do?

  Audley looked up into the sky, as though gauging his position. “Well … so far as I can make out, we’re southeast of the village— maybe south-southeast—which means this is the wood we came out of, probably.”

  Winston squinted towards the sun. “Yeah—could be.”

  “Right … so if we head due east through the wood we should hit that other road—the one they took?” Audley looked at Winston questioningly.

  Winston nodded slowly. “Could be, yeah.”

  “Then we head south.”

  Butler looked from one to the other of them as they stared at each other.

  “I get you,” said Winston. “And then the first Frenchman you meet, you ask if your buddies have passed that way, huh?”

  “That’s right, Sergeant.”

  The American smiled. “You know, Lieutenant, I kind of thought you were going to say that—I really did.”

  “You did?” said Audley stiffly. ‘That was clever of you, Sergeant.”

  “Sure. You’re still the real Chandos Force. All two of you.”

  Audley took a deep breath. “I was … very much hoping it would be all three of us, Sergeant. I was hoping that very much.” He took another breath. “We could use some help.”

  The sergeant chewed his lip. “Yeah, I can see that.” He looked at Butler. “What d’you think, Corporal?”

  Butler’s mouth opened. “Who—me?”

  Winston gazed at him for a second, shook his head, and then turned back to Audley.

  “Okay, Lieutenant,” he said. “Let’s get the real Chandos Force on the road.”

  CHAPTER 12

  How they met strangers in the forest

  THE DRAWBACK of the wood was that it was impossible to move quietly in it.

  Once they had put the first belt of trees and bushes between themselves and the vineyard they were able to walk free and upright, and that was a marvellous relief. But the ground was thick with twigs and small fallen branches which crunched and crackled and snapped underfoot until Butler felt that the whole German Army, or at least that part of it which was south of the Loire and hadn’t yet heard that the war was almost over, must hear them.

  That was a childish imagining, he knew, but it also seemed to affect the others, because they both trod as delicately as they could, and indicated to him that he should do the same. The problem was that it was difficult to keep his eyes on his feet and at the same time avoid the foliage that brushed against his face, something that would normally not have worried him at all but which now became extremely painful. Try as he would, he could not stop the branches whipping the wounds on the side of his head and his ear: they seemed malevolently determined to draw blood again, so that finally he found himself stumbling along with one hand clamped over the injuries and the other stretched out ahead of him like that of a blind man feeling his way in the dark.

  At the same time he experienced a growing irritation with Audley for holding onto his precious Sten gun. He recognised the emotion as being no less childish than his fear of the noise they were making and his preoccupation with the pain of superficial scratches; and that the young officer had only taken the Sten in the first place as an act of kindness. But without it he felt naked and defenceless in the knowledge that if they did meet up with any Germans the lack of it left him no choice other than to surrender or to run like a rabbit. Which was not only unfair, but doubly unfair, because Audley still had his holstered pistol—which was the only other weapon they possessed between them.

  For the first time he began to think of the impossibility of what Audley was proposing to do.

  It wasn’t just impossible—it was ridiculous. They didn’t know where they were— They didn’t know where they were going— They didn’t know where the major was going— And even if they were able by some miracle to find out the answer to that last question they had no prospect of catching up with the major before he did whatever it was that he intended to do, whatever that was exactly, which they didn’t know—Apart from which, there were still the sodding Germans to think about, because however experienced the major and his bloody bandits were at keeping out of harm’s way, Second Lieutenant Audley’s knowledge of war was limited to the destruction of tanks, and mostly British tanks, and Sergeant Winston was of all things, for Christ’s sake, a demolition expert who probably didn’t know one end of a rifle from the other—

  Not that they’d even got a rifle—all they’d got was a Sten and a bloody revolver, and Mr. Audley was now carrying both of those— “Are you all right, Butler?” asked Audley. “Sir?” Butler looked at his right hand.

  “You were mumbling and”—Audley stared at him—“and you’ve started bleeding again, man.”

  Butler could see that from the bright wet blood on his hand. Looking at it made him feel dizzy.

  “Sit down,” ordered Audley.

  “I’m okay.”

  “I know you’re okay. I’m just going to patch you up a bit, that’s all. So sit down like a good fellow.”

  Butler sat down. There was a crashing in the bushes and Sergeant Winston appeared. Audley must have sent him up ahead to scout the route, he decided. Look-see and movement, in the best Chandos Force manner, that would be.

  There was a glugging sound and then Audley handed him a large red silk handkerchief, soaking wet.

  “Wipe your face with that, Corporal—freshen up.” Audley’s voice changed. “What’s it like up ahead?”

  “Like this for about half a mile. But then there’s a track goes more or less in the right direction.” Winston paused. “And I guess you were right.”

  “Right? … That’s fine, Corporal. Now hold this dressing on the side of your head.” Audley took the silk handkerchief in exchange. “How was I right?”

  Butler applied the field dressing cautiously to the side of his head. He could well understand why Audley was so concerned about his well-being, since he constituted one third of the available manpower. But the subaltern needn’t have worried, he thought grimly: if there was one thing worse than the madness of going on it was the prospect of being abandoned as unfit.

  “How bad is he?” asked the American.

  “I’m perfectly all right,” said Butler.

  “Huh?” Winston addressed the sound to Audley.

  “The corporal?” Audley bent over him. “Oh, he’s okay … I’m going to tie the dressing down with this handkerchief, Corporal. When I tighten it—that’s when it’ll hurt… . Yes, he’s okay. That second grenade went off right in his face and all he’s got is a couple of scratches and mild shock—“

  What second grenade? There had been a second grenade which had gone off somewhere behind them, on the other side of the wooden gates, but—ouch!

  What second grenade?

  “—so he was obviously born to be hanged, like Corporal Jones… . But how was I right, Sergeant?” Audley surveyed his handiwork. “Well, it doesn’t improve your appearance much, I must say. As the Iron Duke said, I don’t know what effect you’ll have on the enemy, but by God you frighten me… . But I think it’ll hold for the time being. How was I right, did you say, Sergeant?”

  Winston lifted his hand, one finger raised to silence them. In the far distance there was an angry, buzzing drone—no, it was not so much far off as high up. He had been listening to it for a minute or two—it had been growing inside his mind while they had been talking, Butler realised. And he had heard it before.

  “Yes …” Audley looked at Butler. ‘Well, at least we won’t have to be worrying about the Germans following us, not for the time being anyway … all right, Corporal?”

  They pushed on at a steady dogtrot, careless of the noise they made.

  Butler was aware, with a curious sense of detachment, that he felt very much better. He couldn’t quite work out what had ha
ppened back in the village: there seemed to be a gap in his memory now, although there hadn’t been any loss of consciousness at the time. But after that there had been some bad moments—he could see now that they had been bad moments by comparing the clarity of his present thoughts with the haziness of his recollection of their escape from the village into the woods.

  He was also aware that the drone of limejuice was building up into a roar. The first time he had heard it the sound had been overlaid by the acceleration of the jeep’s engine at the road crossing near the big house with the fairy-tale towers; now the trees surrounding them and the makeshift bandage which covered his damaged ear did nothing to mute it, but only seemed to spread it until it echoed all around them until it changed abruptly to a high-pitched shriek directly over their heads.

  Suddenly they weren’t dogtrotting any more, they were running as though their lives depended on their legs again.

  With his new-found detachment, Butler realised as he ran that they were running away from nothing. The Typhoons were attacking the village, drawn irresistibly by that column of smoke like wasps to a jam pot. What they were experiencing—and he could feel the same fear pounding in his own chest—was what the old sweats in the battalion, the survivors of Dunkirk, had warned him against: the panic which made men believe that every dive-bomber was lining itself up on them alone.

  Not even the distant sound of explosions far behind them slowed down their speed. Rather, the explosions seemed to urge them on— Butler could feel another logic taking over, whispering to him that he couldn’t be too far away from what was happening behind him. The farther away, the better, the farther away the better, the farther away the better.

  Not until they finally burst out of the last of the thick undergrowth into a plantation of tall pine trees did they start to slow down. “Which way?” said Audley breathlessly, skidding at last to a halt.

  “Hell, Lieutenant”—Winston panted, looking around him—“I didn’t come this way first time”—he pointed towards a great tangle of what looked like blackberry bushes on the far side of the plantation—“that way, I guess.”

  Audley stared at the bushes for a moment, then sank onto one knee behind a pine tree. “What was it like? Did it look as if it’s used much?” he said.

  Butler was suddenly aware that the noise behind them had stopped and the drone of the Typhoon engines was dying away. The loudest sound now was the thudding of his own heart.

  “The track?” Winston frowned from behind his tree towards Audley. “It looked kind of overgrown to me, what I could see of it. You want me to take another look, Lieutenant?”

  “No.” Audley was still staring at the bushes ahead, moving his head from one side to the other to scan the green wall more closely, as though there was something he had glimpsed momentarily and then lost.

  “You seen something?” Winston stared intently in the same direction.

  “No.” Audley’s voice had dropped to an urgent whisper. “But I can smell something, by God!”

  “Smell—?” Winston cut the question off.

  Butler started to draw in a deep breath through his nose and then stopped as quickly as Winston had stopped speaking.

  It was a sweet-rotten smell, not the dead-cow smell, which was foul enough, but something different and fouler which caught in the back of his throat. He breathed out carefully through his mouth, grateful that there was nothing in his stomach; it wasn’t that he hadn’t encountered this particular death-smell before—it was very much a Normandy-smell—but rather that here, beyond the killing ground, it had caught him by surprise.

  “Yeah …” Winston sniffed again, crouching down behind a tree as he did so. “Which way, d’you reckon?”

  “Must be somewhere ahead,” said Audley.

  “Yeah …” Winston peered to the left and right, and then moved silently across the pine needles to sink down beside Audley. “Gimme the gun, Lieutenant, and I’ll go take a look.”

  Audley surrendered the Sten before Butler could think of protesting, but then caught the American by the arm. “Not you, Sergeant—I’ll go.”

  “Aw—come on, Lieutenant!” Winston tried to shake off the hand. “You’re the brains of the outfit.”

  Butler came to a lightning decision: they were both equally unsuited to scouting, the heavily built engineer sergeant and the large dragoon subaltern, and it was high time he justified his own existence as something more than the useless walking wounded. He ran lightly across the plantation to a tree near Audley’s. “Sir”—the trick was not to give them time to argue, so he started to move again as they turned towards him—“cover me—“

  The thick carpet of pine needles deadened his footfalls as he zigzagged from tree to tree, heading for the only gap he could see in the thicket ahead. Beyond the gap and in the chinks in the thicket he could see the bright sunlight unfiltered by overhanging greenery: it was like looking from a cool, shadowy room into the open, where nothing was hidden from sight.

  There was a thin scatter of brambles, weak and straggling for lack of direct light, among the last trees of the plantation. Their trailing ends plucked at his battle dress, but without the encumbrance of the Sten he had both hands free to part them without making any sound. As he did so the stink of dead flesh thickened horribly around him, filling his nose and his mouth and his lungs. It seemed to grow worse with every step he took, until suddenly he knew with absolute certainty that all his care in making a silent approach to the track was unnecessary: whatever there was out there, it was long past listening to anything— nothing alive and breathing could endure to hang around within range of this smell, which begged only for the mercy of a burial detail. He would stake his stripes on that.

  The sunlight lay three steps ahead of him. Only as he was in the act of taking the third, when it was really too late to draw back, did it occur to him that he was staking more than his stripes on his sense of smell.

  Twenty yards down the track, half hidden in the undergrowth on the other side into which it had been driven, was a German lorry. Behind it, farther down, was another vehicle—a decrepit-looking truck—surrounded by several smashed-open ammunition boxes, and beyond that what looked like a civilian car with its touring hood half raised, its doors hanging open. Like the lorry, they had both been driven off the narrow track into the overgrown verge. The track itself stretched away beyond them, open and deserted, and so silent that he could hear the buzz of insects.

  “Butler”—Audley was crouching in the shadow at the edge of the plantation—“can you see anything?”

  A big dragonfly flew across the bonnet of the lorry, hovered for an instant in a flash of iridescent blue, and then set off fearlessly down the line of vehicles. Butler watched it settle on one of the splintered boxes. His eye came back to the lorry again: its windscreen was bullet-scarred. He beckoned to Audley. “It’s all clear,” he said.

  Audley stepped out through the thicket into the sunlight, stared for one long moment at the abandoned vehicles, and then pushed his pistol back into its webbing holster.

  Sergeant Winston appeared at his shoulder, wrinkling his nose against the smell. “Jesus! Looks like someone’s been picking off the stragglers, eh?”

  Audley looked at him quickly. “The stragglers? Yes—I see … you mean the French Resistance?”

  “Can’t be anyone else this far south of the river. Our patrols didn’t tangle with anyone.” Winston walked towards the lorry, pointing to its pock-marked side. “That’s sure as hell not nice, and it’s not point-fives either, so it’s not an air strike—those babies punch bigger holes than that. This is small-arms stuff did this.”

  “Uh-huh?” Audley had circled warily round to the back of the truck as the American was speaking. He raised his hand towards the bullet-torn canvas flap.

  “Hey, hold on, Lieutenant,” Winston cautioned him, grimacing. “The way it stinks here, maybe what’s in there’s better left alone, huh?”

  “Oh … yes.” Audley stared at the flap
for a moment, then dropped his hand, wiping the palm against his trousers as though the nearness to the lorry had contaminated it.

  They moved on to the truck which had carried the ammunition boxes. It was a bit like a box itself, with an old-fashioned, home-made look about it which reminded Butler of the ancient vehicle which the scouts had hired to transport the troop and its equipment to the Lake District for that last camp before the war.

  Winston ran a professional eye over it, shaking his head in wonderment. “Man—they sure are scraping the bottom of the barrel,” he murmured.

  Audley stepped up onto the runningboard and peered into the high, open cab. There was a sudden buzzing sound and a cloud of flies rose into the air—great bloated obscene things the size of young wasps.

  Audley shied away from them, jumping back onto the grass with an exclamation of disgust.

  “What’s the matter?” said Winston quickly.

  “Nothing.” Audley blinked and shook his head. “Just blood.”

  “Blood?”

  “Dried blood … four, five days old.” Audley went on shaking his head. “Just… it just reminded me of s-s-something, that’s all.”

  Beyond the truck and the shattered boxes lay a big BMW motorcycle. Winston pounced on it eagerly.

  “Now this is more like it”—he heaved the machine upright—“aw, shit—the goddamn thing’s smashed to hell!” He let it fall back into the grass. “Front fork’s snapped, handlebars twisted—like it ran smack into something.”

  “Indeed?” Audley bent over the motorcycle. “Yes, I think you’re right… .” He straightened up, staring back the way they had come and then forward at the last vehicle, the civilian car. “You know there’s something funny about this little lot—something decidedly queer …”

  “Funny?” Winston stared at him.

  “Yes. Funny peculiar, not funny ha-ha.” Audley nodded, studying the line again. “I thought it was a straightforward ambush when I first saw it—took it for granted. But you know … it isn’t an ambush at all.” He shook his head emphatically. “These things were all shot up somewhere else, I think—and then they were brought here and dumped.”