The '44 Vintage

by Anthony Price

  “The Germans!”

  “Oh, yes … almost directly after the Armistice, they took over the chateau—some in uniform, and some out of uniform.” She caught her husband’s eye. “What was it they called themselves?”

  “L’Association de l’Amitié Franco-Allemande—there was at least someone who had a sense of humour of a sort,” said Boucard grimly. “To take over an Englishman’s castle for what they had in mind—their brand of Franco-German friendship.”

  “Which was?”

  “It was the liaison centre for the Gestapo and the Service d’Ordre Legionnaire—which is now the Milice—the scum of the scum.” Boucard’s eyes flashed. “Even the Englishman was preferable to that alliance.”

  Audley nodded. “So security would have been tight?”

  “At Pont-Civray? My dear boy—Pont-Civray has not been a healthy place these last four years. Not since …” Boucard trailed off.

  “Not since 1940,” said Audley.

  CHAPTER 19

  How Second Lieutenant Audley got the truth off his chest

  DAD WAS right about hay, Butler decided: it wasn’t nearly as good as straw for sleeping in.

  The night before he had been so dog-weary that it hadn’t really mattered, he had been too tired to analyse its defects even though he had been the last one to go to sleep. But now, with what must be the first hint of dawn in the open doorway, he was conscious that it was dustier and mustier and pricklier, and above all colder, than straw ricks of happy memory.

  He rubbed his sleep-crusted eyes and was surprised at the clarity of his mind. His body had been warm and relaxed when he had let it sink at last into the hay, but his brain had been a football crowd of unruly thoughts; now his body was cold and stiff, but a few hours of oblivion seemed to have shaken his thoughts into order. He could even remember how he had approved Mr. Audley’s obstinate refusal of beds in the chateau in preference to the hayloft in the old barn by the stream; and how he had wondered later, as he listened to the subaltern mumble and groan in his sleep, whether that refusal had been due to knowledge of his sleeping habits rather than to military prudence.

  Not that it mattered now, for young Mr. Audley was quiet at last and in a very few minutes it would be dawn. And the dawn of a very special day, too.

  He straightiened his legs cautiously, so as not to wake the others. This was, for a guess, the same hour when he had parted the canvas flaps on the truck yesterday morning and had looked out over the darkened vineyards of Touraine across the river. He had seen the rows of vines in the flare of the American military policeman’s lighter, and had not known they were vines because he had never seen a vineyard before; and also because he hadn’t known where he was any more than where he was going.

  But since then the world had changed, and he had changed with it.

  He had killed his first man.

  He had been betrayed by men he had trusted.

  He had fought his first Germans.

  (He had fought his first Germans, but not very efficiently; and then he had run away from them in terror.)

  He had been wounded.

  (But not very badly, and his wound had covered a multitude of weaknesses thereafter, so he had been lucky there.)

  He had spoken to his first German, his first prisoner.

  (Why was it so astonishing that Germans were so ordinary? The soldier with the loaves … and then Hauptmann Grafenberg, who really wasn’t so very different from Second Lieutenant Audley—)

  (No. Say, not so different from his own company officers in the Rifles. Mr. Audley was something else and something very different from both. He didn’t even know whether he liked and admired Mr. Audley, or whether he disliked and mistrusted him. But it was the general who always said that brains alone didn’t make an officer, there had to be a heart somewhere—)

  A heart!

  Somehow, he didn’t know how, on the day that all this had happened to him, he had lost his heart to a girl he hardly knew, and a foreigner too. And God only knew what Dad would make of that, apart from his other ambition—

  French girls—a wink and a nod, man to man—are a bit of all right. So just you watch your step, Jack boy!

  Contradictory advice that had been. And even the general had been less than helpful there—

  Women—generals do not wink—are the very devil. But fortunately you will be otherwise engaged, I fancy.

  Well, there was nothing that Dad or the general—or he himself, for that matter—could do about last night. He could no more remove the name from his heart than he could avoid the bullet which had his name on it.

  It was dead quiet with that peculiar before-dawn stillness which he recognised now, but to which as a town-bred boy he knew he would never grow accustomed. Beyond the breathing of the other men in the loft he could even hear the soft swish of the stream below, reminding him that before it had been downgraded to a bam the old building had been a water mill.

  He ran his hand across his face at the thought of water, feeling the stubble under his finger ends. Shaving didn’t really matter much in the circumstances, particularly with his colouring, but the chances of washing his feet was not to be missed: it was the least he could do for them, and also the most since the destruction of his bottle of gentian violet.

  He eased himself sideways across the mounds of hay until he was able to slide down almost noiselessly into the open space by the doorway. Nobody stirred in the darkness behind him; the one and only advantage hay had over straw was that it didn’t crunch and crackle so much.

  But then, as he took his first cautious step towards the opening, a darker nucleus moved on the stone platform outside.

  “Who’s that?” whispered Audley.

  Butler stopped. “Me, sir—Butler.”

  “Come on out then. No need to wake the others yet.”

  Butler tiptoed onto the platform. The air was surprisingly more chilly than in the loft, so much so that he shivered as he drew it into his lungs, and wished that he had stayed inside. Now he would have to talk to the officer, when he didn’t feel like talking to anyone, least of all to Audley, who had no heart to grow cold in the moming chill.

  But Audley didn’t say anything; he merely sank down again with his back against the stone and stared into the black nothingness of the woods ahead of him.

  His very silence unnerved Butler. It was too dark to go blundering down the steps to the stream—much darker than he had expected from the patch of sky he had seen from inside the loft. If he went he would probably fall in, or drop his boots into the water, or do something just as silly. But if he stayed …

  “I thought I’d just … stretch my legs, sir,” he said.

  “Good idea—so long as you don’t break one of them,” Audley murmured. “But be my guest, Jack.” Jack?

  Butler took another look at the darkness and decided against it. But then decided also that he couldn’t just go back into the loft.

  “Did you sleep okay, sir?” he asked politely.

  Audley didn’t reply, and the silence lengthened until Butler began to think he hadn’t actually asked the question, it had been something he had said inside his head.

  Then Audley shifted his position. “No, I didn’t sleep okay,” he said, still staring ahead of him. “I dreamt my usual dream. And then I dreamt it again. And then I came out here. Though I suppose I did sleep in between the two main features—I must have done.”

  “Your usual dream, sir?” The statement demanded the question. “A nightmare, you mean?”

  Audley appeared to consider the question as though it hadn’t occurred to him before. “I suppose it must be,” he said finally. “But it just doesn’t seem like one, that’s all.”

  Butler began to feel embarrassed. “No, sir?”

  “No, sir.” Audley turned towards him, his face a vague blur in the darkness. “You looking forward to going back to your battalion, Jack?”

  No doubt about that answer! “Yes, sir.”

  Back in the ba
ttalion a man knew who his enemies were—and in which direction they were likely to be.

  “No taste for cloak-and-dagger?”

  “Not trained for it, sir.”

  “No? Well, you’ve done damn well so far. We wouldn’t be here now if you hadn’t had your wits about you.”

  Butler’s spirits rose, then fell as the truth grinned foolishly at him from behind appearances. “More like luck than wits.”

  “I doubt that. Don’t sell yourself short.”

  “No, sir.” Butler decided to change the subject. “I bet you’ll be glad to get back to your regiment, sir.”

  “Me?” Audley made a sound that wasn’t a laugh. “I tell you, Jack—if I never see a tank again, that’ll be too soon. And it’ud be to the British Army’s advantage if I didn’t, too: I was one damn bad tank commander, and that’s the truth.”

  Butler wished he hadn’t changed the subject. “Your CO didn’t seem to think so, sir.”

  “He didn’t?” This time the sound was a laugh—of a sort, anyway. “Well, now … he probably wouldn’t at that … which just goes to show how deceptive appearances can be, you know.”

  Amen to that, thought Butler. But surely that couldn’t be true about everyone?

  “In fact I know just why he thought that.” Audley turned towards him again. “And I’ll tell you why—it makes a rather nice cautionary tale in its way.”

  Butler stared at him.

  The white blur shook up and down. “Yes … I think I must have just the merest touch of claustrophobia—or cold feet as they call it in the Mess—but I couldn’t bear to batten down inside my tank. I liked to have as much of me outside the steel coffin as possible, no matter what. Much easier to bail out if you get brewed up too …” He fell silent for a few seconds. “Besides, the last tank I had, the previous commander had his head blown off—his body slipped down inside … whole thing was swimming in blood, and you wouldn’t believe how difficult it is to clean out a tank. In fact you can’t clean it out—and you know what happens then, eh?”

  Butler couldn’t think of anything to say.

  “Flies,” said Audley. “Bloody thing was full of flies—great big fat things. Couldn’t get rid of them. Which was another reason I never battened down—I can’t bear flies. Especially flies full of blood belonging to a friend of mine. That’s what I dream about—flies.” He paused again. “When I get home I’m going to buy myself the biggest fly-swatter you ever saw, and ten dozen flypapers, and I’m going to declare total war on the blighters… .”

  He seemed to have lost the thread, but Butler was loath to recall him to it, whatever it was.

  “Yes …” Audley’s voice strengthened. “So there was me, with my head and shoulders always sticking out of the top, because otherwise I’d get the screaming ab-dabs—and that’s how all the really brave chaps like to ride, and damn the snipers. ‘Proper cavalry spirit’—that’s what the CO called it—‘standing up in the stirrups to look.’ Except I was so scared into a blue funk, I was more frightened of the flies than the snipers … and that last time, when the Tiger jumped three of us—we were the last one he got—I was out of the turret two seconds before he pressed the tit, not blown out but bailed out, and knocked myself out cold in the process. Which is what they found when they came to pick up the pieces: three brewed-up Cromwells and one heroically concussed cornet of dragoons.” His voice cracked. “And the Tiger knocked out by a Firefly posting an AP up his back-passage … so don’t let anyone ever tell you about the victors and the vanquished, Jack. In war there are only the dead and the survivors, and the dead don’t win anything. But if they think they’re going to get me back inside a tank again, they’re going to have to carry me kicking and screaming—and stuttering too. Because that’s where I got that bloody stutter of mine … and the farther away from the regiment I got, the farther away from my stutter—isn’t that a funny thing, now?”

  Butler stared and stared into the darkness, and was glad of it because it hid whatever expression he was wearing on his face—whatever it was, it felt hot as though he was blushing, though whether that was for himself or for Audley he couldn’t make out.

  “Phew!” Audley breathed out. “They say confession is good for the soul, and I feel better for that already. But it must be somewhat less reassuring for the recipient, I should think, eh?”

  Butler swallowed. “No, sir.” He reached feverishly into his imagination. “I think—I think you’re no different from me—when I said it was luck, not wits, that counts. What people see, that’s the truth for them.”

  “Uh-huh? ‘Beauty is only skin-deep, but it’s only the skin you see’? But I don’t think that’s really a very sound basis for action, I’m afraid.”

  Butler reached out again, and Rifleman Callaghan came to his rescue. “I dunno about that, sir. But there’s a man in my platoon who always says it’s better to be lucky than beautiful… I reckon we’re both lucky, it looks like.”

  There was no point in adding that Rifleman Callaghan was referring to his conquests in the ATS quarters, not to matters of life and death in France; and that in his victories it was not survival but a clean pair of heels that mattered.

  “You may be right—I hope you are,” Audley mused. “On the other hand …”

  Butler reached out for one last time, despairingly. Things had gone quite far enough, and he didn’t want to go into the fight today with any more of Audley’s burdens on his back. Also, if there was such a thing as good luck, and they still had it, he didn’t fancy listening to Audley try to take it to pieces to see how it worked, as though it was a cheap watch. It was one thing to take a watch to pieces, but a very different thing to make it work again afterwards. “There’s one thing I’d like to know, sir,” he said.

  It took Audley a moment to shake himself free from his own thoughts. “Yes … ? Well, what’s that?”

  What was there that he’d like to know? Butler asked himself desperately. He’d exchanged one problem for another.

  He’d like to know what had been carried out of Paris in that ambulance four years before, to the Chateau de Pont-Civray. But Audley didn’t know the answer to that, so he could only ask such a silly question as a last resort.

  What would Rifleman Callaghan have done in such a fix? “I don’t really know how to ask it,” he temporised.

  “You don’t?” Audley gave a short laugh. “Then I bet I know what it is.”

  Well, that was one for Callaghan’s book, thought Butler: by a pure fluke he’d reversed the question, and what he was going to get now was what Audley himself would like to know. “The major,” said Audley. The major?

  “Yes, sir.” Butler controlled his voice with an effort. “The major.” It was growing lighter; he could just begin to make out Audley’s features, though not yet his expression. Which was a blessing, because it meant that Audley couldn’t see him either.

  “I know …” Audley nodded. “Because I’ve been thinking about him too. Ever since maman spelt it out last night I’ve been thinking about him off and on.” Butler decided to say nothing.

  Audley looked at him for a moment, and then turned away again to stare at the wood, in which the trees nearest them were just beginning to emerge as individual shapes.

  “It’s funny … I knew from the second we decided to go after him that if we did catch up with him we’d have to kill him. Not only because it’s the only thing we can do, but because if we don’t he’ll certainly kill us—it’ll be the only thing he can do.” Butler frowned. He hadn’t thought of it that way.

  Audley shook his head at the trees. “I’ve never killed a man before … I mean, I’ve never killed a man I knew—in cold blood like this. Maman was quite right, as usual: the word is ‘assassinate’—God knows how she guessed, but that’s what it is. Just one step up from murder, really.”

  Butler cleared his throat. “I don’t see that, sir. Not so as to worry about it anyway. Not after what we’ve been through.”

  “Oh—it doesn�
�t worry me, not at all. Quite the opposite actually. As I say, it’s funny … but the last twenty-four hours or so I’ve been really almost happy for the first time since I landed in Normandy.”

  “Happy?” Butler repeated the word incredulously.

  “I said it was funny, didn’t I?” Audley rocked forwards. “I suppose being away from … from the regiment has something to do with it Away anywhere. Even here.”

  There came a sudden sound of flapping wings from the wood, making Butler sit up sharply in alarm.

  “It’s all right,” Audley reassured him. “He’s just gone on his morning patrol. If it’ud been anything else he’d have sounded his danger call.”

  Butler stared at the young officer curiously, wondering suddenly how much guilty truth and how much honest battle fatigue there had been in the story of the fight with the Tiger. What was certain was that too much brains and too much imagination could be an extra burden in the front line: Audley was like a racehorse down a coal mine, desperately pretending to be a pit pony.

  The wood was quiet again.

  “I didn’t think much about the major, anyway,” Audley took up the thread once more. “The best part of yesterday … I suppose the problem of catching him seemed more important than doing what we had to do when we did catch him—if we ever did. But now …” he trailed off.

  Butler felt strangely protective. “We’ll just do what we have to. Duty isn’t a problem, sir.”

  Audley turned towards him. “Yes—but now I want to know why, don’t you see?”

  “Why what, sir?”

  “Why Major O’Conor’s gone rotten on us, man—wasn’t that what you wanted to ask in the first place?”

  Butler blinked. “Oh … yes, sir—it was. But I didn’t think you’d know the answer to that, of course.”

  “But maybe I do.”

  “You do?” Butler’s surprise was genuine.

  “I said ‘maybe.’ The trouble is I know so little about him, really—just what they said … and what he said too … in the Mess last night.” Audley paused. “No, I mean the night before last. It seems only last night … and yet it also seems a hell of a long time ago.”