The '44 Vintage Read online

  For who is he whose chin is but enriched

  With one appearing hair that will not follow

  These culled and choice-drawn cavaliers to France?

  —Henry V

  He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored.

  —Battle Hymn of the American Republic

  CHAPTER 1

  How Corporal Butler was saved by his boots

  THE TOES on Corporal Butler’s left foot were bright purple.

  He remembered, as he almost unfailingly did when he peeled his sock off, that purple was the chosen colour of kings and emperors in the olden days: he had read in a history book somewhere that “to assume the purple” was for them the very act of putting on their power and glory.

  The trouble was that whatever it had meant in those old palaces and courts it told a very different tale in the Mill Street elementary school and in King Edward’s Grammar School: there it was a mark of shame indelibly painted on dirty boys who had dirty diseases.

  Dirty boys from dirty families, publicly disgraced by the disfiguring patches of colour on their faces and on the shaven areas of their heads and condemned to sit by themselves in a leper-group at the back of the class. For it was common knowledge that where purple was to be seen there were also probably fleas and nits and bedbugs lurking unseen, eager to crawl across the intervening desk spaces onto clean boys from respectable families.

  Onto clean boys like Jack Butler.

  From dirty boys like Sammy Murch.

  Corporal Butler sighed at the memory. Sammy Murch had been a good friend of his until the morning Sammy had arrived at school with the purple patches, when Butler had shunned him like all the other clean boys. And that had been the end of friendship.

  And maybe more than the end. Because it had been next year that he’d won his scholarship, and the year after that Sammy had been up for breaking into Mr. Burns’s sweetshop on the corner; which hadn’t surprised him one bit, because theft seemed a natural progression from impetigo contagiosa. In fact he’d been much more surprised when his dad had gone to court to speak for Sammy—though of course he hadn’t done that so much for Sammy as for his father, who had been with him in the trenches and come back with a lungful of phosgene, and his two uncles, who hadn’t come back at all.

  He stared at his toes with disgust, deciding as he did so that Sammy Murch had been nicely avenged even though it wasn’t impetigo—and even though vengeance had come too late for Sammy to enjoy since the Germans had caught the Spartan off Anzio.

  He lowered his foot into the stream. Fresh water probably wouldn’t do it much good—sea water, the book said, but against all expectation and hope he’d come ashore dry-shod and there’d been no time for paddling after that. But it was cooling and cleansing, and that was better than nothing (“Look after your feet and they’ll look after you,” his dad had said that last time, old-soldierly).

  He reached down and unbuckled the gaiter on his right ankle. For some obscure reason his right foot had resisted the infection of Epidermophyton inguinale, but it was better to be safe than sorry.

  Gaiter, boot, grey woollen sock: he stacked them carefully on the bank above the ledge where the rest of his equipment was piled, then bent over the foot to search for the faintest telltale signs between the fourth and fifth toes.

  EPIDERMOPHYTOSIS or Athlete’s foot is a condition of ringworm of the skin between the toes, usually between the fourth and fifth (He knew the hated details in Pearce’s Medical and Nursing Dictionary by heart now)—

  It is due to a fungus—

  The thought of a fungus attacking him, a loathsome fifth column in his boot, was frightening and disgusting.

  He wrinkled his nose as he gently parted the toes, as the breeze reminded him that there was something else disgusting not far away from where he was sitting, upwind from him.

  Something not alive, like the fungus, but disgustingly dead.

  It had come to him a few minutes before, on the first breath of the breeze, as he lay in the tall grass of the roadside verge a dozen yards away, half dozing and half watching a formation of high-flying Mustangs. He had just finished reasoning out their presence as cover for an earner flight of rocket-bearing Typhoons when the smell had blotted out the sound, telling him that there was dead flesh at ground level nearby that was as high as the Mustangs.

  It was, he had nearly convinced himself, a poor dead cow, probably lying bloated and stiff-legged in the field beyond. He had already seen and smelt such cows, and this was close enough to the smell of recent memory. What was certain was that it was a very bad smell, although if his father was to be believed horses would smell worse than this and mules were in a class of their own.

  With a conscious, deliberate effort he breathed in the corrupted air. What was even more certain was that there would be many more bad smells, and a good soldier simply took them for granted.

  More than anything else in the world Butler wanted to be a good soldier.

  So—the cow was dead and he was alive, which was better than the other way round; and he would worry no more about rotting cows than live cows would worry about dead and rotting soldiers.

  Also he could see that his right foot was still clear of infection under its purple dye, which was a positive cause for rejoicing. Because despite Sister Pearce’s claim that this condition is easily treated the raw cracks between the toes on the other foot had so far obstinately refused to heal; though to be fair to the Sister he lacked the permanganate of soda and the chlorinated soda and boric acid which she prescribed; and even if he had possessed them he would never have been able to find a way of soaking his feet in her weak solution of those chemicals. He just had his handy bottle of gentian violet.

  He reached over to his left-hand ammunition pouch and carefully extracted the precious bottle from its nest of cotton waste between the Sten magazines. The luxury of privacy was another thing to be thankful for. This time at least he would be free from the humiliation of painting his feet while others were watching.

  He set the bottle on the ledge beside the boot, noting as he did so that it was still nearly half full. With a little luck it could still outlast the fungus if used sparingly, with no need to report sick …

  He stared down with concentrated hatred at his left foot through the distorting glass of the cool water, wishing irrationally that it was acid which might burn and cauterize both the infection and the treacherous toes. The colour was a filthy, degrading colour, and the toes were his enemies—he, who had always been the smartest and the cleanest man in the platoon. And they, the toes—his own flesh, they were the source of his waking and sleeping nightmare of being unfit for duty when at last there was real duty to be done.

  He could hear his father’s voice in his inner ear:

  Look after your feet and they’ll look after you.

  And—

  Trench feet? The bad battalions had it, but not the good ones.

  He didn’t even know what trench feet were. But they had to be something like this.

  Something had moved in the corner of his eye. Or maybe it was a slight sound, or a shadow, or the warning of a fifth sense that told him he was no longer alone.

  He reached for the bottle of gentian violet, to hide it away in his ammunition pouch.

  “Hände hoch, Tommy!”

  Butler froze, unable to believe his ears, his hand halfway towards the little bottle.

  “Hände hoch.”

  The impossible words came from behind him, quite close. But where they had been almost conversational the first time, more a suggestion than an order, now they were a harsh command which made his back a yard wide.

  Butler raised his hands.

  “Gut. Steh jetzt auf.”

  Th
e words banged against each other in his brain like goods wagons in a shunting yard, their meaning clanging out loudly.

  He stood up in the stream, feeling the water crawl up his legs to soak his trousers below the knee.

  The meaning expanded. First, it wasn’t possible: this was ten miles, more than ten miles, behind the front line of a retreating enemy.

  And then, because it was happening, it was no longer impossible, only cruelly unfair.

  It must be an escaped prisoner … or maybe a bailed-out Luftwaffe pilot?

  No, hardly an airman. Because he hadn’t even heard a German plane, never mind seen one, in the last twenty-four hours. But if an escaped soldier … that was a frightening thought, because the shambling prisoners he had seen had seemed relieved to be out of their defeat alive. Anyone determined to fight on would have to be a hard man, most likely a dyed-in-the-wool Nazi from the SS units.

  “Dreh dich um … langsam.”

  Langsam? Butler scrabbled desperately in his German vocabulary, fear sharpening his memory to a razor-edge.

  Slowly.

  He turned round slowly.

  To his surprise there was no one to be seen. The strip of rough pasture between the stream and the hedgerow was empty, and the open gateway to the road through which he had entered the field over the tank-crushed remains of the gate was empty too.

  “Gut… zuwelchem Truppenteil gehörst du, Tommy?”

  The voice seemed to come out of the thin air of the gateway, for choice from the left of it where the vegetation was thickest.

  Butler licked his lips nervously, sorting out the words for their meaning and trying at the same time to divine the intention behind that meaning. The German obviously wanted to know his prisoner’s unit as a prelude to asking if he was alone. But why should an ex-prisoner want a prisoner of his own when he ought to be avoiding all contact with his enemies?

  The answer came back frighteningly quickly: the uniform he was wearing was what the German wanted. A nice clean British uniform, without holes or bloodstains—which was why he was using words and not bullets.

  “Zuwelchem—Truppenteil—gehörst—du … ?” The German spaced the words patiently, as though he had all the time in the world.

  Butler was suddenly and shamefully aware that he was sweating profusely. Fear wasn’t cold, like the books said, but hot—and he was bathed in sweaty fear. It was running off him and down him like water.

  He was going to die.

  In ten minutes’ time the major would arrive to find him naked and dead beside the stream.

  With purple feet.

  No, his brain screamed at him.

  “Tommy—“

  “Nein,” said Butler.

  His own voice surprised him—it didn’t sound like his voice: it was someone else’s voice in someone else’s language. But it also roused him to fight for his life with the only weapon he had. His eye fell on the Sten gun lying on the ledge in the bank, beside his boots and equipment. But that wasn’t his weapon—yet.

  His weapon was time.

  “Du hast”—he fumbled for the right word—“du hast überhaupt keine Chance.” It was the first German sentence he had ever spoken to a German—it was like firing the first shot in anger. “Du hast überhaupt keine Chance—meine Kameraden werden bald zurückkommen.”

  “Eh?”

  That had given the bugger something to think about, thought Butler —the confident assertion that he had no chance because the place would soon be crawling with British troops.

  “Deine Kameraden?” The German seemed surprised.

  “Ja.” Butler nodded vigorously. But then the thought hit him sickeningly that he had maybe given his captor a bloody good reason for pulling the trigger straight away and then getting clear as fast as he could.

  He had said exactly the wrong thing, bugger it.

  “Deine Kameraden?” the German repeated.

  Think. Say something. Say anything.

  “Ja …” The words dried up in Butler’s throat. He must give the man a reason not to fire.

  If he fired they would hear it.

  “Ja. Wenn du mich tötest—“ To his horror Butler discovered that he couldn’t remember the German word for hear. All he could think of as an alternative was to make a direct threat: if the German killed him then his mates would extract vengeance. “Wenn du mich tötest, werden sie dich sicher töten.”

  The hedge was silent, and as the seconds ticked away a small flame of hope kindled inside Butler. Every second was a small victory advancing him towards the rendezvous hour.

  Always supposing this Major O’Conor was a punctual man—God, please make Major O’Conor a punctual man!

  The German chuckled nastily—it was the dry, contemptuous chuckle of the confident man who held all the cards in his hand and didn’t care who knew it.

  “Kummere dich nicht um mich, Tommy. Komm heraus and argumentiere nicht.”

  The flame was gone as though it had never been. Instead there was only another wave of dead cow to remind him that in the moment he stepped out of the stream, away from the Sten, he was as dead as the cow.

  Dead with his purple feet for the German to laugh at.

  Dead without his boots on.

  His boots.

  From his hiding place in the hedge all the German could see of his equipment was a pair of boots—the rest was out of sight on the ledge. And what he couldn’t see he couldn’t know about.

  What was the German for “boots”?

  Stiefel.

  That one word carried Butler from despair to resolution.

  “Meine Stiefel …” He tried to sound abject. “Aber lass mich meine Stiefel aufnehmen.”

  “Deine Stiefel?” Another chuckle. “Ja, ja! Also—nimm deine Stiefel auf.”

  The contempt in the man’s voice was the final spur Butler needed. He took a step sideways, settling his feet firmly on the bed of the stream, and bent over slowly as though to pick up his boots. Then, in the very instant that his right hand seemed about to close on them he doubled up below the lip of the bank.

  The fruits of a hundred weapon drills were harvested in seconds: cocking handle slammed back to “safety”—magazine from the open pouch snapped firmly home—stud on “automatic”—cocking handle off “safety”—

  Now it’s not meine Stiefel, you bugger—it’s meine Sten!

  Viewed from where he knelt in the water the stream was a wide, shallow trench meandering across the open field roughly parallel to the hedge and the road beyond. To his right the bank was open, but six yards to his left there was an enticing clump of willows. That was the obvious place to head for—but that was also the way the German would expect him to go—

  And if the German had a grenade—

  A grenade?

  Butler’s nerve snapped and his instincts took over: before he could stop himself he had straightened up and loosed half the magazine into the hedge. Dust and fragments of wood splattered around the foot of the gatepost in the opening.

  “All right, Corporal Butler—cease fire!”

  Butler was turned to stone.

  “Put it on ‘safety,’ Corporal—d’you hear?” The voice came from the hedge where the German had been. “Put it on ‘safety’ and then I’ll come out… and if you shoot me I’ll never forgive you—d’you hear?”

  Butler stared at the hedge uncomprehendingly.

  “This is Major O’Conor speaking, Corporal. I’m ordering you to put that Sten on ‘safety’—d’you understand?” the voice barked, with exactly the same shift in tone from the conversational to the peremptory which had characterised the original German order to surrender.

  The same tone—and the same voice.

  There was another sound too now, of a rapidly approaching vehicle. As Butler struggled to make sense of events a cloud of white dust rose from behind the bocage and a jeep skidded to a halt in the gateway.

  The dust cloud swirled around the vehicle, enveloping its khaki-clad driver momentarily. Until i
t settled he sat like a statue, still grasping the steering wheel with both hands as though he was holding an animal in check.

  “All right, Sergeant-major.” The voice from the hedge was almost back to conversational level. “No damage, no casualties.”

  “Sir!” The sergeant-major killed the engine, twisted towards Butler— and stiffened. ‘You—“ he shrieked, stabbing his finger after the word, “don’t point that machine carbine at me! What d’you think you’re playing at?”

  The familiar formula broke Butler’s trance. He lowered the Sten shamefacedly, automatically pulling back the cocking handle into the safety slot as he did so.

  “That’s better!”

  Butler was suddenly aware that he was no longer hot—he was deathly cold. There was a jumble of other feelings churning around inside him, some of which could not safely be expressed aloud in the presence of an officer—a field officer—never mind a sergeant-major. He was conscious that he had been cruelly and unfairly treated; that he had been the subject of some sort of joke which had been no joke at all, and which could have ended in tragedy. But chiefly he was conscious of feeling cold—the top half of him cold and clammy, the bottom half cold and soaking wet.

  And he had also made a perfect fool of himself.

  He set the Sten down on the bank beside his boots and reached for one of the magazines which had fallen into the muddy edge of the stream. As he did so he noticed the bottle of gentian violet still standing on its ledge, safe and sound… . Well, that at least was a mercy. There was no question of continuing the treatment here and now, but there would be other opportunities. He would beat that fungus if it was the last thing he did—

  “Well now, Corporal Butler—“

  Butler straightened himself into attention as best he could—it wasn’t easy to smarten up while standing up to one’s knees in muddy water and trying to conceal the telltale bottle at the same time—and steeled himself to look Major O’Conor straight in the eye.

  In fact he found himself looking directly at Major O’Conor’s fly, two buttons of which were undone. It occurred to him irrelevantly that the major hadn’t appeared as soon as the sergeant-major had arrived because he had been pissing in the hedge—and that might be why the sergeant-major had sat rigidly to attention in the dust cloud.