The '44 Vintage (3 page)

“I hope so—for your sake, Corporal.” The sergeant-major’s gaze moved inexorably downwards, his nose wrinkling. It could be the cow to begin with—the poor rotting beast seemed to have ripened measurably in the last quarter of an hour. But at the end it would be the feet, thought Butler despairingly.

“And get those feet of yours cleaned up … on
the double
!” concluded the sergeant-major.

Butler looked down at his feet in surprise. They were encased in thick brown mud.

How the corporal missed the battle of Normandy

THERE HADN
’
T
been much room in the back of the jeep even before Butler had added himself and his belongings to its cargo, but that didn’t worry him; in exchange for the privilege of not having to march he was prepared to adjust himself to almost any discomfort. What shocked him now was not the amount of the cargo but its nature: it looked most suspiciously like plunder.

Then shock became instant embarrassment as the major swiveled in his seat to catch the expression naked on his face.

“Not for us, Corporal, I’m sorry to say. Not for us.” The major shook his head and grinned at him, the gold of his smile matching exacdy the gold of the serried ranks of botde tops. “Besides … it wouldn’t taste very good in this heat, you know. Chilled is the only way to drink it.” Butler stared fascinated at the bottle tops. Champagne, it must be, and that was one drink he’d never had the opportunity of trying. Or, to be honest, one of the many drinks; he’d not even had the chance of any of the cider for which this bit of France was supposed to be famous, like Somerset back in England—He felt the major’s eyes on him. “Yes, sir.” He found himself automatically copying the sergeant-major’s impassivity. “No, sir.”

“No—“ The jeep jerked forward sharply and widiout warning under the sergeant-major’s hands, cutting off the major’s sentence and nearly dislocating Butler’s neck with the whiplash. As with men, so with machines, he thought critically: both were there to be driven hard. But with the major it would be different.

“No, indeed.” The major had the trick of riding the sergeant-major’s driving, rolling easily with each jar and bump. “You see, Corporal, this is a trading mission we’re on now. And these”—he patted the champagne bottles—“these are the trade goods for our next port of call.”

The sergeant-major grunted—it was the most eloquent sound he had made yet—and swung the jeep regardlessly off the track onto the main road in a cloud of dust, tyres squealing, missing by a full yard the burnt-out hulk of a Sherman which had been shunted into a gateway almost opposite the junction. In the very nick of time Butler tensed himself and leaned into the swerve, pressing against the side of the jeep to counteract the force which threatened to hurl him at the Sherman. He had just been getting the hang of the major’s easy riding technique—Trading mission?

The major took in his bafflement. “He wants to know what we’re trading in, Sergeant-major,” he murmured. “The old merchandise, that’s what—the old merchandise … not sandalwood and cedarwood, or emeralds and amethysts … or cheap tin trays either … just the old merchandise, the perishable goods, that’s what.”

He flicked another quick glance backwards, and then shrugged away a second before Butler could find his wits and give him some sign of recognition.

With a cargo of ivory
And apes and peacocks,
Sandalwood, cedarwood,
and sweet white wine—

He
flushed with annoyance at his slowness in meeting the challenge, even though it wasn’t fair expecting him—expecting anyone—to pick up poetry straight off in this place, at this time—

Quinquireme of Nineveh from distant Ophir—

The verses, hard-learned under the eagle eye of the Third Form English master at King Edward’s, came back now to mock him as he stared at a German Mark IV stranded in the cornfield just ahead on his left, its long gun drooping submissively. That corn had been harvested after the tank had been knocked out, he could see that from the thin screen of standing stems along its side: the farmers had come back after the battle and—

It wasn’t fair. And it was doubly unfair because he wasn’t used to being talked to like this by anyone, least of all by an officer—and a field officer too, a major.

But that was this officer’s way of going about things, he told himself grimly, to test men with the unexpected to gauge their capabilities. Where the sergeant-major was looking for the exact performance of a man’s duties, the major was looking for something more.

Looking—and not bloody well finding this time, he thought bitterly.

He had been tested once, in oral German, and he had passed by the skin of his teeth. But he had failed the cultural test and the major would have him tagged as a German-speaking clod with quick reflexes. And it was far too late now—and he was far too shy anyway—to tap the officer on the shoulder and say “John Masefield, sir, that was, sir.” All he could do was to learn his lesson and be ready for—

Ready for what?

Detached for Special Duties.

The words had made him gawp at the RSM for a moment like a recruit who didn’t know his left foot from his right. And then, in sinking through to the first layer of his understanding, they had made him do something which two moments before he would never have dreamed of doing in his wildest fantasy: he had questioned the RSM’s order.

“What duties, sir?”

He heard the question after he had spoken it, it had hung in the air between him and the RSM, surprising both of them.

The RSM had looked at him, and he had the feeling that he was really being looked at by the RSM for the first time as a person, not as 944 Butler J., Corporal, “B” Company.

The RSM sighed. “Corporal … ask me no questions, son, and I’ll tell you no lies.” And then he had paused, and had looked down at the papers on the table as though to recall himself to the matter in hand.

“Ten minutes—you have ten minutes to get your kit together and report back here on the double—ten minutes. And then regimental transport will take you to a point one mile south of—of”—he looked down again uncertainly—“Meznil—lez—Bockage … that’s it—Meznil-lez-Bockage … where you will rendezvous with a Major O’Conor at precisely eighteen hundred hours.” He had looked up at Butler, eyes opaque. “Is that clear, Corporal?”

It had been all too clear then; it had been appallingly clear; it had been
Detached for Special Duties
.

“But, sir—“

“Ten minutes. By which time the relevant documentation will have been completed.”

The finality of the RSM’s voice had broken through the final layer. The words on that piece of paper were chiselled in stone.

“Away from the battalion?” It hadn’t really been a question, and it certainly hadn’t been addressed to the RSM; Butler had simply been talking to himself.

But it had been spoken aloud.

“Away—?” The RSM had started to speak sharply; but then, as the cry from the soul had registered, his expression had changed. Loyalty to the battalion was something he took for granted, but it was still not a quality to be spurned. It was something which merited an answer.

“Now then, son …” The RSM had struggled briefly with the problem. “You do speak German—you are proficient in that language, aren’t you?”

Butler swallowed, unable to deny what he was so proud of. “Not … I wouldn’t quite say that, sir.”

“
Proficient
.” The RSM held on to the word. “That is what the record says … and there is a requirement for a German-speaking noncommissioned officer.”

Butler’s heart had beaten faster then. The requirement was not for him—not for 12048944 Butler J., Corporal, 2nd/4th Royal North-East Lancashire Rifles. Nor was it for a red-haired soldier suffering in secret from
Epidermophyton inguinale
, who had been born in Jubilee Street, Blackburn, nineteen and a half years before. It was just for an NCO who could speak in German. And that could be—anyone.

“With respect, sir—I’d like to stay with the battalion, sir.”

The RSM had frowned at that “What you’d like—and what you don’t like—don’t come into it, Corporal.”

The frown had frightened Butler. But the prospect of what was proposed for him had terrified him beyond fear: his instinct made him fight before his reason had time to instruct him otherwise. “I’ve been with the battalion for two years, sir.” The frown had deepened. Two years or ten minutes—two years
and
ten minutes—it was all the same to the RSM. He needed a better reason than that.

“The battalion’s just about to go into action, sir,” he had said. Slowly the frown had cleared, until the face was expressionless again.

“My … my father was with the regiment in 1916, sir.”

Now there was an expression, but he couldn’t identify it. “Aye, I know, son.” The RSM had nodded slowly. “And he was RSM, 1st Battalion, at Ypres in ‘18.”

It had been Butler’s turn to frown then. Because that knowledge had been just too exact, too precise. It had been all very well for “the record,” whatever it was, wherever it was, to note that he could speak German. He had never concealed that—he had been proud of it. But how could the RSM—?

The question answered itself before he had finished formulating it in his mind. Somewhere, wherever that record was, probably far away back in the regimental depot, there was a sheet of that thick white writing paper which General Sir Henry Chesney always used … he could almost see the beautiful copperplate writing on it There was a sheet of the same paper, with the same copperplate, in his pocket now—

Dear Jack,

By the time you receive this letter I expect you will be in the thick of
it—

It
would be like the general to do his best for him, unasked, with just such a letter of recommendation. And it was—what was the word, “irony” was it?—an irony if that recommendation was now taking him away from the battalion.

Unless—the thought had come out of nowhere and he had clutched it desperately—unless they were now giving him a chance to distinguish himself, perhaps?

In that instant he had stopped fighting and had started to think about a Major O’Conor who required a German-speaking NCO for Special Duties.

His eyes had met the RSM’s. “I’ll get my kit, sir,” he had said then.

Ready for what?

They were driving steadily southwards; or perhaps, from the position of the earty evening sun, south inclined a few degrees eastwards. But then the road had twisted and turned so many times that they could just as easily have drifted westwards first … the three-tonner which had carried him away from battalion headquarters had certainly left Caen—or the rubble that had once been Caen—on a more or less southwesterly route.

Butler’s head swam with the effort of trying to work out where he was and where he was heading. He had studied a map of Normandy carefully back in England only a week before, but that seemed a very long time ago, and it hadn’t been this part that he’d concentrated on—at least, so it seemed to him now, because the names on the signposts were all strange and new to him.

And the places themselves, they were all the same, most of them fearfully knocked about, some of them no better than Caen itself; blank empty windows and smashed-up churches with holes punched methodically into their towers where the snipers had been.

And the civilians … he had half expected, even more than half expected, that there would be cheers and flowers for liberation, or at least that some pretty girl would wave at him. But he hadn’t heard a cheer or seen an arm raised, never mind a pretty girl. Half the time they didn’t even look at him, any of them, and he didn’t blame them a bit now for that, with their homes in ruins.

But, one thing, the country was different here. Not flat and open, but closed into small fields with high earth banks out of which the trees and hedges sprouted, and rolling up and down into deep litde valleys full of trees.

And the fighting, although it had passed now—away almost due east, so far as he could judge the sound—it had been bad here. In one place they passed three British tanks, Cromwells all of them, blackened and burnt and shunted into a twenty-yard stretch of ditch; and he caught a glimpse of others, one with its turret lying beside it, through a gap in the earth bank on his left.

“Getting warm,” said Major O’Conor. ‘Take the left fork at the next junction, Sergeant-major. If there’s a sign it’ll be for St Pierre-sur-Orne, most likely.”

Butler blinked and stared at the weatherbeaten back of the major’s neck. The Orne flowed northwards into the sea from Caen, but before that … where did it come from?

And now the sound of the distant guns seemed to be coming more from the southeast than the east …

Butler shivered. Whatever it was doing, it wasn’t getting warm at all, it was almost chilly. Or maybe the sight of those burnt-out Cromwells had chilled him.

The major twisted in his seat. “Been admiring the scenery, Corporal?”

“Yes, sir,” said Butler.

“Quite right too. Lovely countryside, and we’re just getting into the best of it. And you know what they call it?”

Butler thought of the Cromwells again, and then with a start realised that he was about to be told where he was.

“No, sir.”

“La Suisse Normande, Corporal—‘the Norman Switzerland.’ Actually, it’s nothing like Switzerland, but it’s the nearest thing they’ve got, and the food’s a lot better.” The major looked around proprietorially. “Not a place to fight in, of course … if you’ve got to do the attacking, that is … but fortunately, Jerry has pressing business elsewhere and other things in mind, so we don’t have to worry about that.”

So the Germans really were retreating, thought Butler. All the rumours were true after all.

“Sir?” he inquired hopefully.

The major smiled. “Another five or ten minutes, and you’ll be able to stretch your legs. And then after that I fancy you’ll be able to travel more comfortably too.”

He turned away, leaving Butler not very much the wiser. La Suisse Normande might be anywhere; it certainly wasn’t a name he’d seen on any map. But the Germans had retreated through it, and the major obviously wasn’t contemplating attacking them.