The '44 Vintage (31 page)

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

Back in the battalion 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.”

So Audley was having trouble with time too, thought Butler. “Yes, sir?”

Audley nodded. “He wasn’t just in the show from 1940 onwards. He was in the first lot, in 1918—did you know that?”

Butler nodded back. “Yes, sir. I recognised the ribbons.”

“Yes, of course—I hadn’t thought of that… . Well, he was a second lieutenant. Won the MC up beyond Ypres somewhere, right at the end of things. And he wanted to stay on afterwards and make a career of it, but they wouldn’t have him—that’s what he said. I can’t imagine why anyone in his right mind should want to do that, but I think he did—very much.”

Butler opened his mouth to say something, but the words wouldn’t come out.

“It’s pretty remarkable that he got back in at the sharp end in 1939. He’d been a schoolmaster or something like that—maybe he was a Territorial officer, I suppose. That might be it. But it’s still remarkable.”

There was a lump in Butler’s throat. “If a man wants something enough, sir …”

“But he wanted it enough in 1918—or 1919. Anyway he did get back in—France in ‘40, then the Middle East—Greece and Crete. North Africa and then Italy. And finally Jugoslavia as a weapons adviser to a big Partisan outfit—a DSO for that, so he must have been damn good. It seems incredible, doesn’t it?”

“That he should go wrong on us?” Butler found himself staring at the trees. It did seem incredible. It even required an effort of will to recall the voice and the words he had heard spoken just above him on the island in the Loire, even though both were etched deep into his memory. “Yes, it does, sir.”

“And yet it was there, the night before last.”

It was there? “What was there, sir?”

“Something wrong. He kept asking me what I was going to do after the war. Like, did I really want to go up to Cambridge.”

“They asked me that too, sir. What I wanted to do after the war. The … Corporal Jones did. And Sergeant Purvis.”

Somehow Sergeant Purvis’s treachery seemed the blackest of all. The major was an Olympian figure, a being from another world, to be admired or hated rather than understood—and it was difficult to hate what he didn’t understand. But Sergeant Purvis—and the sergeant-major too —had been men he knew and trusted as the backbone of the British Army. The major was like the general, his idol. But
they
were no different from Dad, and that made their treachery worse and killing too good for them, the buggers.

“They did?” Audley gave him a knowing look: he could see that now and he’d have to watch his own face. “Yes … well, I suppose they were checking us both for the same thing. The other two chaps were from Intelligence—Colonel Clinton’s men. That’s why the major got rid of them. Maybe he hoped to recruit us into the plot—at least for the time being, anyway … I don’t know. But that’s the key to it, I think.” His mouth twisted. “In fact, when I think about it, he as good as said as much, by golly! Do you know that, Jack?” Jack. Equals.

“No. What did he say?”

They were equals. Mr. Audley and Corporal Butler were just for the time being. He would learn and he would catch up because he had learnt. And he would be a better officer than Audley because of that “He said things would be rough after the war.”

“They said that too.” He couldn’t quite bring himself to say
David
. That would only come with friendship, if not equality.

“Huh! He said the war was won, but we hadn’t won it—we’d just fought it. He said the Yanks and the Russians had won, we’d lost. At least,
the
British
had lost. But there was still a chance for individual chaps to grab what was going and get something out of it—did they say that to you, Jack?”

The lump was there again. “More or less.”

Audley nodded. “I gave him the wrong answer too. I said everything I wanted was at Cambridge, waiting for me—“

He was only one breath away from asking what was waiting for Corporal Butler to keep him on the straight and narrow road, thought Butler. And he had to be headed off from that question. “What did he say to that, sir?” he said hastily.

“Oh, he sheered off. He said he was glad I’d got myself a cushy billet. And then he said something I thought was rather clever: he said that the difference between wise countries and wise men was that wise countries prepared for war in peacetime, whereas the wise man was the one who prepared for peace in wartime.” He gave Butler a twisted grin. “The laugh is—I thought he was talking about me. But actually he was referring to himself, I suppose: kill everyone who gets in the way, grab the loot, and keep going, that’s his formula.”