Read Online The '44 Vintage by Anthony Price - Free Book Online

background, all of which he had smelt or heard or glimpsed during the last half hour. All it had needed was a girl or two—say Dolores del Rio in a low-cut dress, with gipsy earrings— to complete the picture.
    Chandos Force.
    The Chandos Gang—
    Must be false impressions.
    Butler struggled with the evidence of his senses and his limited experience, as the sudden glow of the half-smoked dog-end in the mouth of the next man to enter the barn caught his eye. As the man stepped briefly into the lamplight Butler saw that he sported an Uncle Joe Stalin moustache.
    In the Lancashire Rifles no rifleman or junior NCO dared to grow a moustache. In the Lancashire Rifles men stood close to their razors every morning without fail.
    And when the ACIs were pinned on the notice boards appealing for volunteers for the paratroops or any other strange and wonderful units like this one, Lancashire Riflemen did not volunteer—the senior NCOs saw to that, their official reasoning being that anyone wishing to quit the best battalion in the finest regiment in the whole British Army must be bloody mad, and it wouldn’t be right and proper to saddle other units with such madmen, particularly units which must already have more than their share of thugs, misfits, and criminals.
    Over two happy years of mastering the basics of the only trade he had ever wanted to learn, Butler had become convinced of the inner truth of that simple logic. Everything he was told and everything he learnt fitted in with everything he had ever read and with those things which General Chesney had told him: that the highest moment in war was the ordinary line infantryman setting his face and his best foot toward the enemy in battle. All the rest—all the tanks and artillery and planes and staffs and generals—were but the means and the auxiliaries to that end.
    He had tried to prepare himself for the ugly facts of pain and discomfort and dirt and smells which he knew would mask this truth. But he discovered now that he had relied far more on the shelter of the battalion itself: he had not prepared himself for this kind of war in this kind of unit.
    He wasn ’ t afraid, he told himself. Because this wasn’t the feeling he had had by the side of the stream, when the major had shouted at him in German.
    But he was alone, and he was unutterably and desolately lonely .
    A sudden stir among the bandits, and then a spreading hush of their muttered conversations, roused him out of self-misery.
    The sergeant-major strode into the lamplight and glowered around him into the darkness. He was still wearing his leather jerkin, but had forsaken his beret for a knitted cap-comforter.
    “Purvis!” he barked into the gloom.
    “S’arnt-major!” One of the bandits barked back.
    “Everybody here?”
    “S’arnt-major.” Purvis paused. “One extra.”
    The sergeant-major frowned for a moment. “Corporal Butler!”
    “Sergeant-major!” Butler attempted to bark, but his voice cracked with the effort.
    “Right.” The sergeant-major swung round towards the doorway, his hand coming up to a quivering salute. “All present and correct, sir!” he roared into the darkness.
    Second Lieutenant Audley stepped cautiously through the doorway into the circle of light, stooping to avoid the lintel.
    The bandit in front of Butler inclined his head towards his neighbour. “Cor, bleedin’ ‘ell,” he said in a deliberate stage whisper.
    It was true that Audley looked absurdly young, despite his size. Indeed, his size seemed to emphasise his youth as he blinked nervously around him, with the squatter but menacing figures of Purvis and the sergeant-major on the edge of the light on either side of him, like wolves bracketing a newly born bull calf.
    “ ‘E wants ‘s mummy,” stage-whispered the other bandit.
    Bastards— Butler thought of the burnt-out Cromwells— bastards .
    The sergeant-major swung sharply towards the direction of the whisper, his chest expanding. But Audley