The '44 Vintage

Price, Anthony - [David Audley 08] - The '44 Vintage

The '44 Vintage

ANTHONY PRICE

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

I. 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.

Price, Anthony - [David Audley 08] - The '44 Vintage

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.

Price, Anthony - [David Audley 08] - The '44 Vintage

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