The '44 Vintage

Madame Boucard sat bolt upright. 'Pont-Civray.'

'Pont—?' Audley swung towards her.

'Civray.' Madame Boucard nodded. 'Le Chateau de Pont-Civray. About fifteen kilometres from here.

You may even have heard us speak of it, David—in the old days.'

'No, maman—I don't think so.'

'Then it was our . . . delicacy. It was—acquired, shall we say?— acquired by an Englishman from an old family here, the De Lissacs. They said that Etienne de Lissac couldn't see the cards he had in his hand, and the Englishman could see both sides of the cards in both hands . . . but that may have been mere scandal-mongering.' She inclined her head very slightly. ' En tout cas . . . the Englishman moved in—

that was in 1938—and had the house gutted. The builders were still there in 1940 when the Germans came.'

'The Germans!'

'Oh, yes ... almost directly after the Armistice, they took over the chateau—some in uniform, and some out of uniform.' She caught her husband's eye. “What was it they called themselves?'

' L'Association de l'Amitie Franco-Allemande—there was at least someone who had a sense of humour of a sort,' said Boucard grimly. 'To take over an Englishman's castle for what they had in mind —their brand of Franco-German friendship.'

'Which was?'

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

'It was the liaison centre for the Gestapo and the Service d'Ordre Legionnaire—which is now the Milice

—the scum of the scum.' Boucard's eyes flashed. 'Even the Englishman was preferable to that alliance.'

Audley nodded. 'So security would have been tight?'

'At Pont-Civray? My dear boy—Pont-Civray has not been a healthy place these last four years. Not since . . .' Boucard trailed off.

'Not since 1940,' said Audley.

19. How Second Lieutenant Audley got the truth off his chest

Dad was right about hay, Butler decided: it wasn't nearly as good as straw for sleeping in.

The night before he had been so dog-weary that it hadn't really mattered, he had been too tired to analyse its defects even though he had been the last one to go to sleep. But now, with what must be the first hint of dawn in the open doorway, he was conscious that it was dustier and mustier and pricklier, and above all colder, than straw ricks of happy memory.

He rubbed his sleep-crusted eyes and was surprised at the clarity of his mind. His body had been warm and relaxed when he had let it sink at last into the hay, but his brain had been a football crowd of unruly thoughts; now his body was cold and stiff, but a few hours of oblivion seemed to have shaken his thoughts into order. He could even remember how he had approved Mr. Audley's obstinate refusal of beds in the chateau in preference to the hayloft in the old barn by the stream; and how he had wondered later, as he listened to the subaltern mumble and groan in his sleep, whether that refusal had been due to knowledge of his sleeping habits rather than to military prudence.

Not that it mattered now, for young Mr. Audley was quiet at last and in a very few minutes it would be dawn. And the dawn of a very special day, too.

He straightiened his legs cautiously, so as not to wake the others. This was, for a guess, the same hour when he had parted the canvas flaps on the truck yesterday morning and had looked out over the darkened vineyards of Touraine across the river. He had seen the rows of vines in the flare of the American military policeman's lighter, and had not known they were vines because he had never seen a vineyard before; and also because he hadn't known where he was any more than where he was going.

But since then the world had changed, and he had changed with it.

He had killed his first man.

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

He had been betrayed by men he had trusted.

He had fought his first Germans.

(He had fought his first Germans, but not very efficiently; and then he had run away from them in terror.) He had been wounded.

(But not very badly, and his wound had covered a multitude of weaknesses thereafter, so he had been lucky there.)

He had spoken to his first German, his first prisoner.

(Why was it so astonishing that Germans were so ordinary? The soldier with the loaves . . . and then Hauptmann Grafenberg, who really wasn't so very different from Second Lieutenant Audley—) (No. Say, not so different from his own company officers in the Rifles. Mr. Audley was something else and something very different from both. He didn't even know whether he liked and admired Mr. Audley, or whether he disliked and mistrusted him. But it was the general who always said that brains alone didn't make an officer, there had to be a heart somewhere—)

A heart!

Somehow, he didn't know how, on the day that all this had happened to him, he had lost his heart to a girl he hardly knew, and a foreigner too. And God only knew what Dad would make of that, apart from his other ambition