War Children by Gerard Whelan Read Free Book Online

the road, dazed and blinking . When she looked around she could see hardly anything . It was as though she was in the middle of a cloud.
    I’m blinded! she thought. Blinded altogether!
    But she wasn’t blinded. She really was in a cloud. The cloud was made of dust, she realised, as it thinned and settled . Dust and smoke. She could see the donkey now, still between the shafts of the cart but lying stretched out on the road with his mild eyes closed and his great head between his outflung forelegs. His back legs had buckled under him, and his rump was in the air. He looked like he was bowing down to the sight before him. And when Statia looked, that sight was surely strange enough to bow down to. There was a shimmering twinkle of lights from the Auxie tenders, which had come to a halt ahead of her, across the bridge. And the bridge …
    Statia shook her head to clear it. There was a ringing in her ears, but no other sound. She stared ahead. The bridge over the Rasheen … she squinted at it, unsure of what she was seeing. The bridge hadn’t entirely disappeared, but a great ragged chunk of it was simply gone .
    A mine, she told herself. They mined the bridge!
    She said this to herself almost calmly, but she was moredazed than calm. She couldn’t quite believe that any of this was real. Everything seemed to be happening very slowly, and in complete silence. She remembered the man in the river. She turned her head to look to where she’d seen him. The man was still there, but there were two other men standing with him now. They climbed up on the bank and were scrambling onto the roadway ahead of her. They were carrying rifles. As Statia watched, they lay down flat in the roadbed, sheltered by the amputated stump of the hump-backed bridge, and started firing their rifles towards the Auxiliary tenders. One of them – the man who’d been waving at her – turned and waved again. There was no mistaking his message this time: he was telling her to go away.
    All of this took place in a world that for Statia was absolutely silent except for the ringing in her ears. She could still see the tenders, trapped between the blown bridge and the steep hill behind them. The rear one was still on the slope. The twinkle of lights that she’d seen still went on, and she realised finally that the lights were gunflashes. As she watched, the Auxies abandoned their tenders. They jumped out and lay in the road. But some of them stayed in the tenders. Those would be the dead. Statia looked back up at Mulligan’s Drop. From the top of it she saw more flashes coming from the hedges and bushes. And still all was silent.
    Statia tried to guess how many Auxies had been in thetenders, but she couldn’t. That they were in a very bad position , whatever their numbers, even she could see that. The foremost tender was only a few yards from the wrecked bridge. Its cab was burnt out and smoking, caught full-on by the explosion of the mine. The windscreen was gone, and a dark, burnt, motionless figure slumped over what was left of the steering wheel. The Auxies on the road were exposed to a raking fire from the high ground above them, and when Statia looked she saw more gunflashes coming from this side of the river.
    She was still sitting beside the cart. There wasn’t a stir out of the ass: he was either insensible or dead. His fall had dragged the cartshafts down till their front ends were on the ground, so that the back of the cart itself stood raised to the sky. Statia put a hand out and rested it on the cart, to push herself up. Something smacked into the wood a couple of inches from her fingers. She stared, puzzled. It happened again, even closer to her hand this time. A big splinter of wood flew from the cart, raking the back of her hand in its passing. Blood welled in the long, shallow scrape. Suddenly understanding, Statia jerked her hand off the wood as though from a hot pan. Those were bullets that were