War Children by Gerard Whelan Read Free Book Online Page A

hitting the cart. Statia scrambled round the back of the near wheel and into the shelter of the cart’s raised body. She curled into a ball and closed her eyes and listened to the ringing in her ears, suddenly glad of her deafness.
    She’d no idea, afterwards, of how long she lay there. Itfelt like forever, but it could have been no more than a few minutes. Gradually her hearing came back. She heard the storm of gunfire and the cries of shot men. She heard curses roared. The sounds were all mixed up with the endless clucking sound of the river, that sound which had always seemed peaceful to her before. More explosions came – grenades or bombs, she guessed – and more screams. One scream in particular went on and on, like the sound of the river itself. It was an endless wail that spoke of an agony Statia didn’t even want to think about. Anybody feeling such pain should be dead – they’d be better off dead. But the wail just went on, rising and falling, endlessly.
    They were feared men, the Auxies, and hated – more feared and hated than the Tans in a way, precisely because they had the discipline the Tans lacked. There was more cold cruelty in their acts, and more thought. But now as she listened to their cries Statia heard only the sound of the pain, and she wanted it only to stop. She covered her ears with her hands and she lay there, shivering, wanting to scream herself.
    Go away! she thought. Go away, all of you, this minute!
    They didn’t go away. The intensity of the gunfire, though, did begin to lessen. Statia started to believe that it might even end. She didn’t care who won, so long as it all stopped. But then there was a new sound, a sound she didn’t notice at first over the diminished shooting. It was the sound of another motor. Suddenly the firing grew to afresh crescendo. A machinegun opened up, and there were repeated volleys of rifle fire. Bullets smacked off the ground around the cart, and off the cart itself. Statia heard a strange, animal whimpering. It came from very close by. For a moment she thought that it must be the ass; but she’d noticed a pool of blood growing around the still figure of the poor brute between the shafts, and she knew that the ass was dead. She realised that the sound was coming from herself. She tried to stop it, but she couldn’t. Her mouth had become like a stranger’s, beyond her control.
    Running footsteps approached. Statia saw several sets of flying feet go by. One set stumbled, and a man fell full length on the road with his face only a couple of feet from her own, staring at her from wide-open eyes. His mouth was open too. He had long yellow teeth, and several of them were missing. With his wide eyes and his open mouth, he seemed almost to be laughing. But there was no life in his eyes, and she realised he was dead. He wasn’t an Auxie. His cap lay in the roadway, and the rifle that had dropped from his hand. Someone came and picked up the rifle, then ran on. The dead man lay grinning at Statia, like someone who’d been frozen in the act of playing ‘peep’ with her.
    Peep! said the dead man’s grin. I sees you there.
    Statia stared at the man’s face for a very long moment, at the wide, staring eyes, dead and cold, like a fish staring back at her. Then she shrieked and scrabbled out from under the cart. She crouched there like an animal on the open road,whimpering, then risked a look up towards the scene of the ambush.
    At the brow of Mulligan’s Drop she saw the cab of another Auxiliary tender. A Lewis gun on its roof was sending burst after burst of machinegun fire into the hedges lining the roadway down the Drop, and into the fields on either side. Lumps were flying off the hedges, and puffs of dirt spitting out of the ground. Dark-uniformed men were already in the fields, shouting and shooting. At the foot of the hill, the surviving Auxies from the first two tenders had regrouped.