Ride Out The Storm Read Online Free PDF Page A

food and sleep, they were far too frightened to stop women with sore feet carrying exhausted children, old, and sick, all moving like frightened cattle. An old man was wheeling his equally ancient wife in a wheelbarrow and a group of women were pushing perambulators piled high with household goods. One of them suckled an infant as she trudged by, while a second child, not more than six years old, had harnessed itself to the perambulator and plodded forward like a small beast of burden. An overloaded farm cart, carrying a brass bedstead and a dozen old people, came to a halt on the rise to the crossroads, and as the way ahead cleared, the ancient animal between the shafts hadn’t the strength to start it again. In the gutter an old man had collapsed with fatigue and lay with his back against a suitcase. The two women who bent over him had faces that were taut with vexation, as though they were wishing he would die so they could continue. A child that had lost its parents was screaming with terror, and an elderly woman sat sobbing while her husband massaged her numbed feet and legs.
    There were thousands and thousands of them, all pressing against the military vehicles. Then Allerton noticed a Fieseler recce plane hovering over the village, humming like a dragonfly in the blue sky, and with a sudden horrified awareness of what was going to happen, he set his men to digging slit trenches in a field alongside. They were none too willing, but they were philosophical and still managed to laugh. Then a Heinkel roared over the village just above the church spire, lifting above the trees to the west. They heard the whistle as the bomb came down but it fell in the next street and Allerton’s batman, a cheerful idiot in spectacles called Rice, yelled out, ‘Foul! Send him off, ref!’
    As the Heinkel disappeared and there were no more bombs, Allerton decided the single missile was all they need expect. He was just watching a mechanised regiment of French cuirassiers, hurrying past him in their four-seater cars and motor-cycle combinations to force their way through to the bridge, when the Stukas arrived, ten thousand feet up, bunched together in the shape of an arrowhead. Even as he saw them the point of the arrow seemed to wobble and the refugees started to run.
    The sky came alive with bursting shells as the leading plane did a half-roll and went into a dive. It came down at a terrific speed, piercing the air with a maniac scream so that on a simple impulse they all hurled themselves down to hug the earth. No one spoke because they were all of the opinion that they’d been singled out individually for destruction, that nothing on God’s earth could stop the diving plane. As the first group of bombs landed, Allerton saw the ground heave among the clouds of yellow and grey smoke, like the sea in a heavy swell. Almost immediately a second plane came down, followed by a third and a fourth, and he felt the ground thumping him in the chest as it leapt under the concussion. There was a roar nearby as a house collapsed in a great billow of dust, and children started to scream as walls fell flat and tiles flew through the air, slicing viciously at living flesh through clouds of smoke that were lit with tongues of red flame.
    The horror seemed to go on for hours, while they clawed at the earth, their mouths hanging open, their eyes blinking at every scattering of debris and pulverised earth. Dimly through the din, they could hear the incoherent cries of women and the shrill agony of a wounded horse. The last salvo of bombs burst only a few yards away. Then, as suddenly as it had begun, the world was full of a silence which, after the din, seemed uncanny and Allerton and his men lifted their heads, breathing painfully and still trembling.
    St André seemed to have been blown off the face of the earth. It was now nothing but scree slopes of rubble, and the air was filled with wailing in a strange rising and falling cadence that was broken