As the last left his lips he suddenly saw an old woman, almost bowed down by bundles, trying feebly to get away from the road and out from under the roaring armada of diving death. She took a few faltering steps and then stumbled to her knees. One withered hand was stretched out in mute appeal to the others to help her up, but no one paused to give her aid. Stark fear had them all in its grasp and none could be bothered about the misfortunes of the other.
The old woman was only one in thousands and thousands, but Dave had witnessed her sad plight and so his movements were instinctive. He leaped forward and went dashing to her side. With one hand he grabbed her bundles and the other hand he put under her arm.
"I"ll help you, Madam," he said. "Just lean on me. I"ll get you to a safe place. Don"t worry."
He had spoken in English and of course the old woman didn"t understand his words. She understood his actions, however, and there was deep grat.i.tude in the lined and tired face she turned toward him.
"_Merci, Monsieur, merci_," she whispered and started forward leaning heavily on Dave"s arm.
And then down out of the blue it came! Dave heard the eerie sound above the general din but of course he didn"t see the dropping bomb. He didn"t even taken the time to glance upward. He simply acted quickly. He grabbed the old woman about the waist and hauled her to the scanty protection of a standing wagon. There he pushed her down and bent over her so that his body served as partial protection against what he knew was coming.
It came! A terrific crash of sound that seemed to split the very earth wide open. Every bone in Dave"s body seemed to turn to jelly. The entire universe became one huge ocean of flashing light and fire. The ground rocked and trembled under his feet. Unseen hands seemed to grab hold of him and lift him straight upward to hover motionless in a cloud of licking tongues of colored flame. Then suddenly all became as dark as the night, and as silent as a tomb, and he knew no more.
CHAPTER THREE
_Dave Meets Freddy Farmer_
When Dave again opened his eyes it was night. He was lying on his back under some trees and staring up through bomb shattered branches at the canopy of glittering and twinkling stars high overhead. For several seconds he remained perfectly still, not moving a muscle. What had happened? Where was he? Why was he out here under some trees in the dark?
Those and countless other questions crowded through his brain. Then, as though somebody had pulled a curtain aside, memory came back to him and he knew all the answers. Of course! A Stuka bomb. It had dropped close.
He had been trying to shelter that old woman. Yet, that had been on the road by a cart, and here he was under some trees. How come? Had the exploding bomb blown him under the trees? Was he wounded but still too dazed to feel any pain? Good gosh, it was night now, so he must have been here for hours!
Thought and action became one. He put out his hands and pushed himself up to a sitting position. Almost instantly he regretted the effort. A hundred trip-hammers started going to work on the inside of his head.
The night and the stars began to whirl madly about him. He closed his eyes tight, and clenched his teeth until things stopped spinning so fast. That helped the pounding in his head, too. It simmered down to a dull throbbing ache that he could stand without flinching.
For a few moments he sat there on the gra.s.s feeling over his body and searching for broken bones or any wounds he might have received. There was nothing broken, however, and his only wound was a nice big goose egg on the left side of his head. Thankful for the miracle wrought, he got slowly to his feet, braved a hand against a tree trunk and peered about him in the darkness.
It was then one more little surprise came to him. He was in a field and as far as he could tell there wasn"t a road any place. No unending stream of refugees, no wagons, no carts, and no road. It was as though he had dropped down into the very middle of nowhere. Completely puzzled by the strangeness of his surroundings, he glanced at the sky, found the North Star and started walking northward. Way off in the distance there was a faint rumbling, like thunder far far away, but he knew at once it was the roar of heavy guns. If he needed any proof he had only to stare toward the northeast. There the faint glow of flames made a horizon line between the night sky and the earth.
"But where _am_ I?" he asked himself aloud. "I couldn"t have just been blown away. I haven"t even got a sprained ankle. Gosh! I wonder where the Lieutenant is? And those poor refugees. I sure hope French planes caught those Germans and gave them some of their own medicine. And...."
He choked off the rest and started running. In the distance off to his left he had suddenly seen a pair of moving lights. One look told him that it must be some kind of a car on a road. He would stop it and at least find out where he was. Perhaps he might even get a ride back to Paris. He would be crazy to try and reach Calais, now. The best thing for him to do was to get back to Paris as fast as he could and send word to his father.
"But how can I?" he gasped as sudden truth dawned on him. "I don"t even know where Dad"s staying in London. He was to meet me at the station. I didn"t bother to ask Lieutenant Defoe where Dad was staying!"
The seriousness of his plight added wings to his feet. He raced at top speed toward the pair of moving dim lights. And with every step he took, fear that he would not get to the road in time mounted in his breast.
But he had been the star half miler on the Boston Latin High School track team, and finally he reached the edge of the road a good fifty or sixty yards in front of the advancing pair of lights. Disregarding the danger of being run down in the dark he stepped to the center of the road and waved both his arms and shouted at the top of his voice. The sound of the car"s engine died down, brakes complained, and the car came to a halt.
"I say there, what"s up?" shouted a voice from behind the lights. "I jolly well came close to running you down, you know. Just spotted you in the nick of time."
Dave gulped with relief at the sound of an English speaking voice. He trotted toward the lights and then around them to the driver"s seat. It was then he saw that the car was an ambulance. It was a nice brand new one, and only a little dusty. Painted under the red cross on the side were the words ... British Volunteer Ambulance Service.
"I say, do you speak English?" the driver asked as Dave came close.
Dave looked at him. The driver wasn"t in uniform. He wore civilian clothes, and he was about Dave"s age. Perhaps a few months younger. In the faint glow of the dashboard light his face held a sort of cherubic expression. He wore no hat and sandy hair fell down over his forehead.
His eyes were clear blue, and he had nice strong looking teeth. One look and Dave knew instantly that he could like this friendly English boy a lot.
"You bet I speak English," he said. "I"m an American. My name is Dave Dawson."
"Mine"s Freddy Farmer," said the English boy. "I"m very glad to meet you, America, but what in the world are you doing here? Good grief, look at your clothes! Did a bomb fall on you?"
"One came mighty close," Dave said with a grin. "I just came to a few minutes ago, and saw your lights. I"m trying to get back to Paris. Is it far?"
"Paris?" young Freddy Farmer exclaimed. "Why, it"s over a hundred miles back. This is a part of Belgium. Didn"t you know that? What happened anyway? You say you were bombed? A nasty business, bombing."
For a moment or so Dave was too surprised to speak. This was Belgium?
But it couldn"t be! Freddy Farmer must be wrong. He was sure Defoe and he had not been seventy miles from Paris when they"d met those refugees. Belgium? Good gosh! Did that exploding bomb blow him over thirty miles away? But that was crazy.
"Come, get in and ride with me," the English lad broke into his thoughts. "I can"t take you back to Paris but Courtrai is just up ahead.
That"s where I"m delivering this ambulance. Perhaps you can get something there to take you back to Paris. Right you are, America. Now, tell me all about it."
As gears were shifted and the car moved forward Dave told of his thrilling experiences since leaving Paris that morning. Young Freddy Farmer didn"t interrupt, but every now and then he took his eyes off the road ahead to look at Dave in frank admiration.
"Say, you did have a bit of a go, didn"t you?" Freddy Farmer said when Dave had finished. "That was mighty decent of you to try and help that old woman. I hope she got through, all right. We heard that the Germans were shooting and bombing the refugees. A very nasty business, but that"s the way Hitler wages war."
"I hope he gets a good licking!" Dave exclaimed. "Those poor people didn"t have a chance. They were helpless. I don"t see how he thinks he can win the war that way."
"Hitler won"t win the war," the English boy said quietly. "He may have us on the run for a bit, but in the end we"ll win. Just like we did the last time. That"s part of his plan, shooting civilians on the road. I heard a major and a colonel talking about it. You see, if his airplanes can get the civilians to leave their homes and clog up the roads, why then our troops have a hard time pa.s.sing through. I saw some of that sort of thing myself, today. It was awful, I can tell you. I couldn"t make any more than five miles in six hours. And it was all I could do to stop them from taking my ambulance and using it for a bus. I wouldn"t let them, though."
Dave looked sidewise and saw how tired the English lad was. His cheeks were slightly pale from fatigue, and his eyelids were heavy. Dave reached out and touched the wheel.
"I"ve just had a pretty good sleep," he said with a laugh, "and you look pretty much all in, Freddy. Want me to take the wheel for a spell? You can tell me which way to go."
The English boy turned his head and smiled at him, and somehow both suddenly knew that a deep friendship between them had been cemented.
"Thanks, awfully much, Dave," Freddy Farmer said, "but I"m not really tired at all. Besides, there isn"t far to go now. Only a few more miles, I fancy. It"s nice of you to ask, though."
"It"ll still be okay if you change your mind," Dave said. "Have you been driving an ambulance long? Do you go out and help pick up the wounded, and stuff? I guess you"ve seen a lot of battles, haven"t you?"
"Oh, No, I"m not really an ambulance driver, Dave. You have to be eighteen to get in this volunteer service, and I won"t be seventeen until next month. You see, I"ve been going to school just outside Paris and my family decided I"d better come home to England. Well, yesterday several of these ambulances arrived at the Paris headquarters of the Service. They had been shipped clear to Paris through a mistake. The French do funny things sometimes, you know. Anyway, they were needed in Belgium and there were no regular drivers in Paris. Not enough, anyway.
I thought it would be good fun to drive one and then carry on to the Channel and on home to England. We left Paris at midnight last night, and soon lost track of each other. It"s been fun, though. I"ll be sorry to have the trip end."
"Jeepers, you"ve been driving since midnight?" Dave exclaimed. "You sure can take it, Freddy, and how!"
"Take it?" the English boy murmured with a puzzled frown. "I don"t think I know what you mean."
Dave laughed. "That"s American slang, Freddy," he said. "It means that you"ve got a lot of courage, and stuff. It means that you"re okay."
"Thanks, Dave," Freddy Farmer said. "But it really doesn"t take any courage. I"m very glad to do my bit, if it helps the troops any. We"ve got to beat the Germans, you know. And we jolly well will, I can tell you!"
The two boys lapsed into silence and for the next two or three miles neither of them spoke. During that time Dave stared at the dim red glow of burning buildings in the distance and thought his thoughts about the war that had apparently begun in earnest. He was an American and America was neutral, of course. Yet after what he"d seen this day he was filled with a burning desire to do something to help beat back Hitler and defeat him. He knew that there had been a lot of boys his age who had taken part in the last World War. He was big for his age, too, and strong as an ox. He decided that when he got to London and found his father he would ask Dad if there wasn"t something he could do to help.
Nothing else seemed important, now. The important thing was to help stop all this business that was taking place in Europe.
At that moment Freddy Farmer suddenly slipped the car out of gear and braked it to a stop.