Wheels of Terror Read Free Page A

fire-fountains twenty yards into the air. Flaming phosphorus poured down over the ruins like a cloudburst. It whistled and whirled in a tornado of fire and explosives. The biggest air-mines literally lifted whole houses into the air.
    Porta lay beside me. He blinked encouragingly through the gas-mask's large screen. I felt as if my mask was full of boiling water and steam. It pressed against my temples. A choking terror gripped my throat. 'In a moment you'll get shell-shock,' the words shot through my head. I half sat up. I had to get away, no matter where, anywhere, only away.
    Porta was over me like a hawk. A kick, and I was in the hole again. He hit me again and again. His eyes gleamed through the screen of the gas-mask. I shouted:
    'I want to go, let me go!'
    Then it was over. How long did it last? One hour? One day? No, ten to fifteen minutes. And hundreds had been killed. I, a panzer soldier, had shell-shock. My friend had damaged my jaw. One tooth was broken. One eye was swollen. Every nerve screamed in wild revolt.
    The city had turned into a furnace of foaming fire where people ran shrieking from the ruins which flamed like a gas-stove's blue burners. Living torches, they tottered, whizzed round and fell, stood up and went faster and faster. They kicked, shouted and screamed only as people can scream in death agony. In a flash a deep bomb-crater was filled with burning people: children, women, men, all in a danse macabre supernaturally lighted.
    Some of them burned with a white, others with a crimson flame. Some were consumed in a dull yellow-blue glow. Some died quickly and mercifully, but others ran around in circles, or reeled backwards rolling head over heels and twisting like snakes before they shrank into small charred dummies. Yet some still lived.
    The Old Un, always so calm, broke down for the first time in our experience. He shouted in a thin high-pitched scream:
    'Shoot them. For Christ's sake, shoot them!'
    He put his arms across his face to shut out the sight. Lieutenant Harder tore his pistol out of its holster, slung it at The Old Un and shouted hysterically:
    'Shoot them yourself! I can't.'
    Without a word Porta and Pluto drew their pistols. Taking careful aim, they opened fire.
    We saw people hit by bullets aimed with deadly precision, fall, kick a little, scratch a few times with their fingers, and then lie still to be immolted in the flames. It sounds brutal. It was brutal. But better a quick death from a heavy-calibre bullet than a slow one in a monstrous grill. Not one of them had a chance of rescue.
    From the cellar of that devastated Children's Home rose cries to heaven from hundreds of children's throats, the cries of suffering, trembling children, innocent victims in an infamous war such as no one had ever imagined before.
    Time after time, Pluto, Moller and Stege crept down into the gloom and pulled them out. When the cellar at last collapsed, we had managed to get a quarter of them out. Most of them died shortly afterwards. Pluto was trapped between two granite blocks and only sheer luck saved him from being crushed. We had to prise him loose with crowbars and pickaxes.
    Exhausted, we threw ourselves on the trembling ground. We tore off our gas-masks, but the stench was so nauseating that it was intolerable without them. A sweetish, all-pervading smell of corpses was mixed with the sour, choking stench of charred flesh and the odour of hot blood. Our tongues stuck to our palates. Our eyes stung and burned.
    Glowing roof tiles whirled through the air. Smoke-blackened flaming joists sailed through the streets like leaves driven on an autumn evening.
    We ran crouching between the banks of flame. In one place a huge unexploded air-mine, evil messenger of death, stood darkly against the sky. Several times we were blown along the streets by the gale which had developed. It resembled a gigantic vacuum-cleaner. We scrambled and waded through a morass of skinned bodies, our boots slipping in jellied,