Read Online Lord of the Nutcracker Men by Iain Lawrence - Free Book Online Page B

ran toward her. “A raid!” I cried. “My dad went over the top; he went out on a raid.”
    “Well, didn't I tell you?” she said. “
My
dad's been on a dozen raids, on twenty raids, maybe. They always have raids.”
    “It was just the same,” I said. But she didn't care.
    Below the beech tree, she had started a second pile of muddy ammunition. “Johnny, let's have our barrage,” she said.
    I placed my new soldier in the line. He didn't look right hunched in the bottom of the trench, so I movedhim forward until he was crawling up the parapet. His strange, animal face peered over the edge, and I ducked down to see what he would see.
    My no-man's-land looked enormous then, sloping up toward the German lines. My nutcracker men were hidden, but the tips of their silver bayonets poked up from the mud like the pickets of a ragged fence. I wished I could make myself tiny and go charging toward them.
    “Johnny, come on,” said Sarah.
    I stood beside her near the tree, the pile of stones and mud between us. We filled our hands with shells.
    “You fire the big guns,” said Sarah. “I'll be the mortars and the Moaning Minnies.”
    I didn't even know what those were. But as soon as Sarah started shooting, I wished that
I
had the Moaning Minnies.
    These guns fired whole handfuls of dirt and pebbles, with a bloodcurdling shriek that reminded me of the sounds I'd heard from the farmhouse. “Shhreeeeee!” Sarah yelled, and threw the dirt. “Bam! Bam-bam!”
    I took the biggest clumps of mud and tossed them high in the air. “Whizz. Bang!” They exploded behind the British trenches, sending bits of shrapnel skittering over the ground.
    “Blast those Tommies!” shouted Sarah in a German accent. “God punish England!” Her mortars popped and boomed, her Moaning Minnies sent lumps of mud screaming past me. She bent down, grabbed more dirt and threw more bombs.
“Aarrgh!”
cried the Tommies. And the Germans said, “Again! Punish them again.”
    My big guns kept firing, slowly and methodically. Ihurled the stones—“Whizzz!”—tossed up my hands— “Bang!”
    We rained the Tommies with dirt and stones. We worked our way through our pile of ammunition, until only the largest shells were left. Then Sarah, too, started firing the big guns. She bobbed down, popped up again, hurling the stones like a shot-putter. Then she hit the British trench. And she crushed the first Pierre.
    “Don't!” I shouted.
    I threw myself down by the trench and rolled the stone aside. Frantically, I scrabbled through the mud. I dug and dug, but all I found were the Frenchman's feet. The rest of him was gone.
    “Look what you did!” I cried. “You broke him, you clot.” I clawed at the mud, searching for Pierre's body. “My dad made that for me and you've gone and broken him, you clumsy oaf.”
    “I'm sorry, Johnny.” Sarah panted. Her face was red, her hair in tangles. “I didn't mean to do it.”
    I was digging like a dog. “At least help me look,” I said.
    “Not if you're going to talk like that.” She stomped away. “I'm not going to help someone who shouts,” she said, and climbed the wall and left me there.
    I kept searching for the rest of my Frenchman. I looked until supper, and again until dark, but he seemed to have vanished, as though the shell had blown him into smithereens. I hated Sarah then; I would never play with her again, I said.
    At school I avoided her. When classes ended I dashed home on the footpaths to play by myself in the garden. Icleaned up the rubble and rock, then scraped out my trenches where the barrage had caved them in. I shifted my Tommies out of the way, standing them up on the mud above the trenches. But the metal soldiers couldn't balance on the broken ground, and they toppled over on their sides and their backs. I said that snipers had got them. “Watch out, lads,” I said.
    Nearly the entire front line was in order when I heard footsteps coming up to the wall. “You can't come in