Read Online Young Lions by Andrew Mackay - Free Book Online

this. You mark my words.” Schuster looked up at Zorn again. “What are they doing there?”
    “They’re digging up the dead.”
     
    “Whores!” Alan shouted at the top of his voice. “You’re a bloody disgrace! You should be ashamed of yourselves!” The German soldiers strolling in the Town Square started to turn towards the source of the abuse as their English girlfriends desperately tried to drag them away, not wanting to draw any attention to themselves and not wanting any trouble.
    “Alan!” Sam grabbed Alan’s arm.
    “Whores!” Alan screamed, tears streaming down his cheeks.
    Whistles blew. Two Military Policemen started running towards them from across the Square.
    “Alan!” Sam grabbed Alan around the waist, “come on! We’ve got to get out of here!”
    Sam seemed to startle Alan out of his trance. They took off at full pelt, running out of the Square, the Germans in hot pursuit. The boys ran up the High Street dodging in and out of pedestrians on the pavement. They turned right off the High Street and into a side street. They hid in a narrow alley and they held their breaths as the German jackboots thumped past. The whistle blasts faded into the distance.
    “Phew!” Alan bent over with his hands on his knees gasping for breath. “That was a close call.”
    “ ‘ A close call?’” Sam said incredulously, “you stupid bastard, you nearly got us killed!”
    “What are you so upset about?” Alan asked. “We got away, didn’t we?”
    “Listen, Alan, if I’m going to get killed, I’m going to choose the time, the place and the reason, not you,” Sam explained through clenched teeth. He was trying hard to control his temper.
    Alan could sense the warning signs that Sam was about to blow. “You’re right, Sam. I’m sorry. I don’t know what came over me. It’s just that…I feel so helpless.” Alan punched his leg in frustration. “Our girls with those dirty Hun bastards and our boys not yet cold in their graves…”
    “I know, Alan,” Sam said. “But we’re not beaten yet.”
    “What can we do?” Alan asked despairingly. “There are only two of us.”
    “Do you remember what Mr. Flinders told us in Greek?”
    “No.”
    “It only took the Greeks four hundred years to kick out the Turks.” Sam stood up and put his hands on his hips. “Tonight we’ll show the Huns that the British Bulldog can bite as well as bark.”
     
    The boys put boot polish on their hands and faces and got changed into their darkest clothes. They slipped into their blackened gym shoes that they had also covered with shoe polish. The boys carefully crept out of Sam’s bedroom window and climbed down the fire escape ladder. At the bottom of the ladder they tip toed up the path to the garden gate, wincing as they made crunching noises on the gravel path. Sam crossed his fingers and prayed that a German patrol did not happen to be passing. The boys reached the garden gate and gently eased it open. They kept to the shadows and cat walked to the Square, taking thirty minutes to cover a journey that would have usually taken them ten minutes. The boys approached the High Street and took cover in a darkened alley. Sam looked at his watch, shielding the face with his right hand so that no one would be able to see the luminous dials shining in the darkness. Half past ten. Thirty minutes until closing time. Ruthlessly enforced by the Military Police.
    At ten to eleven a lorry pulled up outside the “Chicken and Egg” pub, a favourite watering hole of the paratroopers in Hereward. The boys could hear the Military Policemen talking inside the lorry.
    At precisely eleven o’clock the boys heard the landlord’s deep voice bellow through the pub. But the landlord’s polite request to finish up merely seemed to encourage them to continue drinking. Raucous singing and drunken laughter wafted out from the pub. The paras did not seem in a hurry to come out.
    At five minutes past eleven the tailgate of the lorry