Chapter 449: Without a Sound
“The Germans are already this close? My God.” John was so shocked he couldn’t speak when he heard that the German army was now able to shell
“The Germans are already this close? My God.” John was so shocked he couldn’t speak when he heard that the German army was now able to shell London. The last time he had heard news of the German advance, they were still near Cambridge. Heaven only knew how they had reached London so quickly.
The officer who was John’s patron gave a wry smile. This kind of unfavorable war news was naturally not to be spread around. It was a matter of course to say as little as possible. If it weren’t impossible to hide, the government might even have claimed that the Germans had been beaten back.
They had skipped their lunch, not because they were too busy, but because there was no more food. The German army had begun to lay siege to the city, and the trivial matter of providing food for the civilians had naturally been forgotten. The whole of London was unnaturally silent, like a dying beast, its quietness suffocating.
John and the officer went out to look for food. They rummaged through the ruins for a long time but couldn’t find anything decent. One after the other, they walked back to their air-raid shelter, their hearts filled with frustration.
It was said that the officer had spent a large sum of money, even using the gold bars he had long kept hidden, to bribe his way to a spot to go to America. But because the war situation had taken a sharp turn for the worse, before he could send his son away, the Germans had broken into London. The traffic was in chaos, and the bombing by German planes had become incredibly fierce. The officer’s son had missed his chance to board the ship and could only huddle with John’s family in the London air-raid shelter, starving.
The officer’s mood had been very bad these past few days, for obvious reasons. The two of them stopped at a street corner. The officer took out two cigarettes, and they stood there, puffing away.
“Orders have come down from above. We’re to distribute gasoline and bayonets,” the officer said, smoking, as he spoke of the task he had just been assigned. “That bastard Churchill wants everyone to go to hell with him.”
“Let him go to hell. The army can’t hold its positions, so he wants to bury the women and children with them. It’s a wonder he could even think of such a thing! How did a bastard like that become the Prime Minister of Britain?” John followed, blowing out a cloud of white smoke and cursing loudly.
A dozen or so British soldiers came running from the distance. From their uniforms, it was clear they were mainline troops who had been at the front. Their clothes were somewhat tattered, covered in dust and mud. Their faces were etched with exhaustion, but they still gripped their rifles tightly.
Some carried ammunition, some a machine gun, and some a grenade in one hand and a rifle in the other. They moved cautiously, hunched over, sticking close to the walls. They passed by John and the officer without saluting or stopping, their eyes looking at them as if they were two dead men.
The second-to-last soldier stopped, held out his hand, and asked in a hoarse voice, “Got a smoke? Spare one.”
John patted his pockets and shook his head with a wry smile. The officer took out his cigarette case, pulled one out, and handed it to the soldier. Then he struck a match and lit it for him.
The soldier took a drag, then nodded his thanks. “Thanks. You’d best get away from the open spaces. The Germans have some small teams that like to infiltrate. Their snipers are very accurate.” After speaking, he caught up with his comrades and ran towards the distant city block, from which black smoke was continuously rising.
“He talks as if it’s really happening,” the officer said, looking with contempt at the soldiers who had run off. His face was full of scorn. “They can’t even hold their own positions, and they have the nerve to tell us to be careful. If it were me…”
As John was listening to the officer’s complaints, he suddenly saw something tear through his patron’s chest. Blood splattered onto his own face. He recoiled in fear, then scrambled and crawled to the cover of a nearby corner.
A loud gunshot rang out, and John could roughly tell which direction it had come from. He adjusted his position to avoid being hit by the sniper, then crouched against the wall and looked at the officer who had fallen to the ground.
“Hey! Are you alright?” John was so scared that he dropped his cigarette. He looked at the officer lying in a pool of blood and asked in a whisper, as if afraid of startling someone.
“I… I’m… hit! Save… me…” The officer seemed to be in pain with every breath. He struggled on the ground, his plea for help coming out in broken, difficult words. “Help…”
“My God! I can’t get near you! Sir! He’s over there, near that big building. If I go out, I’ll be hit!” John cried, leaning against the wall, tears streaming down his face. “You… you wait for me! I’ll go find a stick! You grab the stick, and I’ll pull you over!”
In a moment of inspiration, he quickly turned and ran in the opposite direction, leaving the officer who was still repeating “save me” over and over on the ground. He ran to a pile of rubble, pulled a tattered curtain from it, and quickly ran back to where the officer had fallen.
But when he got there, he didn’t throw out the curtain, because the officer on the ground was no longer breathing or struggling. He lay there with his eyes open, perfectly still and quiet. John leaned against the wall, gasping for breath, looking at the body that was gradually growing cold, the tears flowing uncontrollably from his eyes. You were my companion in this hellish London for so long, you took care of me for so long, and in the end, you couldn’t even leave a final word. How tragic.
He didn’t know how long he sat there, staring at the body. It was only when a few British soldiers ran past him that he came to his senses. One of the soldiers took cover around the corner, leaned against the wall panting, and then glanced at John sitting at his feet.
“Told you there might be a sniper, but you wouldn’t listen,” the soldier sneered. He then kicked John’s leg and pointed to the other side of the wall. “If you want to die, you can keep sitting here. There’s a German tank at the crossroads less than two hundred meters in that direction. It won’t be long before it gets here.”
John looked at the officer’s body again. He didn’t dare to stay. He stood up alone and followed the few British soldiers to the other side of the street. When he reached the end, he turned and looked back at the body. He saw that on the other side of the corner where he had just been sitting, a German soldier was peeking his head out, looking in his direction.
He quickly ran around the corner, breaking the line of sight. This was the first time in his life that John had ever seen a German soldier. The young German boy looked a bit like his neighbor’s son, just a few years older.
Only then did John realize just how close he was to the German soldiers. He looked in the direction of his family’s air-raid shelter and took a Lee-Enfield rifle from the hands of a British soldier. He raised the rifle, worked the bolt, then pulled the still-warm hand grenade from his pocket, pulled the pin, and threw it with all his might in the direction the Germans were charging from.
The battle raged fiercely in the streets and alleys. John raised his rifle, not daring to aim. He would just fire a shot, mechanically chamber another round, and then fire again. He and a few British soldiers held their position in a few houses at the street corner. When reinforcements arrived and pushed an anti-tank gun into position, the small group of a few dozen British soldiers miraculously held their ground. The sound of gunfire in this area only gradually subsided towards evening.
During the battle, explosions could be heard from time to time from the surrounding buildings. Many civilians, knowing that the Germans had broken through and not having the courage to attack the German army themselves, chose to commit suicide. The hand grenades that had been issued to them became the best tool for the job.
However, when John, exhausted, dragged his body back to his own home, carrying the rifle on his back and accompanied by a few new “comrades,” he found that the officer was not the only one who had left this world today.
The thugs that John had driven away had returned. Driven by hunger, they had started to cause trouble again, and this time they had come specifically to take revenge while John was away. Unexpectedly, as they were about to assault John’s wife and children, his wife, unable to bear the humiliation, pulled the pin on the grenade that had been left at home. The bodies of John’s wife, his two children, and several of the thugs now lay in the air-raid shelter. Mary, the officer’s wife, was squatting in a corner, completely insane.
John looked expressionlessly at the few remaining old people and women in the air-raid shelter and suddenly began to laugh. “Hehehe, hahaha. Good, very good. I fight to the death outside, and this is how you repay me…”
Overcome with grief and rage, he snatched a grenade from one of his comrades and pulled the pin. His comrades, terrified, fled the air-raid shelter. A moment later, another explosion blasted a cloud of thick dust from the shelter’s entrance.
John was dead. As a most ordinary little person in London, he had died in the most anonymous way in his own “home.” He had fought hard to live, had had beautiful hopes, had tried desperately to secure a path to survival for his children. After failing, his family was destroyed.
And the officer who had been John’s patron was also dead. He had once had a chance at a better end than John’s, but he still died, at a street corner, in a familiar place he had walked past countless times. And his child was missing, his wife killed by John in the place that could be called home.
The street fighting in London continued. The British soldiers held every corner. They did their utmost to stop the German advance, fighting for every city block, every road, every room in every building, fighting back and forth in the kitchens and living rooms of every house. As for what they were fighting for, it seemed they themselves did not know.
On the first day of the Battle for London, the German army broke into the city’s outskirts and engaged in fierce combat with the British defenders. After a day of hard fighting, the British retook most of the city blocks the Germans had occupied, pushing them back to the edge of the city.
Published: 2025-08-25T04:20:10.000+00:00
Last Edited: 2025-11-13T13:48:08.000+00:00
URL: https://www.patreon.com/caleredhair/posts/mtr-c449-without-137276620
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