"Everybody aboard!" bellowed another.
"Never mind your kit, you men, get aboard!" thundered a third.
"All lights out!" a fourth voice carried above all the others.
In the wink of an eye the moving lights stopped moving and went out. All was plunged into darkness. A darkness filled with grunting sounds on the ground, and the throbbing beat of approaching airplanes overhead. Instinctively Dave and Freddy grabbed hands and started moving toward the train. No sooner had they taken a dozen steps than they ran smack into a wall of solid flesh. They tried to force their way through but it was as futile as trying to push a tidal wave to one side. They alone were not the only ones trying to get aboard that train. A few hundred others had the same idea.
Suddenly the shrill whistle of the engine cut through all other sound. A moment later the angry roar from hundreds of throats told Dave and Freddy that the train was moving. They stopped trying to push forward, and simply stood there listening to the angry shouting of the troops who could not get aboard, and the sound of the train as it picked up speed and went racing off toward the east.
"Here they are! Everybody scatter!"
Perhaps it was the same fog horn voice, and perhaps it wasn't. Anyway, everybody heard the command and started moving. A moment later the air became filled with the howl of diving wings. Further orders were not necessary. In a flash Dave thought of the bomb blasted bridge. The road had once dipped down under it, but now it was no more than a cave made out of jagged chunks of stone with twisted steel rails and splintered ties for roof shingling. He grabbed Freddy by the arm and spun them both around.
"That busted bridge!" he shouted in his friend's ear. "We can crawl down under it. We should be safe."
"Just thinking of that, myself!" Freddy shouted back as they both broke into a run. "Those blasted Stukas! Will we never hear the last of them!"
As though to punctuate that sentence the leading bomber swooped low, dumped its load and went screaming up into the night sky. Its bomb struck a hundred yards away but the concussion seemed to lift both of the boys off their feet. It put wings on their feet as well. They dashed madly through the roaring darkness, missed turned-over trucks and hunks of the bombed station by inches, and finally scrambled down under the bridge and into the cave-like hole blown out of one of the supporting walls. They crawled back over the broken stones as far as they could and sat huddled together listening to the world blow apart over their heads.