The Rape of Nanjing

Screams... Wailings... Utter chaos reigned, the cacophany of sound could not be distinguished from children crying, to men screaming or women young and old wailing. She watched in mute horror, her arms trembling with the sheer terror of the scene before her. 

A young girl aged between twelve to thirteen lay stretched wide, her arms held far above her head as a soldier heaved brutally between the pale broken limbs of her legs. As he shoved one last final time in ecstacy inside the pitiful body another shortly joined where the first had finished. 

***

Millicient Grainger watched helplessly as she could do nothing whilst the soldier eyed her haughtily and yet there was fear in his dead snake like eyes. She barricaded the door to the orphanage the American flag flying wiltedly behind her a meagre hope against the atrocity waiting to happen to the young group of children in her care. She knew that whilst the flag of her country flew over the building and she was there to reside over it, the animals watching her intently could do nothing. 

She was only a missionary, but her parents had always ingrained in her that even one person helping those in need was all it took to bring change. 

She couldn't save everyone but she was damned if she wasn't going to try. Nor was she going to give up on the 40 youngsters in her care. She answered the soldier again, clearly and succinctly and stood there with baited breath as she watched him eye her beadily again before saying something to the group of soldiers before him. There was a warning and insolence in his hacking spittle as it flew across her worn boots and lay with unnering accuracy on one of the windows. 

She trembled in terror as they finally left, her body shuddering again as she went back inside. Once there she looked around at the sea of pitiful bedraggled faces, the despair etched in their eyes heartbreaking and yet the bitter gory truth of Nanjing's youth. They had suffered unspeakable horrors, they had barely survived as their mother's and sister's and aunt's and grandmothers were raped with barronets, bamboo sticks and their lives brutally snuffed. Some had even witnessed their pregnant mother's bodies ripped apart in crude cesareans whereby the foetuses they had nurtured were slain in gory fashion before those same women were raped.

She prayed for deliverence from the blood, gore and terror of such mindless evil brutality and wondered again as she looked around the young faces that had already witnessed too much in their young lives what would become of their fates...

***

Please R+R