The main street, a narrow passageway that clambers up
from the sea and points due west, was filled with a procession that
slowly marched down one side and up the other. People hardly spoke.
They made room automatically for a group of silent boy scouts, who
carried an unconscious woman past us to the hospital. There was the
insistent honk of a motor car as it pushed its way through; all that
struck me about the car was the set face of an old man rising above
improvised bandages about his neck, part of the price of the Kaiser's
Christmas card.
The damage to property did not first reach our attention. But as we
walked down the main street and then up it with the procession we saw
that shops and houses all along had windows smashed next to windows
unhurt. At first we thought the broken windows were from concussion, but
apparently very few were so broken; there was not much concussion, but
the shells, splintering as they exploded, had flown red-hot in every
direction. The smoke we had seen had come from fires quickly
extinguished. Scarborough was not "in flames."
We left the main business street and picked our way toward the Foreshore
and the South Cliff, the more fashionable part of town as well as the
school section. Here there was a great deal of havoc, and we had to
climb over some of the debris. Roofs were half torn off and balancing in
mid-air; shells had shot through chimneys, and some chimneys tottered,
while several had merely round roles through the brickwork; mortar,
bricks, and glass lay about the streets; here a third-story room was
bare to the view, the wall lifted out as for a child's dollhouse and
disclosing a single bedroom with shaving materials on the bureau still
secure; there a drug store lay fallen into the street, and the iron
railing about it was torn and twisted out of shape.
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