A man and a boy had
just been carried away dead. All around small pieces of iron rail and
ripped-up asphalt lay scattered. Iron bars were driven into the woodwork
of houses; there were great gaps in walls and roofs; the attack had not
spent itself on any one section of the city, but had scattered itself in
different wards. The freaks of the shells were as inexplicable as those
of a great fire that destroys everything in a house except a piano and a
mantelpiece with its bric-a-brac, or a flood that carries away a log
cabin and leaves a rose bush unharmed and blooming.
Silent pedestrians walked along and searched the ground for souvenirs,
of which there were aplenty. Sentries guarded houses and streets where
it was dangerous to explore, and park benches were used as barriers to
the public. All the cabs were requisitioned to take away luggage and
frightened inhabitants. During the shelling hundreds of women and
children, breakfastless, their hair hanging, hatless, and even
penniless, except for their mere railway fares, had rushed to the
station and taken tickets to the first safe town they could think of.
There was no panic, these hatless, penniless women all asserted, when
they arrived in York and Leeds. A wealthy woman whom I slightly know
nearly rushed into my arms, her face very flushed, and told me that she
had left the servants to pack her china and vases, and was now on her
way to find a workman to dig a hole in the garden to receive them; as
for herself, she would eat from kitchen dishes henceforth.
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