II
THE FOLKESTONE AIR-RAID
WHEN I rushed out of our house by the seaside I found crowds gazing upward in the direction of the sun. I could see nothing for the glare, neither apparently could others.
Suddenly two little girls cried: "There they are!" Then I saw them, two airplanes, not Zeppelins, emerging from the disc of the sun almost overhead. Then four more, or five, in a line; and others, all like bright silver insects hovering against the blue of the sky. The heavens seemed full of them. There were about a score in all and we were charmed with the beauty of the sight. I am sure few of us thought seriously of danger.
Then the air was split by the whistle and rush of the first bomb, which sounded like the shrill siren of a car. This was followed at once by a detonation that shook the earth. I heard nobody shriek, weep, or cry aloud. The people were marvelously controlled.
I glanced in the direction of the shell-burst, 100 yards away, and the debris was still going up like a column of smoke. Then came two more strokes, apparently in the same spot. Then three other bombs fell. I afterwards found the missiles wrecked the Osmond hotel and wounded our motor driver.
Then another bomb demolished the manor house by the sea. Two others fell in the water behind me and the gravel and mud and water spouted up in a geyser to the top of the cliffs where I stood. Later I learned that one of these shots tore off the legs of a little boy playing with his sister. The mother lay in a faint and the little sister, driven mad, rushed blindly into the water. She was rescued by a wounded soldier.
Other shots fell, but I could count no further. They came thick and fast, like crackling, rolling blasts of our western lightning and thunder. Nobody has reported the number of shells so far as I know. There were 200 or more casualties, nearly 100 of them fatalities. Anti-craft shells were now bursting on the fringes of the air fleet. Then followed in the distance the purr of the machine guns and we knew that our own planes were up in pursuit. We were later informed that three of the hostile fleet were brought down in the channel. Most people took to the cellars. Had I known there was a cellar handy, or that it is considered good form in the circumstances, I should have followed, for soon I found myself alone on the leas overlooking the sea, where I had gone at the first cry of "Zepps."
It was our first time under fire and reminded me of a Missouri cyclone. The only drawback to this comparison is that the sun was shining in a clear blue sky over a placid sea.
As the bombs were crashing around us and houses were caving in, before I knew it I was humming a long-forgotten tune, doubtless sub-consciously associated with those old days. Two other men in our party independently testified that they also began singing softly.
Perhaps this tendency to sing or whistle is a manifestation of nerves and explains why troops always do so when we see them embarking for France; they know that next day they will be in the trenches—maybe over the parapet. At all events we confessed to nerves and fear.
When I reached the spot where the first three bombs had fallen, glass strewed the street for a block. In the middle of the macadam road was a shell hole six or eight feet across and three deep. Here lay two men in uniform, who looked to me to be dead; there was a civilian, white-haired, who I knew had been killed.
Yonder was a little girl, half her face gone, yonder a young woman, both feet gone. Our young lieutenant, a Y. M. C. A. man from Canada, our host of those days, himself wearing the gold stripe on his arm, which betokens a wound, and no longer fit for service in the field, was bending over the wounded. I heard one of the stricken soldiers moaning, now, "Mother, O, mother!" Yonder lay two little babies already covered with sacking.
We rushed into a nearby basement, where they said was a wounded woman. Her hip was gashed. A Red Cross nurse appeared from nowhere. They were carrying an old lady, shaking with palsy, from a shell of a house. She was 80 years old, if a day. She had on bonnet and gloves. How she managed thus to array herself for departure from her home or to live at all in her demolished house is beyond me.
Down the slope of the lower and busier section of the town a narrow street crowded with afternoon shoppers was strewn with scores of dead, mostly girls and women. The old shoemaker who had been in his little shop was never found. Legs and arms and heads, detached, were scattered about. The draper's shop was a mass of brick and stone and every girl in it was dead.
The remarkable thing was that I heard no shrieking and saw no weeping nor wringing of hands. All faces were white; teeth were clenched, lips compressed, women clutched at their garments or spasmodically smote their breasts. But not a moan nor a loud word escaped any lip in my hearing. The English are a marvelous people.
The young lieutenant in the Y. M. C. A. service already referred to, was formerly in the Princess Patricia's regiment. Of that gallant unit not more than a half dozen or so are in active service. Our lieutenant had not sufficiently recovered from wounds to take the field. On this day at Folkestone his hands were bloody to the wrists from his activity in first aid to the wounded.
Our little driver, Frank, was due to come for us at six-thirty, detailed by the Army Service Corps, to drive us out for a meeting at Otterpool. The raid took place at six and lasted until six-ten. When the time for us to start came, and no Frank appeared, I began to look about for a car; since, raid or no raid, the boys at Otterpool would be expecting us, and ought not to be disappointed. Of course all cars were busy with the dead and wounded.
At last, at six-forty-five, here came Frank, his head bandaged, and no cap on. He had driven his car out of the garage at six o'clock, and stood beside the Osmond hotel. One bomb wrecked the hotel; another fell in the street thirty yards in front of him; another, a like distance behind him. Debris or a bit of a bomb laid open his head. They took him into the hospital, and the surgeon sewed him up and said:
"Now, Frank, you lie there," indicating a cot.
"But," objected Frank, "I've got to drive those Americans out to Otterpool!"
"Frank, lie there!" repeated the surgeon. "You're in hospital."
When the surgeon's back was turned, little Frank, nineteen or twenty, slipped out at a side door and appeared at our pension only fifteen minutes late and his hand as steady as mine now as I write. He drove us thirty miles an hour in his little "Tin Lizzie," upon which the bits of brick and mortar were still lying, out to Otterpool. We made him lie down during our meeting, then he drove us home again with the greatest steadiness.