BOMBARDING UNDEFENDED CITIES
THE GERMAN RAID ON THE ENGLISH COAST -- MRS. KAUFFMAN’S DESCRIPTION --
CANNONADING AT WHITBY -- FREAKISH EFFECT OF SHELLS -- FLIGHT OF SCHOOL
CHILDREN.
The Ninth Hague Convention of 1907, to which both Germany and Great
Britain gave their assent upon identical conditions, expressly forbids
“the bombardment by naval forces of undefended ports, towns, villages,
dwellings or buildings,” and by inference requires notice to be given
previous to any such operations. Neither of these stipulations was
observed by the German naval raiders who on December 16, 1914, bombarded
the historic English towns of Hartlepool, Whitby and Scarborough.
Appearing in the early morning, the Germans rained deadly shells upon
these coast towns, none of which was of strategic importance, and only
one protected by fortifications. The immediate result was the useless
slaughter of many non-combatants--men and women and children, and the
ruin of buildings, churches and historic monuments, including the
ancient abbey of St. Hilda at Whitby.
The raid on Scarborough was described by Ruth Kauffman, the wife of the
novelist, Reginald Wright Kauffman, in an interesting communication.
The Kauffmans had been living for several years just outside of
Cloughton, a village near Scarborough.
MRS. KAUFFMAN’S DESCRIPTION
“It’s a very curious thing to watch a bombardment from your house.
[Illustration: WHERE THE WAR WAS BROUGHT HOME TO ENGLAND.]
“Everybody knew the Kaiser would do it. But there was a little doubt
about the date, and then somehow the spy-hunting sport took up general
attention. When the Kaiser did send his card it was quite as much of a
surprise as most Christmas cards--from a friend forgotten.
“Eighteen people were killed in the morning between eight and
eight-thirty o’clock in the streets and houses of Scarborough by German
shrapnel, two hundred were wounded and more than two hundred houses were
damaged or demolished.
“From our windows we could not quite make out the contours of the
ruined castle, which is generally plainly visible. Our attention was
called to the fact that there was “practicing” going on and we could at
8.07 see quick flashes. That these flashes pointed directly at
Scarborough we did not for a few moments comprehend, then the fog slowly
lifting, we saw a fog that was partly smoke. The castle grew into its
place in the six miles distance.
“It seemed for a moment that the eight-foot thick Norman walls tottered,
but no, whatever tottered was behind the keep. Curiously enough, we
could barely hear the cannonading, for the wind was keen in the opposite
direction, yet we could, as the minutes crept by and the air cleared,
see distinctly the flashes from the boats and the flashes in the city.
“After about fifteen minutes there was a cessation, or perhaps a
hesitation, that lasted two minutes; then the flashes continued. Ten
minutes more and the boats began to move again. One cruiser disappeared
from sight, sailing south by east.
CANNONADING AT WHITBY
“The other two rushed like fast trains north again, close to our cliffs,
and in another half hour we heard all too plainly the cannonading which
had almost escaped our ears from Scarborough. We thought it was Robin
Hood’s Bay, as far north of us as Scarborough is south, but afterward we
learned that the boats omitted this pretty red-roofed town and
concentrated their remaining energy on Whitby, fifteen miles north; the
wind blowing toward us brought us the vibrating boom.
“We drove to Scarborough. We had not gone one mile of the distance when
we began to meet people coming in the opposite direction. A small
white-faced boy in a milk cart that early every morning makes its
Scarborough rounds showed us a piece of shell he had picked up, and said
it had first struck a man a few yards from him and killed the man. A
woman carrying a basket told us, with trembling lips, that men and women
were lying about the streets dead.
“We did not meet a deserted city when we entered. The streets were
thronging. There was a Sunday hush over everything, without the
accompanying Sunday clothes, but people moved about or stood at their
doorways. Many of the shop fronts were boarded up and shop windows were
empty of display. The main street, a narrow passage-way 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 the 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.
FREAKISH EFFECTS OF SHELLS
“We left the main business street and picked our way toward the
foreshore and the South Cliff, the more fashionable part of the 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 holes through the brick work;
mortar, brick and glass lay about the streets; here a third-story room
was bare to the view, the wall lifted as for a child’s doll house and
disclosing a single bedroom with shaving materials on the bureau still
secure; there a drug-store front lay fallen into the street, and the
iron railing about it was torn and twisted out of shape.
“A man and a boy had just been carried away dead. All around small
pieces of iron rail and ripped 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 rosebush unharmed and
blooming.
“Silent pedestrians walked along and searched the ground for souvenirs,
of which there were plenty. 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.
FLIGHT OF SCHOOL CHILDREN
“A friend of mine hurried into Scarborough by motor to rescue her
sister, who was a pupil at one of the boarding schools. But it appeared
that when the windows of the school began to crash the teachers hurried
from prayers, ordered the pupils to gather hats and coats and sweet
chocolate that happened to be on hand as a substitute for breakfast and
made them run for a mile and a half, with shells exploding about them,
through the streets to the nearest out-of-Scarborough railway station.
My friend, after unbelievable difficulties, finally found her sister in
a private house of a village near by, the girl in tears and pleading not
to be sent to London; she had been told that her family’s house was
probably destroyed, as it was actually on the sea-coast.”