By Ruth Kauffmann.
[From THE NEW YORK TIMES.]
CLOUGHTON, Scarborough, England, Dec. 17.--It's a very curious thing to
watch a bombardment from your house.
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 here yesterday morning it
was quite as much of a surprise as most Christmas cards--from a friend
forgotten.
Eighteen people were killed yesterday morning between 8 o'clock and 8:30
in the streets and houses of Scarborough by German shrapnel, 200 were
wounded, and more than 200 houses were damaged or demolished.
A little before 8 o'clock three dreadnought cruisers were seen to cut
through the light fog, which was just lifting, and, hugging the cliffs
opposite our house, scuttle south to Scarborough. From our windows we
could not at that hour 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 minutes 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
completely from sight, sailing south by east. The other two rushed, like
fast trains, north again, 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 Whithy, 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. The postman assured us that
Scarborough was in flames. A road worker told us we should be turned
back, and another man warned us to beware of a big hole in the road
further along, large enough to swallow our horse and trap; yet we could
certainly see no flames issuing from Scarborough, which now lay directly
before us.
We put up the horse at a stable on the very edge of the city and walked
up the steep hill. The hotelkeeper and his wife, we were told, were
already "refugees."
Scarborough is a sprawling town that stretches a length of about three
miles from the extreme north end to the extreme south. Inland about a
mile and a half is a wireless station, and on the cliff, 300 feet high,
stands the ruined castle and its walled-in grounds, in the midst of
which is--or was, for it was yesterday blown clean away--a signal
station. Although there are barracks the town is unfortified. A seaside
resort of considerable importance, its population varies by many
thousands in Winter and Summer, with a stationary population of 45,000.
But to compensate for its Summer losses are the numerous fashionable
schools for both boys and girls.
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 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 débris. 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. 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.
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 seacoast.
On the other hand, instances of self-possession were not lacking.
Another school hardby took all its children to the cellars, where the
teachers made light of the matter, and the frightened father of one very
nervous child was pleasantly amazed to find his child much calmer than
himself--and quite delighted with the experience. In St. Martin's
Church, the Archdeacon was celebrating communion. Shells struck the roof
of the church. The Archdeacon stopped the service for a brief moment to
say:
"We are evidently being bombarded. But we are as safe here as we can be
anywhere," and proceeded calmly with the service.
We left Scarborough at night. The exodus of inhabitants, school
children, whose Christmas holidays began earlier by one day on account
of the raid, and visitors continued steadily. The cabmen, so idle in
Winter, were rejoiced to find that work for today would not be lacking.
"At this rate," said one of them to me as he lighted the carriage
candles for our trap and handed me the reins, "if the Germans come again
there'll be no one left for them to kill."
There is, the Admiralty tells us, no military significance in this
event, and, from the British point of view, I doubt if a woman will ever
be considered worthy of a hearing in anything military; but I presume
there is some sort of significance from a real estate point of view in
the holes made in the hotels and houses, and from the hospital point of
view in the sad procession of stretchers. But however little
significance the December bombardment of Scarborough has, it is
certainly a surprise to be wakened by three hostile cruisers, and one
must admit that the Kaiser has at least left his greetings of the season
on the east coast.