Dieuaide, who wrote the Sun’s story of the Santiago sea-fight, is also distinguished as the author of the first published description of St. Pierre—or, rather, of the ashes that covered it—after that city and all but two persons of its thirty thousand had been buried by the eruption of Mont Pelée. The introductory paragraph of Dieuaide’s article gives an idea of his graphic power:
Fort de France, Martinique, May 21—To-day we saw St. Pierre, the ghastliest ghost of the modern centuries. But yesterday the fairest of the fair of the wondrous cities of the storied Antilles, bright, beautiful, glorious, glistening and shimmering in her prism of tropical radiance, an opalescent city in a setting of towering forest and mountain, now a waste of ashen-gray without life, form, color, shape, a drear monotone, a dim blur on the landscape—it seems even more than the contrast between life and death.
The dead may live. St. Pierre is not alive, and never will be. Out of shape has come a void. It is the apotheosis of annihilation. To one who sits amid the ruins and gazes the long miles upward over the seamed sides of La Pelée, still thundering her terrible wrath, may come some conception of the future ruin of the worlds.
It has been a day of sharp impressions, one cutting into another until the memory-pad of the mind is crossed and crisscrossed like the fissured flanks of La Pelée herself; but most deeply graven of all, paradoxically, is the memory of a dimness, a nothingness, an emptiness, a lack of everything—the gray barrenness unrelieved of what was the rainbow St. Pierre. Mont Pelée, the most awful evidence of natural force to be seen in the world to-day—La Pelée, majestic, terrible, overpowering, has been in evidence from starlight to starlight, but it is the ashen blank that was once the city of the Saint of the Rock that stands out most clearly in the kaleidoscopic maze slipping backward and forward before our eyes.
And thus on, without losing interest, for seven solid columns.
Will Irwin’s great page story, printed beside the straight news of the San Francisco earthquake, is another Sun classic. Irwin had the fortune to be familiar with San Francisco, and he was able, without reference to book or map, to give to New York, through the Sun, a most vivid picture of “The City That Was.” It is a literary companion-piece of Thomas M. Dieuaide’s gray drawing of St. Pierre, but only the introduction must do here:
The old San Francisco is dead. The gayest, lightest-hearted, most pleasure-loving city of this continent, and in many ways the most interesting and romantic, is a horde of huddled refugees living among ruins. It may rebuild; it probably will; but those who have known that peculiar city by the Golden Gate, and have caught its flavor of the “Arabian Nights” feel that it can never be the same.
It is as though a pretty, frivolous woman had passed through a great tragedy. She survives, but she is sobered and different. If it rises out of the ashes it must be a modern city, much like other cities and without its old flavor.
There were less than five columns of the article, but it told the whole story of San Francisco; not in dry figures of commerce and paved streets, but of the people and places that every Eastern man had longed to see, but now never could see.
Writers like Ralph and Chamberlin, Dieuaide and Irwin, are spoken of as “star” reporters, yet the saying that the Sun has no star men is not entirely fictional. Its best reporters are, and will be, remembered as stars, but no men were, or are, treated as stars. Big reporters cover little stories and cubs write big ones—if they can. A city editor does not send an inexperienced man on an assignment that requires all the skill of the trained reporter, yet it is Sun history that many new men have turned in big stories from assignments that appeared, at first blush, to be inconsequential. There are always two or three so-called star men in the office, but the days when there are two or three star assignments are comparatively few.