The scene was a wild one. Hysterical women and white-faced, frightened men, in every stage of dress or undress, were huddled in the centre of the place while the hotel clerks and servants were doing their best to pacify them. In the confusion, the boys attracted hardly any attention, and they laid the woman down on a lounge while they summoned a doctor, of whom several were already busy attending to women who had swooned or become hysterical.
The fear of the crowd was that another bomb might follow the first. Already word had spread that a hospital had been struck and a dwelling house wrecked, two women and a man being killed outright in their sleep in the latter.
“What an outrage!” exclaimed Bill, looking about him at the wild scene while a doctor administered restoratives to the woman they had saved. “To attack women and children and harmless citizens from the sky.”
“I hope they get that old wind bag and blow it to bits,” wished Jack, with not less warmth.
“Well, this is our first taste of war, Jack, and I can’t say I like it.”
“Nor I. It would do some of those jingoes in our own country, who were yelling for war with Mexico, a lot of good to see this,” returned the young wireless man.
“Let’s go outside and see what’s going on,” suggested Bill. “I guess our charge is all right, now she’s beginning to recover.”
If the scene in the hotel had been wild, like a nightmare more than a reality, that outside was pandemonium itself. Imagine a crowd of wild-eyed men and women, few of them wholly dressed, surging behind lines of policemen and the entire street lighted by the ghastly glare of flames upon which the engines were playing furious streams.
“If that bomb-thrower sailed over here now he could wipe out half of Antwerp, I should think,” said Jack, as they elbowed their way through the throng. Oddly enough, although the lads had only been able to throw on a few garments hastily, they did not, till that moment, recollect that their new outfits had been destroyed. It was Bill who called attention to this.
“We ought to make the fortunes of a tailor,” he commented. “We’ll have to get a lot of new stuff to-morrow,—or rather to-day, for it’s after three o’clock.”