“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.