CHAPTER XIII.
OTHER HOLOCAUSTS.
Since the time that civilized man first met with fellow man to enjoy the work of the primitive playwright, humanity has paid a toll of human life for its amusements. Oftener than history tells the tiny flicker of a tongue of flame has thrown a gay, laughing audience into a wild, struggling mob, and instead of the curtain which would have been rung down on the comedy on the stage, a pall of black smoke covered the struggles of the living and dying.
Of all the theater disasters of history, none ever occurred in America equaling the loss of life in the Iroquois fire. Only two in the history of the civilized world surpass it. There have been fires accompanied by greater loss of life, but not among theater audiences.
But the grand total of persons killed in theater holocausts is large and the saddest comment on this list is that most of the victims were from holiday audiences of women and children. Lehman's playhouse in St. Petersburg, Russia, was destroyed in Christmas week, 1836, and 700 persons lost their lives. The Ring theater, Vienna, Austria, was destroyed Dec. 8, 1881, and 875 persons lost their lives. These are the only theater holocausts whose deadliness surpasses that of the Iroquois.
To all have been the same accompaniments of panic, futile struggle and suffocation. In the last century with the introduction of the modern style of playhouse, these fatal fires have increased. The annals of the stage are replete with dark pages that cause the tragedy of the mimic drama depicted behind the footlights to pale and shrivel into comparative nothingness.
Perhaps it is a fatal legacy from the time when civilized society gathered in its marble coliseums and amphitheaters to witness the mortal combats of human soldiers or the death struggles of Christians waging a vain battle against famished wild beasts. Whatever it may be, death has always stalked as the dread companion of the god of the muse and drama.
An English statistician published six years ago a list of fires at places of public entertainment in all countries in the preceding century. He showed that there had been 1,100 conflagrations, with 10,000 fatalities, and he apologized for the incompleteness of his figures. Another authority says that in the twelve years from 1876 to 1888 not less than 1,700 were killed in theater disasters in Brooklyn, Nice, Vienna, Paris, Exeter and Oporto, and that in every case nearly all the victims were dead within ten minutes from the time the smoke and flame from the stage reached the auditorium. As in the Iroquois fire, it was mainly in the balconies and galleries that death held its revels.
Fire wrought havoc at Rome in the Amphitheater in the year 14 B. C., and the Circus Maximus was similarly destroyed three times in the first century of the Christian era. Three other theaters were razed by flames in the same period, and Pompeii's was burned again almost two centuries later, but the exact loss of life is not recorded in either instance. The Greek playhouses, built of stone in open spaces, were never endangered by fire.