St. Pierre was destroyed, not by lava streams and not by showers of red-hot rocks, but by one all-consuming blast of suffocating, poisonous, burning gases. Death came to the inhabitants instantly. It was not a matter of hours or minutes. It was a matter of seconds. They did not burn to death. They died by breathing flame and their bodies were burned afterward. It is not merely true that no person inside the limits of the town escaped, but it is probably a literal fact that no person lived long enough to take two steps toward escape. These facts will go on record as the most astounding in the history of human catastrophes.
The manner of the annihilation of St. Pierre is unique in the history of the world. Pompeii was not a parallel, for Pompeii was eaten up by demoniac rivers of lava, and lava became its tomb. But where St. Pierre once stood there is not even a lava bed now. The city is gone from the earth.
The half-dead victims who escaped on the Roddam or were brought away by the Suchet, talked of a “hurricane of flame” that had come upon them. That phrase was no figure of speech, but a literal statement of what happened.
When the first rescue parties reached the scene they found bodies lying in the streets of the city—or rather on the ground where streets once were, for in many places it was impossible to trace the line between streets and building sites—to which death came so suddenly that the smiles on the faces did not have time to change to the lines of agony.
That does not mean death by burning, though the bodies had been charred and half-consumed, nor does it mean suffocation, for suffocation is slow. It can mean only that the bath of burning fumes into which the city was plunged affected the victims like a terribly virulent poison when the first whiff of the gases entered their lungs.
There were many of the victims who died with their hands to their mouths. That one motion of the arm was probably the only one that they made before they became unconscious. Others fell to their faces and died with their lips pressed into the earth. There was no time to run, perhaps no time even to cry out, no time to breathe a prayer. It was as if St. Pierre had been just dipped into an immense white-hot furnace and then set out to cool. Mount Pelee went sputtering on, but that made no longer any difference. In the city all life was destroyed.
Every combustible thing was burned. Animal bodies, full of moisture, glowed awhile and then remained charred wrecks. Wood and other easily combustible things burned to ashes. On the ground lay the bodies, amidst heaps of hot mud, heaps of gleaming ashes and piles of volcanic stones. That was all.
That St. Pierre and the strip of coast to the north and south of it were burned in an instant was probably due to the first break in the mountain coming on its western side and immediately above them, though the direction of the wind may have had a little to do with it. In this way one can understand how the mountain resort of Morne Rouge, where about 600 people were staying, escaped annihilation. Rocks and dust and boiling mud fell upon it, no doubt harming it, but they did not destroy it, for it was out of the pathway of the first awful blast.
For days after this most awful of blasts, beginning indeed immediately after the first explosion, Mount Pelee continued sending down lava streams in many directions. They filled the ravines and followed river courses and made their way to the sea. They did great destruction, but most of the inhabitants in their course had some chance at least to escape.
From Le Precheur around the northern end of the island, to Grande Riviere, Macouba, and Grande Anse, directly across the island from St. Pierre, the lava was flowing. Great crevasses opened from time to time in the hills. The earth undulated like waves. Rivers were thrown out of their courses by the change in land levels. In some places they submerged the land and formed lakes. In other places they were licked up by the lava that flowed on them and turned them to steam.