were many willing hands. Even in half-an-hour a wonderful difference had been made in the streets, and those people who had been rushing towards the country for safety began to return. They brought in reports of losses which had been suffered in the outskirts through shells; but, as I have said, the worst cases of all were just about here.
One house was completely demolished, and the father, mother, and half-a-dozen children were killed, so that home and family were wiped out in an instant. One part of the Old Town is so utterly destroyed that it is called “Louvain,” and if you look at the houses there you will find that they are just heaps of rubbish and ruins, with beds and furniture and so on, buried.
Shells had exploded in the streets, in houses, fields, at the gasworks, in shipyards—anywhere and everywhere—and one big thing stuck itself in a house and is kept as a relic. Another crashed through four railway waggons, and another shell, which travelled low on the ground, went through several sets of the steel metals on the railway, which shows the fearful penetrative power of the projectile.
If the Germans had had their way, no doubt this place would have been wiped out altogether. They made a dead set at the gasworks, but did not do a great deal of mischief there, though it meant that that night a lot of people had to burn candles instead of gas. And though more than a hundred people were killed, and the Germans fondly supposed that they had struck terror into the place, they had done nothing of the sort.
The residents were soon clearing up the ruins and settling down again as if nothing had happened. The most pitiful of all the tasks was that of dealing with the dead and wounded children, and the remembrance of the sad sights will be the best of all inspirations for some of our fellows when the day comes on which they will get their own back from the Germans.
It was not long before we learned that at about the same time as we were being shelled at Hartlepool, German warships had appeared off the entirely undefended places of Whitby and Scarborough. They call these old fishing ports fortified, but that is an absolute untruth, and they know it. But the Germans were out to kill and destroy, and they did both in a manner which showed that they had made calculations to a minute, and that their spies had been long at work.
At Scarborough the raiders did a lot of damage before they ran away. They had prepared one of their boasted surprises for us, and we got it; but that was nothing to the surprise we gave them on Christmas morning at Cuxhaven—a real fortified place—and nothing, I hope and believe, to the surprises that our Navy has in store for the German naval runaways.
You ask how long shall I be in hospital.