The Harvard University Regiment marching through the streets of Boston (© Underwood)
CITY OF SHATTERED HOMES
From the snowy Place de la Gare the street cars started regularly in divergent directions, but oh, the gloom of those dead streets which they passed! Wide streets, winding between rows of low houses, plain and solid, but built on a neighborly plan. Their desolation is the more marked because of this innate, homelike quality. In almost all of them the window and door spaces were boarded up, and the first impression was rather that of a deserted city than of a demolished one. But a second glance showed that destruction had come from the sky, tearing away the roof, annihilating the interior, and rendering the house uninhabitable, perhaps irreparable, though the walls might to a certain extent be left standing. Often the havoc was more apparent, exposing the bare skeleton of a home and the shattered remnants of household comforts in shocking nudity.
The freakishness of destruction by bombardment is proverbial. It is this which creates in the timid an intense anxiety and in the hardy the willingness to take a chance. The 8-year-old son of the chief surgeon at the Military Hospital, stretching out his hand during a bombardment, said calmly, "Of course it may fall on that, but there is plenty of room on each side." And this rather sums up the spirit of the Dunkerquois who remain.
Of a population of 40,000, about 5,000 are left, and most of these have become modern cave men. To be thoroughly up to date one must live in a "casemate." In every quarter of the town posters announce the locality of these public refuges. They are either cellars reinforced overhead, or dugouts in the public squares, strongly roofed with corrugated iron, which is covered with wood and sandbags. Often there is extra trench work inside, always a tight little stove with a pipe running the length of the cave, plank benches along the sides, and usually beds with army blankets.
DODGING THE BOMBS
Into these refuges the Dunkerquois has learned to precipitate himself with extraordinary celerity. He considers a minute and a half sufficient time in which to gain safety, no matter where he may be when the "alerte" is given. When there is a bombardment from the land side the alarm is sounded as the obus[**? *french for shell] leaves the gun at the front. It takes 90 seconds for its flight to Dunkirk. So accurately is this calculated that casualties seldom result from a land bombardment. The inhabitants scuttle into safety, and the damage is limited to bricks and mortar. The peppering from sea is also taken lightly. The firing is very rapid, but it is soon over, and the shots are comparatively small, passing clean through the walls without shattering them. It is the air raids which are dreaded, and these are increasingly frequent and destructive. Often the chugging of the motors can be heard in the thick darkness for a quarter of an hour or more before there is an explosion, and this is a nerve-racking experience.
A striking feature of the streets in Dunkirk is the incumbrance of the sidewalks by boxes filled with stones and sandbags. These cover the windows and approaches to the cellars and serve as shock absorbers against flying pieces of shell.
And why does any one stay in so precarious an outpost on the verge of the fighting line? Some perhaps because to set forth alone or with a brood of children into an unknown world already trampled by countless refugees seems an equally perilous outlook. Others because their maintenance still depends upon the docks and shipyards, though the 6,000 longshoremen usually employed about the piers have disappeared. Then there are those whose interests are bound up in a shop or other investment in the town, and business is brisk in Dunkirk, owing to the presence of two armies. A few there are who are not only of Dunkirk but who are Dunkirk itself, upon whose presence depends the prosperity of the town and its usefulness to the State.