Everybody knew the Kaiser would do it. But there was a little doubt about the date, and then somehow the spy-hunting sport took up general attention. When the Kaiser did send his card here yesterday morning it was quite as much of a surprise as most Christmas cards—from a friend forgotten.
Eighteen people were killed yesterday morning between 8 o'clock and 8:30 in the streets and houses of Scarborough by German shrapnel, 200 were wounded, and more than 200 houses were damaged or demolished.
A little before 8 o'clock three dreadnought cruisers were seen to cut through the light fog, which was just lifting, and, hugging the cliffs opposite our house, scuttle south to Scarborough. From our windows we could not at that hour quite make out the contours of the ruined castle, which is generally plainly visible. Our attention was called to the fact that there was "practicing" going on, and we could, at 8:07, see quick flashes. That these flashes pointed directly at Scarborough we did not for a few minutes comprehend. Then, the fog slowly lifting, we saw a fog that was partly smoke. The castle grew into its place in the six miles distance. It seemed for a moment that the eight-foot-thick Norman walls tottered; but no, whatever tottered was behind the keep. Curiously enough we could barely hear the cannonading, for the wind was keen in the opposite direction, yet we could, as the minutes crept by and the air cleared, see distinctly the flashes from the boats and the flashes in the city.
After about fifteen minutes there was a cessation, or perhaps a hesitation, that lasted two minutes; then the flashes continued. Ten minutes more and the boats began to move again. One cruiser disappeared completely from sight, sailing south by east. The other two rushed, like fast trains, north again, again close to our cliffs; and in another half hour we heard all too plainly the cannonading which had almost escaped our ears from Scarborough. We thought it was Robin Hood's Bay, as far north of us as Scarborough is south; but afterward we learned that the boats omitted this pretty red-roofed town and concentrated their remaining energy on Whithy, fifteen miles north; the wind blowing toward us brought us the vibrating boom.
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. The postman assured us that Scarborough was in flames. A road worker told us we should be turned back, and another man warned us to beware of a big hole in the road further along, large enough to swallow our horse and trap; yet we could certainly see no flames issuing from Scarborough, which now lay directly before us.
We put up the horse at a stable on the very edge of the city and walked up the steep hill. The hotelkeeper and his wife, we were told, were already "refugees."
Scarborough is a sprawling town that stretches a length of about three miles from the extreme north end to the extreme south. Inland about a mile and a half is a wireless station, and on the cliff, 300 feet high, stands the ruined castle and its walled-in grounds, in the midst of which is—or was, for it was yesterday blown clean away—a signal station. Although there are barracks the town is unfortified. A seaside resort of considerable importance, its population varies by many thousands in Winter and Summer, with a stationary population of 45,000. But to compensate for its Summer losses are the numerous fashionable schools for both boys and girls.
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 passageway 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 an 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. Scarborough was not "in flames."
We left the main business street and picked our way toward the Foreshore and the South Cliff, the more fashionable part of town as well as the school section. Here there was a great deal of havoc, and we had to climb over some of the débris. Roofs were half torn off and balancing in mid-air; shells had shot through chimneys, and some chimneys tottered, while several had merely round roles through the brickwork; mortar, bricks, and glass lay about the streets; here a third-story room was bare to the view, the wall lifted out as for a child's dollhouse and disclosing a single bedroom with shaving materials on the bureau still secure; there a drug store 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-up 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 rose bush unharmed and blooming.