Silent pedestrians walked along and searched the ground for souvenirs, of which there were aplenty. Sentries guarded houses and streets where it was dangerous to explore, and park benches were used as barriers to the public. All the cabs were requisitioned to take away luggage and frightened inhabitants. During the shelling hundreds of women and children, breakfastless, their hair hanging, hatless, and even penniless, except for their mere railway fares, had rushed to the station and taken tickets to the first safe town they could think of. There was no panic, these hatless, penniless women all asserted, when they arrived in York and Leeds. A wealthy woman whom I slightly know nearly rushed into my arms, her face very flushed, and told me that she had left the servants to pack her china and vases, and was now on her way to find a workman to dig a hole in the garden to receive them; as for herself, she would eat from kitchen dishes henceforth.
A friend of mine hurried into Scarborough by motor to rescue her sister, who was a pupil at one of the boarding schools. But it appeared that when the windows of the school began to crash the teachers hurried from prayers, ordered the pupils to gather hats and coats and sweet chocolate that happened to be on hand as a substitute for breakfast, and made them run for a mile and a half, with shells exploding about them, through the streets to the nearest out-of-Scarborough railway station. My friend, after unbelievable difficulties, finally found her sister in a private house of a village near by, the girl in tears and pleading not to be sent to London; she had been told that her family's house was probably destroyed, as it was actually on the seacoast.
On the other hand, instances of self-possession were not lacking. Another school hardby took all its children to the cellars, where the teachers made light of the matter, and the frightened father of one very nervous child was pleasantly amazed to find his child much calmer than himself—and quite delighted with the experience. In St. Martin's Church, the Archdeacon was celebrating communion. Shells struck the roof of the church. The Archdeacon stopped the service for a brief moment to say:
"We are evidently being bombarded. But we are as safe here as we can be anywhere," and proceeded calmly with the service.
We left Scarborough at night. The exodus of inhabitants, school children, whose Christmas holidays began earlier by one day on account of the raid, and visitors continued steadily. The cabmen, so idle in Winter, were rejoiced to find that work for today would not be lacking.
"At this rate," said one of them to me as he lighted the carriage candles for our trap and handed me the reins, "if the Germans come again there'll be no one left for them to kill."
There is, the Admiralty tells us, no military significance in this event, and, from the British point of view, I doubt if a woman will ever be considered worthy of a hearing in anything military; but I presume there is some sort of significance from a real estate point of view in the holes made in the hotels and houses, and from the hospital point of view in the sad procession of stretchers. But however little significance the December bombardment of Scarborough has, it is certainly a surprise to be wakened by three hostile cruisers, and one must admit that the Kaiser has at least left his greetings of the season on the east coast.
How the Baroness Hid Her Husband on a Vessel
[Special Cable to The New York Times.]