Bloody Saturday by Paul French

Author:Paul French
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Non-Fiction
Publisher: Penguin Random House Australia

Facing the Slaughter House

R. Somers from the Central Fire Station was in charge of the first engine that reached the Great World. He told Rhodes Farmer that, ‘A call came through to the station. I hadn’t got the faintest notion of what had happened although I coupled matters with the explosions I had heard.’ As he arrived aboard his engine, Somers recalled, ‘Facing that slaughter house there wasn’t even time to rub my eyes. The cries told me I wasn’t dreaming.’ He jumped from the engine and ran back across to the Settlement side of Avenue Eddy to find a telephone and call the Chief Officer for more ambulances. He found a shop with a public phone that still worked. The front windows had been blown out and the customers inside were horrifically injured. Somers realised he had no change to make the call and saw among the few survivors a man whose limbs has been fatally damaged. He could think of nothing to do but ask the man for change. The man reached into his jacket pocket with his one good arm and handed Somers a five cent coin. Somers thanked him and turned to make the call. After requesting more ambulances, Somers turned back to the man to see if he could help him, but he had died.

The streets to the south of Avenue Eddy were in the French Concession and so it was the French gendarmes that responded to the tragedy first. Those at the recently built and very modern Mallet Station, the Poste Mallet, on Avenue Eddy realised immediately where the bomb had hit and were quick to arrive on the scene. Gendarmes from French Police HQ on Route Stanislas Chevalier arrived soon after, including Nicolai Slobodchikoff. Outside on the bombed street he encountered ‘crowds’ of corpses on the pavement around the Great World.

Shortly after Slobodchikoff and other French gendarmes reached the scene, a division of the SVC’s Russian Company arrived from the Avenue Joffre Fire Station. Among them was young Boris Ivanovich, who still had no uniform but had borrowed a tin helmet. Marching at the double down from the Avenue Joffre to Thibet Road, Ivanovich walked past the Metropole Cinema, where he had been sitting watching a Hollywood western the previous evening. The lobby of the cinema was now a hastily assembled refuge for the injured and dying. Joined by the Chinese company of the SVC, who had been barracked not far from the Great World at the Cathedral Boy’s School, the police and Volunteers began to sort the wounded from the dead, and the hopeless cases from those who might have a chance of survival if they could get treatment.

Together Slobodchikoff and Ivanovich commandeered a French Concession flatbed garbage truck and loaded twenty-one badly wounded Chinese onto it. By the time they found a hospital able to take them, all but five had died. Slobodchikoff and Ivanovich were instructed to take the bodies to a cemetery in Siccawei, on the western fringes of the Concession, and bury them in a hastily dug mass grave.

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