By Motor To The Firing Line: by Walter Hale

Author:Walter Hale [Hale, Walter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, General
ISBN: 9781443709002
Google: Yeka1MfiiXcC
Publisher: Read Books
Published: 2008-08-15T05:00:28+00:00

There was a sudden lull in the cannonading as though both sides, breathless, had stopped at a given signal. We could hear the echo of our footsteps on the cobbles. We came out into the district of shops. An epicérie displayed tins of American canned goods in its broken windows; there was not a whole pane of glass in the city. The grocer conducted his business in the cellar. In a narrow street a few vegetables and some fruit were on sale with little price marks sticking in the trays. Women and small girls were standing at the side of the market carts. It was a pitifully meager market, but the women were undismayed. A little further on we came across a car that had been hit by a shell. It was a low, gray racing runabout of the torpedo type. It had evidently been used by a despatch bearer or as an official car for the staff. The frame of the chassis was broken in the middle, the radiator and bonnet gone, and three of the four cylinders poked themselves above the open crank case. There was only one fender left and a part of the tonneau in the rear—the rest of the machine had been blown to bits against the neighboring wall.

A turn out of the little Rue de Jérusalem brought us up to the cathedral. It had been violently bombarded since early morning. There was an enormous new “marmite” hole in the northern façade, some of the cornices had been shot away and many of the columns were smashed into a shapeless mass of stone. A cloud of tawny smoke rose from the interior; beneath it was the crimson glow of many small fires started by incendiary bombs. Soldiers had laid lines of hose and were playing streams upon the ruins. They might as well have tried to put out Vesuvius. As fast as a blaze would be smothered in one part of the building a bomb dropped and started another somewhere else.

A tired-looking group of townspeople—there are a thousand of its twenty-five thousand inhabitants still remaining—whispered together as they watched the destruction of the cathedral. A priest stood in the rain with bared head.

The devastation was complete in whatever direction we turned. The girders of the enormous steel train shed at the railway station were broken in and every skylight smashed. The arrival and departure platforms were covered with débris and grass three feet high grew over the tracks of one of the greatest railway centers of northern France. In the Rue Gambetta nearby the beautiful Ursuline chapel was badly damaged. Pieces of its tower had been shot away and in its irregular outlines it somewhat resembled an unsteady spiral staircase of stone.

Following the Rue Douai in the environs toward Blangy there is nothing left of the town at all. There was not a house standing intact and only a few of the chimneys. Trees, freshly hewn off as if by an ax, were flung across the streets—everywhere great holes in the cobble stones where the shells had torn up the pavement.

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