Shattered City by Janet Kitz

Author:Janet Kitz
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: HIS006000
Publisher: Nimbus
Published: 2010-08-20T00:00:00+00:00

At the Chebucto Road mortuary the bodies were kept in the basement. (MARITIME MUSEUM)

The committee placed a notice in local newspapers stating that all deaths other than in hospital had to be reported. It also asked all private undertakers to send unclaimed bodies to Chebucto Road. The bodies were stripped and washed with water from nearby homes. (Although the school had been hastily repaired, the water supply was not yet reconnected.) Clothing was kept if possible, but most of it was in too bad a state. Everything found in pockets, all rings or other jewellery, and all objects collected from the vicinity of a body were placed in a carefully labelled cloth bag. Many of the bodies sent from hospitals did not have effects or clothing with them, and this added to difficulties in recognition. The effects, the descriptions, and the bodies themselves were all given the same number, and every effort was made to identify corpses, with office workers upstairs filling out specially prepared forms on each one.

Mortuary workers tried to be as exact as possible about where the body had been found—both the address and the actual spot. They also noted approximate age and any pertinent remark. In many cases, only vague assumptions could be made. Descriptions such as “3 lots from … Veith Street, possibly Mrs … and two children” were common.

Meanwhile rescue squads—working with five members of the mortuary committee, under the direction of aldermen R. B. Colwell and W. G. Foley—attempted to label every body: “Lady at N. W. corner of basement, Flynn Block. Lying with children.” The snow and the wind and the rain, however, blew labels away or erased the writing. Often workers could not determine how many bodies there were, so they resorted to general descriptions such as “charred remains.” Relatives, too, carried pathetic remnants of humanity to the mortuary in all sorts of containers. They did not know what else to do. One tag read, “Remains of three or possibly six bodies brought in a clothes basket.” Another said, “Two or possibly three children.” The sadly essential tasks of the mortuary workers, most of whom were soldiers or volunteers, not professionals, were difficult and distressing.

Troops were not relieved from the gruesome duty of removing bodies from the ruins until January 11, 1918. Along with the bodies, they were instructed to gather all personal effects lying nearby. Assigning belongings to corpses was not easy. One team of soldiers, for example, dug through a basement of a two-storey house inhabited by six families. It had collapsed and burned. A packet of letters, bills, and receipts had, surprisingly, escaped damage and was lying near a child. It was sent with the boy. Someone from the same church identified the boy and the rest of his family, and all were buried at Mount Olivet Cemetery. As there were no close family members left alive, the contents of the mortuary bag were never claimed, and the papers stayed in the child’s cloth bag in the mortuary.

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