SHELLED TOWNS

Evening Post, Volume LXXXIX, Issue 27, 2 February 1915, Page 3

SHELLED TOWNS

FRENCH AND ENGLISH COMPARISONS A WAR CORRESPONDENT'S IM- • PRESSIONS. Were it not for the shell-holes and the fact that two poor fellows are lying dead in the mortuary, you might doubt the reality of that devastating seven minutes in this little Yorkshire town (writes Mr. G. Ward Price, a war correspondent for the London Daily Mail, under date 18th December). Away from the places where the shells actually struck there is no visible sign in the quiet little town to-day, and was none even last night, that anything at all unusual had occurred. That is the Yorkshireman's way. He is not going to put himseli ont over a few minutes' bombardment. In fact, from the unconcerned, phlegmatic, detached way in which the Yorkshire folk talk about yesterday's cannonading, you might think that the whole thing had been passed beforehand by the Urban District Council as one of the unavoidable necessities of the war. "Bombardment," they say. "Ay, 'a had 'one burst just agen my 'ouse — j one o' them big 'uns — might 'a done a lot o* damage, but it didn't." CALM INDIFFERENCE. I have been in a fair number of bombarded towns since the war began, but never in towns that took it with such calm, almost with such indifference, as these. In French villages the people are still standing in the streets talking about their bombardment in the middle of September, and the children sell you pieces of shell only at the price of silver — though in Reims they certainly warm them first to make them seem fresher. At one place this morning the souvenir interest was so slack that I had handfuls of shell-fragments given, to me and was offered more. The, small impression which German guns make ,upon these hard-headed Yorkshire folk is instanced in the very casualties themselves. Poor Tunmore, the wagon-driver, a very popular man and a churchwarden, was going steadily on with his work when he was hit. He had Jeft his wagon in the station yard and was taking his horse to the stables — only, as he had seen a, shell fall close to the road he ordinarily took, he was making a slight detour. But he was going on with his work all the same. And the coastguardsman had his hands in his pockets and was making a joke about the Germans when his head was knocked off. There was no panic. About 300 people left one small town during the day, says the stationmaster, but the calmness of their going is Bnown by the fact that they nearly all went by the 12.13, 3.55, and 7.3 trains, to York, although there is a better train at 10.25. They were not hurried ; they stayed to pack up properly. "We're not running away," said a man and his wife whom I met with their little baby, "but it might happen again, perhaps, and when you ye got young children it's awkward." That is what Yorkshire thinks of the attacks by German super-Dreadnoughts ; they> are awkward when you've got young children. STRONG FEELING OF RESENTMENT. At the same time calmness and ootuage still leave room for a strong feeling of resentment. Yorkshire men have a gift for expressing themselves forcibly, and the most respectable citizens of these towns admit having used during the minutes the bombardment lasted more strong language than usually suffices for a whole, year of their wellordered lives. And their wives who heard them approve of every word of it. These vigorous emotions, however, were very beneficial to some people. SeveTal rheumatic subjects who had had to be turned over in bed every morning for several years past were across the room and looking out of their bedroom windows before the third salvo had been fired. One man, walking along the front to the dentist's at 9 o'clock, after a sleepless night with raging toothache, found at 9.15 that it had entirely disappeared along with the German battlecruisers. The raid is unfortunately another instance of the Germans' thorough knowledge of our coast defence system. The ships came in far closer than was necessary, or than they would have dared to do if they had not known that there was not a single gnn on the cliffs to return their fire. Their shells were aimed not only at the conspicuous coastguard station, which they smashed, but at the hidden railway station lying haft a mile back up the valley ; and one seems to have been fired even at the tiny little green hut on the promenade that was once a pay-box. "There must have been someone aboard every one of those ships who knew the town ac thoroughly as a postman," said a Scarborough man who was there during the bombardment. It "is odd to see the same kind of ahell-holes in the walls of aa English homo aa one has grown used to at Pervyse, at Reims, or at Soissons. An Englishman in France put it well when he said, "You know, these ruined villages don't make on me the impression they ought to do ; I can't get away from the idea that it all happened to 'foreigners.' " SOMETHING OF A SHOCK. It certainly does come as a shock to see a typical little English house with half of one side ripped out of it, with the frame of the first-floor bay window hanging out over nothing at all, and its Venetian blinds and neat lace curtains waving distractedly in the wind. Or a solid, substantial four-square Georgian house a little farther down the hill with its old time-blackened garden wall smashed, and broken-off stones of the original creamy-white colour lying around. Or a green English meadow like the one across which the youngsters of Mr. Curries school scampered under fire pitted into shell-holes with great brown sods torn out and thrown for yards. Or the row of four scalped houses in Windsor-terrace lying down there apparently sheltered in the hollow, with the great shoulder of the abbeycrowned East Cliff hiding them from the sea. Or an ordinary terrace with the windows of all but three of the twenty houses on One side boarded up • — smashed by the concussion of the explosion that tore the whole of tho first floor out of neat little red-brick "West Lea" opposite, where I picked up a great jagged chunk of a shell that is certainly an eleven-inch !