SHANGHAI BOMBINGS

Evening Star, Issue 22880, 11 February 1938, Page 13

SHANGHAI BOMBINGS

AIMLESS DEVASTATION NEW INSIGHT INTO HUMAN NATURE In Nanking road, a withered and grey-haired Tittle Chinese, squeezing himself as flat as possible against a wall, was uttering unintelligible sounds through his set teeth and shaking his blood-smeared fists in helpless fury, writes Jim Marshall (in an overseas newspaper). His eyes were turned towards a leaden sky. It was empty now, but a minute ago a stream-lined silver bird had shot past through the clouds and disappeared eastward, after dropping its load of dynamite. At his feet lay heaps of dead and wounded, men, women, and children, writhing in agony, moaning and weeping, The pavement was covered with debris and glass, with bricks and paper and goods that must'have been the merchandise sold in the nearby stores. The air was thick and heavy with an acrid smoke which made the eyes water and tasted salty on the lips. “You! . . . You, lousy dog . , .” the old man went on cursing. He did not know whether the messenger of death had been a Chinese or a Jap. Nobody knew except the man who had sown that seed of death and vyas now speeding, maybe toward a, hospital or a school, or the native district of the enormous city. I went up to the old man, but he looked at me vacantly, shook his head, and stumbled on. Ten years ago it would not even have occurred to us that an open city could be bombarded without an official declaration of war. But 10 years ago are a long time, sufficiently long at any rate to teach us that the world has changed and that even civilian populations may henceforth be attacked without warning. The recent massacre of Shanghai, the aimless devastation of Nanking and other Chinese cities have given us a new insight into the deepest recesses of human nature. A handful of whites, who deem themselves superior, live among millions of ignorant and superstitious natives in the immense city of Shanghai, but when bombs and shrapnel begin to explode over their heads—as they may one day above the metropolises of Europe and America—all racial and cultural differences are obliterated. When the gate to hell opens, all are alike; the stoical Chinese and the vivacious Frenchman, the haughty English and the cool, phlegmatic Dutchman, who a few weeks ago had felt “ perfectly safe in the International Settlement. The noise which resounded in my ears long after the explosion was not the terrific detonation, but the everlasting clatter of broken glass. It would not end. . . . When you hear it your first impulse is to run, run blindly without stopping, without looking back, squeezing yourself against the _ few houses that are still standing straight, run on, no matter where, hut away from hell. DRIFTING CROWDS. If you are in a crowd you drift helplessly along with it, you sway forward a few hundred yards, then backward, and for no reason whatever you turn into a side street, for the crowd moves like a single body. Nobody speaks, and you hear the tapping of thousands of feet and the crunching of sand and glass under them. Occasionally a sob or an outcry from a wounded child is heard. But look at the ipeople closely and you realise that they are trembling. Thick heads of perspiration are running down their dirty cheeks. They move automatically, hut their reason and senses are paralysed with fear and their stare is vacant.