COVENTRY ORDEAL

Evening Star, Issue 23811, 15 February 1941, Page 12

COVENTRY ORDEAL

" ENGLAND IS HOT HELPLESS " Amid tho black horror of tho Nazi attack on Coventry two things stand out —the great courage of the people and the devotion of A.R.P. workers, who were only stopped by death, says Hilde Marchant, writing in a London paper. It seemed to me as I walked through this great bomb-ploughed city that nothing could have survived through the night. Yet in all its devastation there was still life, work, and sanity. City defence workers were toiling with blood, sweat, and dust on them. The A.F.S. were covered in dirt, wore soaking wet, and their eyes were barely open from fatigue and smoke. Women were still working at canteens, brought in to feed the people. Ambulances wore parked on a stack of masonry, and stretcher-bearers ran through the broken houses to take out yet another body with still a breath of life in it.

There is no means of describing tho spirit of these people, or the spirit of the civilians of Coventry. They who survived walked with blankets over their heads, bundles under their arms, away from their shattered homes, shaken and shocked, but by no moans panicked. The wardens said they had no hysterics in the night, no terror, no stampede. People had wept—l saw there many with reel eyes—but they had a courage that kept them sane in the midst of this insanity. _ , This disaster is so big that it seems no individual picture can toll the tale, but hero are a few details of the people who still walked around:—Dozens of people climbed over masses of masonry to look at tho fourteenth-century cathedral, as if it was a sight-seeing tour. One of the men who was looking into it commented: “ Well, it looks old now, anyway.” There were women buying food in a shop and a grocer quietly weighing it out. Four doors away a rescue squad was digging into a basement because they had heard people calling from underneath. And then there was a man at a canteen who was complaining because there was sugar in his tea ; and another who said he preferred coffee to tea. There was one woman, whoso name is really Mrs Smith, who had been on duty all through the raid, handing out cups of tea from a mobile canteen. Later, emergency canteens came into the citv, and she was very proud that they could not get ns far as she was. through some of the roads being blocked. I asked her bow she managed to be in the centre of tho ruins. “ 1 was hero first.” (die said. The ruins had fallen around her. A brick had landed on top of her canteen, and she had still served tea. But it is useless to try to find heroes in this city. Everyone, from the children to the chief constable and mayor, has been a hero.