World War, 1914-1918 -- Hospitals; World War, 1914-1918 -- Personal narratives
We were up early in the morning, and our first business was to go
round to the British Headquarters to find out what they intended to do,
and what they expected of us as a British base hospital. If they
intended to stay, and wished us to do likewise, we were quite
prepared to do so, but we did not feel equal to the responsibility of
keeping more than a hundred wounded in a position so obviously
perilous. From shrapnel they were fairly safe in the basement, but
from large shells or from incendiary bombs there is no protection. It is
not much use being in a cellar if the house is burnt down over your
head. So two of us started off in our motor to get news.
The Headquarters were in the Hotel St. Antoine, at the corner of the
Place Verte opposite to the Cathedral, so we had to go right across
the town. We went by the Rue d'Argile and the Rue Leopold, and we
had a fair opportunity of estimating the results of the night's
bombardment. In the streets through which we passed it was really
astonishingly small. Cornices had been knocked off, and the
fragments lay in the streets; a good many windows were broken, and
in a few cases a shell had entered an attic and blown up the roof.
Plainly only small shells had been used. We did not realize that many
of the houses we passed were just beginning to get comfortably
alight, and that there was no one to put out the fires that had only
begun so far to smoulder. A few people were about, evidently on their
way out of Antwerp, but the vast bulk of the population had already
gone. It is said that the population of half a million numbered by the
evening only a few hundreds. We passed a small fox terrier lying on
the pavement dead, and somehow it has remained in my mind as a
most pathetic sight. He had evidently been killed by a piece of
shrapnel, and it seemed very unfair. But probably his people had left
him, and he was better out of it.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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