Men who had been at the front said they had seen nothing so bad in Flanders. Over there men were torn with shrapnel, but the victims were in all cases men. Here father and mother, daughter and little child, all fell in "one red burial blent." A returned soldier said of it: "I have been in the trenches in France. I have gone over the top. Friends and comrades have been shot in my presence. I have seen scores of dead men lying upon the battlefield, but the sight .... was a thousand times worse and far more pathetic."[26] A well-known relief worker who had been at San Francisco, Chelsea and Salem immediately after those disasters said "I am impressed by the fact that this is much the saddest disaster I have seen." It has been compared to the scenes pictured by Lord Lytton in his tale of the last days of Pompeii: True there was not that hellish river of molten lava flowing down upon the fleeing people; and consuming them as feathers in fierce flames. But every other sickening detail was present--that of crashing shock and shaking earth, of crumbling homes, and cruel flame and fire. And there were showers, not it is true of ashes from the vortex of the volcano, but of soot and oil and water, of death-dealing fragments of shrapnel and deck and boiler, of glass and wood and of the shattered ship.[27] Like the New Albany tornado, it caused loss "in all five of the ways it is possible for a disaster to do so, in death, permanent injury, temporary injury, personal property loss, and real property loss."[28] Here were to be found in one dread assembling the combined horrors of war, earthquake, fire, flood, famine and storm--a combination seen for the first time in the records of human disaster. [26] Johnstone, Dwight, _The Tragedy of Halifax_ (in MS.). [27] McGlashen, Rev. J. A., _The Patriot_ (Dartmouth, N. S.). [28] Deacon, J. Byron, _Disasters_ (N. Y., 1918), ch. ii, p. 158. It was an earthquake[29] so violent that when the explosion occurred the old, rock-founded city shook as with palsy. The citadel trembled, the whole horizon seemed to move with the passing of the earth waves. These were caught and registered, their tracings[30] carefully preserved, but the mute record tells not of the falling roofs and flying plaster and collapsing walls which to many an unfortunate victim brought death and burial at one and the same time. [29] "The effect of the vast, sudden interference with the air was practically the same as if an earthquake had shaken Halifax to the ground." (MacMechan, Archibald, "Halifax in Ruins," _The Canadian Courier_, vol. xxiii, no. 4, p. 6.) [30] The tracings on the seismograph show three distinct shocks at the hours 9.05, 9.10 and 10.05.