Great Britain -- Defenses; Imaginary wars and battles
The quiet squares of Bloomsbury were in some cases great yawning
ruins--houses with their fronts torn out revealing the shattered
furniture within. Streets were indeed, filled with tiles, chimney pots,
fallen telegraph wires, and _débris_ of furniture, stone steps, paving
stones, and fallen masonry. Many of the thoroughfares, such as the
Pentonville Road, Copenhagen Street, and Holloway Road, were, at points,
quite impassable on account of the ruins that blocked them. Into the
Northern Hospital, in the Holloway Road, a shell fell, shattering one of
the wards, and killing or maiming every one of the patients in the ward
in question, while the church in Tufnell Park Road was burning fiercely.
Upper Holloway, Stoke Newington, Highbury, Kingsland, Dalston, Hackney,
Clapton, and Stamford Hill were being swept at long range by the guns on
Muswell Hill and Churchyard Bottom Hill, and the terror caused in those
densely populated districts was awful. Hundreds upon hundreds lost their
lives, or else had a hand, an arm, a leg blown away, as those fatal
shells fell in never-ceasing monotony, especially in Stoke Newington and
Kingsland. The many side roads lying between Holloway Road and Finsbury
Park, such as Hornsey Road, Tollington Park, Andover, Durham,
Palmerston, Campbell, and Forthill Roads, Seven Sisters Road, and
Isledon Road were all devastated, for the guns for a full hour seemed to
be trained upon them.
The German gunners in all probability neither knew nor cared where their
shells fell. From their position, now that the smoke of the hundreds of
fires was now rising, they could probably discern but little. Therefore
the batteries at Hampstead Heath, Muswell Hill, Wood Green, Cricklewood,
and other places simply sent their shells as far distant south as
possible into the panic-stricken city below. In Mountgrove and
Riversdale Roads, Highbury Vale, a number of people were killed, while a
frightful disaster occurred in the church at the corner of Park Lane and
Milton Road, Stoke Newington. Here a number of people had entered,
attending a special service for the success of the British arms, when a
shell exploded on the roof, bringing it down upon them and killing over
fifty of the congregation, mostly women.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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