CHAPTER XXIII

BOMBARDING UNDEFENDED CITIES

THE GERMAN RAID ON THE ENGLISH COAST -- MRS. KAUFFMAN’S DESCRIPTION -- CANNONADING AT WHITBY -- FREAKISH EFFECT OF SHELLS -- FLIGHT OF SCHOOL CHILDREN.

The Ninth Hague Convention of 1907, to which both Germany and Great Britain gave their assent upon identical conditions, expressly forbids “the bombardment by naval forces of undefended ports, towns, villages, dwellings or buildings,” and by inference requires notice to be given previous to any such operations. Neither of these stipulations was observed by the German naval raiders who on December 16, 1914, bombarded the historic English towns of Hartlepool, Whitby and Scarborough. Appearing in the early morning, the Germans rained deadly shells upon these coast towns, none of which was of strategic importance, and only one protected by fortifications. The immediate result was the useless slaughter of many non-combatants--men and women and children, and the ruin of buildings, churches and historic monuments, including the ancient abbey of St. Hilda at Whitby.

The raid on Scarborough was described by Ruth Kauffman, the wife of the novelist, Reginald Wright Kauffman, in an interesting communication. The Kauffmans had been living for several years just outside of Cloughton, a village near Scarborough.

MRS. KAUFFMAN’S DESCRIPTION

“It’s a very curious thing to watch a bombardment from your house.

“Everybody knew the Kaiser would do it. But there was a little doubt about the date, and then somehow the spy-hunting sport took up general attention. When the Kaiser did send his card it was quite as much of a surprise as most Christmas cards--from a friend forgotten.

“Eighteen people were killed in the morning between eight and eight-thirty o’clock in the streets and houses of Scarborough by German shrapnel, two hundred were wounded and more than two hundred houses were damaged or demolished.

“From our windows we could not quite make out the contours of the ruined castle, which is generally plainly visible. Our attention was called to the fact that there was “practicing” going on and we could at 8.07 see quick flashes. That these flashes pointed directly at Scarborough we did not for a few moments comprehend, then the fog slowly lifting, we saw a fog that was partly smoke. The castle grew into its place in the six miles distance.

“It seemed for a moment that the eight-foot thick Norman walls tottered, but no, whatever tottered was behind the keep. Curiously enough, we could barely hear the cannonading, for the wind was keen in the opposite direction, yet we could, as the minutes crept by and the air cleared, see distinctly the flashes from the boats and the flashes in the city.

“After about fifteen minutes there was a cessation, or perhaps a hesitation, that lasted two minutes; then the flashes continued. Ten minutes more and the boats began to move again. One cruiser disappeared from sight, sailing south by east.

CANNONADING AT WHITBY

“The other two rushed like fast trains north again, close to our cliffs, and in another half hour we heard all too plainly the cannonading which had almost escaped our ears from Scarborough. We thought it was Robin Hood’s Bay, as far north of us as Scarborough is south, but afterward we learned that the boats omitted this pretty red-roofed town and concentrated their remaining energy on Whitby, fifteen miles north; the wind blowing toward us brought us the vibrating boom.

“We drove to Scarborough. We had not gone one mile of the distance when we began to meet people coming in the opposite direction. A small white-faced boy in a milk cart that early every morning makes its Scarborough rounds showed us a piece of shell he had picked up, and said it had first struck a man a few yards from him and killed the man. A woman carrying a basket told us, with trembling lips, that men and women were lying about the streets dead.

“We did not meet a deserted city when we entered. The streets were thronging. There was a Sunday hush over everything, without the accompanying Sunday clothes, but people moved about or stood at their doorways. Many of the shop fronts were boarded up and shop windows were empty of display. The main street, a narrow passage-way that clambers up from the sea and points due west, was filled with a procession that slowly marched down one side and up the other. People hardly spoke. They made room automatically for a group of silent Boy Scouts, who carried an unconscious woman past us to the hospital. There was the insistent honk of a motor-car. As it pushed its way through, all that struck me about the car was the set face of the old man rising above improvised bandages about his neck, part of the price of the Kaiser’s Christmas card.

“The damage to property did not first reach our attention. But as we walked down the main street and then up it with the procession we saw that shops and houses all along had windows smashed next to windows unhurt. At first we thought the broken windows were from concussion; but apparently very few were so broken; there was not much concussion, but the shells, splintering as they exploded, had flown red hot in every direction, The smoke, we had seen, had come from fires quickly extinguished.

FREAKISH EFFECTS OF SHELLS

“We left the main business street and picked our way toward the foreshore and the South Cliff, the more fashionable part of the town as well as the school section. Here there was a great deal of havoc, and we had to climb over some of the debris. Roofs were half torn off and balancing in mid-air; shells had shot through chimneys and some chimneys tottered, while several had merely round holes through the brick work; mortar, brick and glass lay about the streets; here a third-story room was bare to the view, the wall lifted as for a child’s doll house and disclosing a single bedroom with shaving materials on the bureau still secure; there a drug-store front lay fallen into the street, and the iron railing about it was torn and twisted out of shape.

“A man and a boy had just been carried away dead. All around small pieces of iron rail and ripped asphalt lay scattered. Iron bars were driven into the woodwork of houses. There were great gaps in walls and roofs. The attack had not spent itself on any one section of the city, but had scattered itself in different wards. The freaks of the shells were as inexplicable as those of a great fire that destroys everything in a house except a piano and a mantelpiece with its bric-a-brac, or a flood that carries away a log cabin and leaves a rosebush unharmed and blooming.

“Silent pedestrians walked along and searched the ground for souvenirs, of which there were plenty. Sentries guarded houses and streets where it was dangerous to explore and park benches were used as barriers to the public. All the cabs were requisitioned to take away luggage and frightened inhabitants. During the shelling hundreds of women and children, breakfastless, their hair hanging, hatless and even penniless, except for their mere railway fares, had rushed to the station and taken tickets to the first safe town they could think of. There was no panic, these hatless, penniless women all asserted, when they arrived in York and Leeds.

FLIGHT OF SCHOOL CHILDREN

“A friend of mine hurried into Scarborough by motor to rescue her sister, who was a pupil at one of the boarding schools. But it appeared that when the windows of the school began to crash the teachers hurried from prayers, ordered the pupils to gather hats and coats and sweet chocolate that happened to be on hand as a substitute for breakfast and made them run for a mile and a half, with shells exploding about them, through the streets to the nearest out-of-Scarborough railway station. My friend, after unbelievable difficulties, finally found her sister in a private house of a village near by, the girl in tears and pleading not to be sent to London; she had been told that her family’s house was probably destroyed, as it was actually on the sea-coast.”