VICTIMS OF THE AIR ASSASSINS

Dominion, Volume 10, Issue 3149, 30 July 1917, Page 7

VICTIMS OF THE AIR ASSASSINS

j MAIMED BABIES IN HOSPITAL

PATHETIC SCENES

('Daily Mail's" Special Correspondent.) icsterday afternoon (after the big London air raid) I went down into tho J'jast End and spent some hours among the smash and rubble of tho air raid on London. Crowds thronged fit tho corners of small streets where tho damage had been done. Workwomen by the score, with their aprons twisted round their baro arms, stood outside their- homes, ankle-deep some of them on a carpet of powdered glass, discussing angrily, and often with tears, the terrors, the adventures, and tho escapes of the raid. The day was suffocatingly hot; tho dust and smother of the scene, and the press of the throng with the sun blazing down on the picture, made it almost unbearable. For considerable spells, as the work of salvage went on, the traffic was stopped; passengers on the tops of omnibuses and tramway-cars, and the crowds below them, were ever looking up in the sky as if expecting further trouble. But nothing camo out of the heat-haze except a few wandering balloons, floating low and moving almost imperceptibly in the hot afternoon air.

At the corner of one little street, roped off to keep the people, back* stood an East End motßer with her baby in her arms.

"If they had only given us warning— and they had it, it seems, early enough— that wouldn't have happened," said she bitterly, pointing to a little house with a board nailed across the window.• "Old Mrs. and her grandchild Jessie lived in that house. Jessie's father's away lighting, her mother's dead, and she Uvea alone with granny.

"Jessie was playing outside in the street when the bombs began falling. Her granny looked out of the door and saw the child standing in the middle of tho road and staring up in tho sly. 'Come in, Jessie!' she cried, and ran out to. pick the kiddy up. She was stretching out her arms to the child when a bomb fell between them. Jessie was killed instantly and her granny had both her legs smashed. . . There's only a small hole in the road and one broken window to show what happened. They gathered up the remnants cf the shattered little body, and with "two more scraps of children" picked up in a neighbouring street, carried the three all on one stretcher to the mortuary. "And there was still room on tho stretcher," said the mortuary keeper, who for a man of his calling was mora moved at this than at anything he had ever seen before.

It is only a short walk from the seem of Jessie' 6 death to tho cool, quiet hospital whither many of the school children were taken.- Tho secretary met me at the door. "Come upstairs into the wards," he said, "and I will Bhow you some of the work the murderers did." For fifteen years tho secretary of this hospital has worked among the tragedy of the poorest part of London. "I have seen many terrible things in my time," he said, "but this . . ." His voice shook. " ■

Silently we walked from bed to bed. Forms of men and women lay there, shrouded and bandaged. Some weTO so quiet that they might have- been dead ; others were'moaning faintly. In the children's ward all tho cots were full. One mito had just died; tho screen around his cot contained a sight tho bravest would quail at. "Since last night," said tho secretary, "seven children and one woman have died, and another child is dyingmangled beyond all possible hope of recovery. Two or three.we have hopes of saving yot." Wo passed into another ward, where, among the bandaged men, the littlo sufferers of the infants' class lay, each in a big bed all to himself. Of two I could 6ee littlo One curiyhaired child of about seven lay back holding a bunch of bright spring flowers in his little fist. He could not seo them, for both his eyes were bandaged; ■Another was sitting up, supported by the arm of a nurse. He was a six-year-old. His forehead was strapped up, but a tangle of ruddy curls overflowed tho bandage. His eyes were black and swollen, and his face, neck, and hands were a. bright yellow, as though his head had been plunged into some strong orange dye. He was moaning softly, and crying, "Mummy, Mummy, Mummy!" all the time, while the nurse, with her sweet solicitude, was doing all she could to comfort him.

In the next bed lay another littlo victim, dyed the same poisonous hue .and orying for his mother. Tho nurses had been trying all tho morning to wash off those vivid, horrible T.N.T. (high-ex-plosive) stains from the poor littlo faoe3, but the stuff defied them. The sight of these disfigured babes was almost terrifying.

Some soldior3 had just been brought into the adjoining ward straight from the front. They saw these maimed and mutilated children; their hearts melted at the sight.

"Poor little blighters!" said one of tho men. "They look as if thev had just come but of a shell-hole! "When ire get tack somebody'll hare to. pay for this!"