FIELD HOSPITALS BOMBED.

Hokitika Guardian, 3 November 1917, Page 4

FIELD HOSPITALS BOMBED.

STEW i’RTGHTFULNKSS. (From W. Beach Thomas.) France, Sepfc 1. Whether by intention or the accident of blind fighting, the enemy in one of his latest bombing x-aids at night attacked three of onr hospitals, one of them with what he would call success. This is what happened. A great English surgeon visiting a hospital with some American surgeons heard the hum of aeroplanes, and the company 7 , going out to see, caught a glimpse of a big plane high up, but picked out by searchlights. It flew straight in their direction, and the surgeon took the visitors under cover. Immediately 7 they 7 had entered a crash was heard, then another, and then auotnCr and another. The third fractured every-thiug in the room, and. the doctors, lying flat on the fiooy, were smothered with glass and dn.st and bits of rnbbish. A fourth bomb* fell farther off, and this distinguished company 7 of. doctors were out to see what help they could render.

The place‘echoed with loud guttural shouts from some of the German patients, and they 7 were tlie only 7 men who did not keep their alarm to themselves. • The whole place , was pitch dark and the debris was investigated by the light of a single flash lamp, which slowly revealed a scene as horrible as the eye could look upon. Bombs containing no less than 3001 b of explosive made craters at least as big as a loin shell. They must have been carried by one of the newest giants of the air. The first of these had struck a ward full of German wounded, and nine of them were heaped in every attitude of horrible and fantastic death. It was a work of time for these doctors to unravel the human and material debris and disembarrass the xvounded from the burden of the dead. In all their 1 united experiences they had felt no such horror, nor even imagined such a scene. > All was done at first . by the light/ of this single flash lamp until nurses and other doctors came to help. No i other ward suffered quite so severely | as these Germans, but other patients and some nurses were among the victims. By an amazing chance no medical man was seriously hurl* On, the same night attacks were made against three other hospitals, all of which had been on the same j sites tor about two years. Blind or blear-eyed as this night bombing from great heights is, it is at least an tin- - happy chance that virtually 7 the whole ! of the bombs let fell that night were in the close neighbourhood o£ per- | manent hospitals many miles behind the lines, '

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