U.S. THEATRE DISASTER.

Taranaki Daily News, 4 March 1922, Page 11

U.S. THEATRE DISASTER.

.. REMINDER OF GREAT WAR. ? EYEWITNESS DESCRIBES SCENE. . I <» . A HORRIBLE SPECTACLE. , , , : i San Francisco, Feb. I. Amplification of the scanty cable details sent to the Antipodes of the Washington theatre disaster will indicate that the cataclysm was the most terrible in the capital's history. No description will do justice to the awfulness of the Knickerbocker Theatre tragedy. In loss of life the world’s record of catastrophes contains many of greater magnitude; few, except those wrought by the Great War, ever brought death so swiftly or mercilessly as it> was dealt to the men, women and children caught that fateful Saturday night like rats in a trap of masonry and ice. To those at the acene of the carnage, through the long vigil while the almost hopeless work of rescue proceeded, its ghastly resemblance to war havoc in France or Belgium or England at once forced itself to the memory. Could poor Chauncey Brainerd, newspaperman, before the life of him was crushed out, have surveyed the vista of his own tomb, his mind instinctively would have travelled back to the devastated France he saw in 1918. A gaping shell crater would have staggered his gaze. As he looked down from the roofless heights of the demolished theatre into the chaotic debris of the death pit, one saw a piece of the shattered doth Hall of Ypres. The crumbled ruins of Arras Cathedral were conjured up. London houses in smithereens from German airbombs flitted across the recollection. But the most vivid picture of all, perhaps, was the wrecked Chapel of St. Germain in Paris on that Good Friday of war time when a ‘Big Bertha,” a long-range messenger of Kultur, shelled almost as many souls into eternity as were entombed in Washington on • the last Saturday night of this January. The miracle, as one envisaged the remains of the Knickerbocker Theatre, was that anybody ever would emerge alive from beneath that crush and chaos. HUMAN HEROISMS.

Survivors sufficiently recovered of their escapes recounted heart-rending experiences in which there was a fine blend of human heroism mixed with sheer physical and mental anguish. One eye-witness told of a characteristic episode in which a 19-year-oid girl, just released from beneath chunks of concrete which had held her pinioned for two hours, was brought out on a stretcher. Her hair was tousled, her clothes awry, but her flushed face was without a scratch. She must have undergone supreme torture, yet she was smiling and almost laughing. It was the mirth of hysteria undoubtedly, but whatever it was she was game as a Spartan mother. As Red Cross helpers were huddling her into a blanket, ‘‘there’s nothing wrong with me,” she almost chuckled.

There were many who came forth from the death pit like that—apparently unhurt, half-suffocated, lacerated—but unafraid and uncomplaining, like the women in Britain during the German air raids. This girl who did not wince coaxed a tear -from a begrimed fireman. “It takes the women folk to suffer,” was his pungent tribute to her sex.

The labor of rescue was incomparably difficult. The standing walls, unroofed as clean as if a giant’s knife had just cut the top off and left no vestige of it, enveloped in a wild jumble of concrete, twisted steel, tangled railings, boulders of snow, and indiscriminate tangles of wood and iron that a few moments previously were the furnishings of a playI house de luxe. Upon roughly half of i the victims only, the roof, with its deadly crust of snow, had fallen. Upon the rest, being those with seats beneath the balcony, not only the roof but the balcony with its extra weight of human beings piled down.

HORRIBLE SPECTACLE. There were thus two layers of death as if in a cake. Victims caught in the balcony were impounded between the collapsing roof and the masonry of the balcony, and then were hurled headlong upon the heads of another stratum of victims on the main floor. The death roll was heaviest in those parts of the house beneath the balcony, which extended well towards the middle of the orchestra seats. In those parts, too, rescuing operations were correspondingly hampered. The agonies of the trapped audience were excruciating. The screams of the women and children echoed into the street, amid the frantic crjes of strong men helpless to succour either them or themselves. Escape for anyone was practically impossible. The swiftness with which people were buried benca th the debris was such in most cases that their location could be detected only by their wails or faint cries for rescue. Even then the actual ta*k of getting at them was one of the utmost difficulty. The firemen, police, and soldiers hurried to the scene, but found, themselves hopelessly unequipped with the proper kind of tools. Acetyline torches had to be sent for, and that involved great delay. The delays means deaths to many who might otherwise have been saved. Bodies dead and living were brought forth throughout the night at tediously long intervals, so laborious was the work of salvaging the human wreckage. As the catastrophe itself was one of the totally unlooked for sort, the most willing of rescuing hands were caught tragically unprepared for the duty they yearned to render. The night from every standpoint was heartbreaking. The anxiety and anguish of parents and brothers and sisters waiting for news of kith and kin was the most saddening aspect of all. They stood in the streets and shivered through the night, hoping against hope for comforting tidings or visible evidence that their own at least had been spared. ARISTOCRATIC SHOWHOUSE. The Knickerbocker was Washington’s most aristocratic showhouse. It was in the centre of th? ultra-fashionable north-west residential section, with the capital’s richest homes and diplomatic establishments in the immediate neighborhood. The theatre was erected four or five years ago when society and fashion, following the lead of the “common herd,” took perforce to the movies. On Monday mornings the Knickerbocker, during the autumn and winter, housed the most exclusive gatherings of women folk in Washington—T,ooo or 1,200 who went to hear Janet Richards’ “Current Events” talks. The house was usually full on those occasions, when wives of Cabinet Ministers, Senators, Represen-

tatives and other elite women comprised the audience.

On this fateful Saturday night, by the one provident mercy of an otherwise calamitous occasion, the blizzard kept the Knickerbocker’s ordinary night crowd at home. Instead of the 1000 or 1200 usually there for the Saturday comedy, only 200 or 300, more or less, went for the night’s tragedy. DEBRIS AND DEATH. Beneath'the dead weight of twentyfour inches of snow, accumulated during the whole of the preceding night and day, the ceiling of the theatre crumpled like an eggshell in the grip of a giant., The break seemed to start from the centre. Then came a general crash from every direction, carrying every fragmefit of the roof so completely that nothing but the starlit sky was left to gape down on the lesultant mass of debris and death.

All was the work of seconds, destruction was wrought, so people nearby recorded, with terrorising suddenness and many of the accompaniments of an earthquake. There was an explosive roar, a quivering of the ground, a shaking of houses and rattling of windows; then deadly silence.

The corner at which the Knickerbocker stood is ordinarily a live centre of traffic. On this fateful Saturday night, owing to the inclement weather, it was comparatively deserted. Thus it came that few were available for immediate rescue work. Those at hand rendered Trojan service. Army, navy, police, fire department, hospitals, and citizens generally from all parts of Washington cleared for action instantly the alarm was sent out. From conference headquarters the guard of the marines was hurried to the scene. Walter Reed Hospital rushed a fleet of ambulances, staffed by dozens of nurses, surgeons and stretcher-bearers.

Police, firemen and plain clothes detectives, ably marshalled by Inspector Grant and Captain Doyle, jumped over the debris and worked like beavers at the inextricable ruins. Bodies began to be uncovered at the end of an hour. Some were bodies devoid of life, others the bodies of dying, in whom life flickered only while they were being transported in ambulances around the corner to the First Church of Christ, Scientist, which became an emergency hospital. Many taken from the ruins just alive had passed into the Beyond by the time tender hands deposited them in the church. Many bodies miraculously bore no traces of injury, but were sufferiug from agonising internal injuries. Two tiny babies were 'discovered in the ruins at 4 o’clock on the Sunday morning, and both were alive and almost unhurt. One was sound asleep and the other gurgling its joy at escape. Their hands were frost-bitten. Their parents were said to be dead.

Perhaps the most heart-rending experience of all the injured was that of Grant Kanston, a nine-year-old boy. He arrived at the church, his head covered in bandages, to find he was the only one left of a happy family of five. The teairs came with a little pry of anguish as lie identified the horribly torn bodies of his mother and two sisters. Fifteen minutes before, Oscar Kanston, • his father, had died in a hospital. . Albert Buehler, of the Portner Apartments, one of the men caught in the wreckage, watched rescuers save others for three hours before he permitted them to turn their efforts to him. Some of the others were more badly hurt than Buehler, he told the rescuers. But he died uncomplaining on the operating table in the church a little later.

A younger hero was Gordon Hill, sixteen years. He helped pull a small girl to safety. “I had never seen her before and didn’t know who she was,” he said. “I didn't know what was happening; it came all of a sudden. F.'rst, it was all dark, but I began to crawl and pretty soon I could see the sky.”

W. H. Morris, of Buck Hannon, believed to be the last man to leave the theatre before the roof crashed down an the orchestra seats, gave this eye-wit-ness story of what happened: “The last thing I remember seeing was the baton of the orchestra, leader. I heard a crackling overhead. I had worked forty years in a mine and I knew what that meant. It sounded exactly to me as though the slate of the mine roof was coming down. The thought fished across my mind. “I can beat that to the door,” and although I was about half-way across the huge exit, I did. I am 63 years old, but I am a pretty good sprinter yet. Just as I got to the door, the gale of wind, caused by the falling roof blew me through the door into the street. I cut a piece out of my ear in the door.”