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Newspaper Page Text
LIVING AND DYING UNDER BOMB FIRE OF ZEPPELINS HORROR OF SKY AT ANTWERP BY H. J. PHILLIPS. Staff War Correspondence (By Mes senger to London). Ostend, Belgium, Oct. 7. I have just conducted a masterly retreat to Ostend. I was practically on Antwerp's five yard line when the Germans were within striking distance of the goaL And, being unlike most warcorre spondents whom, I understand, write home about the delirious pastiming they find in dodging bullets, I retreat ed. I can't dodge them very well YET! I have walked home at midnight in Chicago but 17-inch shells and bombs from the sky, well, that's something else again. I know all about the, bombs from the sky the 17-inch shells I don't want to know about. But of the two I would prefer the shells. From the stories I heard among the refugees, with whom I traveled to Ostend, there is nothing more terrifying, nothing more hor rible, than a Zeppelin attack upon a sleeping city. Babies blown to atoms while they slept at their mother's side, little chil dren's faces torn off and they live in awful agony, blasted roofs falling and crushing or smothering whole fami lies those are only a few of the re volting results 'that follow night at tacks from above. That's what Antwerp suffered while besieged. And from what I can learn not a soldier was killed by the air fleets. Non-combatants alone fell. Half-starved and terrorized men, wo men and children were the victims. The nearest approach to the military who were killed were two civil guards acknowledged non-combatants who were buried under a falling house. I was perhaps 25 or 30 miles from Antwerp when I came upon the flee ing bands of refugees from that city. Always in this country refugees are the same. Merchant or peasant, they come slowly along the road in quaint, dilapidated carts drawn by horses one would swear were resurrected from the soap factories for the occasion. With the two boy scouts, separated from family and friends, I had "met along the road all of us on bicycles we came upon this odd paarde. We turned about and kept abreast of the leader of the procession, a sim ple thing as the carts ambled along at only two or three miles an hour. I Alongside the horse drawing the first cart trudged a thin, stoop-shouldered and middle-aged schoolmaster, not unlike the kind we caricature in the United States. In the vehicle were his wife and aged mother. One of the family was missing. Their little daughter who had come to them late in life was killed by a bomb as she slept on the second floor of their little cottage. The school master and his wife in another room escaped with merely splinter bruises. They buried her as best they could, wrapped in blankets and rugs, in their own flower garden! From this calm and silent scholar I learned, not without difficulty, as he spoke reluctantly, of the horrors the people of Antwerp went through. The Black Hole of Calcutta may still produce a gasp whenever mentioned, but for pure ferocity the siege of Antwerp rivals anything the Hindoos or Mongolians ever exhibited. I cannot repeat all I have heard. It is too terrible. Peculiarly every one in our caravan had suffered a be reavement. Half of my money I di vided among the poor wretches. Before even a fortified town can be bombarded, the rules of war pro vide for twenty-four hours' notice be fore the commencement of actual bombardment. But they aren't car- HitaaaMitfMAMitt