Читать книгу Catastrophe and Social Change - Samuel Henry Prince - Страница 5

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The City of Halifax—Terrific nature of the explosion—Destruction of life and property—The subsequent fire and storms—Annihilation of homes—Arresting of business—Disintegration of the social order.

Halifax is the ocean terminal of the Dominion of Canada on her Atlantic seaboard. It is situated at the head of Chebucto Bay, a deep inlet on the southeastern shoreline of Nova Scotia. It is endowed by nature with a magnificent harbor, which as a matter of fact is one of the three finest in the world. In it a thousand vessels might safely ride at anchor. The possession of this harbor, together with ample defences, and a fortunate situation with regard to northern Europe established the Garrison City, early in the year 1914 as the natural war-base of the Dominion. Its tonnage leaped by millions, and it soon became the third shipping port in the entire British Empire. Hither the transports came, and the giant freighters to join their convoy. Cruisers and men-of-war put in to use its great dry-dock, or take on coal. Here too, cleared the supply and munition boats—some laden with empty shells, others with high explosives destined for the distant fields of battle. How much of the deadly cargo lay in the road-stead or came and went during those fateful years is not publicly known.[22] Certainly there was too much to breed a sense of safety, but no one gave the matter second thought. All were intent upon the mighty task of the hour. Sufficient unto each day was each day's evil. Each night the great war-gates were swung across the channels. Powerful searchlights swept unceasingly the sea and sky. The forts were fully manned. The gunners ready. The people knew these things, and no one dreamed of danger save to loved ones far away. Secure in her own defences the city lay unafraid, and almost apathetic.

About midway in the last two years of war—to be exact December, 1917,—a French munitioner[23] heavily laden with trinitrotoluol, the most powerful of known explosives, reached Halifax from New York. On the early morning of the sixth of that month, she was proceeding under her own steam up the harbor-length toward anchorage in the basin—an oval expansion half-hidden by a blunt hill called Turple Head. Suddenly an empty Belgian relief ship[24] swept through the Narrows directly in her pathway. There was a confusion of signals; a few agonized manoeuvers. The vessels collided; and the shock of their colliding shook the world!

War came to America that morning. Two thousand slain, six thousand injured, ten thousand homeless, thirty-five millions of dollars in property destroyed, three hundred acres left a smoking waste, churches, schools, factories blown down or burned—such was the appalling havoc of the greatest single explosion in the history of the world.[25] It was an episode which baffles description. It is difficult to gain from words even an approximate idea of the catastrophe and what followed in its trail.

It was all of a sudden—a single devastating blast; then the sound as of the crashing of a thousand chandeliers. Men and women cowered under the shower of debris and glass. There was one awful moment when hearts sank, and breaths were held. Then women cried aloud, and men looked dumbly into each other's eyes, and awaited the crack of doom. To some death was quick and merciful in its coming. Others were blinded, and staggered to and fro before they dropped. Still others with shattered limbs dragged themselves forth into the light—naked, blackened, unrecognizable human shapes. They lay prone upon the streetside, under the shadow of the great death-cloud which still dropped soot and oil and water. It was truly a sight to make the angels weep.

Men who had been at the front said they had seen nothing so bad in Flanders. Over there men were torn with shrapnel, but the victims were in all cases men. Here father and mother, daughter and little child, all fell in “one red burial blent.” A returned soldier said of it: “I have been in the trenches in France. I have gone over the top. Friends and comrades have been shot in my presence. I have seen scores of dead men lying upon the battlefield, but the sight .... was a thousand times worse and far more pathetic.”[26] A well-known relief worker who had been at San Francisco, Chelsea and Salem immediately after those disasters said “I am impressed by the fact that this is much the saddest disaster I have seen.” It has been compared to the scenes pictured by Lord Lytton in his tale of the last days of Pompeii:

True there was not that hellish river of molten lava flowing down upon the fleeing people; and consuming them as feathers in fierce flames. But every other sickening detail was present—that of crashing shock and shaking earth, of crumbling homes, and cruel flame and fire. And there were showers, not it is true of ashes from the vortex of the volcano, but of soot and oil and water, of death-dealing fragments of shrapnel and deck and boiler, of glass and wood and of the shattered ship.[27]

Like the New Albany tornado, it caused loss “in all five of the ways it is possible for a disaster to do so, in death, permanent injury, temporary injury, personal property loss, and real property loss.”[28] Here were to be found in one dread assembling the combined horrors of war, earthquake, fire, flood, famine and storm—a combination seen for the first time in the records of human disaster.

It was an earthquake[29] so violent that when the explosion occurred the old, rock-founded city shook as with palsy. The citadel trembled, the whole horizon seemed to move with the passing of the earth waves. These were caught and registered, their tracings[30] carefully preserved, but the mute record tells not of the falling roofs and flying plaster and collapsing walls which to many an unfortunate victim brought death and burial at one and the same time.

It was a flood, for the sea rushed forward in a gigantic tidal wave, fully a fathom in depth. It swept past pier and embankment into the lower streets, and receding, left boats and wreckage high and dry, but carried to a watery doom score upon score of human lives. Nearly two hundred men were drowned.

It was a fire or rather a riot of fires, for the air was for a second filled with tongues of igneous vapour hiding themselves secretly within the lightning discharge of gas, only to burst out in gusts of sudden flame. Numberless buildings were presently ablaze. Soon there was naught to the northward but a roaring furnace. Above, the sky was crimson; below, a living crematorium—church and school, factory and home burned together in one fierce conflagration; and the brave firemen knew that there were men and women pinned beneath the wreckage, wounded past self-help. Frantic mothers heard the cries of little children, but in vain. Fathers desperately tore through burning brands, but often failed to save alive the captives of the flame. And so the last dread process went on,—earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust. And when the fires at last abated, the north end of the City of Halifax looked like some blackened hillside which a farmer had burned for fallow in the spring.

But perhaps the most terrible of all the terrible accompaniments was the tornado-like gas-blast from the bursting ship. It wrought instant havoc everywhere. Trees were torn from the ground. Poles were snapped like toothpicks. Trains were stopped dead. Cars were left in twisted masses. Pedestrians were thrown violently into the air, houses collapsed on all sides. Steamers were slammed against the docks. Then followed a veritable air-raid, when the sky rained iron fragments upon the helpless city. Like a meteoric shower of death, they fell piercing a thousand roofs, and with many a mighty splash bore down into the sea.

Nor yet did this complete the tale of woes of this Dies Irae. Scarce was the catastrophe an hour old when the news was flashed around that a second explosion was approaching. It was the powder magazine in the Navy-yard, and the flames were perilously near. Through the crowded streets raced the heralds like prophets of wrath to come. “Flee!.... Flee!.... Get into the open ground” was the cry. Shops were abandoned unguarded, goods laid open on every side. No key was turned, no till was closed, but all instanter joined the precipitant throng, driven like animals before a prairie fire—yet this was not all; for “the plight of the aged, the sick, the infants, the bed-ridden, the cripples, the nursing mothers, the pregnant can not be described.”

It was like the flight from Vesuvius of which Pliny the Younger tells:

You could hear the shrieks of women, the crying of children and the shouts of men. Some were seeking their children; others their parents, others their wives and husbands ... one lamenting his own fate, another that of his family. Some praying to die from the very fear of dying, many lifting their hands to the gods, but the greater part imagining that there were no gods left anywhere, and that the last and eternal night was come upon the world.[31]

It has been said that “Moscow was no more deserted before Napoleon than were the shattered streets of Halifax when this flight had been carried out.”[32] And when the hegira was over, and when there had ensued a partial recovery from the blow and gloom, a still lower depth of agony had yet to be undergone—a succession of winter storms. Blizzards, rain, floods and zero weather were even then upon the way. They came in close procession and as if to crown and complete the terrors of the great catastrophe thunder rumbled, lightning broke sharply and lit up weirdly the snow-clad streets. Such was the catastrophe of Halifax—“a calamity the appalling nature of which stirred the imagination of the world.”[33]

The description here concluded, brief and inadequate as it is, will sufficiently indicate the terrific nature of the catastrophic shock, and explain how utter and complete was the social disintegration which followed.

There was the disintegration of the home and the family,—the reproductive system of society—its members sundered and helpless to avert it. There was the disintegration of the regulative system—government was in perplexity, and streets were without patrol. There was the disintegration of the sustaining system—a dislocation of transportation, a disorganization of business while the wheels of industry ceased in their turning. There was a derangement of the distributive system[34]—of all the usual services, of illumination, water-connections, telephones, deliveries. It was impossible to communicate with the outside world. There were no cars, no mails, no wires. There was a time when the city ceased to be a city, its citizens a mass of unorganized units—struggling for safety, shelter, covering and bread. As Lytton wrote of Pompeii; “The whole elements of civilization were broken up .... nothing in all the varied and complicated machinery of social life was left save the primal law of self preservation.”[35]

A writer has given a vivid word picture of the social contrasts of the disaster night and the beautiful evening before.

What a change from the night before! No theatres open, no happy throngs along the street, no cheery gatherings around the fire-side. The houses were all cold, and dark and silent. Instead of laughter, weeping; instead of dancing, agonizing pain; instead of Elysian dreams, ominous nightmares. Fears and sorrow were in the way and all the daughters of music were brought low ... Halifax had become in a trice a city of dead bodies, ruined homes and blasted hopes.[36]

To have looked in upon one of the great makeshift dormitories that first night, to have seen men, women and children, of all stations, huddled together on the stages of theatres, the chancels of churches, in stables, box-cars and basements was to have beheld a rift in the social structure such as no community had ever known. Old traditional social lines were hopelessly mixed and confused. The catastrophe smashed through strong walls like cobwebs, but it also smashed through fixed traditions, social divisions and old standards, making a rent which would not easily repair. Rich and poor, debutante and chambermaid, official and bellboy met for the first time as victims of a common calamity.

Even on the eighth, two days after the disaster, when Mr. Ratshesky of the Massachusetts' Relief arrived he could report: “An awful sight presented itself, buildings shattered on all sides—chaos apparent.” In a room in the City Hall twelve by twenty, he found assembled “men and women trying to organize different departments of relief, while other rooms were filled to utmost capacity with people pleading for doctors, nurses, food, and clothing for themselves and members of their families. Everything was in turmoil.”[37] This account faithfully expresses the disintegration which came with the great shock of what had come to pass. It is this disintegration and the resultant phenomena which are of utmost importance for the student of social science to observe. To be quite emotionally free in the observation of such phenomena, however, is almost impossible. It has been said of sociological investigations that

observation is made under bias because the facts under review are those of human life and touch human interest. A man can count the legs of a fly without having his heart wrung because he thinks there are too many or too few. But when he observes the life of the society in which he moves, lives and has his being, or some other society nearby, it is the rule that he approves or disapproves, is edified or horrified, by what he observes. When he does that he passes a moral judgment.[38]

Sociology has suffered because of this inevitable bias. In our present study it is natural that our sympathy reactions should be especially strong. “Quamquam animus meminisse horret, incipiam” must be our motto. As students we must now endeavor to dissociate ourselves from them, and look upon the stricken Canadian city with all a chemist's patient detachment. In a field of science where the prospect of large-scale experimental progress is remote, we must learn well when the abnormal reveals itself in great tragedies and when social processes are seen magnified by a thousand diameters. Only thus can we hope for advances that will endure.

In this spirit then let us watch the slow process of the reorganization of Halifax, and see in it a picture of society itself as it reacts under the stimulus of catastrophe, and adjusts itself to the circumstantial pressure of new conditions.

Before doing so, however, we shall pause, in the next chapter, to glance at a number of social phenomena which should be recorded and examined in the light of social psychology. But we must not lose the relationship of each chapter to our major thesis. It is sufficient for our purpose if thus far it has been shown that at Halifax the shock resulted in disintegration of social institutions, dislocation of the usual methods of social control and dissolution of the customary; that through the catastrophe the community was thrown into the state of flux which, as was suggested in the introduction, is the logical and natural prerequisite for social change; and finally that the shock was of a character such as “to affect all individuals alike at the same time,” and to induce that degree of fluidity most favorable to social change.