The evening world. Newspaper, April 27, 1918, Page 11

x SATURDAY, APRIL 27, 1918 IF New York Were Shelled By a 75-Mile-Range Gun, How Would People Act? Martin Green, Evening World Staff Correspondent, Describes the Uncanny Bombardment of Paris and, in Imagination, Gives the Awful A Scenes a New York Setting. By Martin Green ~ If New York, Like Paris, Were Under Shell Fire ARTIST BIEDERMAN DRAWS, UNDER INSPIRATION OF MARTIN GREEN’S ARTICLE, AN IMAGINARY RESULT OF BOMBARDMENT BY A 75-MILE-RANGE GUN. (Gpeotal Staff Correspondent of The Evening World.) Copyright. 1018, by The Press Publishing Oo, (The New York Brening World), i ARIS, April 1.—As ! write this afternoon I look out from The. World . ‘ PLAZ Bureau In the Avenue de l’Opera, a block from the Paris Opera - iia House and the Grand Boulevard, upon long lines of shuttered shop windows on the street level, at hundreds of closed and locked windows on the floors above the street level—windows behind which are the work- rooms of tailors, milliners, artificial flower manufacturers and fachioners} of light merchandise such as ts turned out from the skyscrapers In Lower Fifth Avenue, New York. This 's a holiday In Paris—Easter! Monday—and the holiday accounts for the shuttered and locked win-/ dows. A corresponding neighborhood in| | New York might be the corner of 13th Street and Fifth Avenue, with noon promenading humanity, an- swering for the boulevard a block} away. Make Fifth Avenue the Ave- mue de !'Opera, 14th Street the bou- levard, the time Sunday afternoon, March 30—for this holiday after- noon Is like a Sunday afternoon in New York in normal times. All business In Paris Is suspended to- day just as all business In New Mead was suspended on Easter Sunday. Carrying myself to New York by| a process of mental transportation, | find myself wondering If, were | sitting in an office at 13th Street and Fifth Avenue on Easter Sunday afternoon, 191, there would be, moving up and down the avenue! and across 14th Street, endless} streams of laughing, chatting people, endless Ines of honking taxicabs, and if there would come to me through my open window sounds indicating the celebration of a fete by a popu- lace unafrald and happy; 1 find myself wondering If this would be the case had New York been subjected for nine days—with two days of intermission no less momentous because of the suspense—to a systematic , bombardment of the city by great explosive shells fired from @ cannon} stationed seventy-five miles away. As I write this line a bomb has fallen somewhere in Paris, echoes of the explosion are still reverberating. ] ‘nas stopped; not one has looked toward the sky. WHAT EFFECT WOULD BOMBARDMENT HAVE ON NEW YORK? The Not @ person on the street I find myself wondering if, under similar conditions {n New York, 1 ing if, instead, Fifth Avenue and 14th Street would not be jammed with trucks and moving vans, if the stores and shops would not be wide open and {f thousands of sweating, swearing workers would not be striving In all the disorder of panicky baste to start bales, boxes and barrels of mer- chandise to points outside the bombardment zone; ff Lower Manhattan ‘would not be congested with citizens carrying personal effects en route to railroad stations; if there would not be chaos where, here in Paris, ‘within sound of the bombardment area, there is peace and seeming in- difference, ——————————EE that Paris {s totally unconscti f th t \ | Het that Paris § if scious of the fact that the city ts be-! W041 aah street, Actually I was reading the morning papers in my room etoged, for Paris ts as truly besieged to-day as she was in 1870-71 when ’ the Germans were battering at the walls. In those days there were no|*™ the Hotel Lott! in the hve 9 convene Ld slp Hy? m ; sf ne seventy-five-mile range guns, no aeroplanes. The only difference ts that sae es Mel pall Mie aang aero ceasene TI ay possible to get out of Paris under the conditions preva! dusty in oid gp it fe s bay Prsvalent in 2918, concussion whicb waved the curtaing, then the sound of a great explosion “A German aviator,” sald my American friend—we are proceedin: with the Imaginative happening—"“has just dropped @ bomb about on, | siles There came a} edoes which are dropped from Boche Gothas while the population was shut in forty-eight years ago, and it 1s possible to get food and other necessary supplies {nto Paris to-day, while Parts | ‘wes starving in the siege in the ranco-Prussian War, So too would ito the alr in the form of @ ight miat. ersons In the hotel office, that we bad heard in all probability iermans were giving New York something new in the way of destructive The two explosions had lacked the deep, echoing resonance! which accompantes the shattering from within of one of the aerial tor- | Right here | mentally transport myself back to Paris and the office o® The sun was shining, but e sky was cloudy and a heavy frost of the night before was being drawn We decided, after talking with! shots t ak ah ¢ SATURDAY, APRIL 27, 1918 \ IMAGINE City Hall Struck, ‘ | Brooklyn and the Bronx Hit, Would New YorkBein Panic? | But Paris Boulevards Crowded Like Fifth Avenue on Easter, Although Shells Were Falling Every Few Minutes and Many Persons Were Being minutes after the initial shock. We proceeded to rovise our opinion as to the origin of the explosion, Tho twelve minute interval was lending an uncanny effect to the bombardment, BHELL BURSTS IN WAITING ROOM IN PENNSYLVANIA STATION, On the way down Sixth Avenue we had noted that no business was being done tn the stores. The sidewalks were crowded with salespeople, Proprietors and clerks looking at the misty, partially clouded sky. In the hotel the walters were nervous and the breakfast was badly served. At 9.15 o'clock, one hour to the second after the first explosion, we heard the sixth, The dining room was doserted and there remained but one | walter, who was nervously fingering our breakfast check, and one white faced hatboy, who was tnststing that we should take our hats and depart, From the McAlpin we crossed 34th Street to Seventh Avenue and walked south to the Pennsylvania Station, where there Was a great crowd of policemen and firemen, The first shell had landed In the restaurant ‘off the great waiting room, after tearing through the roof, and bad killed lor wounded every one within a radius of 100 feet, The head of a soldier had been blown off and was plastered against the wall, There were {pools of blood on the floor, Policemen and soldiers were bunting for fragments of shell to be turned over to the artillery experts, who were ito analyze them {nan effort to determine their nature and the probable | jPower which had propelled the missile. 14th Street, carrying Its teeming | SHELL KILLS SCHOOLBOYS AT COLUMBUS CIRCLE, i | saving th snaylvania Station we walked ovi Broadway. The SStOW! S . Leaving th naylvania Station walked over to crosstown current of Sunday after-) iatreet was jammed with hurrying, gossiping men and women, Banks had closed. The curtains were drawn on the displays in the show win- dows of the great department stores, Traffic policemen had been with- ‘drawn from the corners, and taxicabs and motorbuses were violating @ll rules of epeed and right of way. Saloons and restaurants were deserted and white aproned bartenders and waiters were standing In doorways, looking at the sky. All the shops along Broadway and 42d Street were Jclosed. Tho subways and street cars wero jammed. The crowds in the latreets were thinning out as cltizens, fearing the worst, were hurrying home to their familtes. ! Crossing 42d Street to the Grand Central Station, we found that @ |bomb had landed at the corner of Lexington Avenue, tearing out a section of the corner of the new Commodore Hotel. Two persons had been killed there, one a policeman, and a crosstown car had been blown from the track. We telephoned The Evening World office and found that a ‘bomb bad dropped in Columbus Circle and that several schoolboys on thelr way from the subway to the High School of Commerce had been killed; also that another bomb, falling on @ house in Bast §7th Street, thad killed @ mother and her nursing baby. i CITY A HOTBED OF WILD RUMORS. | Ry thts time it was noon, The city was a hotbed of rumors. Tt was quite plain that the bombing had not been accomplished by German aero- planes, for scores of our planes had scoured the sky without sighting an lenomy. It was reported that the Germans had mado a landing at Rockaway | Intot and had set up cannon with which they were bombarding Greater New York, Hoboken and Jersey City, for shells had fallen across the North River, The most persistent report was that German Zeppeling, flying five or six miles high, out of alght, were hurling projectiles on the city, One o'clock In the afternoon found all business abandoned, shops, stores, fac- ‘tortes, offl all closed and everybody hurrying homeward, And all through the morning and Into the early afternoon there had been explostotis ‘at twolve-minute Intervals. After 1 o'clock the time between the explostons lengthened to twenty- two minutes and finallygto half an hour, At 4 o'clock the bombardment ceased and at the same time there appeared on the streets an extra of The | Evening World giving detafled statements of the damage inflicted, and stating, on the authority of the War Department, that the shells had been fired by a gun stationed In a gtrip of woods in the vicinity of Long Branch, MOBS BESIEGE THE RAILROAD STATIONS TO FLEE CITY, ‘The streets at the points where the bombs had dropped were ankle deep with broken glass, Mobs wore besieging the railroad stations. The statement that a gun had been bullt which would hurl a projectile seventy- ft ved with Incredullty on all sides, But the shells had come trom somewhere! Into the altuation had entered the dramatic ele ment of mystery and New York went to bed late Saturday night half fa the belfef that the age of miracles had returned, That night there was an aeroplane air raid and promptly at 8 o'clock the next morning, Sunday, a shell dropped into the city In the vicinity of the Pennsylvania Station. and until the early afternoon the bombardment continued, explosions occu» | ring at twenty-five minute Intervals, On Monday morning the first she dropped at 7 o'clock and the bombardment proceeded irregularly all day. miles waa rec: Tho World on the Avenue de l'Opera. T leave to New Yorkers to imagine ied in the efty Sunday and Monday and on the succeeding days. I have placed In Now York what J expertenced in Parts. At 8 o'clock {n the morning of March 26 I left Parte for the French what hap Killed and Injured. t should say, the Grand Central Station.” “No,” I objected. “That bomb landed at about the Pennsylvania Station.” ed by anti-atreraft guns in the suburbe, do by This supposition was strength New York be besieged were the Germans able to shoot shells Into the otty | the fact that as yet the fire engines and sirens had sounded trom a point seventy-five miles distant to the east or northeast or from a ship ' orvising or stationary seventy-five miles out on the Atlantic Ocean. Thousands have fled from Paris, but hundreds of thousands remain | ané go about their business, and when the shells explode, those who hear} {dhe sound and are nearly or distantly remote from the aren of destruction | shrug their shoulders, ejaculate “Boom!” and, apparently, forget {t. Two! months of night bombardments from aeroplanes and nine days of shelling from a long distance gun have made of the Parisian left behind @ brother fm indifference to the soldier at the front Neverth d myself wondering thts afternoon {f New York or Chicago or of the United States would be the | game as Paris unc 1 find myself wondering !f, for in- would be looking out upon plactdly promenading men, women and chil- dren, upon long lines of shuttered shop windows and at hundreds of closed and locked windows of workrooms or lofts, I find myself wonder- front and was soon tn the battle zone, forgetting all about Parts and the long dletance bombardment, 1 did not return to Parts anti] 3 o'clock in the morning of Saturday, March 80, and at the hotel I learned thet the long distance gun had Killed seventy-five people {n an old Paris ohuroh during @ service 14 Friday afternoon, I vislted the church Sunday morning. Tt the German marksman Bad been within sighting distance and had deliberately aimed his shel he ld not have struck the old structure at a more vital spot, The missile, penetrating the roof, shattered a pillar supporting the roof arches, aad part of the roof and the pillar fell on the worshipping congregation. » alarm NEW YORKERS BEWILDERED AS FIRST SHELL STRIKES We walked from the Algonquin down Sixth Avenue to the McAlpin Whereupon we had an argument about where the bomb landed. J r breakfast. At Sixth Avenue and 424 Street, fust twenty-four minu twelve minutes tater, an we were leaving the room, we heard another ex er the first explosion, we heard a third. This appeared to plosion and the sound came from the general direction of the firs! Th: red at some point a considerable diatance to the southeast—-eay in second explosion told our eare—trained, by this time, to distinguish tn y Hall Park, And just as we had eeated ourselves at the table tn the a measure by the sound the size and effect of a bursting bomh—that the \cAlpin we heard a fourth explosion, this occurring exactly forty-eight | How Our Destroyers Got Their Names WOULD OUR NERVES STAND STRAIN LIKE PARISIANS'? From the devastated church I walked to the Cathedral of Notre Dame, | where Haster high mar ul front of the or any other elty bombardment was being celebrated, The beaut! etance, t east side of New York, which bursts out with volcante —_ 1K Ingram SAREE 4 mate, ore the torpedo hie an & " 1, ' a! was banked with sandbags and entrance was effected through o S t ressure , who gave bi to pave the nto the p | Ce si i 9 force {nto chaotic disorder under the pres ure f trivial unusual events, | Ingram Named for Gunner’s Mate, “Cassin” Iero, Who he wave Sie like Hee ye i Bate ng concrete tunnel built Into one of the doorways, The spacious body would hold if shells from a gun seventy-five miles away were dropped | ” vis Li Jan is S, in W, 5 . . * ttt the was jammed and the mass was sing with all the solemnity : ve Bis Life to Save His Ship—Cassi as Named At work on patrol, the Canin 1 be naming scores of ¢ of the Cathedral four days in succession into the plaza of Williamsburg Bridge. 1 find cones Wave! Naval Thema W dg Re nine ted Ma fad solic ys veo he land picturesque grandeur of an Easter morning celebration—although with myself wondering what would happen in Harlem {f a few shells from a or Brave ¢ nm War of 1812, 1 start heroea of this war will be thal ta sound of the bells of Notre Dame there was another historic stone pale, source shrouded tery and unbelief were dropped in the northern By Henry Collins Brown < and when de I bot rated t « worship of God, which had been shattered by a German end of Central Park; what would happen in the Bronx {f even a single we of “ 5 a nee Paneer ' ‘al a chal save:ct Siepet nee the it pace Acai comlaw tron & molt none could Aetarniine should fall cf a calm ((TAN Ee ee eee ok Seuniea abs hes annoup eadly mistle was about 400 yards|and men whose courage In ba 1 it tan atriking colneldence that there are exhibited to the devout every { t 149th St and Thi rags ; | duced by the present war ts t0 4 radical departure in this pract! Jed directiy for th 1] Bive un other worthy names for thes tts a strik ‘ spring morning at 249th Street and Third Avenue; what would happen ; \ he vonne y oa mpiday in the Cathedral of Notre Dame a part of the crown of thorns srr ne lower west side were myatery shells to tear up Union Square; what} make democracy # real tangible by ruling that in future all men of ' when It was sighted by | Mout effective fighters of t 4 seen. was prasscd on the brow of Jews Christ ea he was 16d out in Ge would happen in Brooklyn were shells to fall at ri r intervals about the | Particularly has this beentrue the navy, regardless of position, w 1 Ver 4 ang for Ri ' ipssubtled : 4 Ain) © ri e of the crose to which he was hanged, and one of the aafle Long [sland Railroad Station and It was known to the people that these jof the navy, No matter what the hereafter be recognized ho ns pency : Si Peis Wide. ane cution. The section of the crown of thorns was presented shells came from a gun protected inside German positions at a point seyenty-| reason, the navy has always arro-|tion of names of naw hoata on heb ag Peisigscanty'p Poe ncaa ne al PRC Pep aE é favors Louls 1X., who received It from the Emperor of Coa five miles away on Long Island |wated to itself a certain exchislveness equal footing with superior officers tha in the war of 1812, At a tantinople, a © plece of the cross and the nafl are ecciestastically, BRINGING THE BOMBARDMENT HOME TO NEW YORK and a certain air of aupertority, That} In an address in I ro, A would atrike uw the part of the ship| ment his ship, the 7 was yertfied as genuine, Tens of thousands visit the Cathedral on Good Brides To bring home to New York what Parls has gone through since /has ‘been exemplified to an extent in % Secretary Daniels stated that the where high + ven were placed and | loft without support and was attncked | 29 view these relies. + March 23 it is necess to put New Yorkers in the place of Parisians, |naming ships. All of the names were; /#*t oficial paper to which he aj . AS if these. explnced ihe Dy ten apek ee of jut here js Paris, seemingly accustomed to a siege such as the wildest For that purpose I eha entally transport myself to New York once|those of officers of some tank above Dane ta Aan ARERR J R by ff DOA EAI RO TAD prsgaped ba ; a n never concelyed, end I find myself wondering again weet gore; I shall in e o'clock on the morning of March 23 ordinary seaman cretary Daniels, sign an order naming the | t into t s the inatant nefora | host's Pe ha {9 afternoon !n New York under parauiel frou @ was reading (h papers {n my room in the Algonquin Hotel in who has always been a warm friend etroyer Ingram, in 7 ot ' ASAE TAC GAAPARME: LATAn Bona ad : ances. MARTIN GREBN,