The telegram from Halifax was quickly forwarded to Henry B. Endicott, the shoe magnate who chaired the Massachusetts Relief Commission. He promptly paid a visit to Governor McCall at the State House at about 11:00 a.m. Given the telegram’s scant information, neither man could be sure what had happened or what was needed, but they wasted no time firing off a telegram to the mayor of Halifax: “Understand your city in danger from explosion and conflagration. Reports only fragmentary. Massachusetts ready to go the limit in rendering every assistance you may be in need of. Wire me immediately.”
While waiting for a response, Governor McCall called a meeting of his recently formed Committee on Public Safety for 2:30 that afternoon, then made the short trip down from Boston’s golden-domed State House past the expansive Boston Commons to convene a “town hall” meeting. There, a hundred leaders from across the state formed the Massachusetts-Halifax Relief Committee.
After confirming that Halifax had not replied to the governor’s first telegram, and that no one in Washington had any information either, the committee decided to take action anyway, organizing a relief train to leave that evening. Governor McCall sent the following message by wireless: “Since sending my telegram this morning offering unlimited assistance, an important meeting of citizens has been held and Massachusetts stands ready to offer aid in any way you can avail yourself of it. We are prepared to send forward immediately a special train with surgeons, nurses and other medical assistance, but await advices from you.”
When Governor McCall received no response to that message either, he sent another: “Realizing time is of the utmost importance we have not waited for your answer but have dispatched the train. —Samuel W. McCall, Governor of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.”
To lead Boston’s relief effort in Halifax, McCall tapped Abraham C. Ratshesky, officially listed as A. C. in print, but called “Cap” in conversation. Born in Boston to Jewish immigrants in 1866, he founded the United States Trust Company thirty years later to serve the immigrants other banks often turned away. His bank succeeded, allowing Cap to give the Boston chapter of the American Red Cross its first headquarters, mount a campaign to save “Old Ironsides”—the USS Constitution—devote his time to the war effort after the United States entered that spring, and serve as the vice president of the Massachusetts Public Safety Committee.
On Thursday, December 6, at Governor McCall’s direction, Cap Ratshesky assembled a relief train consisting of two Pullmans, a baggage car, and a buffet car. They were filled with boxes upon boxes of medical supplies; eleven surgeons and doctors, an ophthalmologist and an anesthetist; ten nurses; six American Red Cross representatives, each with a different specialty; four leaders of different railroads; and five reporters from the Associated Press and four Boston papers: the Globe, the American, the Herald, and the Post.
The reporters were usually the least-noted members of the contingent, but in some ways they were the most important. In addition to getting complete access to a major international story, these reporters had a couple of crucial advantages. Unlike covering wartime stories in the United States, which were closely watched by military censors, in Canada they could write freely to a public hungry for authentic war stories. At the same time, because it was Halifax, a city close to Boston in almost every way, the reporters knew their subject, and knew their audience would care about it, too. In the process, they had the chance to provide a vital service: reporting on the true severity of the situation in Halifax and publishing it across North America.
The relief train pulled out of Boston a little after 10:00 that night, some thirteen hours after Mont-Blanc exploded—an impressive turnaround time for a committee that had not yet communicated with the people it was trying to help. The train had received special permission to pass all other train traffic en route to Halifax. The sooner it reached Halifax, the sooner those aboard could start helping.
The reporters wrote stories from the train, long before they arrived.
Boston Post, December 7, 1917:
BOSTON RUSHES RELIEF SPECIAL
Trainload of Physicians, Nurses, Red Cross Workers
and State Guard Officers on Way to Halifax
By Roy Atkinson, ON BOARD RELIEF TRAIN EN ROUTE TO HALIFAX, Dec. 6—
John F. Moors, chairman of Boston Red Cross civilian relief committee, together with colleagues, spent the first part of the journey planning to supplement organizations of relief in Halifax, especially [for the] Homeless, sick, injured, children, and rehab of victims, especially handicapped.
They still were just guessing, working with only a patchy telegram from Halifax as their guide. When the train pulled out of Boston, the people on the Massachusetts-Halifax Relief Committee thought they might be overdoing it with four train cars packed with medical professionals and supplies. But when the Boston party arrived in Saint John, New Brunswick, on Friday, December 7, and dozens of relief workers boarded with more stories about crushed buildings and broken windows, the Boston contingent surmised they might have underestimated the city’s needs.
“The most we obtained were rumors,” Cap Ratshesky said, but “the more we obtained the worse they sounded.” At the next station, Ratshesky wired Boston for a trainload of building materials, particularly glass and putty.
The people already in Halifax couldn’t afford to wait. Once the Haligonians had organized their committees, they put them to work.
The Transportation Committee was authorized to secure automobiles to take the newly homeless to shelters, the injured to hospitals, and the relief workers to the damaged areas most in need. But when only twenty-five car owners volunteered to lend their autos or driving services to the committee, the leaders authorized their committee members to commandeer any car whenever they saw one or heard of one in storage.
The Emergency Shelter Committee opened an office at City Hall where people who needed shelter, or who had shelter to offer, could register so supply could be matched up with demand. Committee members toured the North End to find survivors in destroyed homes and help them find shelter elsewhere, and set up first-aid dressing stations at drugstores, shelters, and the YMCA downtown.
The Finance Committee opened a line of credit at the Bank of Nova Scotia, which was eager to help, while the Food Committee arranged for suppliers to deliver boxes of food staples to emergency shelters, hospitals, and dressing stations, and to set up a food depot at City Hall.
The Mortuary Committee would be burdened with many unenviable tasks, but the first was straightforward: instead of storing the corpses at a half dozen locations around town, which made it more difficult for soldiers to transport the bodies and record-keepers and families to find them, they needed to select a single building to house an official, temporary morgue. They quickly settled on the Chebucto Road School, which, despite its broken windows, had a lot to recommend it: it was large, it could be quickly cleared out and converted to its new purpose, and it was close to Pier 6, minimizing the transport of corpses and travel for their relatives. The committee also needed a place that could keep bodies for as long as possible, giving them the best chance of being identified.
They designated the upper floors for offices and the wide-open, cooler basement for the bodies, which they planned to lay in rows and cover with sheets. The Royal Engineers quickly fixed up the damaged school, covered its windows, and cleaned the space. As soon as people learned of the location, bodies began to pile up outside the building, stacked two and three high until morgue workers could retrieve them.
The Relief Committee also dispatched crews of volunteers to put out fires and turn off water mains, faucets, and spigots, and to pick up the dead—tagging their names, when they knew them, to the victims’ wrists, or simply attaching a number when they didn’t—loading them onto rudimentary flat wagons dozens at a time.
They soon learned to conduct this dispiriting job late at night so as not to offend the friends and relatives of the deceased. But because everyone could hear the horses’ hooves eac
h night, the rolling midnight morgue was a poorly kept secret, one that woke many Haligonians whose homes still lacked windows.
Chapter 25
A Steady Stream of Victims
If the sight of the survivors on the No. 10 train pulling into Truro stunned the locals helping them off, it was nothing compared to the shock of those who took the train the other direction into Halifax.
Dr. Percy McGrath had graduated from Dalhousie Medical School in May, and like so many of his classmates, he immediately signed on to serve the Crown in the Great War. He was stationed at Camp Aldershot, about 65 miles from Halifax and just 9 miles from Ernest Barss’s hometown of Wolfville. When McGrath heard about the explosion, he and his wife, a nurse, gathered their equipment and all the medical supplies they could find and boarded a relief train in Kentville heading to Halifax. The seats were already filling with medical personnel and track and bridge repairmen.
Word of the calamity had spread quickly throughout the province, although no one had much accurate information about it. When the train pulled into each town along the way, the people boarding the train knew progressively more about the disaster, and consequentially more fully grasped Halifax’s desperation.
That included Dr. Elliott and Ernest Barss, who likely boarded the same train at the next stop in Wolfville. The conductor made the journey to Halifax—or as close as he could get to it—in record time. The relief workers got off the train in Rockingham and walked the remaining distance. It wasn’t easy trekking either, especially for Barss and his cane, requiring them to navigate the wreckage until they reached the northern tip of Barrington Street, which the military had cleared with great efficiency that morning.
On Dr. McGrath’s walk, he saw survivors being pulled from basements even as their houses were collapsing on them. People bumped past them carrying victims in bundles or sometimes a basket, on their way to the hospital or the morgue. A doctor walking with McGrath “muttered something about Dante’s Inferno.”
It’s no surprise that a doctor like Percy McGrath, who had never seen trench warfare, would be astonished by the scenes in Halifax that day. But it says something that Ernest Barss, who had experienced just about everything a soldier could, was just as shocked. This carnage wasn’t coming from trenches stretching for miles but from the home front, a picturesque town Barss had grown up loving, which now produced casualties at a rate that would rival Ypres, the very place Barss had been willing to take a bullet in the arm to escape.
“Of course you have read of the terrible disaster down there,” Barss wrote to his uncle Andrew Townson in Rochester, New York, in a typed letter that ran to five single-spaced pages. “No reports could exaggerate the terrible damage and loss of life. We couldn’t get within three miles of the city for the whole space in between was a blazing mass of ruins.”
The relief workers were guided by an army officer and his men. When they passed Richmond, Barss was aghast.
“I saw some terrible scenes of desolation and ruin at the front, but never, even in that old hard-hammered City of Ypres, did I ever see anything so absolutely complete. In that entire area of over three square miles in the immediate vicinity of the explosion there was not one stick or stone standing on another. Every house and building had just crumpled up and the whole was a raging mass of flames.”
Because the heat from the fires was so intense, their army guides kept Barss, Dr. Elliott, and company moving along at a brisk pace. That wasn’t easy either, thanks to the “mud about up to our knees caused by the tidal wave, which swept over everything.” He didn’t mention the toll such hard walking took on his damaged left foot, but he kept up without complaint.
The entire city had been placed under martial law just a few hours after the event, Barss noticed, and parties of soldiers were working everywhere among the ruins, “pulling out the dead and the almost dead, and trying to get them identified. We had to walk between long rows of hundreds and hundreds of dead. Men, women, and the most pitiful part of it all, little children. They were lying in every conceivable position, their bodies in many cases crushed or burnt out of all recognition, and all so blackened and charred that one would hardly know them for anything but heaps of charred rags. The blood was everywhere, and even when we got up to the less ruined part of the city the sidewalks and streets were strewed with it everywhere.”
After Dr. Elliott and Barss got past Richmond, they were able to commandeer “a motor” to take them to City Hall, which must have been welcomed. The drive into town also gave them a better sense of the damage done.
“Practically the whole water front was wrecked,” Barss said. “All the large new steel and concrete piers just completed recently were wrecked beyond repair. People were killed everywhere, all over the city, and there was hardly a whole ceiling or pane of glass in the city or within a radius of five miles.”
A few hours later, an eye doctor named G. H. Cox boarded the first relief train from New Glasgow in northwest Nova Scotia. He described the Devastated Area as “going from one corner of hell to another.”
Captain Frederick T. Tooke, an ocular surgeon from Montreal, wrote, “The sense of depression was almost unbearable. Not a sound could be heard, railway stations were not running, ours had only been the second to arrive in Halifax, electric cars had been suspended, one could not even hear a motor horn. The streets seemed empty. The silence was intolerable and Halifax at first impression seemed in fact a city of the dead.”
When the various groups of relief workers reached what used to be the North Street Station and King Edward Hotel in Richmond, the guards arranged transport to City Hall, where committee members assigned doctors, nurses, and other volunteers to various hospitals, centers, and makeshift facilities of all sorts, a task that was more complicated than the committee members had expected.
When a committee leader instructed one of the volunteers to take a group of wounded to St. Mary’s Hospital in Richmond, he was informed that wasn’t possible. Not because of the blocked roads, the fires, or the downed wires, but because the hospital—the rooms, the beds, the doctors, and the patients—was gone, blasted away by the explosion. Another volunteer had been sent to the Canadian Infantry’s North Barracks to solicit more help, only to discover that it, too, had been obliterated.
The military, civilian, and private hospitals were all swamped with patients. Wounded mothers had to bring their children with them, which added to the crowding and confusion, as did hundreds of desperate family members searching the halls for their relatives. Because the records of those admitted were either woefully incomplete or nonexistent, the only way people could find relatives was by walking slowly past each bed, trying to recognize faces that had been covered in black gunk, lacerated, severely bruised, or broken.
Most facilities were severely damaged. The explosion had cost Rockhead Hospital, which housed eighty convalescent soldiers, all its windows and many of its steam pipes. Nonetheless, by the first afternoon, the soldiers recovering there had sacrificed their beds for about ninety newly injured explosion victims.
If the facilities were pushed to their limits, so were the doctors and nurses. “I wish I could describe the scene at the hospital adequately,” Halifax’s Dr. Murphy wrote of Victoria General, one of the city’s biggest and busiest hospitals. “The ground in front was jammed with autos, wagons and every conveyance capable of carrying a sufferer. The hallways, offices and every bit of floor space was littered with human beings suffering with all degrees and manners of wounds and injuries.”
Dr. Murphy, two other doctors, and two local eye specialists operated nonstop for three days and nights, treating 375 wounded on the first day alone. Before they finished, they had received 575 victims at a hospital that had enough space and staff to handle only 200 beds.
“The predominance of facial injuries,” Victoria General superintendent W. W. Kenny wrote, “rendered the scene all the more ghastly because of the freely flowing blood.”
A doctor at another hospital praised t
he small staff of nurses, who “controlled the frenzied patients, some of whom attempted to escape and to take their lives, amidst the initial confusion following the explosion.”
Able-bodied survivors set up the wounded on every flat surface they could find in the hospitals, the city buildings, and even the doctors’ homes. On December 6, hundreds of emergency surgeries were performed on store counters, front porches, and dining room tables, often without anesthesia.
The YMCA was converted from the unofficial home of bootleggers into a makeshift emergency hospital within a few hours. When Dalhousie’s medical students responded to the call for volunteers, some were sent to the YMCA, including fourth-year medical student Florence J. Murray, the minister’s daughter from rural Nova Scotia. When the blast broke the windows at Dalhousie University 2 miles away, the medical students knew their time had come to help.
When Murray reported for duty at the YMCA, the commanding officer asked her, “Has your class had instruction in anesthesia?”
“Yes, sir,” Murray replied, although years later she admitted, “There was no opportunity to say that all in the class except myself had had this training. In the army one doesn’t explain. One answers questions.”
Murray’s answer was good enough for the C.O. “Go to the operating room and give anesthetics,” he ordered, and she did as instructed. Her first patient was six years old, which gave her pause. “Did a child require the same amount of anesthetic as an older person, or should she have a smaller dose?” she wondered. “I didn’t know. I knew I should watch the eye reflexes to help judge the depth of anesthesia, but this unfortunate child had lost both eyes.”
The Great Halifax Explosion Page 23