The True Story of Our National Calamity of Flood, Fire and Tornado | Page 4

of houses not torn from their foundations look all right, but
it fairly makes you sick to see the waves of turbid water lapping at
second floor sills, with tangled tree branches and broken furniture
floating about. It seems horrible--it is horrible--to think of that yellow
flood pouring into pleasant rooms where a few hours before the family
sat in peace and fancied security--roaring over the threshold, swirling
higher and higher against the walls, setting the cherished household
treasures astray, driving the furniture hither and thither, drowning out
cheerful rooms in darkness and death.

If anything can be worse than this, it is the scenes when the waters
recede. The shade trees that stood in the streets so trim and beautiful
are all bedraggled and bent, their branches festooned with floating
wreckage and all manner of offensive things, their leaves sodden, their
trunks caked with mud. The streets are seas of yellow ooze. Garden
fences and hedges are twisted or torn away. Reeking heaps of
indescribable refuse lie moldering where there were smooth lawns and
bright flower beds. The houses that stand are all smeared with the dirt
that shows the height of the flood.
But inside those houses--that is the dreadful thing. The rooms that the
water filled are like damp caves. Mud lies thick on the floors, the walls
are streaked with slime, and the paper hangs down in dismal festoons.
Some pictures may remain hanging, but they are all twisted and
tarnished. The furniture is a tumbled mass of confusion and filth. But
the worst is the reek of decay and death about the place.
THE TRAGEDY OF DEATH AND SUFFERING
But there is something greater in its tragedy than all this--something
greater than a great region where splendid cities, towns and humble
villages alike are without resource--something greater than a region of
broken dams and embankments and of placid rivers gone mad in flood,
bridgeless, uncontrollable, widened into lakes, into seas. It is the
hundreds of dead who died a hideous death, and the hundreds of
thousands of living who are left helpless and homeless, and all but
hopeless.
Just for one moment think--we in our warm, comfortable houses,
comfortably clad, safe, smiling and happy--of the half million of our
fellow creatures out yonder shivering and trembling and dying, in the
grasp of the "destruction that wasteth at noonday," swiftly pursued by
"the pestilence which walketh in darkness." The leaping terror of the
flames climaxes the terror of the harrowing day and the helpless,
hopeless night of agony and sorrow and despair.
Think of the men, women, children and the little babies crushed and
mangled amid the wreck of shattered homes--but yesterday as beautiful

and bright as ours--the pallid faces of hundreds floating as corpses in
the stately streets turned into rushing rivers by the relentless
floods--brothers and sisters of ours, freezing and starving in homes
turned suddenly into broken rafts and battered houseboats amid the
muddy deluge, while the pitying stars look down at night upon
thousands, wet, weeping, shivering, hungry, helpless and homeless,
with the host of their unrecognized and unburied dead, in this frightful
holocaust of fire and flood and pestilence.
Think of the region where people are huddled shivering on hills or
housetops, watching the swelling waters; where practically every
convenience, means of communication, comfort, appliance of
civilization has been wiped out or stopped; where there is little to eat
and no way of getting food save from the country beyond the waters;
where millionaire and pauper, Orville Wright and humble scrub-woman,
stand shoulder to shoulder in the bread-line that winds towards the
relief stations, all alike dependent for once on charity for the barest
sustenance.
THE SYMPATHY OF NATIONS
These are the tragedies that touch our hearts. These are the tragedies
that have brought messages of condolence from King George of
England, from the King of Italy, from the Shah of Persia and from
other monarchs of Europe. These are the tragedies that impelled a
widow in a small town in Massachusetts, in sending her mite for the
relief of the unfortunate, to write: "Just one year ago, when the ill-fated
Titanic deprived me of my all, the Red Cross Society lost not a moment
in coming to my aid."
These are tragedies, too, that have prompted wage-earners all over the
country to contribute to the relief of the flood sufferers a part of their
own means of support that could ill be spared--soiled and worn bills
and silver pieces laid down with unspoken sympathy by men and
women and children, too, who wanted nothing said about it and turned
and went out to face the struggle for existence again. These people did
not think twice about whether they should help those in greater
necessity than their own. They had been helping one