As I hurried across the square I looked up at the cathedral spire.
It was swaying and rocking in the air like the mast of a ship
at sea. The lace-work fell from it in blocks of stone. The people
rushed screaming through the rain of death. Many were struck down,
and lay where they fell.
I ran as fast as I could. But it was impossible to run far. Every
street and alley vomited men--all struggling together, fighting,
shouting, or shrieking, striking one another down, trampling over
the fallen--a hideous melee. There was an incessant rattling noise
in the air, and heavier peals as of thunder shook the houses. Here
a wide rent yawned in a wall--there a roof caved in--the windows
fell into the street in showers of broken glass.
How I got through this inferno I do not know. Buffeted and blinded,
stumbling and scrambling to my feet again, turning this way or
that way to avoid the thickest centres of the strife, oppressed and
paralyzed by a feeling of impotence that put an iron band around
my heart, driven always by the intense longing to reach my wife and
child, somehow I had a sense of struggling on.
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