The True Story of Our National Calamity of Flood, Fire and Tornado. Logan Marshall

      THE CITIES AND TOWNS INCLOSED BY THE HEAVY BLACK DOTTED LINES WERE THE CHIEF SUFFERERS BY THE SWEEP OF WATERS

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      The scene in a town is particularly ghastly. How ghastly it is, you would have realized if you could have gone with the writer into the flooded districts of Ohio and Indiana, traveling from point to point in automobiles and motor boats, penetrating to the heart of the flood in boats even before the waters receded, and afterwards on foot. The upper floors 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 another all their lives, and it seemed not so much a duty as a natural thing to do to respond to the call from the West, where people had lost their lives and others were homeless and suffering.

      THE COURAGE OF THE STRICKEN

      This spirit of helpfulness is a fine thing. But even finer was the spirit of self-help. Secretary Garrison's telegram to President Wilson from the flooded districts that the people in the towns and cities affected had the situation well in hand and that very little emergency assistance was needed, was a splendid testimonial to the courage and the resourcefulness of the people of the Middle West and the admirable cheerfulness which they exhibited during the trying days that followed the beginning of the calamity. There was not a whimper, but on the contrary there was a spirit of optimism that must prove to be most stimulating to the rest of the country.

      MEN THAT SHOWED THEMSELVES HEROES

      But perhaps the finest thing of all is the memory of the heroes that showed themselves. When death and disaster, in the form of flood and fire, swept Dayton, John H. Patterson arose with the tide to the level of events. Patterson is the man, more than any other, who brought cosmos out of chaos. When the flood was rising and nobody knew what the result would be, John H. Patterson began to wire for motor boats. He did not ask, he demanded. And the motor boats came. Patterson took all of the carpenters from the National Cash Register—one hundred and fifty skilled woodworkers—and set them to work making flat boats. The entire force of the great institution was at the disposal of the people who needed help. And not a man or a woman was docked or dropped from the payroll. Everybody had time and a third.

      As for John H. Patterson himself, he worked in three shifts of eight hours each; and for forty-eight hours he practically neither slept nor ate. And then, by way of rest, he took a Turkish bath and a horseback ride, and forty winks, and was again on the job—this man of seventy, who has known how to breathe and how to think and who carries with him the body of a wrestler and the lavish heart of youth!

      There were many other heroes—too many to mention here—but we cannot forget John A. Bell, the telephone operator who was driven to the roof of the building, where with emergency instruments he cut in on one of the wires, and for two days and nights, in the driving rain, without food or drink or dry clothing, kept the outside world informed as to what was going on and the needs of the sufferers. What Bell endured during those long hours was enough to kill the heart in a very strong man. Yet his greeting to Governor Cox, over the crippled wire Thursday morning, was: "Good morning, Governor. The sun is shining in Dayton."

      Could anything be finer! Men with such spirit are great men, and the spirit that was in John H. Patterson and John A. Bell is the same spirit that was in John Jacob Astor, and Archie Butt, and George B. Harris, and Charles M. Hayes, and the band of musicians on the Titanic that played in water waist deep.

      As I stood amid the slimy ruins of Dayton the day after the waters receded, Brigadier-General Wood said to me, "There go Patterson and Bell. Would you like to shake hands with them?" And I said, "Just now I would rather shake hands with those two men than own the National Cash Register Company."

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