The sword turned the tables on the pen with a vengeance early yesterday morning wh n the "North-China Daily News" took the brunt of a stream of shells from Chapei and won the uneasy distinction of suffering a more sustained strafing than any other important building in th~ Central District since Sino-Japanese hostilities flared up. Three big missiles struck its top storeys, one bursting through the west wall and nearly killing three Chinese, another exploding as it struck a steel balustrade, and the third miraculously passing through two windows more than 100 ft, apart and ending in the Whangpoo.
A dud shell splashed a yellow smear high up on the west wall of the Cathay Hotel, another pierced three floors of the Palace Hotel, ending up in the manager's bathroom, and three very live ones ruptured the superstructure of the Chartered Bank, Anderson, Meyer's building Yuen Ming Yuen Road was hit; three landed on the roof of the Shanghai Commercial and Savings Bank in Kiangse Road, another fell harmlessly on the Yokohama Specie Bank roof top and a dozen more endangered Navy Row. A casualty list of three lightly wounded Chinese and two foreigners whose nerves for hours twanged like discordant fiddle strings, was a merciful let-off from what might have easily be a multiple tragedy, Ironically, the shelling coincided with the release from siege of the Continental Bank godown defenders and two witnesses of the actual explosion, who had thrown themselves aside from the screaming path of the projectiles a split second earlier, had no doubt at all that the barrage came from the combat surrounding the Chinese citadel in Chapel, The First Strafing A member of the "North-China Daily News" reporting staff who was quizzing the squirts of flame from machine-gun bursts and the flashes of grenades and trench mortars Beyond the Thibet Road Bridge, at approximately one o'clock, from the newspaper's high roof top had the first terrifying taste of the flight of steel freight. A bolt from the black sped over the Chartered Bank building with the roar of a runaway express, Another came in its wake und fizzling sounds as of doused firebrands reached the ears of the flying scribe from the Whangpoo, For three-quarters of an hour only the sound of distant small arms fire and. tapping typewriters percolated through the editorial offices. Apparently the battery had had its hate and had then hahed. roof in the World from which. te At 145 am, the only newspaper naval, aetian! and military operations of a major war have been watched for months on end was revisited. A-veteran accompanied the earlier observer, a man who had his own valuation on Oriental artillery after weathering previous _conflagrations. Accordingly, he cocked an ear rather than an eye to the mile-away fighting in Chapei. Not so the ingenue to the East who reported that the battle had retreated from the roof top to ground floor obscurity from the watchers, The denial to that came in the shape of another fearful scream, a flash on the neighbouring building, a crash, and a giant blast of a which flattened both mem and possibly saved them from the next shell which struck the north-west wall three feet below and showered them with debris. The heavy-calibre quick-firer—or so it seemed—was simply pumping shells. Swish, swish, crash, swisH—the stream seemed unending, one hitting a building for every four that passed over to the Whangpoo ahead of the USS. Augusta.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.