The cellar of the house had been raided of everything it had. The corks of whisky bottles had been ven into the bottles and the y left untouched. All the gin stock had been drunk. Wine had been sampled, with the ned of the bottles knocked off, and the contents hardly touched. Brandy seemed to have been popular, as empty bottles and debris testified. And even Cointreau had had its votaries among the looters. Pers the early discovery of the cellar might have accounted for the apparent senselessness of the rest of the looting, for not a place in the house had been left untouched.
Even the tank room had been had shell or bomb craters in their gardens. One house, exceptionally strongly built, had evidently defied the efforts of the looters to break in through the doors. Large holes had been knocked through its walls apd the looters had entered that way. What they had done inside the party did not examine, since the means of ingress was more suited to a doller-maker than a reporter and time and aeroplanes had to be considered.
The stream of forlorn humanity pouring towards the boundaries of the foreign areas was thickest near Siccawei, where hundreds of families, carrying their goods and chattels, children, leading goats and sometimes buffaloes, staggered away from the fighting area. Further west the stream was thinner, and heads bowed down by heavy loads were turned to see the bombers as they passed over, loads were cast aside, and their bearers sought shelter where they could.
Wounded Stagger In In the stream could be noted many wounded. Most of them were walking, Others were being brought in rickshaws. But there were obviously not enough rickshaws to go found, for others, bleeding badly from chest and abdominal wounds, were doing their best to get down the road by themselves, or were being helped along by less seriously injured comrades. The stream of refugees paid no attention to them whatever; nor did the wounded expect that they would.
The Chinese soldiers seen at different posts along that road seemed cheerful and in fine fettle. They seemed interested in the foreign party, but incurious, and even when the foreign car bucked a trench across the middle of the road and sent a flimsy plank covering flying into the air, they did not seem to mind, but retrieved the boards and relaid the planking as if that were part of the day's work—which perhaps it was.
The foreign party accomplished little, except, perhaps, to alter their perspective as regards to Japanese bombing. There is a certain thrill, in watching bombs drop outside the Settlement while the watcher himself is comfortable on a roof in a neutral area. But it is quite a different matter to be in the place—or near it—when the bombs are coming down.
Fritz a diminutive Chinese who acted as chauffeur and interpreter for the party, liked the bombing no better than his companions, and did several tricks in plastering himself against walls and almost disappear-ug between cracks in the masonry a manner reminiscent of the invisible robber" of early cine-motograph days. His companions envied, him his girth, since theirs, plaster themselves as close to walls as they would, still left uncomfortably large sections of themselves exposed to sharp-eyed Japanese observers. And cid not a Japanese spokesman say the other day that the Japanese airmen could hit an end hill?
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.