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 CHAPTER V

THE RAIN OF DEATH

the whole afternoon the heavy German artillery roared, belching forth their fiery vengeance upon London.

Hour after hour they pounded away, until St. Pancras Church was a heap of ruins, and the Foundling Hospital a veritable furnace, as well as the Parcel Post offices and the University College in Gower Street. In Hampstead Road many of the shops were shattered, and in Tottenham Court Road both Maple's and Shoolbred's suffered severely, for shells bursting in the centre of the roadway had smashed every pane of glass in the fronts of both buildings.

The quiet squares of Bloomsbury were, in some cases, great yawning ruins—houses with their fronts torn out revealing the shattered furniture within. Streets were, indeed, filled with tiles, chimney pots, fallen telegraph wires, débris of furniture, stone steps, paving stones, and fallen masonry. Many of the thoroughfares, such as the Pentonville-Road, Copenhagen Street, and Holloway Road, were, at points, quite impassable on account of the ruins that blocked them. Into the Northern Hospital, in the Holloway Road, a shell fell, shattering one of the wards, and killing or maiming every one of the patients in the ward in question, while the church in Tufnell Park Road was burning fiercely. Upper Holloway, Stoke Newington, Highbury, Kingsland, Dalston, Hackney, Clapton, and Stamford Hill were being swept at long range by the guns on Muswell 344