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282 WITH THE GERMAN ARMIES IN THE WEST
ments, and the carpets had almost disappeared beneath the
thick white dust. The windows had been smashed to atoms.
Mirrors had cracked into all sorts of curious starry shapes
which threatened to collapse altogether if touched. All the
furniture lay about in little bits. The tablecloths had been
torn to shreds. Yet in the corners of the room, more particu-
larly the western corner, the tables were still standing, but
glasses and crockery had, of course, been smashed. I noticed
the bases of claret and champagne glasses still standing, whilst
the bowls had been shivered to pieces, leaving an edge like an
irregular saw blade.
When the bombardment began some fifty officers had assem-
bled together for dinner in this room, and some of them had
already begun to eat. Most of them had been seated in the
western end of the room, and had thus miraculously escaped
death. But at a window in the eastern corner of the room a
surgeon, Dr. Lippe, had sat down with an Adjutant of the
Naval Brigade, and they had already begun their meal when
the bombardment commenced. A shell had burst its way
through the lower half of this very window. Probably the
hotel had already been struck by a couple of shells, and as
the two gentlemen had perhaps felt that they were rather too
exposed where they were, it seems that Dr. Lippe had got up
to go away, but he got no further than the other end of the
table when he was literally torn to shreds by the shell, which
struck him right in the back. What was left of his body
lay flung forward on the floor, the head resting on the arms
in a pool of blood. All that was left of the uniform was a
few ragged tatters. A piece of one of his legs was found under
a table at the other end of the room, and all the rest of him,
in the form of blood-stains, organs and bowels and their con-
tents, were spattered about the white walls and ceiling and
the tablecloths. Dr. Schönfelder, who had hurried to the spot,
could do nothing but order the remains of his colleague to be
gathered together in a tablecloth and carried to a mortuary.
The Adjutant, who was badly wounded in the head, was taken
to the nearest hospital. A fine-looking Landsturm soldier,
who was in the restaurant together with his son, told me that
all the other diners had got out of it alive, but most of them
had been hurled to the ground by the air pressure, and some
had been cut and bruised by flying splinters. They were
dazed for the moment, but soon recovered.
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