National Affairs: Ad Caelum

A beauty spot of New Jersey, clad in fat trees and voluptuous clover on a still,close night last week . . . now lies prostrated, ravished, wrecked, shivered, torn, blasted.As if razed by ten years’ surging warfare, the fields and villages nearby Lake Denmark, shrouded in grey gunpowder dust, welter in the July heat, pocked and gashed by a terrific bombardment.

Last week for nearly two days 16-in. armor-piercing shells, big shells, little shells, powder, TNT, nitroglycerine, depth bombs, whined and slashed wantonly, smashed hamlets in all directions, popped $93,000,000 worth of Government property, slaughtered many a U. S. soldier, ripped shell holes, thundered, wounded and injured over a hundred, far and near. Fleeing refugees scuttled to remote stations, men hid in shell holes, swam the Lake, lay unsuccored on the smoking fields.

Lightning had hit the U. S. Arsenal at Lake Denmark, Government officials believe. The number of casualties was miraculously small, according to army officers. Most of the men injured were knocked down by the concussion of the explosions as the fragments of the fusillade hurtled over their heads.

Ambulances conveyed dismembered bodies to the Brooklyn Navy Yard, to lie beside the victims of the S-51.