Chicago's Awful Theater Horror Part 6

Some bodies were in a sitting position, while others had fallen forward, with the head resting on the seat in front, as though in prayer. Almost all were terribly burned.

In the aisles lay women and children who had staid in their seats until they finally were convinced that the danger was real. Then they had attempted to get to the door.

The smoke was so heavy the firemen worked with difficulty, but finally it cleared and workmen who were hastily sent by the Edison company equipped forty arc lights, which shone bravely through the smoke. With this help the firemen searched to better effect, and found bodies that in the blackness they had missed.

"Give that girl to some one else and get back there," shouted Chief Musham to a fireman. The fireman never answered but kept on with his burden.

"Hand that girl to some one else," shouted the battalion chief.

The fireman looked up. Even in the flickering light of the lantern the chief carried one could see the tears coming from the red eyes and falling down the man's blackened cheeks.

"Chief," said the fireman, "I've got a girl like this at home. I want to carry this one out."

"Go ahead," said the chief. The little group working at the head of the stairs broke apart while the fireman, holding the body tightly, made his way slowly down the stairs.

One by one the dead were taken from the pile in the angle. The majority of them were women. On some faces was an expression of terrible agony, but on others was a look of calmness and serenity, and firemen sometimes found it hard to believe they were dead. Three firemen carried the body of a young woman down the stairs in a rubber blanket. She appeared alive. Her hands were clasped and held flowers. Her eyes were closed and she seemed almost to smile. She looked as though she was asleep, but it was the sleep of death.

In the dark and smoke, with the dripping water and the dead piled in heaps everywhere, the Iroquois theater had been turned into a tomb by the time the rescue parties had begun their work.

MOAN INSPIRES WORKERS IN MAD EFFORT TO SAVE.

The moan that the frantic workers heard as they struggled to untangle the ma.s.s of bodies gave the police hope that many in the heap might be alive.

"We can't do it, chief," shouted one of the policemen. "We can't untangle them."

"We must take these bodies out of the way to get down to those who are alive," replied the chief. "This man here is dead; lay hold, now, boys, and pull him out."

Two big firemen caught the body by the shoulders and struggled and pulled until they had it free. Then another body was taken out, and then again the workers seemed unable to unloose the dead. Again came that terrible moan through the ma.s.s.

"For G.o.d's sake, get down to that one who's alive," implored O'Neill, almost in despair.

The policemen pulled off their heavy overcoats and worked frantically at the heap. Often a body could not be moved except when the firemen and police dragged with a "yo, heave," like sailors hauling on a rope. As fast as the bodies were freed one policeman, or sometimes two or three, would stagger down the stairs with their burdens.

Over the heap of bodies crawled a fireman carrying something in his arms.

"Out of the way, men, let me out! The kid's alive."

The workers fell back and the fireman crawled over the heap and was helped out. He ran down the stairs three steps at a time to get the child to a place where help might be given before it was too late. Then other firemen from inside the theater pa.s.sed out more bodies, which were handed from one policeman to another until some on the outside of the heap could take the dead and carry them downstairs.

Suddenly a policeman pulling at the heap gave a shout.

"I've got her, chief!" he said. "She's alive, all right!"

"Easy there, men, easy," cried Schuettler; "but hurry and get that woman to a doctor!"

A girl, apparently 18 years old, was moaning faintly. The policeman released her from the tangled heap, and a big fireman, lifting her tenderly in his arms, hurried with her to the outside of the building.

"There must be more alive," said the chief. "Work hard, boys."

There was hardly any need to ask the men to work harder, for they were pulling and hauling as though their own lives depended on their efforts.

Everybody worked.

The reporters, the only ones in the theater besides the police and firemen, laid aside their pencils and note books and struggled down the wet, slippery stairs, carrying the dead. Newspaper artists threw their sketch books on the floor to jump forward and pick up the feet or head of a body that a fireman or policeman found too heavy to carry alone.

Constantly now a stream of workers was pa.s.sing slowly down the stairs.

Usually two men supported each body, but often some giant policeman or fireman strode along with a body swung over his shoulders. Coming down the stairs was a fireman with a girl of 16 clasped in his arms.

"Isn't that girl alive?" asked the chief.

"No," shouted two or three men, who had jumped to see. "She's dead, poor thing, rest her soul," said the fireman reverently, and then he picked his way down the stairs. Half-way down the marble steps two arms suddenly clasped the fireman's neck.

He started so he missed his footing and would have fallen had not a policeman steadied him.

"She's alive, she's alive!" shouted the fireman. "Git out of the way, there, out of the way, men," and he went dashing headlong out into the open air and through the crowd to a drug store.

One child after another was taken from the heap and pa.s.sed out to be carried downstairs. Some were little boys in new suits, sadly torn, and with their poor little faces wreathed in agony. On their foreheads was the seal of death.

A big fireman came crawling from the heavy smoke of the inner balcony. He carried a girl of 10 years in his arms. Her long, flaxen hair half covered the pure white face.

A gray haired man with a gash on his head apparently had fallen down the stairs. A woman's face bore the mark of a boot heel. A woman with a little boy clasped tight in her arms was wedged into a corner. Her clothes were almost torn from her, and her face was bruised. The child was unmarked, as she had thrown her own body over his to protect him.

Out of the ma.s.s of bodies when the police began their work protruded one slender little white hand, clinching a pair of pearl opera gla.s.ses, which the little owner had tried to save, in spite of the fact that her own life was being crushed out of her. Watches, pocketbooks and chatelaine bags were scattered all through the pile. One man was detailed to make a bag out of a rubber coat and take care of the property that was handed to him.

While the police were working so desperately at the fatal angle, another detail of police and firemen were working on the third floor. At the main entrance of the gallery lay another heap of bodies, and there was still another at the angle of the head of the stairs leading to the floor below.

Here the sight was even worse than the terrible scene presented at the landing of the first balcony.

The bodies on the landing were not burned. A jam had come there, and many had been stamped under foot and either killed outright or left to suffocate. Many of the bodies were almost stripped of clothing and bore the marks of remorseless heels.

After these had been carried out, the firemen returned again and again from the pitchy blackness of the smoke-filled galleries, dragging bodies, burned sometimes beyond recognition.

NONE LEFT ALIVE IN GALLERY.

While now and then some one had been found alive in the other fatal angle, no one was rescued by searchers in the top gallery. The bodies had to be laid along the hall until the merchants in State street began sending over blankets. Men from the streets came rushing up the stairs, bending under the weight of the blankets they carried on their shoulders. Soon they went back to the street again, this time carrying their blankets weighed down with a charred body.

DEAD AND DYING CARRIED INTO NEARBY RESTAURANT BY SCORES.

The scenes in John R. Thompson's restaurant in Randolph street, adjoining the theater, were ghastly beyond words.

Few half hours in battle bring more of horror than the half hour that turned the cafe into a charnel house, with its tumbled heaps of corpses, its shrieks of agony from the dying, and the confusion of doctors and nurses working madly over bodies all about as they strove to bring back the spark of life.

Bodies were everywhere--piled along the walls, laid across tables, and flung down here and there--some charred beyond recognition, some only scorched, and others black from suffocation; some crushed in the rush of the panic, others but the poor, broken remains of those who leaped into death. And most of them--almost all of them--were the forms of women and children. It is estimated that more than 150 bodies were accounted for in Thompson's alone.

The continuous tramp of the detachments of police bearing in more bodies, the efforts of the doctors to restore life, and the madness of those who surged in through the police lines to ransack piles of bodies for relatives and friends, made up a scene of pandemonium of which it is hard to form a conception. There was organization of the fifty physicians and nurses who fought back death in the dying; there was organization of the police and firemen; but still the restaurant was a chaos that left the head bewildered and the heart sick.

The work was too much for even the big force of doctors that had flocked there to volunteer their services. Everybody in which there was the slightest semblance of life was given over to the physicians, who with oxygen tanks and resuscitative movements sought to revive the heart beats.

As soon as death was certain the body was drawn from the table and laid beneath, to give place to another. But systematic as was this effort, heaps of bodies remained which the doctors had not touched.