I replied: "Yes, the Veil of S. Agata preserved Catania this time, but it may desert her next time as the Letter of the Madonna deserted you last winter. By the by, what has become of that miraculous Letter? Was it destroyed or did anyone save it?"
They did not know and muttered something about "stupidagini," and perhaps there will be no need to trouble oneself with any such thoughts when one is living the life after death. Later on, in another part of the island, I asked a dignitary of the Church, who had not been through the earthquake, what had become of the Madonna"s Letter and he a.s.sured me that it had been preserved. I had pretty well made up my mind that this would be his answer before putting the question; but if the earthquake had destroyed Girgenti and I had asked him about the letter from the Devil, which is said to be preserved in the cathedral there, I should have expected him to tell me that that letter had not survived the shock.
GIUSEPPE PLATANIA
In Catania I saw my friend Lieutenant Giuseppe Platania, who was quartered in Messina during the winter of 1908-9. He was away for Christmas and returned about midnight on the 27th December and went to bed at two in the morning on the 28th. He was awakened by the falling of a picture, which hit him. He guessed the reason, covered his head with the pillows and lay still, waiting. He had to wait fifty-seven seconds--at least many people told me the earthquake lasted fifty-seven seconds, but the recording instruments were broken, so it is not certain how long it lasted. When the room left off rocking, Giuseppe put out his hand for the match-box, but the table was no longer by his bedside. He heard cries for help, and a man who was sleeping in the next room came with a light, then he saw that the floor of his room had fallen, but not under his bed, which was in a corner. He and the man with the light managed to get to the window and let themselves down into a side street, but they saw no way out because the exit was closed by the fallen houses.
Their window was on the first floor and they climbed back into the house, helped another man who was there, got themselves some clothes and returned into the side street. Here they felt no better off and were afraid of the houses falling on them, but Giuseppe"s soldier servant, Giulio Giuli, a contadino of Nocera, appeared among them. He had come to look for his master and crept through the ruins into the side street. He told them that Messina was destroyed, which they would not believe; everyone seems to have supposed at first that the earthquake had only damaged his own house. Giulio showed them the way out, and so they got into the town and realised the extent of the disaster. If Giulio had not come, Giuseppe and his friends would probably have been destroyed by more houses falling into their narrow street before they could have found a way out.
Giuseppe had changed his bedroom about ten days previously. The house he used to live in was completely destroyed, he showed me a photograph of its ruins. His mother and his brother Giovanni, in Catania, heard of the disaster, but could get no particulars because communication was broken.
Giovanni went to Messina to inquire for his brother, not knowing where his new room was, but he knew the number of his regiment. He stopped a soldier in the street who was wearing the number in his cap and who told him where to find Giuseppe. In the meantime Giulio had walked about fifteen miles to Ali, whence he took the train to Catania, told the mother her son was safe, and returned to Messina to help in the work of rescuing victims.
Giuseppe directed his soldiers in the rescue work and afterwards received a medal "Per speciali benemerenze." While at work they saw a hand among the ruins and began to dig round it, all the time in fear lest the disturbing of the rubbish might make matters worse for the victim and for themselves. The hand belonged to a woman whose head had been protected by being under a wooden staircase. She showed no sign of life and it was already four days since the disaster. They wetted her lips with marsala and poured some into her mouth and thus restored her. Giuseppe told me that nothing made more impression on him than seeing this woman"s breast begin to heave as life returned.
The soldiers had to shoot the horses and dogs for eating the corpses, and the thieves for pilfering. The horses had escaped from their stables, which were broken by the earthquake, and the dogs had come in from the country. And besides the pilfering they told me of other things the doing of which had better be ignored by those who seriously cultivate the belief that civilisation and education have already so transformed human nature that all restraints may be safely removed, things which, nevertheless, were done by human beings in Messina while the houses were tottering during the closing days of 1908 and the opening weeks of 1909.
I inquired whether the townspeople were themselves guilty of these horrors and they said: No. The bad things were done by people who came into the city from the country, like the dogs, and across the straits from Calabria to take advantage of the catastrophe. As my friend Peppino Fazio in Catania put it:
"The earthquake was very judiciously managed; it killed only the wicked townspeople; it did not touch the good ones, they all escaped."
Giuseppe"s brother, Giovanni Platania, is a scientific man and a professor; he went often from Catania to Messina during the early part of 1909 to study the behaviour of the sea during the earthquake--the maremoto. He has embodied the results of his researches in an opuscolo on the subject _Il Maremoto dello Stretto di Messina del 28 Dicembre_ 1908 (Modena. Societa Tipografica Modenese, 1909). It took him twelve hours to return to Catania from one of his first visits; the journey in ordinary times is performed by the express in two hours and a half.
There was no charge for the tickets because it was the policy of the authorities to empty the town; in this way malefactors who escaped from the prison got easily away. In the train was a woman who talked, saying that no one could blame her for travelling to Catania free, especially as she had not deserved to be put in prison--she had been put there for nothing. There was also a man who did not exactly say he was a thief, but he informed his fellow-travellers that the bundle he had with him had been confided to his care by the padrone of his house. There was no reason why he should have told them this, no one had asked him about his bundle, and Giovanni drew his own conclusions.
GIULIO ADAMO
In Trapani I talked with another friend, a doctor, Giulio Adamo of Calatafimi. Communication was broken and it was not until the evening of the 29th that they began to know in Trapani that there had been an earthquake in Messina. Giulio went with others by train to Milazzo and the train could go no further. They continued the journey by boat from Milazzo to Messina, where he arrived on the 30th. When they approached the city and saw the row of houses facing the harbour where the Albergo Trinacria was, they thought the disaster could not have been so very great. But it was only the facciata that was standing, the houses behind were down. There was great disorder, heaps of bodies, no water to drink because the pipes were broken, and for the three days Giulio was there they only had bread from Palermo and the oranges which were in the railway-waggons.
CECE LUNA
In Palermo I talked with another doctor, Cece (Francesco) Luna, of Trapani, whose acquaintance I made many years ago on Monte Erice when he was there as a student in villeggiatura. In September, 1909, I found him in the children"s hospital at Palermo. As soon as news of the earthquake reached the city, the _Regina Margherita_ was fitted out to help the wounded and Cece went in her among the doctors. When they arrived at Messina, they could neither enter the harbour nor take anyone on board because they had to obey orders. It was raining, the sea was rough and covered with little boats full of fugitives, some unhurt, some wounded.
One boat contained a young man holding an umbrella over his mother, who was wounded and lying on two tables.
"I am strong. I can wait seven or eight days without food, it is not for me, it is for my mother."
He cried and prayed till the orders came and she was taken on board.
Cece, who was put in charge of the taking on board of the fugitives, ordered that the wounded were to be taken first. He was somewhat surprised that this order was attended to; it was so, however, the wounded were taken in without confusion; but afterwards among the unwounded there was confusion. There was a boy who tried to get on board first, Cece pulled the boy"s cap off and threw it away, intending it to fall in the sea, but it fell in another boat and the boy went after his cap and gave no more trouble.
The earthquake was at about 5.20 a.m. on 28th December; the _Regina Margherita_ arrived at Messina at 8 a.m. on the 30th December. As soon as Cece landed, he began searching with others and at 10 a.m. found, in a well-furnished house, a woman dead in bed, killed by a beam which had fallen across her. Under the beam, close to her body, lay a baby girl, very dirty but alive and untouched. It was impossible to say precisely when the child had been born, but certainly only a few hours before the earthquake, just time enough for the midwife to leave the house, for they found no trace of her. Cece took the baby to the steamer and gave it sugar and water, and when they returned to Palermo they got it a wet-nurse and it was baptised Maria in the children"s hospital. If one has an earthquake in one"s horoscope, surely it could not be placed at a less inconvenient part of one"s life. New-born babies can live three or four days without food; but if this child had not been born before the earthquake, she would not have been born at all, and if she had been born earlier, she would have died of starvation or exposure before she was found. As it happened she was sheltered and her life preserved by the beam which killed her mother. Maria was adopted by a lady of Palermo, and in April, 1910, Cece told me he had lately seen her and she was beginning to walk.
Cece had had twenty earthquake babies in his hospital, all with fathers and mothers unknown, and, of course, other hospitals were equally full.
When I was at Palermo in 1909 he had only seven of the twenty, the rest having been taken away, some by their fathers and mothers, others by people who adopted them. Travelling back to England I saw in the railway stations at Rome, Milan, and other places, frames of photographs of unclaimed babies put up in the hope that they might be recognised by chance travellers.
The _Regina Margherita_ stayed at Messina one day, loading, and then returned to Palermo with five hundred unwounded and eighty-two wounded.
Cece remained in Messina, searching, but joined the ship when she returned to Messina, where she took up her station in port as a floating hospital.
He told me of a woman who was in the ruins, alive but unable to move.
Her daughter lay dead beside her. It was raining, there was a dripping and she was getting wet. With the morning light she saw it was not the rain that was wetting her, but the blood of her husband and two grown-up sons who were dead in the room above.
He told me of a law-student in Palermo, twenty-four years old, engaged to a young lady who lived in Messina; this young man went to pa.s.s his Christmas holidays with his betrothed. He was not in the same house and the earthquake did him no harm; as soon as it was over his first thought was for his fidanzata. He got into the street and made for her house, paying no attention to the cries that issued from the ruins. But, like a wandering knight on his way to a.s.sist his lady and embarra.s.sed by meeting other adventures, he was stopped and forced to help in searching a particular house, from which he extricated a beautiful girl, nineteen years of age, unhurt. She would not let him go till he had saved her mother. All the others in the house were killed. Still the girl would not let him go.
"Are you rich?" she asked.
"No."
"Then take this ring and tell me who you are."
He took the ring and after giving her all the information she required was allowed to proceed. When he came to the house of his betrothed he found that she and all her family had perished. He returned to Palermo weeping.
Two months later he received a letter:
I asked if you were rich; you replied "No" and I gave you my ring. You saved my mother and you saved me. My mother has since died from the effects of the shock. If you are free I am ready to marry you and I have money enough for both.
On this they became engaged and after a suitable time intend to marry.
Cece wanted to apologise for the conventionality of this story, but I begged him not to trouble; if una.s.sisted nature were to be always original, the occupation of poets and romancers would be gone.
In one house was a servant, a Roman woman; she was devoted to a young lady of the family and all the family were buried in the ruins, but the Roman servant was unhurt. She could get no help, the house was on the outskirts of the city and such pa.s.sers-by as there were would not stop.
She set to work searching for her young mistress and incidentally saved the whole family. It took her twenty-four hours; they were all wounded and her young mistress was the last she found.
A woman kept a small shop opposite another shop kept by a man who sold coal. The woman had saved money and the carbonajo knew she had her money in her house. He entered the woman"s house after the earthquake, accompanied by another malefactor. The woman"s daughter was killed, but the woman was under the ruins alive and they pulled her out. She exclaimed:
"I do not know you."
But she did know the carbonajo quite well, or at least well enough to know he was a bad man and to suspect his intention. They asked her where her money was concealed. She only repeated:
"I do not know you."
They believed her, thinking she was confused by the shock of the earthquake; this was what she intended, otherwise she feared they would have killed her. They threatened her, and at last she told them where the money was, still protesting that she did not know them. They took her money and then, being afraid she might give the alarm and they might be caught before they could escape, they pinned her down with a large piece of the ruins on her left arm and departed, taking the risk of her being rescued later and saying she had been robbed by unknown men. She was rescued and brought to Palermo. In the hospital she begged Cece to put an end to her:
"What is the use of living? My daughter is dead, my arm is gangrened, my money is stolen. Let me die and have done with it."
Cece did not kill her, he chloroformed her and amputated her arm. She gave information about the carbonajo, who was arrested in Messina. His accomplice escaped, but the woman got back her money and thanked Cece for amputating her arm instead of killing her.
FUGITIVES AND VICTIMS
At Caltanissetta they told me that the trains were bringing fugitives from Messina all day and all night. The fugitives were mostly naked and all very dirty, some with rugs, some with cloaks, some with rags. A woman got out of the train clothed, like Monna Vanna, in nothing but a cloak which a soldier had given her. They asked her:
"What do you want done for you?"