The Sugar Islands by Alec Waugh Page B

water, the water that kept the town cool during the long noon heat, came ceaselessly from the hills beyond the murmur of the lizard and the cricket. A lovely city, with its theatre, its lamplit avenues, its Jardín des Plantes, its schooners drawn circlewise along the harbour. Life was comely there; the life that had been built up by the old French émigré. It was a cityof carnival. There was a culture there, a love of art among those people who had made their home there, who had not come to Martinique to make money that they could spend in Paris. The culture of Versailles was transposed there to mingle with the Carib stock and the dark mysteries of imported Africa. St. Pierre was never seen without emotion. It laid hold of the imagination. It had something to say, not only to the romantic intellectual like Hearn or Stacpool, but to the sailors and the traders, to all those whom the routine of livelihood brought within the limit of its sway. Incomparable,’ they would say as they waved farewell to the Pays des Revenants , knowing that if they did not return they would carry all their lives a regret for it in their hearts.
    History has no parallel for St. Pierre.
    And within forty-five seconds the stir and colour of that life had been wiped out.
    The story of the disaster is too familiar, has been told too many times to need any retelling here. The story of those last days when Pelé was scattering cinders daily over Martinique; when the vegetables that the women brought down from the hills to market were dark with ashes; when the Riviére Blanche was swollen with boiling mud; when day after day was darkened by heavy clouds: it has been told so often, the story of that last morning that dawned clear after a night of storm for the grande fête of an Ascension Day: of the two immense explosions that were heard clearly in Guadeloupe, of the voice over a telephone abruptly silenced, of the ship that struggled with charred and corpse-strewn deck into the harbour of St. Lucia, the ship that two years later was to be crushed by ice: of the voice that cried back to the questioner on the wharf, ‘We come from Hell. You can cable the world that Saint Pierre exists no longer.’ It has been told so many times.
    At eight o’clock a gay and gallant people was preparing on a sunlit morning busily for its jour de fête. Forty-five seconds later, of all that gaiety and courage there was nothing left. Not anything. Certain legends linger. They say that four days later, when the process of excavation was begun, there was found in the vault of the prison a negro criminal, the sole survivor. They say that in a waistcoat pocket a watch was found, its hands pointing to half-past nine, a watch that had recorded ninety useless minutes in atimeless tomb. And there are other stories. The stories of fishermen who set sail early in the morning to return for their déjeuner, to find ruin there; of servants whom their mistresses had sent out of the town on messages; of officials and business men who left the town on the 7th or 6th of May for Fort de France. They are very like the war stories you will hear of men who returned after a five minutes’ patrolling of a trench to find nothing left of their dugout nor the people in it. They are probably exaggerated when they are not untrue. And yet it was these stories, more than even the sight of St. Pierre itself, that made that tragedy actual to me.
    â€˜We were,’ I was told, ‘twenty-four of us young people one Sunday on a picnic. We would have another picnic on the following Sunday, we decided. When that Sunday came there were only three of us alive.’
    A European cannot picture in terms of any tragedy that is likely to come to him what that tragedy meant for the survivors of Martinique. It did not mean simply the death of twenty-eight thousand people; the loss of property and possession; the curtain for many years upon the prosperity of the island. It meant