(3 of 4)
"Strangest of all is the quiet that has come. When first I arrived in Managua I believed it to be the noisiest place in the world. . . . One might imagine that workers screamed at the top of their voices, that every automobile blew at least two blasts to every block. . . . But now there is everywhere a quiet as of a tomb. The natives, in the appalling realization of what has happened within two short days, have suddenly been stricken dumb."
Most of them fled to the mountains, down the dusty roads to Granada, but not all. In the ripped-up streets of Managua little groups knelt in prayer all day before religious statues dragged from the crumbling churches and houses, set up on the curb. Meanwhile Marines and soldiers of the U. S.-officered Guardia Nacional worked till the soles burned off their shoes carrying stretchers, pulling bodies from the wreckage, fighting the flames. In three days after the earthquake more than 800 bodies had been buried or accounted for. But there could be no more burials. Managua was beginning to smell. The patrols searching for bodies now carried cans of kerosene which they poured on corpses where found. The smell of cremation now mingled with the smell of decay.
Lieut.-Colonel Daniel I. Sultan with a battalion of U. S. Army engineers was in charge of an expedition surveying the proposed route of the Nicaraguan Inter-Ocean Canal (see p. 18). Arriving in Managua, he took charge of the Marines' fire-fighting detachments. There was no water, no fire apparatus. Dynamite was his only weapon. Marine squads blew up a ring of houses round the blaze, fought the creeping flames with spadefuls of earth and adobe dust.
More Tension, U. S. Minister Matthew Elting Hanna was on vacation in Guatemala on the fatal Tuesday. Reporters found him. on his swift return to the wreck that had been his home, standing beside a suitcase with Mrs. Hanna. "That suitcase," said Minister Hanna dully, "contains all we have in the world." It was not quite all. As the U. S. Legation crumbled and blazed, the Hannas' pet green parrot had slipped from his cage, crawled down a ledge and flopped into the arms of an Army officer. Nerves stretched to the breaking point. Immediately after the shocks, the city had been put under martial law. No one rested, but soldiers relieved from digging in the ruins patrolled the city with fixed bayonets. Col. Frederic C. Bradman of the Marines ordered the patrols to shoot all stray dogs on sight (fear of rabies) and anyone caught looting. The crack of a sentry's rifle tumbled one man like a jackrabbit; in his pockets were seven $1,000 bills, dug from the shell of one of Ma nagua's banks. Four other persons, thirst-crazed, were shot by Marines as they tried to drink the polluted lake waters. Soldiers shot two grave diggers who refused to go on with their heart-breaking task. Saturday night, as Marines snatched a moment of sleep, a loud fusillade rang out. A U. S. lieutenant and a Guardia sergeant. both nerve-frazzled beyond self-control, had gone at each other with pistol and submachine gun. The lieutenant was killed.