Hurricane

Moving behind green and yellow windowshades drawn against the incandescence of the sun, doing business, after the siesta, over a glass of rum-punch and a long pale cigar, the gentlemen of Havana, Cuba, deported themselves last week as usual. They came in at dusk from their offices and clubs, from exercise in fencing-school and walks on the Prado; they thought comfortably that it was still some time before they must start dressing for dinner, and noticed with astonishment the blackness of the air. Was there going to be a storm, they wondered?

Outside the city, beyond its courts, its marble walls hushed above the water, brown men, appearing suddenly, hurried down crooked roads; racehorses with tiny loins and immense pointed legs whinnied and thumped in their stalls at the Oriental Park track; they smelled wind. Veterans at Camp Columbia, the Cuban Army headquarters in the suburbs of Marianao, looked dubiously at their tar-paper mansions. And in the middle of Havana the lean eagle erected to the memory of 260 Americans who went down with the battleship Maine, Feb. 15, 1898, seemed to come alive and with a darkness in each wing to invoke the fall of unforgotten furies. The storm was coming. Next instant, quick as a door slamming, the storm had come.

Newspapermen, appraising the damage later, put it at $5,000,000. Only five bedraggled trees were left standing in the Prado. Half the windows in the city were broken; many roofs blown away; several ships sunk in the harbor. The horses at the track-had run off through the ruins of their stables. The windows of the Havana Automobile Co. and the Ford Motor Branch were blown in. Camp Columbia had vanished. Ambulance surgeons began making up a death list;* truly the hurricane, blowing cone-shaped out of the West Indies, had done its work. And in the middle of Havana the American monument lay on its face.

Nowhere, among the debris, the glass, beams, bricks in the neighboring courtyards, the wrecked automobiles in the streets, could searchers find the American Eagle. It had blown away.

*Sixty in Havana and its harbor at last reports; four hundred more in the back country and on neighboring islands.