Superior hides his pain with a dry joke, but the litter which is now no
longer in one piece cannot be carried further. We decide to wait until
Kinjo can bring a hand cart from Nagatsuke. He soon comes back with one
that he has requisitioned from a collapsed house. We place Father Superior
on the cart and wheel him the rest of the way, avoiding as much as possible
the deeper pits in the road.

About half past four in the morning, we finally arrive at the Novitiate.
Our rescue expedition had taken almost twelve hours. Normally, one could
go back and forth to the city in two hours. Our two wounded were now, for
the first time, properly dressed. I get two hours sleep on the floor; some
one else has taken my own bed. Then I read a Mass in gratiarum actionem,
it is the 7th of August, the anniversary of the foundation of our society.
Then we bestir ourselves to bring Father Kleinsorge and other acquaintances
out of the city.


We take off again with the hand cart. The bright day now reveals the
frightful picture which last night's darkness had partly concealed. Where
the city stood everything, as far as the eye could reach, is a waste of
ashes and ruin. Only several skeletons of buildings completely burned out
in the interior remain. The banks of the river are covered with dead and
wounded, and the rising waters have here and there covered some of the
corpses. On the broad street in the Hakushima district, naked burned
cadavers are particularly numerous. Among them are the wounded who are
still alive. A few have crawled under the burnt-out autos and trams.
Frightfully injured forms beckon to us and then collapse. An old woman and
a girl whom she is pulling along with her fall down at our feet. We place
them on our cart and wheel them to the hospital at whose entrance a
dressing station has been set up. Here the wounded lie on the hard floor,