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MG 1 vol 2124 number 282
Public Archives of Nova Scotia
Halifax

The Office.

It is very much like any other office, save for a screen of cotton sheeting which serves as a partition. The walls and windows have been wrecked by the explosion. On the desks, formerly used by school children are ticketed bundles of clothing. The teacher's rostrum has been changed into an information bureau.

The attendant are very pale and tired, with low pitched voices, as if always ready to answer the same hopeless questions. Yet some of the stenographers are giggling, and a box of chocolates is being passed around

Here in the office is kept a chart showing the exact location of each body, so that any searcher need not face the horrible ordeal of viewing every corpse, but is only taken to those which approximate his description.

The Morgue.

It is very [l]ike Madame Tussaud's perhaps not so dreadful: for in the waxworks, the artists striv[e]r to achieve the horrible, while here the expressions are natural.

Picture an ordinary, cement-walled basement, low-ceilinged and infinitely cold. The rays of the sun are excluded and a restful half light pervades the place. The air is heavily moist, but not unpleasant. The bodies are laid out upon rows of boards, grouped together according to age, sex &ct, the trunks swathed in sheets, but the uncovered faces staring upwards. Sickly whites and yellow, blurred with blood stains: some with their lips still forming shrieks of terror, some absolutely calm.

The resemblance to the wax work show is carried out in the actions of the attendants, mostly soldiers, some of them white-aproned. Here and