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"Wrapped in blankets, the bodies were carried forth
to the wagons and carted to the undertaking
establishments. Every sort of thing on wheels was
pressed into service. Scores of bodies were loaded
into delivery wagons, and one of Madel Brothers
great freight vans moved away from the cafe door
piled with corpses."
"Bodies were taken to the most convenient
undertaking rooms. As the wagons passed through
the crowds, the feet of the dead protruding from
beneath the blankets with which they were
covered, even the morbid, who were hampering the
police, turned away and forced their way out of
Randolph street.
"The police were forced to struggle almost
constantly with the crowd in front of the theater,
and this work was made harder by the fact that
nearly all the men who had forced their way through
the lines were men who feared that members of their
families were among the dead.
"These men fought the police. They pleaded with
them. They eluded them at one point and ran into
their arms at another. They insisted the police
could ascertain if their wives and children were
dead or if they had escaped.
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"It was of no use to tell these relatives that they
could not identify the bodies or that they should
not look at them, or that they could not be allowed
to see them while the work of removal was in
progress.
"All that could be done was to push them back, be
deaf to their pleading, explain when there was time,
and act without explaining where there was not.
"Many of the men who watched the line of drays pull
up empty and leave heavily loaded seemed to have
lost the capacity of suffering any more.
"'Of course they got out,' said one of these men.
'They got out didn't they? My wife and daughter.
They got out, didn't they?' 'Yes, they got out,'
said the policeman, as he shoved the man back.
'There are not many dead.' "
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