tory of the House continues :
' St . [ oseph ' s was taken over as a Hospital for military casualties , and all schools were closed . You would find it hard to believe that school functioned for two weeks in January 1942 with the Japs at our doors . It is true that only the bigger boys came . It was a matter of keeping up morale I suppose , but at what an insane risk . Air raids were frequent and violent : no work at all was possible . Most of the time we spent in interior passages splendidly arranged for mass slaughter . I had four or five days of this and could stand it no longer , so I phoned to the powers that were . I suppose that all other Heads of schools felt much the same . The schools closed ... until the [ aps re-opened them .
' When the Royal Army Medical Corps took possession ( we kept our living quarters ) the first man in the first lorry which stopped under the Hall portico to jump out and salute me was an Irishman from Rathdowney who had retreated the entire 550 miles from Kota Bahru to Singapore with the corps intact . The commander was another Irishman , Colonel Malcolm from Drogheda , beside whom my five feet nine inches helped little to make me look a man of average height . The Irish were thick in this fighting unit , as they proverbially are wherever there is a fight ; and here I was , another Gael to welcome them and say " God bless you all ". I suggested the Map Room as the best lighted and best protected for the Operating Theatre and they fixed it up . All the forty-two classrooms became wards . The desks were piled in the corners of the verandahs and all was done amid ceaseless bombing , shelling and machine gunning . But by now everything outside the buildings was utter confusion . The dead lay in heaps on the streets of the city and were being buried in the fields and parks . Our front garden became a cemetery in fact . Shells whined , bombs burst everywhere and were answered by antiaircraft guns set up anywhere and everywhere . The din wasappaUing : the buildings trembled : the air was stifling : the heat suffocating . Hundreds and thousands of military eehicles of all descriptions choked the streets . Soldiers of all kinds of units were scattered all over the city looking frightfully woe-begone , dog-tired , crest-fallen and gloomy .
' The Colonel often asked me to come the rounds with him because , as he said , " The sight of you men of the cloth will comfort the men " . Bythis time I had grown fairly reckless of danger and callous to injury . I did accompany the Colonel and what sights I saw on those rounds . The R . c . chaplains were marvellous . The men wept as they watched them administer the last rites to the dying utterly regardless of danger , for death rubbed elbows with us the whole time . A dozen or so of poor shell-shocked soldiers cried aloud like boys when another squadron of [ ap planes swept over , releasing bombs and filling the ground and walls with bullets from their machine guns .
' But the most awesome sight that ever met my gaze was the Operating Room with surgeons amputating legs and arms to save poor soldiers who had contracted gangrene from days of exposure and lack of First Aid on the hill sides . There were the surgeons , sweating profusely , with their attendants at their elbows . I won ' t go into all the details : they are far too gruesome . I sickened at it all ; could never get accustomed to the sight and smell of hot blood soaked upin bucketfuls by yards of lint and bandaging . Arms and legs were wrapped in sheeting and taken away for burial with corpses of poor fellows who died en route from the battlefield . I never liked the odour of disinfectant when going through hospitals . Here it filled what was left of the air . Oh , it was all so sad , so unnerving and so very dreadful .
' At least ten shells hit the buildings and one 500lb bomb dropped almost in the centre of the inner courtyard around which were several lorries closely parked . One shell cut out half the wall of a classroom in which twenty-five wounded lay . Not one of them got a scratch . Another shell came through the roof right down to the ground floor without exploding . It made a hole a foot in diameter beside my desk in the Community Room on the second floor ; continued down to the basement and buried itself in the ground . Still another cut through the walls of the [ illegible ] room and exploded in the courtyard . The bomb went down twenty-five feet ; raised the macadamised courtyard ground around it two feet ; set eight lorries on fire and cut hundreds of gashes in the walls of the buildings all around . The fire was put out with sand from the sand bags . All the doors were sucked out , the fastenings being tom off .
The grandfather clock got a splinter through the pendulum , coming in on one side of the frame and going out the other side . It stopped the faithful time recorder of the past fifty years and registered the hour of Singapore ' s last frightful bombing to hasten the surrender in which 15,000people were killed . The clock for weeks afterwards showed four-thirty exactly . That was Sunday evening , February 14th , 1942.1
The numerous shells and the one bomb did not even scratch a single soul . When the dust and
1 . Addendum by Brother Christopher Chen . The 500lb bomb was actually captured by the Japanese somewhere in Malaya . It was about 4.30 pm when the bomb was dropped . At that time all the wounded Austral ian soldiers were lining up along the Hall , the ma in school build ing and the Tuckshop where they were about to receive their evening meal . When the Officer in charge heard the sound of a Ja . lling bomb , he blew the whistle and all the soldiers at once lay flat on the ground . Another shell came through the roof right down to the classroom on the ground floor , where some Officers were at that time . They were very fortunate the shell did not explode .
SI ! in the War 35