"Like Any Battlefield"

The Calcutta-Lahore express plowed stolidly through one night last' week on its 1,100-mile journey. In the morning, hundreds of natives jampacked in the first five cars dozed fitfully on for they had had little sleep. In the two rear cars European passengers rode in greater comfort.

Fifteen miles from Patna all the travelers were shocked into full consciousness, many of them for only a few seconds. With a thunder of shattered wood, a shriek of torn steel, the train and seven cars took a head dive over the embankment, settled in a chaotic mess. The first two cars were completely telescoped, buried beneath the two that followed. From the two rear cars, which had stayed miraculously on the rails, leaped frenzied Europeans to behold a scene described by one as "like any battlefield." Relief workers rushing to the spot dragged more than 100 dead and mangled bodies from the wreckage. The government railway earlier gave out that 80 had been killed, 65 injured. The Exchange Telegraph (British) news-agency's figures were 300 killed, 250 injured. If those last were accurate, the disaster was the worst in official railroad history, topping the Gretna Green, Scotland wreck of 1915 in which 247 were killed. 246 injured.

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