Sauve-Qui-Petit

It was ten below zero outdoors, but inside the College of the Sacred Heart in the little manufacturing town of St. Hyacinthe, Quebec one night last week a fire blazed in the furnace, students and priests were tucked snugly in their beds. On the ground floor slept Brother Lucius, head of the school, most of the 31 priests and five servants. In dormitories on the fourth floor and in the attic above it were 85 boys (aged 9 to 20) and a few priests. At 1 o'clock Watchman Marcel Quesnel, 68, sleepily made his round of the long, red-brick building, the tall tower in front, the little chapel in back. Finding everything apparently in order, he went back to doze in his chair.

Half an hour later Brother Lucius was awakened by an explosion. Jumping into his trousers, he rushed out of his room to find the corridors thick with smoke, flames shooting through the building, most of the other ground-floor sleepers rushing out of the building in panic. Unable to get upstairs. Brother Lucius ran out. too. But Brother Rosaire dashed to the infirmary, picked up a sick boy, crawled along the hot floor to a fire escape. And to the chapel ran another priest to save the Host. Watchman Quesnel was so confused that he forgot to call firemen. Not until a belated laborer returning home saw the flames from the street at 2 a. m. was the alarm sounded. By that time a half-dozen priests and the 85 boys were trapped in the upper stories.

As the firebells rang through the frozen, snow-packed town, the villagers, many of them relatives of the boys in the burning building, gathered screaming before the school. Firemen with ladders were driven back by the flames. A water hose caught fire. Horrified, the town looked up helplessly into the faces of dying boys.

There was pandemonium in the dormitories. In the dark rooms, filled with smoke, the boys ran back & forth, overthrew their beds, screamed from the windows. A priest tried to lead some of them in prayer. White-haired Brother Jean Baptiste, 64, leaped four stories to his death on the icy ground. Some of the boys, clad only in nightclothes, also jumped from the windows, crawled, with broken legs and backs, as far as half a mile through the snow. Crowding the fire escape, screaming boys ran in their bare feet down its red-hot rungs. Some of those who descended were licked off by flames from the windows.

Meanwhile Brother Paul Armand, in charge of "les petits" (the younger boys), led his lads onto the roof of a four-story wing from the attic. There he herded them to the edge, urged them to jump. A few did. Brother Armand was still standing heroically with five or six who remained, when the roof fell, plunging them into the holocaust.

At 3 a.m., the statue of the Sacred Heart in the tower pinnacle toppled over; there was left only the stark front wall of the tower, behind it a heap of twisted steel and charred brick burying the dead. For four days, while French newspapers described the disaster as "un sauve-qui-peut dans la nuit" (an every-man-for-himself in the night) and demanded to know why small boys were quartered in the inaccessible top stories, firemen dug unrecognizable bodies from the ruins until the toll of death was five priests, 41 boys.

Meanwhile, hurrying from Richmond, Que. by automobile in the vain hope of finding their 12-year-old son alive, Mr. and Mrs. Hugh Gendron were struck by an express train, killed.

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