of a ditch in spite of her smashed hip. A first-
class massacre of that sort is only a question of
scale and numbers—seven corpses are no deader
than one. Each shattered man, woman or child who
went to make up the 36,000 corpses chalked up
last year had to die a personal death.
A car careening and rolling down a bank, bat
tering and smashing its occupants every inch of
the way, can wrap itself so thoroughly around a
tree that front and rear bumpers interlock, re
quiring an acetylene torch to cut them apart. In
a recent case of that sort they found the old
lady, who had been sitting in back, lying across the
lap of her daughter, who was in front, each
soaked in her own and the other’s blood indis-
tinguishably, each so shattered and broken that
there was no point whatever in an autopsy to
determine whether it was broken neck or ruptured
heart that caused death.
Overturning cars specialize in certain in
juries. Cracked pelvis, for instance, guaranteeing
agonizing months in bed, motionless, perhaps
crippled for life—broken spine resulting from
sheer sidewise twist—the minor details of smashed
knees and splintered shoulder blades caused by
crashing into the side of the car as she goes over
with the swirl of an insane roller coaster—and the
lethal consequences of broken ribs, which punc
ture hearts and lungs with their raw ends. The
consequent internal hemorrhage is no less danger
ous because it is the pleural instead of the ab
dominal cavity that is filling with blood.
Flying glass—safety glass is by no means uni
versal yet—contributes much more than its share
to the spectacular side of accidents. It doesn’t
merely cut—the fragments are driven in as if a
cannon loaded with broken bottles had been fired
in your face, and a sliver in the eye, traveling with
such force, means certain blindness. A leg or arm
stuck through the windshield will cut clean to the
bone through vein, artery and muscle like a piece
of beef under the butcher’s knife, and it takes little
time to lose a fatal amount of blood under such
circumstances. Even safety glass may not be
wholly safe when the car crashes something at
high speed. You hear picturesque tales of how
a flying human body will make a neat hole in
the stuff with its head—the shoulders stick—the
glass holds—and the raw, keen edge decapitates
the body as neatly as a guillotine.
Or, to continue with the decapitation motif,
going off the road into a post-and-rail fence can
put you beyond worrying about other injuries
immediately when a rail comes through the wind
shield and tears off your head with its splintery
end—not as neat a job but thoroughly efficient.
Bodies are often found with their shoes off and
their feet all broken out of shape. The shoes are
back on the floor of the car, empty and with
their laces still neatly tied. That is the kind of
impact produced by modern speeds.
But all that is routine in every American com
munity. To be remembered individually by doc
tors and policemen, you have to do something as
grotesquely as the lady who burst the windshield
with her head, splashing splinters all over the
other occupants of the car, and then, as the car
rolled over, the windshield frame cut her throat
from ear to ear. Or park on the pavement too
near a curve at night and stand in front of the tail *
light as you take off the spare tire—which will ^
immortalize you in somebody’s memory as the
fellow who was mashed three feet broad and two **
inches thick by the impact of a heavy-duty truck
against the rear of his own car. Or be as original
as the pair of youths who were thrown out of an
open roadster this spring—thrown clear—but each
broke a windshield post with his head in passing
and the whole top of each skull, down to the eye
brows, was missing. Or snap off a nine-inch tree
and get yourself impaled by a ragged branch.
None of all that is scare-fiction; it is just the
horrible raw material of the year’s statistics as seen
in the ordinary course of duty by policemen and
doctors, picked at random. The surprising thing
is there is so little dissimilarity in the stories they
tell.
It’s hard to find a surviving accident victim who
can bear to talk. After you come to, the gnawing,
searing pain throughout your body is accounted
for by learning that you have both collarbones
smashed, both shoulder blades splintered, your
right arm broken in three places and three ribs
cracked, with every chance of bad internal rup
tures. But the pain can’t distract you, as the shock
begins to wear off, from realizing that you are
probably on your way out. You can’t forget that,
not even when they shift you from the ground
to the stretcher and your broken ribs bite into
your lungs and the sharp ends of your collarbones
slide over to stab deep into each side of your
screaming throat. When you’ve stopped screaming,
it all comes back—you’re dying and you hate your
self for it. That isn’t fiction either. It’s what it
actually feels like to be one of that 36,000.
And every time you pass on a blind curve, every
time you hit it up on a slippery road, every time
you step on it harder than your reflexes will safely
take, every time you drive with your reactions
slowed down by a drink or two, every time you
follow the man ahead too closely, you’re gambling
a few seconds against blood and agony and sudden
death.
Take a look at yourself as the man in the white
jacket shakes his head over you, tells the boys
with the stretcher not to bother and turns away to
somebody else who isn’t quite dead yet. And then
take it easy. 1
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