II

[2]Soldiers’ slang for anti-aircraft guns.—The Editors.

[2]Soldiers’ slang for anti-aircraft guns.—The Editors.

“Shop” interest waned at this juncture, and the conversation upon which I had been eavesdropping veered offviâheadache-remedies anda pretty Scotch nurse at a hospital in France to the comparative merits of the “Empire” and “Alhambra” choruses; and I was able to turn both ears to Horne, who had been holding forth learnedly for some minutes on the points of the Andean pony-thoroughbred cross as a polo mount.

Our fellow diners drifted away as they had come—singly, and in twos and threes—and by ten o’clock Horne and I were alone in the deserted lounge with our cigars and coffee. He was expecting to be rung up at ten-thirty, he said, and as the time approached I could not help noticing that he becamedistraitand nervous, palpably anxious. The call came promptly, and it was with a look of ill-concealed apprehension on his face that he rose to follow the summoning flunkey to the telephone booth. A minute later he returned walking on air. Twice or thrice he tried to take up the dropped thread of Argentine reminiscence, finally giving it up as a bad job.

“I can’t help telling you that I’ve just had some very good news,” he exclaimed, with beaming face. “For six weeks now I have been haunted by a fear that that last jarring up Igot was going to put me out of the game for good. Yesterday I had the doctors go over me, and now, after being kept all day on tenterhooks, comes word that, so far as flying is concerned, I’m going to be as right as rain. Nothing whatever likely to occur to prevent my going back in a fortnight. I think I must be just about the happiest man in London to-night. I——”

He checked himself with a deprecatory gesture. “Really, you’ll have to pardon my outburst, old chap; but I wasn’t half sure that I wasn’t in line for invaliding out. Besides, I’ve been fairly itching to be ‘up’ all day. There’s been witchery in the air ever since sunrise. I’ve never known more perfect flying weather. Which reminds me, by the way, that the Zepps are expected in this vicinity to-night. They were on the ‘East Coast’ last night, you know. It’s just a little too clear for their purposes; but the air itself is perfect—perfect. There haven’t been more than one or two other such days for flying as this one since the war began. You can’t understand it till you’ve been in the air yourself. It was in the blood of all those chaps at dinner this evening. They talked about everything on earth except flying; and were thinking about nothing else but that. Didn’t you notice that they wereas restive as the lions in the Zoo an hour before feeding time?”

Throwing aside all reserve, Horne began to speak of his work—his love of it, the fascination of it, the great and increasingly important part it was playing in the war. This was precisely what, hoping against hope, I had been trying to draw him out on all the evening; and so, lighting a fresh cigar, I sank back contentedly in my armchair to play the part of the appreciative auditor. Scarcely was I well settled, however, when Horne abruptly ceased speaking and leaned forward with his head cocked in an attitude of attentive listening.

“Did you hear that?” he whispered; “and that, and that?”

“Nothing but the chatter of the first dribble of the supper crowd,” I answered. “What is it?”

“Bombs,” was the reply; “three or four of them. And, I think, gun-fire. The Zepps must be nearer London than they have been at any time since last October. Let’s get down to the Embankment. We can see from there, if anywhere. They never wander far from the ‘river road.’”

The Strand, packed with the crowds from the emptying theatres, was plainly oblivious andunalarmed, and I promptly taxed Horne with letting either the wine or the “perfect air conditions” go to his head. He said nothing, but, all the way down the black little canyon of a street along which we threaded our way, appeared to be listening intently. Not until we were about to emerge into the brighter blankness of the Embankment did he speak again.

“There have been no more bombs,” he said, “but I think the guns are going right along. If the sound is too faint for your ‘unattuned’ ear, perhaps the fact that you hear no shunting of trains or whistling at Charing Cross or Waterloo (you know of the new order which halts all trains during air-raids) will convince you that the Zepps are about. Or if not that, then come along here and have some ocular evidence. What do you say to that?” And Horne pointed off down past the looming mass of St. Paul’s to where the stationary beam of a single searchlight laid low along the eastern horizon.

“I see the searchlight plainly enough,” I said, “but where’s the Zepp?”

“Take my glass,” said Horne, handing me a small pair of semi-collapsible binoculars which was evidently a constant companion. “Now focus on that point of brighter glow, with a shadow behind it, half-way down the shaft—right there, straight over the back of the right-hand lion at the foot of the Obelisk.”

I did as directed, fairly to gasp with astonishment as a tiny blur, so indistinct as to go unnoticed by the passers-by on the Embankment, sharpened to a long, yellow-ribbed pencil, with pin-points of light—fireflies escorting a glow-worm—flashing out and disappearing above and below and round about it.

“The first Zepp to get over London in six months,” I ejaculated excitedly. “How long will she take to get here? Hadn’t we better get away from the river and under cover? But no,” I went on, peering through the glass again; “I don’t think she’s coming this way. Seems to be standing still. Probably hovering over W——, the old objective.”

“London! W——!” laughed Horne. “Do you realise thatyoudidn’t hear any bombs, and that none of these people have any idea that there’s a raiding Zeppelin, with shells bursting about it, squarely in their range of vision? That fellow’s all of twenty-five miles away, and as for its ‘hovering,’ you may rest assured that when you see a Zepp with incendiary shells burstingaboveit, it is either badly hit or else doing seventy miles an hour toward the home hangars. As a matter of fact, I’ve been expectingto see this fellow begin to drop at any moment. He’s evidently run into better guns and gunners than he counted on. Ah! No hope!” (Horne snatched his glass and turned it quickly on the now agitated searchlight beam.) “He’s gone. Even the light’s lost him.”

Horne turned around disgustedly, led the way to a bench by the curb, pushed along a somnolent “match dame” to make room for him, and wearily sat down.

“He’s slippery game—the Zepp,” he observed presently, after watching the futile flounderings of the questing searchlight. “I didn’t tell you, did I, that it was through trying to get a Zepp that I came that last cropper of mine over Belgium?”

“You know perfectly well you didn’t,” I replied, folding a corner of the old match-seller’s straggling cloak back over her knees and sitting down in the space vacated. “Go to it.”

“I was starting on a reconnaissance over a corner of Belgium just as the Zepp was returning from a raid over France. I got above him, and just after I dropped my first bomb the ‘Archies’ opened up on me from the ground and put me out at just about the first shot. Jolly nervy work, with my machine only a couple of hundred feet above the Zepp. A little too nervy, perhaps,for I’ve never been quite certain in my own mind whether it was my bomb or one from the German guns which sent the Zepp—not wrecked but pretty badly messed up—down into a sugar-beet field. I headed——”

“Just a moment,” I interrupted, anticipating the end of the tale at the end of Horne’s next breath. “You’re dumping over your story just the way a Zeppelin under fire dumps over its bombs. Now please back up and tell it properly. The night is young, the raiders are now headed out to sea, and the lady and I are here to follow you to the end.”

Horne laughed uneasily, fumbled through his pockets in a vain search for matches, filched a box from the tilted tray of our nodding companion,—leaving a sixpence in its place,—lit his pipe, puffed pensively for a minute or two; and even after all that preparation made his beginning apologetic.

“I don’t know that I’ve ever told the yarn from the beginning,” he said, “and I’m dead sure I’ve never said much about the end. If I chatter a bit to-night, you’ll please check it up against the good news I had a while ago—and the air. A man could pretty nearly walk on theair as it has been to-day, and a machine would slide through it like tearing silk. Funny thing, but it was in the dawn following almost just such a night as this that I went off on the flight I have spoken of.

“There are three main factors in flying,”—Horne spoke more freely again as he digressed upon generalities,—“the man, the machine, and the atmosphere. Theoretically, man and machine are supposed to be sent out in perfect order, ready to take the air as they find it. Therearedays, of course, when you are ‘off’, your machine ‘cranky,’ and the air all ‘heights’ and ‘hollows,’ and at such times there is pretty sure to be a ‘stormy passage,’ if nothing worse. Usually, however, it’s a fairly fit man and machine against indifferent air. But once or twice a year there comes a period, like the last eighteen hours, when the air is almost absolutely ‘homogeneous,’ and then, with his engine running ‘sweet,’ the man has spells of fancying himself an ‘air god’ in fact as well as in name, and acts accordingly,—invariably either to his own or his enemy’s sorrow.

“It was like that on the morning I am telling you about—man, machine, and air all in harmony—yes, and with the usual result. I would have remembered this flight for several reasons,even if the Zepp hadn’t come along; for one, because of our ride down the wake of a ‘42’ shell; for another, on account of the terrific shelling they gave, or tried to give us, as we passed over the German lines.

“The meeting with the shell was merely one of those freak experiences that might happen to any one, or, just as well, never happen at all. It was during the time I am speaking of that the Germans were amusing themselves by a long-distance bombardment of N—— with their biggest guns, and we—(I had an observation officer along, a chap named K——, whom you may have heard of as a long-distance runner)—simply chanced to meander into the path of one shell somewhere about the last quarter of its trajectory. Watching from a distance, you can always see one of these brutes go hurtling along, but this one we only heard,—and felt,—and it was like two express trains, going in opposite directions, passing at full speed. There was a strange soft sort of a buzz, growing into a rushing roar inside of two or three seconds, a blow from a solid wall of air that was like colliding with the side of a house, and then, for two or three minutes, a series of bumps like going over a corduroy road in a springless cart.

“I don’t know whether we interfered verymuch with the course of that shell, but the shell pretty nearly broughtourflight to an end then and there. Only the fact that we met the first big rush of air head-on saved us. I wouldn’t have had one chance in a thousand of ‘correcting’ if it had caught us sideways—and even as it was, the machine, in spite of its seventy-miles-an-hour headway, was stood up on its rudder like a rearing horse. After that first ‘collision,’ our fluttering flight down the wake of the ‘42’ was only ‘queer,’ but withal a different sensation from anything I had ever experienced.

“I have no idea how close we passed to each-other. My impression of the moment was that the distance was inside of fifty yards, though it was doubtless really much greater. We were not, of course, going in exactly opposite directions, for the shell must have been coming down at a considerably greater angle than that at which we were going up. Yet the ‘aerial surf’ stirred up by the passage of the Hun’s little messenger of goodwill in that smooth stretch of atmosphere was heavy and persistent enough to keep my machine wallowing for over a mile.

“The air was going by us in a swift, steady river as we neared the German lines, and I neverrecall having been able to climb so quickly and easily. Lucky it was, too, for the enemy—probably in anticipation of a pursuit of their returning raiders—had their whole trench ‘hinterland’ planted with anti-aircraft guns, both stationary and movable. There was one little strip that blossomed out like a poppy garden as they opened up on us, and for a minute or so the smoke from the spreading shell-bursts formed a good-sized little cloud of its own. But they never had any real chance of getting us. My good little engine, singing like the wind in the telephone wires, had enabled me to get up over fourteen thousand feet without turning a hair and at that height you’re a lot safer from shells in an aeroplane than from taxis in crossing the Strand. K—— was feeling the altitude a bit, I think; I saw him wiping blood from his nose and pressing his hands to his ears, but he gave no signs of real distress. As for myself, beyond a little swelling of the fingers and a drumming at the temples, I was quite as usual.

“We passed over the main ‘bouquets’ of the ‘Archies’ without even feeling the kick of the shells bursting beneath us; but in dropping down to ten thousand feet a few miles beyond, we encountered an unexpected ‘plant’ of them and the shrapnel bullets were flying all about usfor a minute or two. A score of neat little holes winked out in the wings, and one friendly bit of a bullet—spent, but still hot from its sharp flight—dropped gently into my lap and slightly singed the fold of my coat in which it found lodgment. Then we left that mare’s nest behind and the going grew smoother once more.

“It was only a few minutes later, and before any beginning had been made on the work we had come for, that K—— picked up a Zepp through his glass and began reporting its progress to me over the telephone. At first it was flying very high, doubtless to keep above gun-fire in crossing our lines. Once over, however, it came down rapidly, probably, as K—— suggested, with the purpose of luring the pursuing aeroplanes into easy range of the German ‘Archies.’ If that was the plan, it was eminently successful; for K—— presently reported one of our ‘chasers’ falling in flames, another planing for our own lines, and two or three others turning back. I could see the marauder myself by this time, and noted that it appeared to be heading off about twenty-five degrees to the west of me, and flying already at a level considerably lower than the twelve thousand feet I had run up to in getting away from the last spasm of gun-fire.

“It was this commanding height, togetherwith the fact that my engine was running as sweetly as when it started, that determined me to take a hand in the game at this juncture. Still keeping well up, I promptly headed across to cut off the returning prodigal. For a minute or two the Zepp either didn’t recognise me as ‘enemy,’ or else ignored me entirely. But presently a sharp speeding up of its engines was apparent, and for a moment I thought that it was going to challenge me for a climbing contest, generally a Zepp’s first resort. But a few seconds later it had altered its course through nearly half a quadrant and headed off at top speed, at the same time beginning to descend at what I figured was about an angle of ten per cent., or five hundred feet to the mile. The ruse—to draw me down over some concealed line of ‘Archies’ in that direction—was plain as day; but I had three thousand feet of altitude to the good, power to burn, and, moreover, was bitten deep for the moment with that ‘air-god’ bug I have spoken of. It seemed as natural that I should chase Zepps as that a fox-terrier should chase chickens. Without further thought, I accepted the challenge and launched off in pursuit of the speeding ‘sausage.’

“It really never occurred to me to discuss thething with K——, but, like the trump he was, he never showed by word or sign that tilting at airships had not been included in our orders. He, also, twigged the game at once.

“‘Guns probably in that thick clump of trees by the little pond,’ his far-away voice said over the telephone. ‘Best catch him as far this side there as you can. One of his engines missing badly, and he’s not going very fast.’

“With a quarter of an hour instead of a couple of minutes to work in, I would have preferred to keep along on a comparatively high level, and only descend, to drop my bombs, at an angle that would have kept me pretty well out of the range of the Zepp’s guns. But K——’s warning was too sound to be disregarded and, in this case, the quickest way was also the only way. As it was, it was really almost a nose-dive, and I did the first half of it with the throttle wide open. So fast did we come up with the Zepp that it seemed almost as if a giant had taken the big gas-bag in his hand and thrown it at us.

“The patter of machine-gun bullets sounded only for a second or two—it wasn’t unlike walking over a lawn-sprinkler—and, so far as I could see, did no harm. Then, cold as ice for the work in hand, I shot straight down along the yellowspine of the airship, letting go a couple of bombs before my terrific speed carried me beyond my mark.

“Now a perfect torrent of shrapnel burst out around me—the smoke-tufts made the still distant clump of trees look like a cotton field—and almost at the same instant there was a strong rush of air from below. The machine teetered giddily on one wing-tip for a moment, and I just managed to right it in time to free a hand to grab the tail of K——’s coat as he, apparently unconscious, started to lurch over the side. I don’t seem to have any very clear recollection of being able to get him back into his seat at all.

“I didn’t have a chance for another good look at the Zepp; I only know that it descended rapidly, although apparently not entirely out of control. My machine, badly shot up as it was, still seemed to have a good deal of ‘kick’ left, though the reek of petrol in the air wasn’t an encouraging indication that its ‘vitality’ would continue. The impetus of my descent quickly carried me out of range of that spiteful but isolated little battery of ‘Archies’—luckily, too, in just the direction I wanted to go.

“Just before I flew over the Zepp—it was while the machine-gun bullets were still pattering,I have since recalled—K—— ’phoned me the compass bearing of the nearest point of the Dutch boundary, and said something about it being our only chance if things went wrong. (That they had already ‘gone wrong’ with him he gave no hint.) Strangely, the figures had stuck in my head, and it was in that direction I sheered as soon as the machine was on an even keel again. It was not far, thank heaven, and, partly planing, partly under the power of that brave little half-fed engine, I somehow managed to keep up long enough to clear the top wire of the boundary fence and pile up in a heap in the hospitable silt of good old Holland.”

A dozen questions tumbled after each other off the tip of my eager tongue, and the old “match dame,” who had snored peacefully all through Horne’s even narration, stirred and muttered petulantly at the unwonted disturbance. But Horne, rising and working his stiff joints, essayed to answer all in a single breath.

“I don’t know how much harm was done to the Zepp, or whether it was I or the Hun’s own ‘Archies’ that did it. K—— died in a Dutch hospital, without regaining full consciousness, two days later. (It was a bullet from one of the Zepp’s machine-guns that did for him.) I can’t tell you how I managed to get out of Holland;and”—as a low whistle sounded from Charing Cross and a hooded eye peeped cautiously out of the black shed—“the trains are running again; so we may take it that the little visitor we were watching is now out over the North Sea and on its way home to bed. I think it’s high time that we followed its good example on the latter score. Good-night and sweet dreams, mother.” And he took my arm and began piloting me back to the Strand to waylay a taxi.

Horne has been back at work for a month now, and, so far as I have heard, with no recurrence of ill luck. Last week I met another friend from Argentina—a doctor, returned to “do his bit” with the Red Cross. “Horne has made a brilliant success of his flying,” he said; “did he tell you anything of his exploits?”

“Only a little about a brush with a Zeppelin,” I replied, “and scant details of that.”

“That’s all he has ever told any one. Yet the Dutch patrol swear that he came down in Holland with the tail of his half-dead observation officer’s coat in his teeth (only thing that kept the chap from falling out); and there is also every reason to believe that it was his bombs that brought that Zepp down, and badly knocked up, too.Either one of them would bring him anything from the Military Cross to the V.C. if he would tell even the plain, unvarnished tale of it. But the quixotic idiot made his report so confoundedly non-committal that there was simply nothing for his commander to go by. Was hardly enough to merit mention in dispatches the way it stood, much less to award a decoration on. Queer thing, but they say they’ve had the same sort of trouble with a number of the flying chaps. Seems to be a sort of cult with them. Can’t say it’s a wholly bad one, either.”

The sea raid, the land raid, the airship raid—this was the trio of bugaboos under the menace of which Britain, uninvaded, almost unthreatened, for a thousand years, stirred uneasily at the outbreak of the war and turned anxious eyes toward the leaden mist curtain which veiled the North Sea. Then the bulldog of the Navy after a tentative snap or two, set its teeth in an ever-tightening strangle-hold, and with the dying gasps of German sea-power the threat of the sea and land raids disappeared for good. So far as England was concerned, only the ways of the air were left open to Germany; only the menace of the Zeppelin remained.

And when weeks had lengthened to months, and summer had given way to autumn, and autumn to winter, without the threatened bombing from the sky, the name of Zeppelin ceased to have interest for the stolid Briton, now just awakening to the fact that he had a mighty task to perform beyond the sea. Continued immunity bred contempt, and even the fore-running aids of the spring of 1915 failed to stir Londonfrom her impassive calm. By midsummer she was showing signs of being bored with the whole subject, and the sky-searching antics of the comedians in her packed music halls began to be greeted with yawns from the stalls. She was becoming impatient of her darkened streets, and captious “Pro Bono Publicos” wrote to the papers demanding more illumination and a general return to “Business as Usual.”

The “authorities” still kept up a pretence of preparedness. The so-called anti-aircraft guns—really a nondescript lot of ordnance, left over after the fittest of the few available pieces had been requisitioned for use in France, on the coast, or by the Navy—still had their crews of half-trained amateurs, and the golden beams of the searchlights continued to whirl and dip and curtsey in their nocturnal minuets. Buckets of water and boxes of sand stood ready for emergency use in the art galleries and museums, and on the hoardings conspicuous posters gave with meticulous articularity instructions as to how one should act if Zeppelin bombs began raining in his vicinity. At the first sight of a hostile airship, we were told, we should repair at once to the nearest cellar, and in case a smarting sensation in the nostrils indicated the release of deleterious gas, the mouth and nose should becovered with a moist double bandage containing a layer of carbonate of soda. Some of the pharmacies displayed patent anti-gas respirators in their windows, but none would admit ever having had an inquiry for one.

“We’ve got a war to fight. Zepps ain’t war; fergit ’em.” So a London bus conductor summed up the situation to me, and so seemed to feel the majority of his fellow townsmen of all classes.

Such, as regards Zeppelins, was the spirit of “London and the Eastern Counties”—to use the official phrase—as the summer of 1915 waxed and began to wane. Something of how this spirit met the trying events of the months which followed, I shall try to show by a few extracts from my journal. In deference to the wishes of the British Censorship the names of several points in London have been slightly altered.

On Board Yacht ——en voyage,Wroxham Broad to Hickling Broad.

August—.

We sailed and poled along the river and canal yesterday, and in the afternoon moored to the bank at this point, which is but a mile or two from the North Sea. The morning papers, whichwe picked up as we passed through the little village of Potter Heigham, contained an official bulletin telling of a Zeppelin raid on the “Eastern Counties” the previous night; and later in the day word was brought us that Lowestoft, the great trawlers’ port about twenty miles to the south-east, had been heavily bombed. A second raid in this vicinity seemed, therefore, anything but likely.

The afternoon closed in one of those characteristic butterfly chases of sunshine and showers so familiar to the Augustvoyageuron The Broads, and, lounging at ease on deck after dinner, we had watched the twilight aeroplane patrol, stencilled in black silhouette against the glowing western clouds, pass north from Yarmouth to meet its fellow from the Cromer hangars. A half-hour later the sharp staccato of its engine, rather than its blurred image against the paling afterglow, told us of its homeward flight.

It was a good two hours after the drumming of the aeroplane’s engine had ceased to be heard that a strange new sound became audible, first distantly, in the puffs of the quickening night breeze, soon more imminent and with steady insistence. It was apparently the booming explosions of powerful gas engines, and presently, blending with this, could be distinguisheda buzzing clackity-clack that suggested whirring propellers.

“Another aeroplane,” suggested one. “A fleet of aeroplanes,” hazarded another. “A dirigible threshing-machine,” opined a third. And, judging by the now almost overpowering rush of sound, the latter was nearest to the truth.

The whole universe seemed to have resolved itself into one mighty roar, and I distinctly recall that the mainsail halyard by which I steadied myself vibrated to the beat of the pulsating grind from above. For a moment—sensing rather than seeing—I was aware of a great black bulk blotting out the stars above the river, and then, stabbing the darkness like a flaming sword, the yellow flash of a search light leapt forth from the dusky void and ran in swift zigzags back and forth across the marshes and canals beneath. Now a herd of cows could be seen staggering dazedly to their feet, now the startled bridge-players on the deck of the houseboat moored above were revealed, and now our own eyes blinked blindly in the yellow glare before the questing shaft darted on down the river to spot-light an eel-fisher’s shanty on the dyke and the gaunt frame of a towering Dutch windmill beyond.

Now it found the sharp right-angling bend of the river, quivered there for a second or two and then flashed out, leaving a blanker blackness behind. At almost the same instant the “Thing of Terror”—a hurtling mass of roaring engines and clattering propellers—shot by overhead, followed by a confused wake of conflicting air-currents. It passed straight down above the middle of the river at a height of not over 300 feet, and beneath the dimly guessed bulk of it bright chinks and squares of light, broken by the shadows of moving men, plotted the lines of two under-slung cars. A Zeppelin had passed almost within a stone’s throw.

The lights of the car leaped sharply upward almost as soon as the bend of the river was reached, and at the end of a couple of minutes the roar of the engines dwindled to a distant buzz and died away completely. Ten minutes passed, during which the old eel-fisher went on stringing his traps across the river and the house-boaters resumed their interrupted bridge. Then a red signal light flashed out in the heavens in the direction of Yarmouth, and at almost the same moment, clear and sharp, came the sound of furious light-artillery fire. This lasted for only a minute or two, and there was anothereight- or ten-minute interval before a still more distant sound of gun-fire became faintly audible. Drowning the crack of these latest shots suddenly came the roll of a heavy boom, quickly to be followed by another, and another, and another, until a dozen or more had sounded. Then the peaceful silence of the early evening resumed its sway.

The eel-fisher finished sinking his traps before paddling up the gangway of the yacht and venturing a casual inquiry as to whether or not we had “chanct to see the Zepp.” “’Er do this onct befoor,” he chirruped. “’Er gets bearin’s from ’e’ riv’r an’ then ’eds off fu No’ich o’ Ya’muth. I be thinkin’ if ’er knowed this grouse moor b’longed tu Ser Edderd Grey, ’er’d a bombed it good as ’er goed by.”

This morning the London papers have the bulletin of still another raid on the “Eastern Counties,” with a good many casualties; also an account of how a Zeppelin was brought down in the North Sea and destroyed by aeroplanes from Nieuport.

London,September—.

Yesterday’s papers had the usual account of an air raid on the “Eastern Counties,” and during the day word was passed round that thishad consisted of an attempt to bomb the Woolwich Arsenal. This morning they have finally had to add “and London” to the regular formula, as last night, for the first time, bombs were dropped upon the heart of the city and seven million people watched the whole performance. It was the nearest thing to their promised “big raid” that the Germans have yet brought off, and to-day London—in the defence of the metropolitan area of which guns were fired for the first time in many hundreds of years—appears to have declared a sort of informal half-holiday to note the consequences.

To Londoners, a Zeppelin raid appears to be a good deal like the paradoxical “man-sitting-on-the-pin” joke—it is funniest to those who miss the point. To the ones in the swath of the raid, like the one who sits on the pin, it is anything but a laughing matter. “But the swath of the raid is so narrow, London so broad; the killed so few, Londoners so many. If this is the worst the Huns can do, on with ‘Business as Usual!’” There is no denying that this epitomises the spirit of London—even as it mourns its dead—on the morrow of the first great air raid of history. For myself, I must admit that I was rather too near the point of the pin,and have since seen rather too many of the “pin-pricks,” to be able to look at the diversion from quite the standpoint of the great majority.

Last night was clear, calm, and moonless—ideal Zeppelin conditions—and walking down from my hotel to the Coliseum at eight o’clock, I noticed that the searchlights were turning the dome of the sky into one great kaleidoscope with their weaving bands of brightness. The warming-up drill was over as I entered the music hall, and, returning home at the end of the “top-liner’s” act, I picked my precarious way by the light of the stars and the diffused halos of what had once been street lamps. I was in bed by a quarter to eleven, and it was but a few moments later that the distant but unmistakable boom of a bomb smote upon my unpillowed ear. I was at my east-facing window with a jump, and an instant later the opaque curtain of the night was being slashed to ribbons by the awakening searchlights.

For a minute or two, all of them seemed to be reeling blind and large across the empty heavens, and then, guided by the nearing explosions, one after another they veered off to the east and focussed in a great cone of light where two or three slender slivers of vivid brightness weregliding nearer above the dim bulks of the domes and spires of the “City.”

Swiftly, undeviatingly, relentlessly, these little pale yellow dabs came on, carrying with them, as by a sort of magnetic attraction, the tip of the cone formed by the converged beams of the searchlights. Nearer and louder sounded the detonations of the bombs. Now they burst in salvos of threes and fours; now singly at intervals, but with never more than a few seconds between. Always a splash of lurid light preceded the sound of the explosion, in most instances to be followed by the quick leap of flames against the skyline. Many of these fires died away quickly,—sometimes through lack of fuel, as in a stone-paved court; more often through being subdued by the firemen, scores of whose engines could be heard clanging through the streets,—others waxed bright and spread until the yellow shafts of the searchlights paled against the heightening glow of the eastern heavens.

The wooden clackity-clack of the raiders’ propellers came to my ears at about the same moment that the sparkling trail of the fuse of an incendiary bomb against the loom of a familiar spire roughly located the van of the attack as now about half a mile distant. Afterthat, things happened so fast that my recollections, though photographically vivid, are somewhat disconnected. My last “calmly calculative” act was to measure one of the on-coming airships—then at about twenty-five degrees from directly overhead—between the thumb and forefinger of my outstretched right hand, these, extended to their utmost, framing the considerably foreshortened gas-bag with about a half-inch to spare.

Up to this moment, the almost undeviating line of flight pursued by the approaching Zeppelins appeared as likely to carry them on one side of my coign of vantage as the other; that is to say, theyseemednot unlikely to be going to pass directly overhead. It was at this juncture, not unnaturally, that it occurred to me that the basement—for the next minute or two at least—would be vastly preferable, for any but observation purposes, to my top-floor window. Before I could translate this discretionary impulse into action, however, a small but brilliant light winked twice or thrice from below the leading airship, and a point or two of change was made in the course, with the possible purpose (it has since occurred to me) of swinging across the great group of conjoined railway termini a half-mile or so to the north. Thismeant that the swath of the bombs would be cut at least a hundred yards to the north-east, and, impelled by the fascination of the unfolding spectacle, I remained at my window.

During the next half-minute the bombs fell singly at three-or four-second intervals. Then the blinking light flashed out under the leader again,—probably the order for “rapid fire,”—and immediately afterwards a number of sputtering fire-trails—not unlike the wakes of meteors—lengthened downward from beneath each of the two airships. (I might explain that I did not see more than two Zeppelins at any one time, though some have claimed to have seen three.)

Immediately following the release of the bombs, the lines of fire streamed in a forward curve, but from about halfway down their fall was almost perpendicular. As they neared the earth, the hiss of cloven air—similar to but not so high-keyed as the shriek of a shell—became audible, and a second or two later the flash of the explosion and the rolling boom were practically simultaneous.

Between eight and a dozen bombs fell in a length of five blocks, and at a distance of from one to three hundred yards from my window, the echoes of one explosion mingling with the burst of the next. Broken glass tinkled downto the left and right, and a fragment of slate from the roof shattered upon my balcony. But the most remarkable phenomenon was the rush of air from, or rather to, the explosion. With each detonation I leaned forward instinctively and braced myself for a blow on the chest, and lo—it descended upon my back. The same mysterious force burst inward my half-latched door, and all down one side of the square curtains were streaming outward from open or broken windows. (I did not sit down and ponder the question at the moment, but the phenomenon is readily explained by the fact that, because the force of the explosives used in Zeppelin bombs is invariably exerted upwards, the air from the lower level is drawn in to fill the vacuum thus created. This also accounts for the fact that all of the window glass shattered by the raiders has fallen on the sidewalks instead of inside the rooms.)

Tremendous as was the spectacle of the long line of fires extending out of eyescope to the City and beyond, there is no denying that the dominating feature of the climax of the raid was the Zeppelins themselves. Emboldened perhaps, by the absence of gun-fire, these had slowed down for their parting salvo so as to be almost “hovering” when the bombs weredropped opposite my vantage point. Brilliantly illuminated by the searchlights, whose beams wove about below them like the ribbons in a Maypole dance, the clean lines of their gaunt frameworks stood out like bas-reliefs in yellow wax. Every now and then one of them would lurch violently upward,—probably at the release of a heavy bomb,—but, controlled by rudders and planes, the movement had much of the easy power of the dart of a great fish. Indeed, there was strong suggestion of something strangely familiar in the lithe grace of those sleek yellow bodies, in the swift swayings and rightings, in the powerful guiding movements of those hinged “tails,” and all at once the picture of a gaunt “man-eater” nosing his terribly purposeful way below the keel of a South-Sea pearler flashed to my mind, and the words “Sharks! Sharks of the air!” leaped to my lips.

While the marauders still floated with bare steerage-way in flaunting disdain, the inexplicably delayed firing order to the guns was flashed around, and—like a pack of dogs baying the moon, and with scarcely more effect—London’s “air defence” came into action. Everything from machine-guns to three-and four-inchers,—not one in the lot built for anti-aircraft work,—belched forth the best it had. Up went thebullets and shrapnel, and down they came again, down on the roofs and streets of London. Far, far below the contemptuous airships the little stars of bursting shrapnel spat forth their steel bullets in spiteful impotence, and back they rained on the tiles and cobbles.

Suddenly a gruffer growl burst forth from the yelping pack, as the gunners of some hitherto unleashed piece of ordnance received orders to join the attack. At the first shot a star-burst pricked the night in the rear of the second airship, and well on a line with it; a second exploded fairly above it; and then—all at once I was conscious that the searchlights were playing on a swelling cloud of white mist which was trailing away into the north-east. The Zeppelin had evidently taken a leaf from the book of the squid.

The tinkle of shrapnel bullets on the roof sent me down at this juncture to join the gathering of my fellow guests on the ground floor, where, on the manager’s calling attention to the fact that my knees were shaking from the cold, I was glad to avail myself of the loan of his overcoat. I was not unappreciative of his delicacy in attributing the undeniable shiver in my frame to the cold, and I have not yet entirely made up my mind just to what extent the chill nightair, standing in a twisted and cramped position in order to look up, and sheer funk shared the responsibility for it.

I have been under shell-fire on several occasions, and I confess quite frankly that I never before felt anywhere near so “panicky” as during that long half-minute in which the airships appeared certain to pass directly overhead. The explanation of this, it seems to me, may be found in the fact that, in the trenches or in a fort which is under fire, one is among cool, determined, and often callous men who are meeting the expected as a part of the day’s work, while in a Zeppelin raid one is more or less unconsciously affected by the unexpectedness of it, and by the very natural terror of the unhardened non-combatants. At any rate, to say that there was not a very contagious brand of terror “in the air” in the immediate vicinity of the swath of last night’s raid would be to say something that was not true of my own neighbourhood.

As soon as the firing ceased I slipped into my street clothes and hurried out, reaching the “Square” perhaps ten minutes after the last bomb had fallen. That terror still brooded was evident from the white, anxious faces at street doors and basement gratings, but a mounting spirit was recorded in the gratuitous adviceshouted out by the “Boots” at a hotel entrance to a portly and not un-Teutonic-looking gentleman who went puffing under a street-light.

“No use hurryin’, mister,” chirped the young irrepressible. “Last Zepp fer Berlin’s just pulled out.”

At the end of a block my feet were crunching glass at every step, and a few moments later I was in the direct track of the raid. By a strange chance—it is impossible that it could have happened by intent—that last fierce rain of bombs had descended upon the one part of London where the hospitals stand thicker than in any other; and yet, while every one of these was windowless and scarred from explosions in streets and adjacent squares, not one appeared to have been hit. One large building devoted entirely to nervous disorders was a bedlam of hysteria, and the nurses are said to have had a terrible time in getting their patients in hand. From another, given over to infantile paralysis, hip-disease, and other ailments of children, came a pitiful chorus of wails in baby treble. The other hospitals, including one or two foreign ones, appeared to be proceeding quietly with their share of the work of succour, receiving and caring for the victims as fast as they could be hurried in.

The fires, except for a couple of wide glows in the direction of the City and a gay geyser of flame from a broken gas main in the next block, had disappeared as by magic, and most of the places where bombs had dropped in this vicinity could be located only by the little knots of people before the barred doors, or by following a line of hose from an engine.

Except for an occasional covered stretcher being borne out to a waiting ambulance, the killed and maimed were little in evidence; and but for a chance encounter with a friend who was doing some sort of volunteer surgical work, I should have failed entirely to have an intimate glimpse of the grimmer side of the raid. I jostled him at a barrier where the crowd was being held back from a bombed tenement, and he pressed me into service forthwith.

“They are trying to uncover some kiddies on the second floor. Four of them—all in one room,” he explained. “Two floors above smashed in on them. Everybody fagged out, and I’m after some brandy to buck ’em up. You’re fresh. Take this armlet and tell the police at the door I sent you.”

The little lettered khaki band passed me by the police cordon, and I found myself in the lantern-lighted hallway of a rickety brick buildingsuch as they erected as tenements in London thirty or forty years ago. Two blanket-covered bodies lay on the floor waiting to be removed to the morgue, and a third, hideously mangled, but still breathing, was being hastily bandaged by a doctor before sending on to the hospital. A dozen children were crying in a room which opened off the hall, and there, too, a hysterical woman in a nightgown, her face and hands streaming blood, was being restrained by a couple of uniformed police-women from rushing up the sagging stairway.

A fireman who had collapsed on the floor gave me his axe, and a special constable with a lantern guided me up the quaking stairs to a little back flat, where several men, distinguished by armlets as some kind of volunteers, were hacking away at the pile ofdébriswhich filled most of one of the rooms. Four children had been sleeping in that room, explained the policeman, and one of them had been heard whimpering a while back. There was no light but a lantern and a flash torch, he added, and every one was dead played out; but just the same, they were going to stick to it as long as there was a chance that the “nipper” was alive.

This must have been somewhere around midnight, and it was by the first light of dawnleaking in through the shattered beams and rafters that we reached the last of the little bruised bodies buried under thedébris. The ghastly interval between was in many respects the most trying I have ever experienced. Somebody’s strength, or nerves, or courage was giving way every few minutes, and there was one dreadful quarter hour during which we all had to knock off and help hold down the now stark-mad mother who had somehow escaped from the room below. For our reward we found that the youngest child was breathing, and might continue to do so, according to the doctor, for several hours. Its two brothers and its sister had mercifully been killed outright in the first crash.

Same day, 7.30p.m.

I wrote the foregoing after a couple of hours of sleep; then went out and spent the rest of the day back-tracking the raiders. As the swath was largely cut through the tenement and slum districts of the East End, the property damage was not great, but, for the same reason, the loss of life must have been considerable. Pathetic little funerals—the kind one sees advertised on posters of enterprising Shoreditch and Whitechapel undertakers as costing two pounds ten shillings, with hearse and two carriages, withan extra carriage added for an even three pounds—were to be seen here and there; but withal there was a remarkable absence of “hate” observable in the crowds that thronged from far and near to view the work of the nocturnal visitors from beyond the North Sea.

It is, indeed, well said that the Briton is a poor hater, and almost the only evidence that I could see of his being stirred by the events of last night was in the heightened activity of recruiting. The astute authorities, quick to see the advantage of taking the tide at flood, kept speakers—both civilians and soldiers—all day at the barriers where the crowds were held back in the vicinities of the points bombed, and many hitherto wavering volunteers were gathered in as a consequence. Here and there threatening crowds gathered in front of bakeries and butcher shops which bore German names; but their leaders were half-tipsy cockney dames whom the ever imperturbable “Bobbies” had no trouble in hustling on out of the way. No, stubborn fighter that he is, the Briton is only the most indifferent of haters.

From the time of the big raid, in early September, until the second week in October therewas not a single night on which the moon, wind, clouds, or some combination of meteorological conditions was not unfavourable to Zeppelin action, and it was not until this date that they tried to come again. Although rather nearer than before to two or three of the explosions, I had no such opportunity to view the progress of the raid as on the previous occasion, and this latest bombing is, perhaps, most memorable to me as having served to shake the monumental calm of two of the most famous and impressive of all London’s institutions, the “Bobby” and the Frivolity chorus girl. I turn again to my journal.

London,October—

I was at the Frivolity last night with my friend Captain J——, of the Royal Artillery, home from France on a week’s leave, to see an oculist. About nine-thirty the nearing boom of heavy explosions heralded another Zeppelin attack. I started for the door at once, but J——, an old Londoner, pulled me down into my stall by the coat-tail, dryly observing that, right before us under the Frivolity footlights, there was transpiring an infinitely more epochal event than anything that could possibly be seen outside.

“We have had other Zeppelin raids,” heshouted close to my ear, to make himself heard above the uneasy bustle which filled the theatre as the bombs boomed more imminent, “but never before in history has man beheld the Frivolity chorus shaken from its traditional languor. But now look! They faint to left and right, and I’m jolly certain that M—— doesn’t get her cue to embrace G—— until the next act. ’Pon my word, I never expected to live to see the waters of this fount of brides for the British peerage so disturbed.” J——’s voice trailed off into wondering speechlessness.

“Boom!” This time it was close at hand, and the rattle of fallingdébriscould be heard above the discordant wail of the mechanically labouring orchestra. Utterly unable to sit still any longer, I shook off J——’s restraining arm, and reached a side exit just as two bombs fell in quick succession, a hundred yards up the Avenue. Again I was conscious of those strange rushes of air from the “wrong” direction which I had experienced during the previous raid. The panes of the upper windows shivered to bits, but the fragments, striking the reinforced glass of the marquee, were robbed of their force before they had caromed to the sidewalk.

On both sides of the Avenue glass was falling in countless tons,—in one great corner buildingalone 25,000 pounds of plate glass are estimated to have been shattered,—and there is no doubt that many were killed and injured by being caught under the vitreous avalanche.

Almost immediately three or four more bombs fell beyond the Avenue, there was another crescendo of falling glass, and then a lone Zeppelin—apparently at the end of its ammunition—headed up and off to the north-east pursued by a single searchlight beam and a scattering gun-fire.

The Frivolity chorus, having been soothed and revived, resumed its wonted demeanour and took up the dropped thread of the performance, and J——, no longer held a fascinated captor by the wonder of its lapse, joined me on the sidewalk to see what had been happening outside. It is a remarkable fact that the great majority of the audience, many of whom had not stirred from their seat, elected to remain and see the show out. From the three theatres opposite, however, one of which had been struck, considerable numbers were pouring forth. But not in all the now dense crowd in the Avenue were there the symptoms of a panic.

As we stepped from the curb something tinkled against my foot. Picking it up, it turned out to be a still warm piece of torn steel whichJ—— identified at once as a fragment of the casing of an incendiary bomb. It was not over an eighth of an inch thick, but of such superlative quality that it rang like a silver bell even to the tap of a finger-nail. A far more murderous fragment of shivered metal, which J—— kicked into a few minutes later, was a piece of shrapnel casing, and there is no doubt that the casualties from anti-aircraft-gun projectiles are very considerable.

The police and fire department work was even more remarkable than in the September raid. Not a single tell-tale glow marked the path by which the Zeppelin had come, and the only fire in our immediate vicinity was the spout from another sundered gas main. Barriers already shut off the crowds from the points where the worst damage had been done, and the work of removing the dead and wounded was being carried on quickly and expeditiously.

A bomb falling in the Avenue midway between a motor bus and a taxi had taken a heavy toll of the passengers of both, while the two vehicles, still standing upright, had been flattened until their appearance was not unlike that of their respective “property” prototypes occasionally employed to give perspective to the stage-setting of a street. A dozen or more dead and woundedlay in a row in front of a gin palace which had collapsed under a bomb; but, as far as we could see or learn, there had been little, if any, loss of life in the historic old theatre which had been struck.

A sinister coincidence had landed one bomb on a temporary wooden building occupied as Belgian Refugee headquarters. Miraculously however, although the rickety frame was blown quite out of shape, no fire was started among the small mountains of highly inflammable baggage on which the bomb exploded.

“The ’Uns ain’t satisfied with wot they did to ’em in Belg’um,” snorted an indignant coster, viewing the wreck; “the baby-killers ’ad to follow ’em to Lunnon.” This was, I believe, about the nearest thing to “hate” that I heard expressed during the several hours we mingled with the crowds on the streets.

Faring on down the “bomb-track” into that historic section of Old London which lies to the east of the Avenue, we came upon an apparition quite as astounding to me as the spectacle of the “panicky” Frivolity girls had been to J——. It was nothing less than a London police constable, hatless, breathless, and so little master of himself that he was unable to respond with the customary “First to the right, second tothe left, and so on” formula when we asked him the way to the B—— Court, where we had heard there had been heavy damage. Slamming down on the pavement a heavy burden which he carried by a loop of wire, he began jabbering something to the effect that the “bloomin’ pill” came down “’arf a rod” from where he stood, and that orders called for the instant fetching of all “evidences” to the nearest station. I switched on my electric-torch—everybody here has carried them since the streets were darkened,—to recoil before the sight of the pear-shaped cone of dented steel toppled over on the cobbles at my feet.

“Good heavens, man, you’ve got an unexploded bomb!” I gasped, backing against the wall. “What do you mean by slamming it around in that way?”

“If she didn’t go off after fallin’ from the sky, I fancy she can stand a drop of a few inches,” was the reply. “It isn’t ’avin’ ’er ’ere, sir, that gets my nerves. They went to pieces when she came down and bounced along the pavement in front of where I stood.”

“Perhaps she has a time fuse, set to go off when she gets a crowd around her,” said the irrepressible J—— by way of encouragement. “The Huns are adepts at just such formsof subtlety. Better leave her alone for a spell.”

Shaking in every limb, but still resolved to carry out “orders” to the last, the doughty chap slipped his bleeding fingers through the wire loop and trudged off on his way to the station, staggering under the weight of half a hundred pounds of “T.N.T.”[3]That he reached there without mishap is evidenced by a flashlight in one of the “penny pictorials” this morning showing both him and his booty at the wicket of the B—— Street Police Station.

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