[3]Trinitrotoluol.
[3]Trinitrotoluol.
Two or three times during the next couple of hours searchlights flashed out to the east and south, and the blink of shrapnel bursting under barely defined patches of pale yellow indicated that the raid was an ambitious one, participated in by many airships. The heart of the city, however, was not reached again. I have it on good authority this morning that a number of bombs were exploded on the works at Woolwich, but, even if true, this only goes to show that Britain’s great arsenal, if not less, is at least not more vulnerable than the non-military areas.
If possible, London took this latest raid even more calmly than the previous one, and the level-headed practicality of the remark of thebus conductor I have quoted—“We’ve got a war to fight. Zepps ain’t war; fergit ’em!”—may be taken as fairly representing the frame of mind in which the metropolis awaits the really frightful visitation that Germany has promised.
For three months following the October visitation there were no further air raids on England, and it was known that this immunity was due to one or more of four things: the strengthening of Britain’s anti-aircraft defences, unfavourable weather, the efficacy of the Allies’ reprisals on South German cities, or a dawning realisation on the part of Germany that the maximum physical damage which can possibly be inflicted on Great Britain by air raids can never be more than an insignificant fraction of the damage done to the Teutonic cause as a consequence of resorting to this form of terrorism.
As weeks lengthened to months without an attack—even though incessant reports from a score of sources told of feverish Zeppelin construction in all parts of the Kaiser’s dominions—there awakened a hope in the breasts of Germany’s enemies and her friends that the humanitarian consideration had been the moving one. This hope was rudely crushed by the mid-January aeroplane raid—evidently a scouting reconnaissance—uponKent, and the renewed Zeppelin attacks on Paris and the Midland counties. Subject only to the weather, then, and to such defensive measures as may be taken in France and England, we now know that this least warranted and most cruel of all forms of Teutonic “frightfulness” may be expected to continue until the end of the war.
All yesterday evening I came upon little knots of sailor men gathered along the quay or at the corners of the streets of Harwich and Dovercourt. Their weather-beaten parchment-brown faces were drawn and troubled, and they spoke in the jerkily lowered voices of men not wont to hold their tongues or passions in restraining leash. There was something in the half-stunned, half-angry looks suggestive of the expressions I had seen on the faces of the sailors at a North Wales port on the evening that a carelessly-framed despatch had tricked them into transient belief that the British Fleet had been beaten by the Germans in the North Sea. But I had been with naval men all afternoon, and knew that there was nothing fresh to report from behind the grey fog-curtain to the north. The trouble was of another kind, but from past experience I knew that the moment when the British sailor man spoke through clenched teeth in those jerkily lowered tones, with his brow corrugated in mahogany wrinkles of perturbation and his blue eyes fixed absently on thefingers of his working hands, was not the one for even the most sympathetically curious to intrude upon him.
Enlightenment came later, when I asked the maid who lowered the shutters and drew the double curtains of my room in the little hotel on the Dovercourt cliff, why it was that the children playing in a narrow street that branched off diagonally below my window hushed their voices and tiptoed as they came down toward the seaward end, and why many of even belated and hurrying delivery carts were pulling up and taking another way on their clattering rounds.
“Is somebody sick?” I asked, “or is one of the neighbours dead?”
“Didn’t you know, sir?” faltered the girl. “That is Captain Fryatt’s ’ome down there. It’s the little red-brick ’ouse—the fourth or fifth from the corner, sir. We all o’ us ’ere knew ’im, sir, an’ loved ’im; an’—you’ll excuse me, sir” (her voice broke for a moment and the starting tears glistened in the flickering light of her candle)—“but I was thinkin’ o’ the missus an’ the nippers. They’s waitin’ down there for more news from Belg’um. I hates to think o’ ’em, sir. It makes me want to scream an’—an’ to fight. I’ll be going now, sir; it gets me all wrought up w’en I talks about it.”
It came to me all at once what those stunned angry sailors on the street were talking of, and the hot wave of indignation—checked for an hour or two by the excitement of meeting and boarding a returning submarine—that had surged over me that afternoon when I first read the news of Captain Fryatt’s execution in the paper, welled up anew inside me and throbbed against my temples. I was conscious of the passing of one of a class of men whom I had learned to know and love during many years of intimate association—in craft stout and frail, on seas fair and stormy—and the fact that the death of this man had been compassed with a cold-blooded cynicism scarcely paralleled in modern history brought the significance of it home to me with especial poignancy. In a dull sort of way I had been conscious of a similar feeling every time I had read of the loss of merchant officers and crews from the inauguration of the submarine campaign, but only now had I come to understand how much of a hold these same sailor men had on my affection, what parts they had played in scores of the vivid incidents of my life that I cared most to dwell upon in memory.
Three of the last ten years of my life had been spent upon the sea, I reflected, and of this time perhaps six months had been put in on one oranother of the “floating palaces” of the main tourist routes, and not more than that aboard ships under the German, French, Dutch, or American flag. That left a good two years—more than seven hundred days and nights—spent aboard the smaller British merchantmen—tramps, coasters, colliers, traders, flat-bottomed river stern-wheelers—in out-of-the-way water-lanes of the world.
Two years of my life—and what treasured years they were, too!—spent in the care of the bold, bluff, bronzed British merchant captains who drove “the swift shuttles of an Empire’s loom.” What strange seas they had steered me through, and what strange corners in the ports that served those seas! And what adventures they had run me into, and what scrapes got me out of! And what courtesy, what consideration—aye, even what tenderness in times of misadventure and sickness—had I not enjoyed at their hands!
Pulling on my cardigan jacket, I “stood-by” at the hour of one—midnight by the sun-time, by which the ships of the sea still sail—and at the instant when the steamers in the harbour would have been sounding “Eight bells” had there been no lurking Zeppelins to guard against, leaned out of the open window till the indrifting fog blew sharp against my face and began my “watch.”
Just so—with a rough blue sleeve brushing against my own—had I leaned over the bridge or taffrail of a hundred steamers ploughing a hundred sea-ways, and now, with the familiar breath of the sea in my nostrils and the familiar mist of the sea damping my hair again, old friends of other days strode down the corridors of memory and ranged themselves, one at a time, by my side. At first I tried to muster them chronologically, in the order I had known them from my first tentative coastal voyages in the Pacific—(B——, of the Vancouver-Seattle packet, who let me sleep on his cabin couch one night when the rooms were all taken in order that I might be rested for the tennis tournament I was engaging in at Tacoma on the morrow; R——, of the old Alaska “Inland Passage” coaster, who taught me to “box” the compass and awoke the slumbering love o’ the sea in my blood with tales of the Victoria sealing fleet; P——, of the Mexican trader, who smuggled me out of Guaymas when the Sonora authorities were trying to arrest me for landing on Tiburon without a permit)—but presently the magnet of my quickened memory began drawing them forward out of turn, and ere long they were crowding on like guests at a reception.
Now I would think of the bravery of them,and instantly a series of pictures took shape before my eyes, a score of names leapt to my lips, a score of hands—hard brown hands, with a world of warmth in their steady grip—reached out to clasp my own. Who was the bravest among men that had all been brave? I asked myself; and then how the pictures formed and dissolved as one stirring incident after another flashed across my mind! What could have been finer than the way Captain K——, of that cranky clipper-bowed old “C.N.” steamer, had stuck out that typhoon off Taiwan, lashed to the bridge for three days, and subsisting on coffee and rum and pilot bread? I could see his brine-white face (as I saw it when I took a timid peep up the companion way on the day the “twister” began to die down) taking shape out there in the drifting fog even as the recollection of that fearsome storm crystallised in my memory, and then fancy turned another cog, and it was a sun-blistered South Pacific trader that I seemed to see, with a sallow, fever-wracked figure at the wheel, and two or three dozen naked blacks writhing in agony on the forrard deck. How old B——, of theCora Andrews, took his load of plague-stricken Papuans through the Barrier Reef and into the quarantine station at Townsville is a South Sea epic.
Then came memories with a more personal touch, and I dwelt for a few moments over the shifting scenes of the mix-up I started the time I tried to take a flashlight of the smokers in the “Opium Den” of the oldYo San, plying on the Hongkong-Bangkok run. Some of the Chinese crew were smuggling opium that voyage, and, taking me for a Secret Service officer on search, started to wipe up the deck with my protesting anatomy. Curled round my camera under a bunk in the corner of the opium den, with nothing but the fact that my assailants were so numerous that they got in each other’s way saving me from instant annihilation, and expecting every moment that one of them would gather his wits together sufficiently to pounce down on me through the slats, I cowered in terror, and was ever music sweeter than the raucous bellow of bluff old Captain G—— when, cursing like a pirate and banging right and left with the belaying pins he held in either hand, he ploughed his way into the den and yanked me out by the scruff of the neck. Poor old G——! he was lost with his ship two voyages later, when the ancientYo Sanwas piled up by a typhoon on the Tongking coast.
Then the recollection of the ignominious wayin which old G—— had pulled me out from under the bunk by the coat collar recalled the time when another British skipper—his command was only a “P.S.N.C.” tender in Valparaiso, and I had long since forgotten his name—saved my life by handling me in quite the same unceremonious manner. The schooner on which I had planned to sail to Juan Fernandez had broken loose in a violent “Norther” and was fast driving before the mountainous swells upon themaleconor seawall, when the “Navigation Company’s” tender, out to salve some drifting barges, came nosing cautiously in toward where the hollow waves were curling over into crashing breakers. The barges and their cargoes were probably worth more than our walty old hooker, but the skipper of the tender, noting only that there were lives to be saved on the latter, hesitated not an instant about deciding to try and stand-by. Unfortunately, we had a lot of Germancolonistasaboard, and the panic among them prevented many from the schooner being saved. I was one of the half-dozen who did not fail in their leaps for the tender’s outreaching starboard bow, but my hold on the slippery rail was so precarious that only the mighty hand of the skipper on my neck prevented my slipping back into the sea. For a moment now, out in the drifting fog, I saw his round red face, underits “sou’wester,” just as I had peered up into it after he dragged me over the rail and slammed me down on the heeling deck.
At times memories crowded so that they became confused. I was not sure, for instance, whether it was T——, of theEimoo, or P——, of theLevuka, whom I had seen go over the rail into shark-infested Rotrura Lagoon to jerk the kink out of an air-hose before his diver strangled; or which of two otherwise well-remembered “B.I.” skippers it was that waded in, barehanded, and floored every one of a bunch of Lascars who were fighting with their knives; or whether it was the mate or the skipper of the East African coaster who, with one of his thighs being torn to ribbons by the beast’s hind claws, kept his grip on the throat of a young leopard that had slipped from its cage, and which he was afraid might become panic-stricken and jump overboard before it could be recaptured; or whether it was the captain of a “Burns, Philips” or a “Union” steamer that I had seen put out through the tortuous passage of Suva Bay when the wind was snapping the tops from the coconut palms, and the barometer was at 28.50 and still falling, just because the wife of the missionary on some obscure little bit of the Fijian Archipelago to the north was expectingto become a mother and needed the attention of the ship’s doctor.
I would have gone on to the end of my “watch” thinking of the bravery—moral and physical—the ready nerve and the general “sufficiency unto occasion” of my old friends, but most that had been brave had also been kind and considerate, and every now and then I found my mind occupied with recollections of the little things they had done for me, or that I had seen them do for others. There was B——, of the oldChangsha, running from Yokohama to Sydney, who went miles off his course just to satisfy my whim to pass over the spot whereMary Glosterwas buried at sea. What an afternoon that was! The Straits of Macassar “oily and treacly,” just as Kipling had described them, and the milk-warm land breeze wafting the odours of the spice groves of Celebes. B—— had his volume of Kipling and I had mine, and between us was the reef-freckled chart of Macassar Straits with Borneo to starboard, Celebes to port, and a thousand dotted lines indicating islets and reefs and rocks—mostly lurking, half-submerged—in between.
“By the Little Paternosters, as you come to the Union Bank,We dropped her—I think I told you—and I pricked it off where she sank—(Tiny she looked on the grating—that oily, treacly sea—)Hundred and eighteen East, remember, and South just three.Easy bearings to carry....”
“By the Little Paternosters, as you come to the Union Bank,We dropped her—I think I told you—and I pricked it off where she sank—(Tiny she looked on the grating—that oily, treacly sea—)Hundred and eighteen East, remember, and South just three.Easy bearings to carry....”
“By the Little Paternosters, as you come to the Union Bank,
We dropped her—I think I told you—and I pricked it off where she sank—
(Tiny she looked on the grating—that oily, treacly sea—)
Hundred and eighteen East, remember, and South just three.
Easy bearings to carry....”
read B——, running his finger along the chart.
“Aye, easy to carry.Here’sthe spot,” and he marked it with a circled dot. Then we “dead reckoned” the latitude from the noon sight, and “shot” for the longitude as we “came to the Union Bank.” And finally, when we were over the spot as near as might be determined from hasty reckoning, nothing would do but B—— must start the lead going to determine the depth. Never shall I forget the way his face lit up when the leadsmen droned out “Fourteen,” and there were tears glistening in his eyes as he turned back a couple of pages and read—
“And we dropped her in fourteen fathoms; I pricked it off where she sank.”
“And we dropped her in fourteen fathoms; I pricked it off where she sank.”
“And we dropped her in fourteen fathoms; I pricked it off where she sank.”
“I might have known that Kipling worked it out with a chart,” he exclaimed; “but what a thrill it gives one to find it exact, even to the soundings!”
The margins of “TheMary Gloster,” in my “Seven Seas,” bear the pencilled records—now thumbed and fingered into dim blurs—of our “mid-sea madness” to this day, and thereis nothing that I treasure more. B—— would never have taken his 5,000-ton freighter miles off her course, at the cost of some hours of time and a number of tons of good Nagasaki coal, had he been any less daft about Kipling than I was. But all British sailors love Kipling; as a class, I have always felt that they had a fuller appreciation of the message of “the uncrowned Laureate” than have any others.
For an hour at least I must have turned in fancy the pages of Kipling, now with this well-remembered skipper, now with that, until the recollection of how kind old N——, of a Liverpool Para-Manaos freighter, had read to me “The Hymn Before Action” one night when I was half delirious from the Amazon “black-water” fever he had been nursing me through set the current of my thought on another tack. N—— was only one of a dozen who had coddled me through some sort of tropical illness or patched me up after some sort of a smash-up.
It was R——, of the Valparaiso-Panama coaster, who had put my hand in splints after it had been crushed between the gangway and a dug-out full of ivory nuts off some pile-built village of Ecuador, and it was my fault rather than his that the little finger was still crooked.And it was H——, of the big White Star freighter on the Australia-South Africa run, who laboured for an hour in helping the ship’s doctor worry back into place the shoulder I had dislocated in the “sports” one afternoon; and it was D——, of the Rangoon-Calcutta “B.I.,” who had reduced with horse-liniment the ankle I had sprained in dodging out of the path of a temperamental water-buffalo while ashore at Akyab; and it was A——, of the Lynch river boat plying from Basra to Bagdad, who stitched up my scalp after the Arabs of the bazaar of then almost unheard-of Kut-el-Amara had amused themselves with bouncing rocks off my head because (this was during the Turco-Italian war) they imagined I looked like an “alien enemy.”
A—— was killed when the Turks shelled his ship—then a transport—early in the Mesopotamian operations, I remembered, and this led my thoughts off to the long watch I kept by the bedside of poor old Y——, on whose “B.P.” steamer I had been roaming in and out among the Solomons, New Hebrides, Fijis and other islands of western Polynesia for two months. Y——’s heart had been giving out for a number of years, and now very hot weather following, the excitement of seeing his ship through an unusually heavy hurricane had hastened an endlong inevitable. He knew his “number was up,” and so he told me, that night, of things he wanted me to explain and set right for him in Australia. It was the thinking of these, and the visit that I subsequently paid to his wife and children in the Illawara, that finally brought my mind back to that other bereaved family in the little red house beneath my window.
The short night had passed, the fog had lifted, and now in the early morning light I saw a milkman stop his cart a half-dozen doors from the Fryatt home and go softly tip-toeing on his near-by deliveries to avoid making unnecessary noise. Out of the retreating fog-bank to seaward two small freighters took sharpened line and headed for the harbour mouth. They were much of a size and type, but the gay red and white splashes on the bows of the more northerly ones indicated she sailed under the flag of an enterprising Scandinavian country, while the unbroken black of the side of the other told just as plainly that she was British. As I watched, the shifting of the shadows on the sides of the Norwegian told me that she was altering her course sharply every few hundred yards—“zigzagging” to minimise the danger from submarine attacks. A wise precaution, I told myself; now what about the other? I took up my glass andheld it on the Briton. One, two, three, four, five minutes passed. All the time the wave curled evenly back from her forefoot; not a ripple of shifting light or shadow told of deviation in her course of the fraction of a point.
“Straight on to your goal, little ship,” I said, saluting with my glass.
But I might have known as much. That was Fryatt’s way, and that was the way all my friends of the Red Ensign did, and always will do. “Good luck, fair weather and snug berths to you all; aye, and a quiet haven when the last watch, the long watch, is finally over!”
Knots of troubled sailor men still gathered along Harwich quay this morning, but now that I understood by what they were moved I no longer hesitated to mingle and talk with them. Their slow anger was steadily mounting—gradually crowding out all other feelings—with every word that was spoken, with every hour that passed; but among them were still men who were stunned and dazed, who could not understand how a thing so monstrous really could have happened.
“But w’y, w’y ha’ the ’Uns done it?” persisted a grizzled old salt, turning his troubledeyes to mine after all the others had shaken their heads perplexedly.
“It is just possible,” I said, “that the Germans believe that the execution of one skipper who attempted to ram one of their submarines will make the others think twice before trying to do the same thing.”
Two or three of the older men fairly snorted in their incredulity that even the Germans should thus cheaply rate the British sailor, but the plausibility of the theory soon convinced even these.
“Do you re’ly believe the ’Uns think that o’ us?” one of them finally ventured.
“I do,” I replied, “for there is nothing else to think.”
The old man took a deep breath and turned his eyes away to sea. “God pity all ’Uns!” he muttered, and “God pity ’em!” “God pity ’em!” echoed his mates.
In the year that had gone by since the first great air-raid on London we knew that much had been done in the way of strengthening the defences. Just what had been done we did not, of course, and do not, know. We knew that there were more and better guns and searchlights, and probably greatly improved means of anticipating the coming of the raiders and of following and reporting their movements after they did come. At the same time we also knew that the latest Zeppelin had been greatly improved; that it was larger, faster, capable of ascending to a greater altitude, and probably able to stand more and heavier gun-fire than its prototype of a year ago. It seemed to be a question, therefore, of whether or not the guns could range the raiders, and, if so, do them any vital damage when they did hit them. The aeroplane was an unknown quantity, and, in the popular mind at least, not seriously reckoned with. London knew that the crucial test would not come until an airship tried again to penetrateto the heart of the metropolitan area, and awaited the result calmly if not quite indifferently.
The Zeppelin raids of the spring and early summer, numerous as they had been, had done a negligible amount of military damage and scarcely more to civil property. The death list, too, had, mercifully, been very low. It seemed significant, however, that the main London defences had been avoided during all of this time, indicating, apparently, that the raiders were reluctant to lift the lid of the Pandora’s box that was laid out so temptingly before them for fear of the possible consequences. Twice or thrice, watching with my glasses after I had been awakened by distant bomb explosions or gun-fire, I had seen a shell-pocketed airship draw back, as a yellow dog refuses the challenge that his intrusion has provoked, and glide off into the darkness of some safer area. “Would they try it again?” was the question Londoners asked themselves as the dark of the moon came round each month, and, except for the comparatively few who had had personal experience of the terror and death that follow the swath of an air-raider, most of them seemed rather anxious to have the matter put to the test.
Last night—just twelve “darks-of-the-moon”after the first great raid of 1915—the test came. It was hardly a conclusive one, perhaps (though that may well have come before these lines find their way into print), but it was certainly highly illuminative. I write this on my return to London from viewing—twenty miles away—a tangled mass of wreckage and a heap of charred trunks that are all that remain of a Zeppelin and its crew which—whether by accident, intent, or the force of circumstances will probably never be known—rushed in where two others of its aerial sisters feared to fly, and paid the cost.
There was nothing of the surprise (to London, at least; as regards the ill-starred Zeppelin crew none can say) in last night’s raid. The night grew more heavily overcast as the darkness deepened, and towards midnight stealthy little beams of hooded searchlights pirouetting on the eastern clouds told the home-wending Saturday night theatre crowd that, with the imminent approach of the raiders, London was lifting a corner of its mask of blackness and throwing out an open challenge to the enemy. This was the first time I had known the lights to precede the actual explosion of bombs, and the cool confidence of the thing suggested (as I heard one policeman tell another) that the defence had something “up their sleeves.”
It was towards one in the morning when I finished my supper at a West End restaurant and started walking through the almost deserted streets to my hotel. London is anything but a bedlam after midnight, but the silence in the early hours of this morning was positively uncanny. Now, with the last of the ’buses gone and all trains stopped, only the muffled buzz of an occasional belated taxi—pushing on cautiously with hooded lights—broke the stillness.
Reaching my room I pulled on a sweater, ran up the curtain, laid my glass ready and seated myself at the window, the same window from which, a year ago, I had watched those two insolently contemptuous raiders sail across overhead and leave a blazing wake of death and destruction behind them. On that night, I reflected, I had felt the rush of air from the bombs, and—later—had watched the firemen extinguishing the flames and the ambulances carrying the wounded to the hospitals. Would it be like that to-night? I wondered (there was now no doubt that the raiders were near, for the searchlights had multiplied, and far to the south-east, though no detonations were audible, quick flashes told of scattering gun-fire), or would the defence have more of a word to say for itself this time? I looked to the eastern heavenswhere the shifting clouds were now “polka-dotted” with the fluttering golden motes of a score of searchlights, and thought I had found my answer.
There was no wheeling and reeling of the lights in wide circles, as a year ago, but rather a steady persistent stabbing at the clouds, each one appearing to keep to an allotted area of its own. “Stabbing” expresses the action exactly, and it recalled to me an occasion, a month ago, when a “Tommy,” who was showing me through some captured dug-outs on the Somme, illustrated, with bayonet thrusts, the manner in which they had originally searched for Germans hiding under the straw mattresses. There was nothing “panicky” in the work of the lights this time, but only the suggestion of methodical, ordered, relentless vigilance.
“Encouraging as a preliminary,” I said to myself; “now” (for the night was electric with import) “for the main event!”
There was not long to wait. To the south-east the gun-flashes had increased in frequency, followed by mist-dulled blurs of brightness in the clouds that told of bursting shells. Suddenly, through a rift in the clouds, I saw a new kind of glare—the earthward-launched beam of an airship’s searchlight groping for its target—butthe shifting mist-curtain intervened again even as one of the defending lights took up the challenge and flashed its own rapier ray in quick reply. Presently the muffled boom of bombs fleeted to my ears, and then the sharper rattle of a sudden gust of gun-fire. This was quickly followed by a confused roar of sound, evidently from many bombs dropped simultaneously or in quick succession, and I knew that one of two things had happened—either the raider had found its mark and was delivering “rapid fire,” or the guns were making it so hot for the visitor that it had been compelled to dump its explosives and seek safety in flight. When a minute or more had gone by I felt sure that the latter had been scuttled, and that it was now only a question of which direction the flight was going to take.
Again the eastward searchlights gave me the answer. By twos and threes—I could not follow the order of the thing—the lights that had been “patrolling” the eastern sky moved over and took their station around a certain low-hanging cloud to the south. The murky sheet of cumulonimbus seemed to pale and dissolve in the concentrated rays, and then, right into the focus of golden glow formed by the dancing light motes, running wild and blind as a bull chargesthe red mantle masking the matador, darted a huge Zeppelin.
Perhaps never before in all time has a single object been the centre of so blinding a glare. It seemed that the optic nerve must wither in so fierce a light, and certainly no unprotected eye could have opened to it. Dark glasses might have made it bearable, but could not possibly have resolved the earthward prospect into anything less than the heart of a fiery furnace. Indeed, it is very doubtful if the bewildered fugitive knew, in more than the most general way, where it was. Cut off by the guns to the south-east from retreat in that direction, but knowing that the North Sea and safety could be reached by driving to the north-east, it is more than probable that the harried raider found itself over the “Lion’s Den” rather because it could not help it than by deliberate intent.
What a contrast was this blinded, reeling thing to those arrogantly purposeful raiders of a year ago! Supremely disdainful of gun and searchlight, these had prowled over London till the last of their bombs had been planted, and one of them had even circled back the better to see the ruin its passing had wrought. Butthisraider—far larger than its predecessors andflying at over twice as great a height though it was—dashed on its erratic course as though pursued by the vengeful spirits of those its harpy sisters had bombed to death in their beds. If it still had bombs to drop its commander either had no time or no heart for the job. Never have I seen an inanimate thing typify terror—the terror that must have gripped the hearts of its palpably flustered (to judge by the airship’s movements) crew—like that staggering helpless maverick of a Zeppelin, when it finally found itself clutched in the tentacles of the searchlights of the aerial defences of London.
All this time the weird, uncanny silence that brooded over the streets before I had come indoors held the city in its spell. The watching thousands—nay, millions—kept their excitement in leash, and the propeller of the raider—muffled by the mists intervening between the earth and the 12,000 feet at which it whirred—dulled to a drowsy drone. Into this tense silence the sudden fire of a hundred anti-aircraft guns—opening in unison as though at the pull of a single lanyard—cut in a blended roar like the Crack o’ Doom; indeed, though few among those hushed watching millions realised it, itwasliterally the Crack o’ Doom that was sounding. For perhaps a minute or a minute and a halfthe air was vibrant with the roar of hard-pumped guns and the shriek of speeding shell, the great sound from below drowning the sharper cracks from the steel-cold flashes in the upper air.
It was guns that were built for the job—not the hastily gathered and wholly inadequate artillery of a year ago—that were speaking now, and the voice was one of ordered, imperious authority. Range-finders had the marauder’s altitude, and the information was being put at the disposal of guns that had the power to “deliver the goods” at that level. What a contrast the sequel was to that pitiful firing of the other raid! Only the opening shots were “shorts” or “wides” now, and ten seconds after the first gun a diamond-clear burst blinking out through a rift in the upper clouds told that the raider—to use a naval term—was “straddled,” had shells exploding both above and below it. From that instant till the guns ceased to roar, seventy or eighty seconds later, the shells burst, lacing the air with golden glimmers, and meshed the flying raider in a fiery net.
For a few seconds it seemed to me that, close-woven as was the net of shell-bursts, the flashes came hardly as fast as the roar of the guns would seem to warrant, and I swept the heavens with my glasses in a search for other possibletargets. But no other raider was in sight; there was no other “nodal centre” of gun-fire and searchlights. Suddenly the reason for the apparent discrepancy was clear to me. The flashes I saw (except for a few of the shrapnel bullets they were releasing) were only the misses; the hits I could not see. The long-awaited test was at its crucial stage. Empty of bombs and with half of its fuel consumed, the raider was at the zenith of its flight, and yet the guns were ranging it with ease. It was now a question of how much shell-fire the Zeppelin could stand.
In spite of the fact that the airship—so far as I could see through my glasses—did not appear to slow down or to be perceptibly racked by the gun-fire, I have no doubt what the end would have been if the test could have been pressed to its conclusion in an open country. But bringing a burning Zeppelin down across three or four blocks of thickly settled London was hardly a thing the Air Defence desired to do if it could possibly be avoided. The plan was carried to its conclusion with the almost mathematical precision that marked the preliminary searchlight work and gunnery.
From the moment that it had burst into sight the raider had been emitting clouds of white gas to hide itself from the searchlights and guns,while the plainly visible movements of its lateral planes seemed to indicate that it was making desperate efforts to climb still higher into the thinning upper air. Neither expedient was of much use. The swirling gas clouds might well have obscured a hovering airship, but never one that was rushing through the air at seventy miles an hour, while, far from increasing its altitude, there seemed to be a slight but steady loss from the moment the guns ceased until, two or three miles further along, it was hidden from sight for a minute by a low-hanging cloud. Undoubtedly the aim of the gunners had been to “hole,” not to fire the marauder, and it must have been losing gas very rapidly even—as the climacteric moment of the attack approached—at the time increased buoyancy was most desirable.
The “massed” searchlights of London “let go” shortly after the gun-fire ceased, and now, as the raider came within their field, the more scattered lights of the northern suburbs wheeled up and “fastened on.” The fugitive changed its course from north to north-easterly about this time, and the swelling clouds of vapour left behind presently cut off its foreshortened length entirely from my view. A heavy ground mist appeared to prevail beyond the heights to thenorth, and in the diffused glow of the searchlights that strove to pierce this mask my glasses showed the ghostly shadows of flitting aeroplanes—manœuvring for the death-thrust.
The ground mist (which did not, however, cover London proper) kept the full strength of the searchlights from the upper air, and it was in a sky of almost Stygian blackness that the final blow was sent home. The farmers of Hertfordshire tell weird stories of the detonations of bursting bombs striking their fields, but all these sounds were absorbed in the twenty-mile air-cushion that was now interposed between my vantage point and the final scene of action.
Not a sound, not a shadow, heralded the flare of yellow light which suddenly flashed out in the north-eastern heavens and spread latitudinally until the whole body of a Zeppelin—no small object even at twenty miles—stood out in glowing incandescence. Then a great sheet of pink-white flame shot up, and in the ripples of rosy light which suffused the earth for scores of miles I could read the gilded lettering on my binoculars. This was undoubtedly the explosion of the ignited hydrogen of the main gas-bags, and immediately following it the great frame collapsed in the middle and began falling slowly toward the earth, burning now with a brightyellow flame, above which the curl of black smoke was distinctly visible. A lurid burst of light—doubtless from the exploding petrol tanks—flared up as the flaming mass struck the earth, and half a minute later the night, save for the questing searchlights to east and south, was as black as ever again.
Then perhaps the strangest thing of all occurred. London began to cheer. I should have been prepared for it in Paris, or Rome, or Berlin, or even New York, but that the Briton—who of all men in the world most fears the sound of his own voice lifted in unrestrained jubilation—was really cheering, and in millions, was almost too much. I pinched my arm to be sure that I had not dozed away, and, lost in wonder, forgot for a minute or two the great drama just enacted.
Under my window half a dozen Australian “Tommies” were rending the air with “cooees” and dancing around a lamp-post, while all along the street, from doorways and windows, exultant shouting could be heard. For several blocks in all directions the cheers rang out loud and clear, distinctly recognisable as such; the sound of the millions of throats farther afield came only as a heavy rumbling hum. Perhaps since the dawn of creation the air has nottrembled with so strange a sound—a sound which, though entirely human in its origin, was still unhuman, unearthly, fantastic. Certainly never before in history—not even during the great volcanic eruptions—has so huge a number of people (the fall of the Zeppelin had been visible through a fifty-to seventy-five-mile radius in all directions, a region with probably from 10,000,000 to 15,000,000 inhabitants) been suddenly and intensely stirred by a single event.
It was undoubtedly the spectacularity of the unexpectedcoupthat had made these normally repressed millions so suddenly and so violently vocal. Many—perhaps most—stopped cheering when they had had time to realise that a score of human beings were being burned to cinders in the heart of that flaming comet in the north-eastern heavens; others—I knew the only recently restored tenements where some of them were—must have shouted in all the grimmer exultation for that very realisation. I can hardly say yet which stirred me more deeply, the fall of the Zeppelin itself or that stupendous burst of feeling aroused by its fall.
By taxi, milk-cart, tram, and any other conveyance that offered, but mostly on foot, Ithreaded highway and byway for the next four hours, and shortly after daybreak scrambled through the last of a dozen thorny hedgerows and found myself beside the still smouldering wreckage of the fallen raider. An orderly cordon of soldiers surrounding an acre of blackened and twisted metal, miles and miles of tangled wire, and a score or so of Flying Corps men already busily engaged loading the wreckage into waiting motor-lorries—that was about all there was to see. A ten-foot-square green tarpaulin covered all that could be gathered together of the airship’s crew. Some of the fragments were readily recognisable as having once been the arms and legs and trunks of men; others were not. A man at my elbow stood gazing at the pitiful heap for a space, his brow puckered in thought. Presently he turned to me, a grim light in his eye, and spoke.
“Do you know,” he said, “that these” (indicating the charred stumps under the square of canvas) “have just recalled to me the words Count Zeppelin is reported to have used at a great mass meeting called in Berlin to press for a more rigorous prosecution of the war against England by air, for a further increase of frightfulness? Leading two airship pilots to the front of the platform, he shouted to the crowd, ‘Hereare two men who were over London last night!’ And the assembled thousands, so the despatch said, roared their applause and clamoured that the Zeppelins be sent again and again until the arrogant Englanders were brought to their knees. Well”—he paused and drew a deep breath as his eyes returned to the heap of blackened fragments—“it appears that theydidsend the Zeppelins again—more than ever were sent before—and now it isourturn to be presented to ‘the men who were over London last night.’ I wonder if the flare that consumed these poor devils was bright enough to pierce the black night that has settled over Germany?”
The tenseness passed out of the night, and—the raid was over. Who knows but what, so far as the threat to England is concerned, the passing ofaZeppelin marked also the passing oftheZeppelin?
I have had many strange meetings—strange in place and attendant circumstance—in various and sundry odd corners of the world, but, everything considered, I am inclined to think my encounter with Radovitch, toward the end of last March, was the strangest of them all.
It was on the gorgeously flower-carpeted slope of a mountain-side in——. But let that transpire in its proper place.
There had been hint of gathering activity in the marching troops on the roads, and I knew that some kind of a skirmish was on from the scattering spatter of rifle-fire above and to my right; but that I had actually blundered in between the combatants was not evident until the staccato of a suddenly unmasked machine-gun broke out in the copse below. I did not hear the familiarly ingratiating swish of speeding bullets, and only an occasional twitching in the oak scrub told of a skirmishing soldier, but it was plain that if the rifles were firing in the direction of the machine-gun, and the machine-gun was firing in the direction of the rifles, theposition of my shivering anatomy came pretty near to blocking a portion of the restricted little neck of atmosphere along which the interchanged pellets must make their way. One never learns it until he is under fire—especially rifle-fire—for the first time, but the faculty for taking cover, for making oneself inconspicuous at the approach of real or fancied danger, is one of the few things in which the more or less degenerate human of the present day suffers the least in comparison with that fine and self-sufficient animal, his primitive ancestor.
I hurdled neatly over a natural “entanglement” of magenta-blossomed cactus, dived through a bosky tunnel in the gnarled oak scrub, and landed comfortably in the matted mass of soft maiden-hair where the water dripped from the side of a deep hole excavated by the village brick-makers in taking out clay. There was ample cover from anything but high-angle artillery fire on either side; so, picking out a bed of lush grass with a cornflower and buttercup pillow, I stretched in luxurious ease to let the battle blow over.
The rifles spat back at the woodpecker drum of the machine-gun for a minute or two, then quieted suddenly and gave way to the crashing of underbrush and the chesty ’tween-the-teethoaths that tell of charging men. Scatteringly, in ones and twos and threes, they began stumbling by above my head, now revealed by the quick silhouette of a set jaw and forward-flung shoulders, and now by the glint of a bobbing bayonet, but mostly by those guttural swearwords which mark the earnest man on business bent. One of them—a gaunt-eyed Serb in the faded horizon-blue uniform of a Frenchpoilu—who passed near enough to the rim of my refuge to allow of a three-quarters length glimpse of him, carried a squawking golden-hued hen by the feathers of her hackle, and I was just reflecting how every other soldier that I had ever known would have put a period on that tell-tale racket by extending his grip round the windpipe, when Radovitch came down to join me. Not that he had anything of the ulterior intention of seeking cover that brought me there—quite to the contrary, indeed. I saw him running hard and low (as every good soldier goes into grips with his foe), burst out of the thicket, saw him straighten up and try to swerve to the right as the hole suddenly yawned across his path, and, finally, saw the quick tautening of the scaly yellow loop of earth-running aloe root which deftly caught the toe of his shambling boot and defeated the manœuvre.
There was little of the fine finesse of my own soft landing in the whacking “kerplump” which completed the high dive executed by Radovitch after his contact with the aloe root. His gun out-dived him and cut short its parabola with the bayonet spiking a fern frond on the opposite bank, but his broad, bronzed Slavic face was the first part of Radovitch himself to reach the bottom, so that all the inertia of the bone and muscle in his firmly-knit frame was exerted in driving the ivory crescent of the teeth of his back-bent lower jaw in a swift, rough gouge through the yielding turf. He pulled himself together in a dazed sort of way, sat up, rubbed the grass out of his eyes, and kneaded gently the strained joints of his jaw to see that they were still swinging on their hinges. Reassured, he spat forth sputteringly asphodel and anemone and the rest of his mouthful of flower-bed, completing the operation by running an index finger around between the lower teeth and lip to remove lurking bits of earth and gravel.
There was something strangely familiar in that index-finger operation, and it was the sudden recollection that was the identical way in which we used to get rid of the gridiron clods that had been forced under our football nose-guards which was responsible for my ferventejaculation of surprise. I don’t recall exactly what I said, but it was probably something akin to “I’ll be blowed!”
The look of dazed resentment on Radovitch’s grass-and dirt-stained face changed instantly to one of blank surprise. The poor strained jaw relaxed, and he turned on me a stare of open-eyed wonder.
“Where in ’ell d’you come from?” he gasped finally; and then, “You speak English?”
When, ignoring the former query, I grinned acquiescence to the latter, he came back with, “Ain’t ’Merican, are you? Don’t know New York, do you?”
On my admission of guilt on both charges, he crawled over and gripped my hand crushingly in his grimy paw.
“My name’s Radovitch. ’Merican citizen myself,” he said proudly. “Took out my last papers just ’fore I came over to fight for Serbia. Went to school five years in New York when I was a kid. Ever been in Chicago?”
“Of course.”
Radovitch’s excitement, increasing when he found I had been in Omaha (where he had worked in the stockyards), and Jerome, Arizona (where he had “dumped slag” in the copper smelter), reached its climax when Iassured him that I had once played a game of baseball at Aldridge, a little coal-mining town in Montana, near the northern portal of Yellowstone Park.
“I got a store there, and a half int’rest in the baseball grounds and a dance-hall,” he cried; and he was just in the midst of an excited account of his rise to fortune in what he called the “hottest little ol’ camp in the Yellowstone,” when the din of two or three fresh machine-guns opening in unison drowned his voice, and a few minutes later a half-dozen rifle muzzles were poked over the edge of our refuge, while a gruff-voiced Serb corporal, in the khaki tunic of a British Tommy and the baggy breeches of a French Zouave, informed us that we were his prisoners.
Radovitch, with a sheepish grin on his face, threw up his hands with the classic cry of “Kamerad!” and then, shambling over opposite his captors, coolly bade them toss down a box of cigarettes for him and his “Merikansky” friend.
“Smashed mine when I fell,” he explained, sauntering back and offering me a “Macedonia.” “Wouldn’t you reckon we’d had about enough fighting in Serbia without these d—— d sham fights while we’re supposed to be resting up herein Corfu? It may be all right for new recruits; but you’ll have to admit that two years of the brand of scrapping we’ve been getting over yonder in those mountains is not going to put us on edge for play-fighting like this. But never mind, we’ll be back to the real thing again in a month or two. Come on along down to the camp and meet my Colonel. We were kids together in Prilep. Now he’s in command of three thousand men and I’m only a corporal; but just the same I could buy him out twenty times over.”
The bare outline of Radovitch’s story he told me that evening (after he had officially been “set free” again), as I trudged beside him across the hills to his camp; but it was not until he obtained an afternoon’s leave three or four days later, and took me for a stroll through the Serbian Relief Camp, that I learned he had been one of that immortal band of heroes who, disdaining to take advantage of the open roads to the Adriatic or Macedonia after Belgrade fell, made their way to a mountain fastness in the heart of their own country and stayed behind to wage such warfare as they could on the hated invader. What sort of a warfare this was—indeed, what sort of a warfare itis, for the band still survives, making up in an unquenchablespirit what it has lost in numbers—I then learned for the first time.
It was only the unexpected coming across a newly arrived comrade (suffering—and it looked to me, dying—from an open bayonet wound and an advanced and hitherto neglected attack of scurvy), that turned Radovitch from wistful reminiscence of Aldridge, Montana, and set him talking of the grim realities of the life he had been leading in Serbia, a subject on which I had found him strangely reticent up to that moment. The things he spoke of that afternoon covered only an incident or two of his life with a body of men who, steadily depleted and yet as steadily recruited from Heaven knows where, have furnished an example of bravery and devotion to an all but lost cause almost without a parallel even in a war in which bravery and devotion form the regular grist of the day’s work.
Because this band in question, although its exploits are even now being sung of by the Serbs along with those of the half-legendary heroes of their early history, is still a “force in being,” exercising in its sphere an influence of its own on the course of the war, it is necessary that the names of the villages and towns and mountains and valleys and rivers to which Radovitch so constantlyreferred in his narrative should be entirely suppressed. I may say, however, that later inquiry which I made at Serbian Headquarters at Salonika revealed ample evidence that the things he told me of—as well as others scarcely less remarkable of which the time has not yet come to write—occurred beyond the shadow of a doubt.
The mood to talk did not seize Radovitch until after he had led me to the summit of the hill behind the Relief Camp, from which lofty vantage the eye roved eastward across a purple strait to the snow-capped peaks of Epirus and Albania, westward to where what was once the Kaiser’s villa of Achilleon stood out sharply against the sombre green of the backbone ridge of the island, northward to where its twin castles flanked to right and left the white walls and red roofs of Corfu town, and southward to the dim outlines of Leukas and Cephalonia, thinning in the violet haze of late afternoon. Below, on three sides, was the sea, with the storied Isles of Ulysses bracing themselves against the flood-tide racing into the bay; above, a vault of cloudless sky, and round about a thousand-year-old forest of gnarled olives. It was the effect of all this, together with the sight of his friend from Serbia in the little tented hospital of the ReliefCamp, which set Radovitch talking of things I had been vainly trying to draw him out upon ever since I met him. While the mood lasted he seemed to need no other encouragement than the attentive listener so ready to hand; when it had passed he was back to the mines of Montana again, deaf and blind to my every attempt to make him talk of Serbia and what had befallen him there.
“How did your band get together in the first place?” I had asked, “and what sort of men was it made up of? Was there some kind of organisation before the retreat, or did you simply drift together afterwards?”
“It must have been mostly ‘drift,’” replied Radovitch. “Probably the Government and our generals knew we’d have to give way when the Austrians and Bulgars together came at us, but none of the rest of us ever dreamed we couldn’t wallop the whole bunch. So I don’t think there is much truth in the yarn about the band of ‘blood brothers’ that had been formed in advance. We were about evenly made up at the start of men who wouldn’t leave the country and men who couldn’t leave the country. The first were mostly mountain men of the region we went to. There were a lot of ex-brigands among them, and most of them hadbeen fighting the Turk, or the Bulgar, or the Government, or each other, all their lives. It was to the way these fellows knew the country, and how to live off it and fight in it, that we owed most of our success. The rest of us were all sorts of odds and ends who had fallen out of the retreat but had still been able to keep out of enemy hands.
“At first this particular mountain region—which later became our stronghold, and is now the only part of Old Serbia in which the enemy has never set foot—was but a refuge, and for a few weeks we were pretty hard put to find enough to live on. It was touch and go for food all of the first winter, and we lived mostly by night raids on straggling Austrian supply trains. But before long we rounded up enough sheep and goats to keep us going, and in the spring got one of the little mountain valleys under cultivation. Since last summer—except for vegetables, which we had no luck with—food was one of our least troubles.
“We had plenty of rifles from the first. A Serb will drop his clothes before he will his gun, as you will find if you ever see our army in action where a river has to be forded. Many a man straggled in to us without pants or shirt, but never a one that I ever heard of without his rifle,We were also tolerably well fixed for cartridges, because a man don’t use one in raiding or fighting from ambush to a hundred he pots off in the trenches. We always managed to have enough for our own regular army rifles, and after we got well started raiding, Austrian rifles and munition came in faster than we ever had use for them. We could have done with an extra machine-gun or two before we had our stone-rolling defence organised, and before the Austrians had learned that it didn’t pay to try and crawl in and pull us out of our holes. But before the winter was over we had enough spare ‘spit-firers,’ so that we didn’t mind risking the loss of one or two by taking them along on raiding parties.
“The lay of the mountains made the wholemesa[4]just one big natural fort, and I miss my guess if in all the world there’s another place of the same kind so easy to defend and so hard to attack. The mountains are steeper and rockier than that main range of Albania you see across there against the sky, and that’s going some. I never struck anything half so rough in all the summers I put in prospecting in Arizona, Utah, and Colorado. Only one of the passes had a cart-road up to it, and only three had muletrails. At two or three other places a man could scramble up by using his hands, but everywhere else he would need to have ropes and scaling ladders.