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 penetrate to 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 heavens where 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--but the 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 charges the 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. But _this_ raider--far
larger than its predecessors and flying 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, it _was_
literally the Crack o’ Doom that was sounding. For perhaps a minute or
a minute and a half the 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 possible targets. 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 the
north, 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 bright yellow 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 not trembled 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 unexpected _coup_ that
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, I threaded 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,
‘Here are 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 they _did_ send the Zeppelins again--more
than ever were sent before--and now it is _our_ turn 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 of _a_ Zeppelin marked also the passing of _the_ Zeppelin?