OF all city dwellers I am sure the Londoner is the most orderly and the
most capable of self-government, as he likewise is the most phlegmatic.
Because of these common traits among the masses of the populace an
air raid over London, considering its potential possibilities for
destruction, is comparatively an unexciting episode everywhere in the
metropolis, save and except only in those districts of the East End
where the bulk of the foreign-born live. There, on the first wail of the
shrieking sirens, before the warning “maroon” bombs go up or the barrage
fire starts from protecting batteries in the suburbs and along the
Thames, these frightened aliens, carrying their wives and children,
flock pell-mell into the stations of the Underground. They spread out
bedclothes on the platforms and camp in the Tube, which is the English
name for what Americans call a subway, and sometimes refuse to budge
until long after the danger has passed. At the height of the bombardment
they pray and shriek, and the women often beat their breasts and tear at
their hair in a very frenzy.
This is true only of the emotional Rus-and Rumanians. The native
Londoners'ed in the most leisurely fashion walk to the subterranean
shelters. Indeed, the chief task of the police is to keep them from
exposing themselves in the open in efforts to get a sight the enemy.
People who live on the lower floors of stoutly built houses mainly bide
where they are, their argument--and a very sane one it is--being that
since the chances of a man's being killed in his home at such a time
are no greater than of his roof being pierced by lightning during a
thunderstorm he is almost as safe and very much more comfortable staying
in his bed than he would be squatting for hours in a damp Cellar.
No matter how intense the bombardment the busses keep on running, though
they have few enough passengers. From one's window one may see the big
double-deckers lumbering by like frightened elephants, empty of all but
the drivers and the plucky women conductors, who invariably stick to
their posts and carry on. The London bobby promenades at his usual
deliberate pace no matter how thick the shrapnel from the defender guns
may splash down about him in the darkened street; and the night postman
calmly goes his rounds too.
One night in London after the alarm had been sounded I invaded the
series of walled caverns and wine vaults known as the Adelphi Arches,
which are just off the Strand, near Charing Cross. Several hundred
men, women and children had already taken refuge there. Near one of the
entrances a young mother was singing her baby to sleep; a little farther
on a group of Australian soldiers were trying, rather unsuccessfully,
to open beer bottles with their finger nails; and at the mouth of a
side basement opening off a layer cave half a dozen typical Londoner
civilians, of the sort who wear flat caps instead of hats and woollen
neckerchiefs instead of collars, were warmly discussing politics in high
nasal notes. Nowhere was there evident any concern or distress, or even
any considerable amount of irritation at our enforced inconvenience.
Still, any man who figures that the Englishman is not stimulated
to stouter resistance by these visitations from the German would be
mistaken. Beneath the surface of his apparent indifference there is
produced at each recurrent attack an enhanced current of hate ior
the government that first inaugurated this system of barbaric warfare
against unfortified communities. There is something so radically wrong
in the Prussian propaganda it is inconceivable that any mind save a
Prussian's mind could have conceived it. His imagination is on backward
and he thinks hind part before. In the folly of his besetting madness he
figures that he can subjugate a man by mangling that man's wife and baby
to bits--the one thing that has always been potent to make a valiant
fighter out of the veriest coward that lives.
They may not waste their rage in vain and vulgar mouthings--that would
be the German, not the English way--but one may be sure that the people
of London will never forgive the Kaiser for the hideous things his
agents, in accordance with his policy of frightfulness, have wrought
among innocent noncombatants in their city and in their island. They are
entering up the balance in the ledgers of their righteous indignation
against the day of final reckoning.
After I had seen personally some of the results of one of the nocturnal
onslaughts I too could share in the feelings of those more directly
affected, for I could realise that, given an opportunity now denied him
by the mercy of distance and much intervening salt water, the Hun would
be doing unto American cities what he had done to this English city;
and I could picture the same unspeakable atrocities perpetrated upon New
Haven or Asbury Park or Charleston as have been perpetrated upon London
and Dover and Margate.
There was an old clergyman of the Established Church who lived in a
rectory not far from Covent Garden, a man near seventy, who probably had
never wittingly done an evil thing or a cruel thing in all his correct
and godly life. He came to have the name of the Raid Preacher, because
at every aerial attack he went forth fearlessly from his home, making
the tour of all the shelters in the neighbourhood. At each place he
would cheer and quiet the crowds there assembled, telling them there was
no real danger, reading to them comforting passages of the Scriptures
and encouraging them to sing homely and familiar songs. He had been
doing this from the time when the Zeppelins first invaded the London
district. He had held funeral services over the bodies of hundreds of
raid victims, so they told me. Regardless of the religious affiliations
of the dead, or the lack of church ties, their families almost
invariably asked him to conduct the burials.
One night in the present year--I am forbidden to give the exact date or
the exact place, though neither of them matters now--the raiders
came. The old clergyman hurried to a cellar under a near-by business
establishment, where a swarm of tenement dwellers of the quarter had
congregated for safety. He was standing in their midst in the darkened
place, bidding them to be of good and tranquil faith, when a two-hundred
pound bomb of high explosives, sped from a Gotha eight thousand feet
above and aimed by chance, came through the building, bringing the roof
and the upper floors with it.
A great many persons were killed or wounded.
When the rescuers came almost the first body they brought out of the
burning ruins was that of the Raid Preacher. They had found him, with
torn flesh and broken bones, but with his face unmarred, lying on the
floor. His thumbed leather Bible was under him, open at a certain page,
and there was blood upon its leaves.
Men who saw his funeral cortège told me of it with tears in their
eyes. They said that people of all faiths walked in the rain behind the
hearse, and that the biggest of all the funeral wreaths was a gift from
a little colony of poor Jewish folk in the district, and that one
whole section of the sorrowful procession was made up of cripples and
convalescents--pale, lame, halt men and women and children who limped
on crutches or marched with bandaged heads or with twisted trunks; and
these were the injured survivors of previous raids, to whom the dead man
had ministered in their time of suffering.
In a hospital I saw a little girl who had been most terribly maimed by
the same missile that killed the old rector. I am not going to dwell
on the state of this child. When I think of her I have not the words to
express the feelings that I have. But one of her hands was gone at the
wrist, and the other hand was badly shattered; so she was just a wan
little brutally abbreviated fragment of humanity, a living fraction,
most grievously afflicted.
There was the pitiable wraith of a smile on her poor little pinched
commonplace face, and to her breast, with the bandaged stump of one arm
and with her remaining hand that was swarthed in a clump of wrapping,
she cuddled up a painted china doll which somebody had brought her;
and she was singing to it. The sight, I take it, would have been very
gracious in the eyes of His Imperial Majesty of Prussia--except, of
course, that the little girl still lived; that naturally would be a
drawback to his complete enjoyment of the spectacle.