John Bull Gets His Eye In

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 defenses. 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 knew also 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, whether or not the guns could range the raiders, and, if so, do them any vital damage when they 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 defenses had been avoided during all 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 swathe of an airraider, most of them seemed rather anxious to have the matter put to the test.

Last night — just twelve ’darks-ofthe-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 returning to London from viewing — twenty miles away — a tangled mass of wreckage and a heap of charred bodies, all that remain of a super-Zeppelin and its crew which — whether by accident, intent, or the force of circumstances will probably never be known — rushed in where two other of its aerial sisters feared to fly, and paid the cost.

There was nothing of the surprise (to London, at least; as regards the illstarred Zeppelin crew none can say) in last night’s raid. The coming of the airships was known far in advance. The night grew more heavily overcast as the darkness deepened, and toward midnight stealthy little beams of hooded searchlights pirouetting on the 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 that I had known the lights to precede the actual explosion of bombs, and the cool confidence of the thing indeed suggested (as I heard one policeman tell another) that the defense had something ‘up their sleeves.’

It was toward 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.

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. 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, though no detonations were audible, quick flashes told of scattering gun-fire), or would the defense have more of a word to say for itself this time? I looked to the heavens, where the shifting clouds were now ‘polka-dotted’ with the fluttering golden motes of a score of searchlights, and I thought that 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 light 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. The gun-flashes had increased in frequency, followed by mist-dulled blurs of brightness in the clouds that told of bursting shell. 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 floated to my ears, and then the sharper rattle of a sudden gust of gunfire. 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 without a single red glow growing out of the fitful flashes from the bombs,

I felt sure that the latter had been scuttled, and that it was now only a question which direction the flight was going to take.

Again the searchlights gave me the answer. By two and three — I could not follow the order of the thing, but I knew it was being directed by some extremely capable and well-informed individual ‘somewhere’ — the lights that had been ‘patrolling’ the sky moved over and took their stations around a certain low-hanging cloud. The murky sheet of cumulo-nimbus 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 from retreat in that direction, but knowing that the North Sea and safety could be reached by driving, 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 till the last of their bombs had been planted, and one of them had even circled back. But this raider — although it was far larger than its predecessors, and was flying at over twice as great a height — dashed on its erratic course as if pursued by the vengeful spirits of those whom 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 — better than that staggering helpless maverick of a Zeppelin when it finally found itself clutched in the tentacles of the searchlights.

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, although few among those hushed, watching millions realized 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. Specially devised rangefinders had the marauder’s altitude to a yard, and the information was being put at the disposal of guns that had the power to ‘deliver the goods’ at that level, and probably a few thousand feet farther up if required. 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 shell-bursts, lacing the air with golden glimmers, 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, how much shell-fire the super-Zeppelin (for such there is every reason to believe it was) 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 gunfire, I have no doubt what the end would have been if the test could have been pressed to its conclusion. Therefore, the idea seems to be for the powerful guns simply to prepare the raider for the ’killing,’ after the manner of the picadors in a bull fight, and to leave the coup de grâce to be administered by the matador — an aeroplane. If this, as I feel sure, was the plan, it was carried to its conclusion with the almost mathematical precision that marked the preliminary searchlight work and gunnery.

From the moment it had burst into sight the raider had been emitting clouds of white gas to hide itself from the searchlights and the 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 farther 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 that increased buoyancy was most desirable.

The massed searchlights let go shortly after the gun-fire ceased, and now, as the raider came within their field, the more scattered lights wheeled up and ‘fastened on.’ The fugitive changed its course about this time, and the swelling clouds of vapor left behind presently cut off its foreshortened length entirely from my view. A heavy ground mist appeared to prevail beyond the heights, and in the diffused glow of the searchlights that strove to pierce this mask my glasses caught the ghostly shadows of flitting aeroplanes — the matadors manœuvring for the death-thrust.

The ground mist 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 tell weird stories of the crackle of machine-gun fire above the clouds and 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 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 gasbags, 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 a halfminute later the night, save for the questing searchlights, was again as black as ever.

Then perhaps the strangest thing of all occurred. London began to cheer. I would 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 a half-dozen Australian ‘Tommies’ were rending the air with ‘coo-ees’ 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 clear and loud, distinctly recognizable as such; the sound from 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 ten to fifteen million inhabitants) been suddenly and intensely stirred by a single event.

It was undoubtedly the spectacular quality of the unexpected coup that made these normally repressed millions so suddenly and so violently vocal. Many — perhaps most — stopped cheering when they had had time to realize that a score of human beings were being burned to cinders in the heart of that flaming comet in the northeastern 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 realization. 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 motorlorries— 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 recognizable as having once been the arms and legs and trunks of men; others were not.

A man at my elbow—a general wearing the red tab of the Staff — 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 dispatch said, roared their applause and clamored 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 down over Germany.’

After the incidents recorded above befell, I was spending the night in—, which has been a more or less direct objective of half the air-attacks on England. It is a place of great military importance, and, therefore, one which the Germans had a certain justification in smashing up — if they could. There had been a bit of indiscriminate bombing of the sea and sands in this region during the big raid, and early on the evening in question, word went round that the Zeppelins were expected over — before morning. The information proved to be correct. The raiders did come. Here is what I set down of the attack in my journal.

‘All were on the qui vive last night, for word had come that the Zepps might be expected any time after mid-

night. I got up and sat by the window along toward one o’clock, for a peep out had revealed a fog-bank creeping in, and if the raiders were going to come they would have to do so before the fog masked the coast entirely from their view. The night was inky — not the flicker of a candle showed at the edge of a curtain, not even the watery reflection of a riding-light blinked in the harbor. Suddenly, without an audible signal or alarm of any kind, a searchlight was unmasked somewhere on the foreshore, and a hot gush of radiance leaped seaward as its beam was directed, at a low angle, straight out to some point apparently located in advance.

’A crisp crescent of the in-rolling fog-bank turned to golden vapor in the lower semi-circle of the piercing beam; but the upper pricked out of the velvety blackness two tiny wriggling glow-worms, which anything less powerful than the lenses of my “prism” would never have magnified enough to make recognizable as Zeppelins. I was just barely able to discern that they were in motion, apparently executing some manœuvre. Now they were microscopic balls, now rounded oblongs, now straight-lined slivers; and then, in reverse, they became oblongs and balls again. “Head-on, side-on, tail-on,” I repeated to myself; and then, with dawning comprehension, “As I live, they’re ‘hooking it’! They’re funking the ‘Archies’ before a shot has been fired.”’

The schooling beam of the searchlight shook back and forth for a few moments like a warning finger, and then, as if in confirmation of my conjecture, blinked once or twice and went to sleep. The tenseness passed out of the night, and — the raid was over. Who knows but that — so far as the threat to England is concerned — the passing of a Zeppelin marked also the passing of the Zeppelin!