III
From the time of the big raid, in early September, until the second week in October there was not a single night on which the moon, wind, clouds, or some combination of meteorological conditions was not unfavourable to Zeppelin action, and it was not until this date that they tried to come again. Although rather nearer than before to two or three of the explosions, I had no such opportunity to view the progress of the raid as on the previous occasion, and this latest bombing is, perhaps, most memorable to me as having served to shake the monumental calm of two of the most famous and impressive of all London’s institutions, the “Bobby” and the Frivolity chorus girl. I turn again to my journal.
London, October—
I was at the Frivolity last night with my friend Captain J——, of the Royal Artillery, home from France on a week’s leave, to see an oculist. About nine-thirty the nearing boom of heavy explosions heralded another Zeppelin attack. I started for the door at once, but J——, an old Londoner, pulled me down into my stall by the coat-tail, dryly observing that, right before us under the Frivolity footlights, there was transpiring an infinitely more epochal event than anything that could possibly be seen outside.
“We have had other Zeppelin raids,” he shouted close to my ear, to make himself heard above the uneasy bustle which filled the theatre as the bombs boomed more imminent, “but never before in history has man beheld the Frivolity chorus shaken from its traditional languor. But now look! They faint to left and right, and I’m jolly certain that M—— doesn’t get her cue to embrace G—— until the next act. ’Pon my word, I never expected to live to see the waters of this fount of brides for the British peerage so disturbed.” J——’s voice trailed off into wondering speechlessness.
“Boom!” This time it was close at hand, and the rattle of falling débris could be heard above the discordant wail of the mechanically labouring orchestra. Utterly unable to sit still any longer, I shook off J——’s restraining arm, and reached a side exit just as two bombs fell in quick succession, a hundred yards up the Avenue. Again I was conscious of those strange rushes of air from the “wrong” direction which I had experienced during the previous raid. The panes of the upper windows shivered to bits, but the fragments, striking the reinforced glass of the marquee, were robbed of their force before they had caromed to the sidewalk.
On both sides of the Avenue glass was falling in countless tons,—in one great corner building alone 25,000 pounds of plate glass are estimated to have been shattered,—and there is no doubt that many were killed and injured by being caught under the vitreous avalanche.
Almost immediately three or four more bombs fell beyond the Avenue, there was another crescendo of falling glass, and then a lone Zeppelin—apparently at the end of its ammunition—headed up and off to the north-east pursued by a single searchlight beam and a scattering gun-fire.
The Frivolity chorus, having been soothed and revived, resumed its wonted demeanour and took up the dropped thread of the performance, and J——, no longer held a fascinated captor by the wonder of its lapse, joined me on the sidewalk to see what had been happening outside. It is a remarkable fact that the great majority of the audience, many of whom had not stirred from their seat, elected to remain and see the show out. From the three theatres opposite, however, one of which had been struck, considerable numbers were pouring forth. But not in all the now dense crowd in the Avenue were there the symptoms of a panic.
As we stepped from the curb something tinkled against my foot. Picking it up, it turned out to be a still warm piece of torn steel which J—— identified at once as a fragment of the casing of an incendiary bomb. It was not over an eighth of an inch thick, but of such superlative quality that it rang like a silver bell even to the tap of a finger-nail. A far more murderous fragment of shivered metal, which J—— kicked into a few minutes later, was a piece of shrapnel casing, and there is no doubt that the casualties from anti-aircraft-gun projectiles are very considerable.
The police and fire department work was even more remarkable than in the September raid. Not a single tell-tale glow marked the path by which the Zeppelin had come, and the only fire in our immediate vicinity was the spout from another sundered gas main. Barriers already shut off the crowds from the points where the worst damage had been done, and the work of removing the dead and wounded was being carried on quickly and expeditiously.
A bomb falling in the Avenue midway between a motor bus and a taxi had taken a heavy toll of the passengers of both, while the two vehicles, still standing upright, had been flattened until their appearance was not unlike that of their respective “property” prototypes occasionally employed to give perspective to the stage-setting of a street. A dozen or more dead and wounded lay in a row in front of a gin palace which had collapsed under a bomb; but, as far as we could see or learn, there had been little, if any, loss of life in the historic old theatre which had been struck.
A sinister coincidence had landed one bomb on a temporary wooden building occupied as Belgian Refugee headquarters. Miraculously however, although the rickety frame was blown quite out of shape, no fire was started among the small mountains of highly inflammable baggage on which the bomb exploded.
“The ’Uns ain’t satisfied with wot they did to ’em in Belg’um,” snorted an indignant coster, viewing the wreck; “the baby-killers ’ad to follow ’em to Lunnon.” This was, I believe, about the nearest thing to “hate” that I heard expressed during the several hours we mingled with the crowds on the streets.
Faring on down the “bomb-track” into that historic section of Old London which lies to the east of the Avenue, we came upon an apparition quite as astounding to me as the spectacle of the “panicky” Frivolity girls had been to J——. It was nothing less than a London police constable, hatless, breathless, and so little master of himself that he was unable to respond with the customary “First to the right, second to the left, and so on” formula when we asked him the way to the B—— Court, where we had heard there had been heavy damage. Slamming down on the pavement a heavy burden which he carried by a loop of wire, he began jabbering something to the effect that the “bloomin’ pill” came down “’arf a rod” from where he stood, and that orders called for the instant fetching of all “evidences” to the nearest station. I switched on my electric-torch—everybody here has carried them since the streets were darkened,—to recoil before the sight of the pear-shaped cone of dented steel toppled over on the cobbles at my feet.
“Good heavens, man, you’ve got an unexploded bomb!” I gasped, backing against the wall. “What do you mean by slamming it around in that way?”
“If she didn’t go off after fallin’ from the sky, I fancy she can stand a drop of a few inches,” was the reply. “It isn’t ’avin’ ’er ’ere, sir, that gets my nerves. They went to pieces when she came down and bounced along the pavement in front of where I stood.”
“Perhaps she has a time fuse, set to go off when she gets a crowd around her,” said the irrepressible J—— by way of encouragement. “The Huns are adepts at just such forms of subtlety. Better leave her alone for a spell.”
Shaking in every limb, but still resolved to carry out “orders” to the last, the doughty chap slipped his bleeding fingers through the wire loop and trudged off on his way to the station, staggering under the weight of half a hundred pounds of “T.N.T.”[3] That he reached there without mishap is evidenced by a flashlight in one of the “penny pictorials” this morning showing both him and his booty at the wicket of the B—— Street Police Station.
[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 the bus 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—upon Kent, 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.