PERRITON MAXWELL

The switchman at Walthamstow.

For twenty-six years old Tom Cumbers had held his job as switchman at the Walthamstow railroad junction where the London-bound trains come up from Southend to the great city. It was an important post and old Tom filled it with stolid British efficiency. A kindly man who felt himself an integral part of the giant railroad system that employed him, old Tom had few interests beyond his work, his white-haired wife, his reeking pipe and the little four-room tenement in Walthamstow which he called home. The latter was one of the thousands of two-storied rabbit-hatches of sooty, yellow brick, all alike and all incredibly ugly, which stretch, mile upon mile, from Walthamstow toward London's tumultuous heart.

The workshops near Epping Forest.

An appalling tragedy of the war.

Within a radius of four dun miles, just on the nearer edge of Epping Forest—the scene in a forgotten day of Robin Hood's adventurings—a section of these huddling homes of the submerged, together with a street of trams and some pathetic shops, constitute this town of Walthamstow. It is a sordid, unlovely place, but for some ten thousand wage-strugglers it is all of England. There are workshops hereabout in which one may mingle one's copious sweat with the grime of machinery and have fourteen shillings a week into the bargain—if one is properly skilled and muscular and bovinely plodding. Walthamstow is not the place where one would deliberately choose to live if bread could be earned elsewhere with equal certainty. But for all its dirt and dullness it has a spot on the map and a meaning in the dull souls of its inhabitants, and here, within half an hour's train travel of the Lord Mayor's Mansion and the golden vaults of the Bank of England, transpired on the sweltering night of which I write, one of the most witless and appalling tragedies of the present war. Forever memorable in the hitherto colorless calendar of Walthamstow will be this tragedy in the second year of Armageddon.

An ordinary hot night.

News of the war.

Beyond the stenchful heat-stress of it, there was nothing up to half-past eleven to mark this night as different from its fellows of the past. From eight o'clock till ten the small activities of the town centered chiefly about its tramway terminus, its smudgy station, its three or four moving-picture theatres, and its fetid pubs. On the pavements, in the roadways and at every crossing, corduroyed men yawned and spat, and slatternly women, most of them with whimpering infants in their arms, talked of shop or household cares and the frailties of their neighbors. Some, more alive to the big events of a clashing world, repeated the meagre news of the ha'penny press and dwelt with prideful fervor on the latest bit of heroism reported from the front. Now and again an outburst of raucous humor echoed above the babble of cockney tongues. The maudlin clamor of "a pore lone lidy 'oos 'subing 'ad desarted 'er" failed to arouse anyone's curiosity. Ladies in their cups are not a rarity in Walthamstow. In side streets, lads in khaki, many of them fresh from fields of slaughter "somewhere in Flanders," sported boisterously with their factory-girl sweethearts or spooned in the shadows. Everywhere grubby children in scant clothing shrilled and scampered and got in the way. Humidity enveloped the town like a sodden cloak and its humanity stewed in moist and smelly discomfort.

Street lamps out.

But shortly after eleven o'clock the whole place became suddenly and majestically still and black. People who go to their work at sunrise cannot afford the extravagance of midnight revelry, and there are few street-lamps alight after ten o'clock in any London suburb in these times of martial law. Walthamstow slept in heated but profound oblivion of its mean existence. Beyond the town lay, like a prostrate giant camel, the heat-blurred silhouette of the classic forest. Low over Walthamstow hung the festoons of flat, humid clouds, menacing storm, but motionless.

The rhythm of the Zeppelin.

The train to serve as pilot to London.

The Zeppelin forced to travel low.

If there was no disturbance in the clouds themselves there was among them something very active, something that drilled its way through them with a muffled whirring, something that was oblong and lean and light of texture, that was ominous and menacing for all its buoyancy. The sound it made was too high up, too thickly shrouded by clouds, to determine its precise position. It gave forth a breathing of persistent, definite rhythm. This was plainly not the wing-stroke of a nocturnal bird; for no bird, big or little, could advertise its flight in such perfect pulsation. And yet it was a bird, a Gargantuan, man-made bird with murder in its talons and hatred in its heart. From its steel nest in Germanized Belgium this whirring monster had soared eight thousand feet and crossed the Channel with little fear of discovery. It had penetrated the English Coast somewhere down Sheerness way and over Southend and then, dropping lower, had sought and found through the haze the tiny train whose locomotive had just fluted its brief salutation to Walthamstow. To the close-cropped men on the Zeppelin, the string of cars far down under their feet, with its side-flare from lighted windows, its engine's headlamp and its sparks, had proved a providential pilotage. They knew that this train was on the main line, and that it would lead them straight to the great Liverpool Street Station, and that was London, and it was London wharfs and ammunition works along the Thames that they had planned to obliterate with their cylinders of mechanical doom. But the moist clouds which aided so materially in hiding the Zeppelin's presence from below also worked for its defeat, in so far as its ultimate objective was concerned, for to keep the guiding train in view it was compelled to travel lower and yet lower—so low, indeed, as to make it a target for Kitchener's sentinels.

The switchman signals "danger."

The train stops at Walthamstow.

Somehow, by sight or intuition or the instant commingling of the two, old Tom Cumbers became aware of the danger above him; for he sprang to his switch, shut off all the cheery blue and white lights along "the line" and swung on with a mighty jerk the ruby signal of danger. The engineer in the on-rushing train jammed down his brakes and brought up his locomotive with a complaining, grinding moan, a hundred yards beyond Walthamstow station. Tom Cumbers had done a greater thing than any other in all his existence.

The German revenge.

That by his act the Germans in their speeding sky-craft were baffled there is no doubt. They had lost their trail of fire; their involuntary guide had disappeared in the gloom. The airmen's long journey had suddenly become fruitless; their peril from hidden British guns and flying scouts was increased tenfold. The heat of the night was as nothing to the hot surge of disappointment that must have swept the brains of the Zeppelin crew. Their commander, too, must have lost his judgment utterly, forgotten his sense of military effectiveness. Whatever happened, he sacrificed his soul when he turned his cloud-ship aside from the railway line, steered over the shabby roofs of Walthamstow and, at less than two thousand feet, unloosed his iron dogs of destruction.

Bombing tenements of a defenseless town.

I have it on the authority of experienced aviators that it is not impossible on a dark night to distinguish buildings of importance like St. Paul's or the Houses of Parliament or a great gun factory or a river as broad as the Thames with its uprearing and frequent bridges. The crowding tenements of Walthamstow could have had no semblance to any of these, at any height. It would seem a cheap and worthless revenge, then, to wreck an unimportant and defenceless town, having failed to wreck the military nerve-center of the world's metropolis. But this is what one of Count Zeppelin's soaring dreadnoughts did in this night, in this blood-drenched year.

When a bomb explodes.

Like the mirage of a tropical island the dirigible hung motionless in space for a breathless minute. There was a wavering pin-prick of light in the carriage suspended from the leviathan's belly—a light that fluttered fore and aft as of a man with a fairy lantern running to and fro giving orders or taking them. Then faintly discernible against the sky, like a rope hung down for anchorage, came a thin, gray streak—the tail of a bomb with all hell in its wake. From somewhere near the town's centre the earth split and roared apart. The world reeled and a brain-shattering crash compounded of all the elements of pain and hurled from the shoulders of a thousand thunderclaps smote the senses. It was a blast of sickening and malignant fury. It did not so much stun as it stopped one—stopped the breath and the heart's beat, suspending thought, halting life itself for a fraction of time. One was, somehow, aware of existence but without sensation. And then came reaction and the realization of what was really taking place. The German's bomb landed fully ten blocks away, but you would have taken oath in court that it had fallen at your feet, behind you, above you and into your very brain.

Terror of the people.

A broken gas main.

An air raid on Walthamstow, which drab town can boast neither ammunition works nor the ownership of war material of any description, could not be at once realized. But here was the cyclonic fact, hideously real, appallingly actual; and there in the heavens was the buoyant Zeppelin maneuvering for further mischief. The reverberation of the first explosion was still grumbling back in Epping Forest when all Walthamstow, rubbing its eyes, tumbled out into the black streets. Men, women, children, all ludicrously clotheless, swarmed aimlessly like bees in an overturned hive. Stark terror gripped them. It distorted their faces and set their legs quivering. The dullest among these toil-dulled people knew what that explosion meant, knew that it was part of the punishment promised by the German foe. "Gott strafe England" had come to pass. But they could not understand why the enemy had singled them out for such drastic distinction. The more alert and cool-headed of the men battled with their fellows and shouted instructions to get the women folks and the kiddies back indoors and down into their cellars. The night-gowned and pajamaed throng could not be persuaded that safety lay not in sight of the Zeppelin but away from it. The hypnotism of horror lured them on to where twelve houses lay spread about in smoking chaos, a plateau of blazing and noisome havoc. Somewhere a gas-main burst with a roar and drove the crowd back with its choking fumes as no human hands could have done. Women frankly hysterical or swooning were roughly thrust aside. Children shrieking in uncomprehending panic were swept along with the crowd or trodden upon. Lumbering men ran and shouted and cursed and shook hairy fists at the long blot on the clouds. Some of the men leaped over iron palings like startled rabbits and flung themselves in the grass, face downward and quaking. And yet, I dare say that most of these would have walked straight into a familiar danger without the waver of an eyelash; it was the unknown peril, the doubt as to how and whence this hurtling death might spring upon them out of the night, that unhinged their manhood. And while Walthamstow's walls went down and great flame-tongues spouted where homes had stood, while the thick, hot air was tortured with agonized and inhuman cries, the enemy up above let loose another bolt.

The second bomb as the town blazes.

Effects of the explosion.

More terrible than the first explosion was, or seemed, this second one. It mowed down half a hundred shrieking souls. And it was curious to note the lateral action of the blast when it hit a resisting surface. Dynamite explodes with a downward or upward force, lyddite and nitro-glycerine and what not other devil's own powers act more or less in the same set manner. But the furious ingredients of these bombs hurled on Walthamstow contained stuff that released a discharge which swept all things from it horizontally, in a quarter-mile, lightning sweep, like a scythe of flame. A solid block of shabby villas was laid out as flat as your palm by the explosion of this second bomb. Scarcely a brick was left standing upright. What houses escaped demolition around the edge of the convulsion had their doors and windows splintered into rubbish. The concussion of this chemical frenzy was felt, like an earthquake, in a ten-mile circle. Wherever the scorching breath of the bombs breathed on stone or metal it left a sulphurous, yellow-white veneer, acrid in odor and smooth to the touch. Whole street-lengths of twisted iron railings were coated with this murderous white-wash.

More bombs as the Zeppelin rises.

Freaks of the explosion.

Having made sure of its mark, the ravaging Zeppelin rose higher on the discharge of its first bomb and still higher after firing the second. At the safe distance of four thousand feet it dropped three more shells recklessly, haphazard. One of these bored cleanly through a slate-tiled roof, through furniture and two floorings and burrowed ten feet into the ground without exploding. This intact shell has since been carefully analyzed by the experts of the Board of Explosions at the British War Office. Another bomb detonated on the steel rails of the Walthamstow tram-line and sent them curling skyward from their rivetted foundations like serpentine wisps of paper. Great cobblestones were heaved through shop windows and partitions and out into the flower-beds of rear gardens; some of the cobbles were flung through solid attic blinds and others were catapulted through brick walls a foot in thickness. A hole as big as a moving-van burned into the road at one place. In a side street an impromptu fountain squirted playfully into the dust-burdened air, the result of a central water-pipe punctured by a slug from one of the bomb's iron entrails. But these things were not noted until dawn and comparative peace had returned to Walthamstow and men could count with some degree the cost of the reckless invasion.

British aeroplanes pursue.

Before the clouds had swallowed up the hateful visitant the noise of its attack had aroused the military guards across Epping Forest, in Chingford village, and, aided by a search-light, the anti-aircraft-gun opened its unavailing fire on the Zeppelin—ineffective, except that its returning shrapnel smashed up several roofs and battered some innocent heads. The Germans had gauged their skyward path to London along which, apparently, they felt reasonably safe from gun-reach. But they had barely headed homeward before a flock of army aeroplanes, rising from all points of the compass, were in hot pursuit. One of the Britishers was shot down by the men aboard the Zeppelin. Neither speed nor daring counts for much in an encounter between flying-machines and swift dirigibles of the latest types. The advantage lies solely with the one that can overfly his adversary. This can be achieved by a biplane or monoplane pilot only if he has a long start from the ground and time enough to surmount his opponent. This is difficult even in daylight with a cloudless sky. Given darkness and clouds, the chances for success are tremendously against the smaller craft.

The old switchman a victim.

Eight bombs in all were launched on Walthamstow—two of them ineffectual. The sixth bomb fell into a field close beside the railway line and worked a hideous wonder. It blew into never-to-be-gathered fragments all that was mortal of old Tom Cumbers, the signalman. They found only his left hand plastered gruesomely against the grassy bank of the railway cut—not a hair nor button else.

The great series of attacks by the massed German Army against the mighty forces of Verdun began in February, 1917, and continued throughout the following months. Taken as a whole, it was the most dramatic effort in all its phases which took place between the German and French forces. The French showed during these terrible months, the spirit of devotion and sacrifice which was never excelled during the war.