L.P.M. : The End of the Great War

by J. Stewart Barney

This was of a great open space, the most desolate and lonely stretch of country that could well be imagined, a broad, open plain that stretched on for miles and miles, perfectly flat, treeless and uninhabited. The wind apparently was blowing violently, judging from the way it tossed Edestone’s hair about as, hatless, he walked back and forth in the near foreground, shading his eyes from the sun with his hand while he looked into the lens and called his directions to the man who was working the camera.

“That disreputable-looking individual is myself,” he confessed. “My hat had blown away, a circumstance quite inconvenient at the time, but not without a certain element of present interest, as showing that a high wind was blowing at that time.”

Behind him in the middle distance was a track and cradle similar to the one shown in the first picture. The machine in the cabinet buzzed, and clicked, and made a noise like that of a small boy rattling a stick along a picket fence. A draught from some open window blowing against the linen screen caused the flat, deserted plain to undulate like the waves of the sea. The horizon bobbed up and down, showing first a great expanse of sky, and then the foreground ran up to infinity. The cradle was seen first at the right, and then at the left of the picture. The clouds in the sky kept jumping about, as if the operator was trying to follow some object aloft, but was unable to get it into the field of his camera.

The audience began to grow impatient. Had the apparatus got out of order, they wondered, and were they to be cheated of the promised sensation? But just then the screen steadied, and there appeared in the upper left-hand corner of the picture a faint, far-away dot which gradually assumed the form of a dirigible. Across the desolate landscape it sailed, growing more and more distinct as it drew nearer. It circled, turning first to the right and then to the left, rising and descending, as if responding willingly to the touch of its unseen pilot, until with a majestic swoop it hovered like a great bird exactly over the cradle, and came to a standstill.

To those among the spectators who had witnessed the evolutions of the great battleships of the air over Lake Constance, there was nothing notable about either the vessel or its performance, except that it seemed larger, more solid, and had four great smoke stacks. In the gale which was blowing, the volumes of inky smoke which poured from the four great funnels were tossed about and flung away like long, streaming ribbons; yet the ship itself was as steady as a great ocean liner on a summer sea.

On closer inspection, too, it was seen that on the upper side of the craft there was a platform or deck running its full length, where men were working away like sailors on a man-of-war, and from portholes and turrets protruded great black things which looked like the muzzles of guns.

All at once, as if acting under an order from within, these were trained on the spectators and simultaneously discharged, belching out great rings of smoke. There was a stifled scream from the gallery at this, but immediately the room grew quiet again, and the audience sat as if spellbound awaiting further developments. A small door in the starboard side now opened, and the figure of a man came running down a gangway to a platform suspended under the ship, where, silhouetted against the sky, he occupied himself in signalling to some one on the ground. He was joined from time to time by others of the crew as the vessel settled slowly toward the earth.

When it was about one hundred and fifty feet above the cradle, Edestone was seen to walk out with a megaphone in his hand, and through it communicate instructions to the man on the bridge, in evident obedience to which the airship settled still lower, until it was not more than twenty feet above the top of the cradle.

A ladder having then been lowered to Edestone, he climbed up it, ascended the gangway, and disappeared into the interior of the great cigar-shaped object, it all the time remaining absolutely stationary. But he was not long lost to view. In a few minutes he re-appeared on the top deck and a man by his side energetically waved a large flag.

And as the two stood there, the airship began to move.