Though never actually assaulted, it was only the stolidity of the British character that kept people’s hands off his effigy during the Zeppelin raids on London. Visitors were too proud, I suppose, to touch him, and from the time the first German airship was brought down in flames on British soil Count Zeppelin’s model began to be ignored.
A British matron quietly remarked, as she stopped an instant in front of the portrait, “So you’re going the way of all our enemies—beaten at your own game.”
In the early months of the war we borrowed from a soldier an Iron Cross that he had taken from the breast of a dead German officer whom he had found lying in a wood at Zillebeke, near Ypres, in November, 1914.
According to the story of the soldier—Drummer Newman, of the Grenadier Guards—our men, comprising Grenadier Guards, Irish Guards, and Oxfordshire Light Infantry, were opposed to the Prussian Guards, who were driven out of the wood, leaving behind them several hundreds of their dead.
Newman was searching for despatches when he happened upon the cross in question. I remember him coming to my studio with the trophy. He was a typical soldier, and he greatly amused me by his description of the way in which old soldiers—bearing in mind one of the trite sayings of Frederick the Great—would hearten their comrades, saying, just before going over the top, “Now then, boys, you don’t want to live for ever, do you?”
The Iron Cross was exhibited with other relics, and used to be handed round for inspection, until one day it was missing. That was in October, 1915, and, although we made inquiries of the police and learned that it had been seen in the neighbourhood of the Exhibition, we heard no more of it till, several months later, it was traced by detectives to a gentleman at Warrington who had innocently purchased it from an invalided soldier.
We willingly refunded the amount that had been paid for the cross, and it has now been restored to our collection.
No sooner was London subjected to the terrible ordeal of air-raids than we received, as was only to be expected, offers of bombs that had been dropped by enemy aircraft.