Yesterday’s papers had the usual account of an air raid on the “Eastern Counties,” and during the day word was passed round that this had consisted of an attempt to bomb the Woolwich Arsenal. This morning they have finally had to add “and London” to the regular formula, as last night, for the first time, bombs were dropped upon the heart of the city and seven million people watched the whole performance. It was the nearest thing to their promised “big raid” that the Germans have yet brought off, and to-day London—in the defence of the metropolitan area of which guns were fired for the first time in many hundreds of years—appears to have declared a sort of informal half-holiday to note the consequences.
To Londoners, a Zeppelin raid appears to be a good deal like the paradoxical “man-sitting-on-the-pin” joke—it is funniest to those who miss the point. To the ones in the swath of the raid, like the one who sits on the pin, it is anything but a laughing matter. “But the swath of the raid is so narrow, London so broad; the killed so few, Londoners so many. If this is the worst the Huns can do, on with ‘Business as Usual!’” There is no denying that this epitomises the spirit of London—even as it mourns its dead—on the morrow of the first great air raid of history. For myself, I must admit that I was rather too near the point of the pin, and have since seen rather too many of the “pin-pricks,” to be able to look at the diversion from quite the standpoint of the great majority.
Last night was clear, calm, and moonless—ideal Zeppelin conditions—and walking down from my hotel to the Coliseum at eight o’clock, I noticed that the searchlights were turning the dome of the sky into one great kaleidoscope with their weaving bands of brightness. The warming-up drill was over as I entered the music hall, and, returning home at the end of the “top-liner’s” act, I picked my precarious way by the light of the stars and the diffused halos of what had once been street lamps. I was in bed by a quarter to eleven, and it was but a few moments later that the distant but unmistakable boom of a bomb smote upon my unpillowed ear. I was at my east-facing window with a jump, and an instant later the opaque curtain of the night was being slashed to ribbons by the awakening searchlights.
For a minute or two, all of them seemed to be reeling blind and large across the empty heavens, and then, guided by the nearing explosions, one after another they veered off to the east and focussed in a great cone of light where two or three slender slivers of vivid brightness were gliding nearer above the dim bulks of the domes and spires of the “City.”
Swiftly, undeviatingly, relentlessly, these little pale yellow dabs came on, carrying with them, as by a sort of magnetic attraction, the tip of the cone formed by the converged beams of the searchlights. Nearer and louder sounded the detonations of the bombs. Now they burst in salvos of threes and fours; now singly at intervals, but with never more than a few seconds between. Always a splash of lurid light preceded the sound of the explosion, in most instances to be followed by the quick leap of flames against the skyline. Many of these fires died away quickly,—sometimes through lack of fuel, as in a stone-paved court; more often through being subdued by the firemen, scores of whose engines could be heard clanging through the streets,—others waxed bright and spread until the yellow shafts of the searchlights paled against the heightening glow of the eastern heavens.
The wooden clackity-clack of the raiders’ propellers came to my ears at about the same moment that the sparkling trail of the fuse of an incendiary bomb against the loom of a familiar spire roughly located the van of the attack as now about half a mile distant. After that, things happened so fast that my recollections, though photographically vivid, are somewhat disconnected. My last “calmly calculative” act was to measure one of the on-coming airships—then at about twenty-five degrees from directly overhead—between the thumb and forefinger of my outstretched right hand, these, extended to their utmost, framing the considerably foreshortened gas-bag with about a half-inch to spare.
Up to this moment, the almost undeviating line of flight pursued by the approaching Zeppelins appeared as likely to carry them on one side of my coign of vantage as the other; that is to say, they seemed not unlikely to be going to pass directly overhead. It was at this juncture, not unnaturally, that it occurred to me that the basement—for the next minute or two at least—would be vastly preferable, for any but observation purposes, to my top-floor window. Before I could translate this discretionary impulse into action, however, a small but brilliant light winked twice or thrice from below the leading airship, and a point or two of change was made in the course, with the possible purpose (it has since occurred to me) of swinging across the great group of conjoined railway termini a half-mile or so to the north. This meant that the swath of the bombs would be cut at least a hundred yards to the north-east, and, impelled by the fascination of the unfolding spectacle, I remained at my window.
During the next half-minute the bombs fell singly at three-or four-second intervals. Then the blinking light flashed out under the leader again,—probably the order for “rapid fire,”—and immediately afterwards a number of sputtering fire-trails—not unlike the wakes of meteors—lengthened downward from beneath each of the two airships. (I might explain that I did not see more than two Zeppelins at any one time, though some have claimed to have seen three.)
Immediately following the release of the bombs, the lines of fire streamed in a forward curve, but from about halfway down their fall was almost perpendicular. As they neared the earth, the hiss of cloven air—similar to but not so high-keyed as the shriek of a shell—became audible, and a second or two later the flash of the explosion and the rolling boom were practically simultaneous.
Between eight and a dozen bombs fell in a length of five blocks, and at a distance of from one to three hundred yards from my window, the echoes of one explosion mingling with the burst of the next. Broken glass tinkled down to the left and right, and a fragment of slate from the roof shattered upon my balcony. But the most remarkable phenomenon was the rush of air from, or rather to, the explosion. With each detonation I leaned forward instinctively and braced myself for a blow on the chest, and lo—it descended upon my back. The same mysterious force burst inward my half-latched door, and all down one side of the square curtains were streaming outward from open or broken windows. (I did not sit down and ponder the question at the moment, but the phenomenon is readily explained by the fact that, because the force of the explosives used in Zeppelin bombs is invariably exerted upwards, the air from the lower level is drawn in to fill the vacuum thus created. This also accounts for the fact that all of the window glass shattered by the raiders has fallen on the sidewalks instead of inside the rooms.)