The giant airship slipped easily out of the long shed with noiseless motors, and after rising to 8,000 feet, the altitude most suited for steady flying, our captain steered by compass straight for London.
Our true German hearts beat high this night with the hope of doing some great and irreparable damage to London....
Perhaps we should destroy their House of Parliament ... or their War Office ... or the Foreign Office ... or the official dwellings of the Prime Minister and the Chancellor of the Exchequer.... Well did I know the location of all these places from my long residence in London.
Our commander said that a bomb dropped in a certain space of half a square mile in London could hardly fail to destroy some person of great importance in the official or wealthy classes of England.
Perhaps we might strike a school or a hospital or a party of women. We should regret such accidents, but it is impossible to modify our splendid and effective aerial warfare simply because innocent combatants place themselves in the way of legitimate objects of attack.... We know that London is a fortified city, and non-combatants who remain there do so at their own peril.
The way had for months been prepared by previous aerial attacks and reconnoissances for a more accurate and effective blow at the heart of London. All lights, both street lamps and those in dwellings, have been lowered by order of the English Government to a point that causes the busiest thoroughfare at night to present only a dull glow a few hundred yards away.
On the other hand, powerful searchlights operated in connection with anti-aircraft guns, and other military works are kept constantly playing on the sky in the search for our airships. If we can discover the topographical position of these searchlights and batteries we can establish the other principal centres of the city from them and throw our bombs with some approach to accuracy—that is to say, we can at least drop them on a quarter where we know that there are public buildings or where important officials reside.
To establish the location of these points has been the work of our earlier air reconnoissances, and as a result of this system our work must become more and more deadly every day. We have, for instance, found that powerful searchlights and batteries are operated at Woolwich on the extreme eastern outskirts of London, at St. James's Park, which is in the centre of the metropolis, at Hampstead Heath on the north, and at the Crystal Palace, south of the Thames. The English are not likely to move all these defensive points, and if one is moved and not the others, the captain of the Zeppelin can discover the change by reference to the other points.
As our Zeppelin can travel seventy miles an hour at its maximum, the journey of a little more than two hundred miles from Belgium could be performed in a few hours. Darkness was falling as we passed over the stormy North Sea for we did not wish to be seen and reported by patrol ships.