“But their own planes?” I objected.
“The Gotha has two engines, it has a slightly different noise, when you get used to it. You'd better step out of that window. It's against the law to show light, and if a bomb falls in the street you'd be filled with glass.” I overcame my fascination and obeyed. “It isn't only the bombs,” my friend went on, “it's the falling shrapnel, too.”
The noise made by those bombs is unmistakable, unforgetable, and quite distinct from the chorus of the guns and shrapnel—a crashing note, reverberating, sustained, like the E minor of some giant calliope.
In face of the raids, which coincide with the coming of the moon, London is calm, but naturally indignant over such methods of warfare. The damage done is ridiculously small; the percentage of deaths and injuries insignificant. There exists, in every large city, a riffraff to get panicky: these are mostly foreigners; they seek the Tubes, and some the crypt of St. Paul's, for it is wise to get under shelter during the brief period of the raids, and most citizens obey the warnings of the police. It is odd, indeed, that more people are not hurt by shrapnel. The Friday following the raid I have described I went out of town for a week-end, and returned on Tuesday to be informed that a shell had gone through the roof outside of the room I had vacated, and the ceiling and floor of the bedroom of one of the officers who lived below. He was covered with dust and debris, his lights went out, but he calmly stepped through the window. “You'd best have your dinner early, sir,” I was told by the waiter on my return. “Last night a lady had her soup up-stairs, her chicken in the office, and her coffee in the cellar.” It is worth while noting that she had all three. Another evening, when I was dining with Sir James Barrie, he showed me a handful of shrapnel fragments. “I gathered them off the roof,” he informed me. And a lady next to whom I sat at luncheon told me in a matter-of-fact tone that a bomb had fallen the night before in the garden of her town house. “It was quite disagreeable,” she said, “and broke all our windows on that side.” During the last raids before the moon disappeared, by a new and ingenious system of barrage fire the Germans were driven off. The question of the ethics of reprisals is agitating London.
One “raid,” which occurred at midday, is worth recording. I was on my way to our Embassy when, in the residential quarter through which I passed, I found all the housemaids in the areas gazing up at the sky, and I was told by a man in a grocer's cart that the Huns had come again. But the invader on this occasion turned out to be a British aviator from one of the camps who was bringing a message to London. The warmth of his reception was all that could be desired, and he alighted hastily in the first open space that presented itself.
Looking back to the time when I left America, I can recall the expectation of finding a Britain beginning to show signs of distress. I was prepared to live on a small ration. And the impression of the scarcity of food was seemingly confirmed when the table was being set for the first meal at my hotel; when the waiter, who chanced to be an old friend, pointed to a little bowl half-full of sugar and exclaimed: “I ought to warn you, sir, it's all you're to have for a week, and I'm sorry to say you're only allowed a bit of bread, too.” It is human perversity to want a great deal of bread when bread becomes scarce; even war bread, which, by the way, is better than white. But the rest of the luncheon, when it came, proved that John Bull was under no necessity of stinting himself. Save for wheat and sugar; he is not in want. Everywhere in London you are confronted by signs of an incomprehensible prosperity; everywhere, indeed, in Great Britain. There can be no doubt about that of the wage-earners—nothing like it has ever been seen before. One sure sign of this is the phenomenal sale of pianos to households whose occupants had never dreamed of such luxuries. And not once, but many times, have I read in the newspapers of workingmen's families of four or five which are gaining collectively more than five hundred pounds a year. The economic and social significance of this tendency, the new attitude of the working classes, the ferment it is causing need not be dwelt upon here. That England will be a changed England is unquestionable.
The London theatres are full, the “movies” crowded, and you have to wait your turn for a seat at a restaurant. Bond Street and Piccadilly are doing a thriving business—never so thriving, you are told, and presently you are willing to believe it. The vendor beggars, so familiar a sight a few years ago, have all but disappeared, and you may walk from Waterloo Station to the Haymarket without so much as meeting a needy soul anxious to carry your bag. Taxicabs are in great demand. And one odd result of the scarcity of what the English are pleased to call “petrol,” by which they mean gasoline, is the reappearance of that respectable, but almost obsolete animal, the family carriage-horse; of that equally obsolete vehicle, the victoria. The men on the box are invariably in black. In spite of taxes to make the hair of an American turn grey, in spite of lavish charities, the wealthy classes still seem wealthy—if the expression may be allowed. That they are not so wealthy as they were goes without saying. In the country houses of the old aristocracy the most rigid economy prevails. There are new fortunes, undoubtedly, munitions and war fortunes made before certain measures were taken to control profits; and some establishments, including a few supported by American accumulations, still exhibit the number of men servants and amount of gold plate formerly thought adequate. But in most of these great houses maids have replaced the butlers and footmen; mansions have been given over for hospitals; gardeners are fighting in the trenches, and courts and drives of country places are often overgrown with grass and weeds.
“Yes, we do dine in public quite often,” said a very great lady. “It's cheaper than keeping servants.”
Two of her three sons had been killed in France, but she did not mention this. The English do not advertise their sorrows. Still another explanation when husbands and sons and brothers come back across the Channel for a few days' leave after long months in the trenches, nothing is too good for them. And when these days have flown, there is always the possibility that there may never be another leave. Not long ago I read a heart-rending article about the tragedies of the goodbyes in the stations and the terminal hotels—tragedies hidden by silence and a smile. “Well, so long,” says an officer “bring back a V. C.,” cries his sister from the group on the platform, and he waves his hand in deprecation as the train pulls out, lights his pipe, and pretends to be reading the Sphere.
Some evening, perchance, you happen to be in the dark street outside of Charing Cross station. An occasional hooded lamp throws a precarious gleam on a long line of men carrying—so gently—stretchers on which lie the silent forms of rich and poor alike.