MANY FRONTS
LEWIS R. FREEMAN

MANY FRONTS

MANY FRONTS

BY
LEWIS R. FREEMAN

LONDON
JOHN MURRAY, ALBEMARLE STREET, W.
1918

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

CONTENTS

My grateful acknowledgments are due to the several magazines in which these stories and sketches have appeared:—The Cornhill Magazine, Land and Water, and The World’s Work in England; and in America, The Atlantic Monthly, The World’s Work, and The Outlook.

L. R. F.

October, 1918.

MANY FRONTS

THE FIGHT FOR THE GARDEN OF EDEN

I

I had known F—— through years of hunting and sports in India, but never until the night that our old British-India coaster lay off the Shat-el-Arab bar waiting for the turn of the tide to run up to Bassorah, did I hear him speak of the things that were really next his heart. Then it was that I was vouchsafed transient vision of the outer strands of the previsionary web England was weaving beyond the marches of India against events to come. I will give his story, as nearly as I can remember, in his own words.

For the best part of the last five years [said he], I have been coming to Arabia and Mesopotamia on “language study.” In all of that time I have not been back to England, and I am almost a stranger to the officers of my own regiment. I talk like an Arab, I am beginning to think like an Arab, and, what with sunlight and dirt that have gone so deep under my epidermis that they will never come out, I shall soon look like an Arab. Perhaps in time—you’d never believe the appeal of the Koran till you’ve bowed toward Mecca, with a Bedouin on either side of you, morning and evening, for six months at a stretch—I shall pray like an Arab. I have had smallpox, dysentery,—which has become practically chronic,—and a dozen varieties of fevers and skin diseases, and I’m mottled from head to foot with “Aleppo button” scars, two of which have never healed. I’ve been alone so much that I talk to myself even in Calcutta and Simla. The Persians in this region distrust me, the Russians and Germans hate me, and the Turks are perfectly frank in saying that they will send me on “the long pilgrimage” if ever a fair chance offers.

All that my Government does is to allow my pay to go on and to provide me with a passport that will land me at Koweit, Bassorah, or Bagdad. If I get into trouble they will not—cannot, in fact—do as much for me as they would for a spindle-legged Hindu coolie. And all this on the chance that, some time before I am retired for old age or invalided from the Indian army, the Great White Bear will try to come down to the Persian Gulf to slake his age-long thirst. In this contingency, of course, there is no denying the fact that I shall be very much in demand, especially if operations are carried on in my own “sphere,” that of North-Eastern Arabia and Southern Mesopotamia, up to a line drawn from Bagdad to Hitt.

Afoot, or by horse or camel, I have traversed almost every square mile of this region. There is not a bazaar from Kerbela to Koweit in which, disguised, I cannot mingle unsuspected in the throng, or, in case of need, call upon friends who will do anything, from giving me a cigarette or a handful of dates to risking their lives to save my own. I also know every one of the greater, as well as most of the lesser, Bedouin sheikhs whose peoples roam the deserts between Bassorah and Damascus; and with one of the most powerful of these—his camels are over 100,000 in number and his sheep and goats three times that—I have gone through the “blood brotherhood” ceremony. The blood of our arms has actually mingled, and each is pledged to stop at no act to serve the other. My friends, I need hardly say, are all Arabs, Chaldeans, Syrians, Jews, or people of one of the other subject races of this region; to the Turk, courteous as he is to me socially in Bagdad and Bassorah, my name is anathema. A week hence, for instance, I shall exchange Oriental amenities with the Vali of Bagdad in his garden on the banks of the Tigris. He will toast me in scented coffee and drink to the success of my visit; and all the while a double guard of police will be watching the gates to prevent my getting away to the desert and my Arab friends. Personally, I know it would pain him if I were to be shot in the dark for neglecting to answer a sentry’s challenge; but officially he is dead keen for it, and there is no doubt that it would do him a lot of good in Stamboul, where he is not in very high favour at present.

The whole thing, when all is said and done, resolves itself down to about this: If a war involving operations in this “sphere” comes within the next twenty years, I,—and a couple of other chaps who are doing the same sort of work,—provided I do not lose my life, or my health, or the best of my faculties in the interim, will probably break all records outside of a Central American revolution for quick promotion. I should probably be a brigadier-general at forty, with ten or a dozen letters after my name. But if, as is likely, there is no war, I shall probably continue these little jaunts into the desert until my health gives out, when, at best, I shall be invalided home and retired on the half-pay of a captain or a major.

So, you see, my future depends entirely upon whether or not some of our neighbours, or would-be neighbours, see fit to “start something” in this little neck of Central Asia within the next decade or two. And now that Russia is in the Entente, and we are acting so entirely in concert with her in Persia, I’m very much afraid that it’s going to be a case of the “hope deferred which maketh the heart sick.”

II

The following day we caught the river steamer at Bassorah, and four days later arrived at Bagdad, F—— putting up at the grim brown fort which housed the British Consulate, post office, and telegraph station. I saw him on and off for a week, usually at tiffins or dinners given for him by some of his British friends. At other times he was not to be found. “F—— Sahib gone to bazaar,” his Pathan bearer invariably answered my inquiries; and F—— himself volunteered no more than that he was spending a good deal of time “renewing old acquaintances.” Then, at the end of about ten days, without a good-bye to anybody, so far as I could learn, he dropped from sight. “F—— is off again to his Arabs,” said his friends.

“I am much relieved,” the Consul whispered to me. “They hung on him like leeches this time, but F—— got away by togging up as an Armenian arabana driver when they were expecting him as an Arab. The Armenian came here, F—— stained his face, got into the chap’s clothes, and actually drove the arabana, with a load of passengers, to Kerbela. The Turks nabbed the real driver when they caught him going out on foot, but got little out of him, and I don’t think they know yet exactly what happened. F—— is far into the desert by this time.”

This was in 1912, and at that time no one—least of all F——, who had the most to gain by such an event—appeared to dream that the blood-drenched plains of Babylonia and Assyria were likely to echo ere many years to the tramp of hostile armies. The broad scope of Germany’s activities, extending far beyond the mere construction of the Bagdad Railway, was evident to every one; but, this notwithstanding, the general impression seemed to be that the whip-hand in this region was Russia’s. This feeling was aptly expressed by an old Turkish officer with whom I discussed Near Eastern politics at Mosul. “The Germans may build railroads,” he said, punctuating his measured speech with puffs from a gurgling hookah, “and the British may build ships, and the Turks may build dams and canals,”—referring to the reclamation work at Hindia on the Euphrates,—“but in the end the Great White Bear will come down to the Persian Gulf and have his drink of warm water.”

That the Germans had ambitious plans for controlling the commerce of the incalculably rich Tigro-Euphrates Valley no one doubted, or even that the Kaiser aimed at some sort of political control. But that German influence should prevail over that of Britain and Russia in Constantinople, to the extent of aligning the Porte on the side of the Kaiser against the Triple Entente, was not dreamed of in Mesopotamia, even by the Turks themselves. The price to the Entente, however, of alienating Italy from the Triple Alliance by acquiescing in that Power’s conquest of Tripoli, was the irretrievable loss of Turkey’s friendship; and with the succession of Enver Pasha to the War Ministry at the end of the first Balkan conflict, there is no doubt that the Porte stood absolutely committed to action with Germany. After the outbreak of the present war, Turkey’s participation on the side of the Central Powers was only a matter of the Kaiser’s nod. Enver Pasha, educated in Berlin and always actively anti-Russian, had spent nearly two years in preparation for the struggle which the Germans had doubtless assured him was inevitable; and the making ready for a fight to the death at the Dardanelles was not allowed to interfere with a general stiffening of the Eastern defences. This, briefly, was the way in which it came about that Britain is facing Turkey instead of the long-prepared-against Russia in the Mesopotamian “theatre.” But I will let my friend F——, to whom it was given to help set and stage the opening scenes of the play, tell something of what happened up to the moment of his tragic exit.

Late in the fall of 1914, a hastily scribbled card reached me in California. “Things looming large at last,” it read. “Am off for the ‘P.G.’[1] to-morrow with big work in prospect. Will write when I can get anything of interest passed.” The card was post-marked Karachi, and dated but a few days previous to Turkey’s official entry into the war. I took it, therefore, that the Indian Government had discounted this action, and that at the moment the Turks opened hostilities by bombarding the Russian coast, F——, doubtless with considerable forces, was on the way to his “sphere.”

[1] Persian Gulf.

The promised letter was long delayed, and when it came bore the post-mark Bassorah, not in the pothook Turkish characters, but in plain English letters, while the blue two-and-a-half anna stamp of India appeared in the corner formerly sacred to the narrow, pink, half-gummed one-piastre sticker which you had often to affix with a pin to keep it from falling off. Thus ran the letter:—

“I am writing you this from the one-time home port of ‘Sinbad the Sailor,’ which, I am rejoiced to say, has been under our flag for some days. The Turks had considerable forces of seasoned troops here,—doubtless you remember how much of the old town was taken up by barracks,—but, evidently because they did not expect us so soon, or in such force, had done little in the way of outpost defence. This, coupled with the facts that our naval strength was overwhelming and the river very ineffectively mined, made what might have been an operation of tremendous difficulty comparatively easy. The guns of our cruisers outranged those of the old forts at the mouth of the Shat-el-Arab, and, with sweepers working ahead of them, the light-draught gunboats peppered so hotly those dense palm groves which fringe the river banks that we had little difficulty in fighting our way through them without great loss.

“Co-operating with the advance up the river, our main force was landed above Koweit and marched across the open desert to attack Bassorah on the west, threatening the rear of the Turkish positions on the left bank. Here the Turk could have made us no end of trouble had he been in sufficient force, for the lowlands were partly inundated and a defence of the practicable routes could have been made very effective.

“It was the weakness of the opposition met here that first led us to hope that Bassorah was not going to be strongly defended. Although the advance resolved itself into little more than a series of outpost actions, the period was an anxious one for us—and especially for me—in that it put to the acid test the result of our work, not only in forecasting the capricious and variable overflow, but also in conciliating the no less capricious and variable Arabs of a region nominally subject to Turkey. I can only tell you now that things turned out, and are continuing to turn out, even better than we had any reason to hope they would. There was no suggestion of a menace to our exposed left flank from the hordes of curious but in no wise hostile Arabs who showed themselves all along the way, and the censor will probably not allow me to tell you that our transport and commissariat, if nothing more, will probably be much helped by active assistance from this source. [Here several sentences, doubtless telling something more of the attitude of the Arabs, were obscured by the censor’s brush.] So you will see that the Turk is reaping the harvest he deserves from his sowing of harshness and duplicity among the Bedouins, and that the time and efforts of us ‘language students’ who have worked this sphere will not have been spent in vain.

“The Turks have undoubtedly been quite sound in deciding not to make a stand at Bassorah. With the sea approaches in our hands, and with the city entirely encompassed by desert and marsh, the holding of it for any time would have hinged upon command of either the Tigris or the Euphrates all the way to the rich agricultural region to the west of Bagdad. As the cutting of this line by us was only a matter of time, the city would have been isolated and forced to withstand a siege which could only have ended in the capture of whatever forces were locked up there. As it is, the most of these forces are now at liberty to dispute our advance, through a very difficult country, to Mesopotamia and Bagdad. Here it seems certain we shall have all the fighting we care for.

“I have not mentioned the fact that I have received my captaincy and am assigned to the general staff. In an ordinary campaign the latter circumstance would mean a lot of dreary consultations at headquarters, and no action. Here, Allah be praised, the case is quite different. R——, K—— (the two chaps who have also worked this sphere), and I are always called in, if we chance to be on hand, when the maps are unrolled; but most of the time the whole lot of us are off on something else. R—— has been through the Turkish lines twice, once spending three days in Kurna, their advanced base, and I have been off on a week’s journey to receive renewed assurances of the friendship of my Bedouin ‘blood-brother.’ It is going to be a jolly amusing game.”

III

Another letter came from F—— a month later, this being in answer to one I had rushed off on receiving the card announcing his departure for the Persian Gulf:—

“You ask what we are driving at here, by which I suppose you mean, ‘What is our plan of campaign?’ This, obviously, is a question I can answer only in the most general way. Our principal purpose in the present campaign will be the occupation of southern and central Mesopotamia up to and including the cities of Bagdad and Kerbela, a region roughly corresponding to what might be called ancient Babylonia proper. Our objective in this is twofold. First, to gain control of all the irrigated—and hence highly productive—portion of the Tigro-Euphrates Valley, and, second, to establish ourselves strongly upon the flank of Persia in the event that that country should show a disposition to make common cause with our enemy.

Map of the Tigro-Euphrates Valley,
Where the operations against Bagdad were carried out.

“There is little doubt that the advance to Bagdad will be a fight all the way. The most difficult country will be that between here and about fifty miles north of where the Tigris and Euphrates come together. Most of this area is marshy all the year, and practically all of it will be under water from the spring floods by the time we are ready to get into it. An endless network of ‘canals’ and backwater channels makes it practically impossible to advance on foot even across much of the overflow country, and one of the main reasons for our long halt in Bassorah has been the training of our men in the use of the various native craft which will have to figure in our transport. Luckily, the Turks will be under the same handicap as ourselves in this region, and our superior artillery and organisation are sure to give us the ‘edge.’ The real fighting is going to come when we emerge upon the level alluvial plains of Central Mesopotamia. Here the enemy will have the Bagdad railway at his back, and, without doubt, a pretty complete little system of German-made light railways to keep him in munitions and food.

“It may be that it will take us to the end of 1915 to attain our first goal. Then, if a decision in Europe has not been reached in the meantime, our next general advance would be up the Tigris to Samara, Tekrit, and Mosul, and up the Euphrates to Hitt and Deyr; this advance would place in our hands an upland grain-growing region of considerable productivity. Still another campaign would have to be launched to occupy the country up to a line from Aleppo to Mardin or Diarbekir; but Russia should reach this region from the Caucasus before we can get there from the south. Upon the guns and munitions which the Germans are able to send through to Bagdad will depend the character of the stand that the Turk is going to make in Babylonia.

“But what a game it is going to be, this fight for the old Garden of Eden,—with the high-banked canals and the crumbling walls of Babylon and Hitt serving for trenches and forts, and the khans which sheltered Ali Baba and Haroun-al-Raschid as outposts! Why, the ‘G.C.C.’ and I have even discussed how we are going to use that isolated old tepe of Birs Nimrud—which some call the ‘Tower of Babel’—when the time comes!

“Our transport for the new campaign will probably be the most remarkable thing of the kind ever assembled. The fact that the country into which we are advancing will be largely under water will compel us to become practically amphibious. On land we are using camels, horses, mules, and donkeys, while on the water the services of everything, from the native balems, gufas, and kaleks to shallow-draught gunboats and river-steamers, will be in demand. The old Bagdad side-wheelers have all been converted into gunboats, but even their slight draught of five or six feet is too great for all but the main river-channels. One of these, by the way, went into action the other day with an armour improvised from mats of dried dates. Of course the Turkish shrapnel made an awful mess of it, and, I am sorry to say, also of the chaps behind it.

“The direction of the training of our men in the use of the native watercraft has been one of my recent duties. The balem is a gondola-like sort of boat which has long been used for passenger transport on the canals and rivers of this region. It may be rowed, sculled, or paddled, and since it is of fairly stable equilibrium, the men are not long in mastering it. The gufa, however, is quite another matter. It is a slightly flattened ball of woven reeds covered with pitch, having a hole from five to ten feet across at the top to receive passengers and freight. It is propelled by paddling, now on one side, now on the other, and two or three old hands can make very fair progress with it. A novice, however, can do little more than make the thing spin on its own axis. Moreover, he invariably renders himself still more helpless by laughing at his own uselessness; and although some of the more serious-minded Sepoys have made considerable progress in handling the gufa, I am afraid we shall never be able to make Thomas Atkins, or his equally frivolous comrade-in-arms, the Ghurka, take it as other than a perpetual joke.

“A score of miles to the north of here, a few days ago, a dozen dismounted troopers, in lieu of anything better to hand, tried to cross a broad back channel of the Shat-el-Arab in a gufa, in order to dislodge some troublesome Turkish snipers. Their best efforts, however, served only to send the contrary craft bobbing down their own bank, the finest kind of a mark for the enemy’s sharpshooters. The latter (I have this on the word of the sergeant whose misplaced enthusiasm was responsible for the trouble), evidently highly amused, held their fire until after the ‘marines,’ as they have since been dubbed by their comrades, had kicked a hole in the bottom of the gufa and been compelled to take to the water. The few scattering shots fired even then were apparently sent only with the intent of ‘shooing’ several belligerent Tommies back to their own side, for the only casualty reported was the drowning of a man who, in the language of one of his surviving comrades, ‘caught ’is bloomin’ spur in the bally goofy an’ got ’eld under water.’

“Which incident reminds me to say a word for our old friend, the Turk, as a sporting fighter. Of course, we knew all the time that he was a first-class offensive fighter and a superlative defensive one; but, because for years we have known him under such characterisations as ‘The Terrible,’ and ‘The Unspeakable,’ we had come to expect from him a programme of ‘frightfulness’ quite in keeping with that of his allies of the Occident. That nothing of this character has been in evidence is one of the most refreshing surprises of the campaign. I can only set down here one of a number of instances in point which have fallen under my observation.

“You doubtless read in the papers that the Turks made an attempt in some force to recover Bassorah a few weeks ago, going by boats to Nasire, on the Euphrates, and marching from there around the inundation area to approach this point from the west. Fortunately, one of our ‘friends’ sent us word of what was afoot, and we were able to prepare a proper reception at Shaiba. It was after we had beaten them back at this point, and while they were fighting rearguard actions in a most cleverly conducted retreat, that the incident I have in mind occurred. I was out with, though not in command of, a troop of cavalry which was pressing the pursuit a considerable distance ahead of our main force. About eleven o’clock in the morning we found our way blocked by a small detachment of the enemy which had been left to make a stand at an isolated khan, one of those walled desert halting-places of the caravanserai order,—really more of a fort than a tavern.

“There was no use in trying to dislodge the Turks until the guns came up, but, unluckily, about a dozen chaps, out of touch with their officer, attempted to rush the gate ’on their own.’ The enemy coolly let them come on to about a hundred yards from the khan, and then, unmasking a machine-gun, dropped them all in a space not fifty feet square. A rifle volley brought down the three or four reckless spirits who, in spite of wounds, staggered to their feet and lurched ahead. Taking advantage of the cover afforded by a pair of old canal banks, we managed to get up within about three hundred yards of the khan gate without exposing ourselves dangerously, there to wait for our field guns and to be ready to make it lively for our Turkish friends in case they tried to evacuate in the meantime.

“For a while we thought that, mercifully, no life remained in any of the still, sprawling brown figures in front of the khan; but presently, with his face covered with the dirt a sniper’s bullet had thrown on it as he put his head up for a look, a man crawled back to report to Major S—— that he had seen a hand feebly raised as though trying to attract our attention. Verifying the truth of the statement at the risk of his big new shikar helmet, S—— promptly called for volunteers to try to bring the wounded man in. ‘It’s a slim chance,’ he said, ‘but this noonday sun would kill an unwounded man lying on his face for an hour out there. We’ve got to make the attempt.’

“Passing down the line, S—— picked the four spryest and wiriest looking of the sprawling row of grimy Tommies, each of whom had raised an appealing hand as the word for volunteers passed along. ‘Make the best of the cover of that strip of date-palms, and bring in the man—he’s the one nearest us—the same way,’ he ordered just about as he would have sent them out on patrol. ‘We’ll give the Turks what diversion we can in the meantime.’

“Then we began peppering the ports of the old khan in a blind and large sort of way that had little effect, as a consequence of the fact that the machine-gun fire which came in reply made it impossible to put our heads up to aim. Enough of a diversion was created, however, to allow the volunteers to make their way, apparently unobserved, to the farther end of the palm clump. But a hail of bullets met them as they left cover, and the last of them dropped while he was still a dozen yards from the object of his rush. The three first to fall lay still,—shot dead, as we learned later,—but the last one, in spite of a punctured femur, presently pulled himself together and began to crawl forward. It was not until this moment, I am certain, that the Turks fully comprehended what we were driving at; for now, although they continued to keep us under cover with sweeping jets from their machine-gun, not another shot was directed at the man on the ground. Nor was there any attempt to check his painful progress as he dragged the man he had been sent after back to the palm grove. Nor yet, finest of all, did the Turks try to wing a single one of another brave four, who, disdaining the cover of the palm trunks, dashed out to relieve their comrade of his burden.

“Encouraged by the forbearance of the enemy, we were about to send out a squad under a white flag to see if any more of the wounded were alive, when dust clouds on the southern horizon warned the Turkish leader that our field-guns were coming up; and, with his task of delaying the pursuit well fulfilled, he made ready to retire by sweeping our cover with a fresh fusillade. The only gate of the khan, opening to the south, was completely covered from our position; but the resourceful Turk coolly breached the northern wall with a flake or two of gun-cotton, and, the first thing we knew, the whole troop—machine-gun and all—went scurrying off across the desert. For two or three minutes they were fair marks for us, and, as they sent several Parthian volleys themselves, there was no military reason why we should not have tried to bring down a few of them. As a matter of fact, we did send a few perfunctory volleys; but if its shooting on that occasion was any criterion of the marksmanship of S——’s troop, Allah have mercy on it when it comes to real grips with the Turk! Not one of the fugitives dropped from his saddle, and I don’t think one of them was hit. If we had done for even a man of them, imagine what our feelings would have been when, on taking possession of the khan, we found, hung carefully in a thick-walled crypt well beyond all danger from our rifle fire, three goatskins of clear, cold water, while scrawled on the wall, in both French and Turkish, was the direction, ‘For the Wounded.’ As we had been out of water for hours ourselves, and as a few cups sufficed for the two or three wounded who had survived the withering sun heat, you may surmise that our hostility toward the ‘unspeakable Turk’ was not materially increased by this latter incident.

“The chap who was rescued at so great a cost died a few hours later, but rather from exposure to the sun than from his wound, which was slight. The man who brought him in is well on the road to recovery and, I trust, a V.C.”

IV

My next, and what proved to be my last, letter from F—— reached me in London:—

“Our general advance has begun, and we have attained our first important objective in the occupation of the ‘Garden of Eden.’ Not the greater ‘Garden of Eden,’ which name Sir William Willcocks applies to all of Mesopotamia south of Hitt and Samara, but the traditional site of the Garden at the meeting of the Tigris and Euphrates. This was surely one of the strangest engagements in history. The country was under water for miles around, and the Turks had fortified and elected to make their stand on the only dry ground in the whole region, a series of low rises—hardly to be called hills—in the rear of Kurna. Fortunately, their available artillery was not powerful. We had prepared for the assault by emplacing batteries of heavy howitzers at every point sufficiently solid to support them, while lighter guns were mounted on the river-steamers and on barges.

“After a heavy shelling of the Turkish positions our troops, in everything from balems and gufas to kaleks and gunboats, were rowed, paddled, poled, and steamed forward to the limit of the draught of their respective craft. Then over they went into the water, and the assault commenced. Luckily the Turkish guns had been pretty well put out of action by our howitzers, else that half-mile or more through mud and water would have been a very costly business for us. As it was, some barges and kaleks with machine-guns on them were brought up close to the enemies’ lines, and, the fire of these and the gunboats having made the Turkish positions practically untenable, the troops had to do little more than go and round up a very sizeable bunch of prisoners who had been cut off by a swift flanking movement of a column of Sepoys. Some of our men, in their eagerness, went overboard into deep water, and, as a consequence, had to chuck their accoutrements and swim for it. A number of them, in fact, lost more than their arms; and a bevy whom I saw later helping to shepherd some Turkish prisoners aboard a gunboat had little to differentiate them, sartorially, from Father Adam in the earliest days of this same ‘Garden of Eden.’

“I had a rather interesting job a few days ago. This was to lead a small picked force across country and destroy a bridge of boats which the Turks were endeavouring to maintain across the Tigris at the Tomb of Ezra, for the use of any stragglers who might still be drifting back from the south.

“You recall the Bible story of this famous structure. The Prophet Ezra, faring about this region in his old age, feeling the hand of Death upon him, directed his followers to bind his body to a camel, drive the animal into the desert, and where it finally lay down to rest, there to make the holy man’s burial-place. The camel headed straight for the nearest reach of the Tigris, and there the brilliantly-tiled tomb which was reared above the Prophet’s remains stands to this day, a mecca for Jews and Mohammedans alike.

“I didn’t make a very brilliant success of my job with the bridge of boats. We got into a marsh in the darkness and waded about in it until too late to make the night surprise I had counted upon at Ezra’s Tomb. We did get there at dawn, however, and, principally because the Turks must have thought we had strong support coming up, managed to induce the latter to evacuate his very good position about the Tomb and retire to the east bank of the river. We established ourselves in one of the Tomb gardens, but could go no farther for the moment on account of the brisk and accurate fire of the enemy from the other side.

“Most of the day I lay on my back in a bed of petunias under the garden wall, and gorged myself on the ripe pomegranates which the Turkish bullets cut down from the trees above. But about mid-afternoon they knocked a couple of bee-hives off the wall into the very midst of us, and, as we were wearing ‘shorts,’ with nothing to protect the leg from calf to knee, the sequel was a very unpleasant one. So dead sure were those bees that our inoffensive little party was responsible for upsetting their homes that they divided themselves into just as many bands as we were men, and started, impartially and systematically, to sting us to death. My men were out of hand in an instant, and I really believe that, had not a modern miracle been wrought, another minute would have seen the whole pack of us, careless of such trifles as Turkish rifle and machine-gun fire, wallowing in the fifty-yard-distant Tigris.

“The miracle was performed by a little pink-cheeked, bare-footed angel of a Jewess, evidently the ‘shepherd of the bees.’ Unconcernedly tripping out among the writhing ‘casualties,’ oblivious alike to the threat of Turkish bullets and the roaring masses of bees, she set up the punctured hives in a safe place under the wall, and then began to beat sharply with a stick upon an old bronze gong which was suspended from her neck by a thong. Instantly the bees stopped stinging, and inside of five minutes the last of them was settling back with a contented buzz into its hive. I could have kissed the stubby brown toes of the pink-cheeked little angel of mercy. And here again let me record to the credit of the Turks that, although her head and shoulders must have been visible to them above the low wall, they made no attempt to stop with a bullet the work which, had they only known it, was all that prevented the whole lot of us from falling into their hands.

“Every man of us was, of course, in beastly shape from the stings. My own agony from this source was infinitely worse than that from a bullet which ploughed up my scalp when we cut the bridge of boats after darkness had fallen; in fact, if the truth were known, I think the desperate pain all of the boys were in had a good deal to do with the absolute recklessness they displayed when the time came for us to try to fulfil our mission. I heard one chap tell another he was afraid that he wasn’t going to get shot, and the whole bunch acted as if they felt the same way. Luckily, the Turks had no searchlight, and it is probable their own fire helped not a little in breaking up the bridge. At any rate, it went off down the yellow Tigris in a score of sections, and we—or what was left of us—with it. A half-dozen impetuous Turks who, in their eagerness to get at close quarters, had come out to welcome us half-way, were also carried along when the bridge broke up. After that it was a case of sauve qui peut for all of us, and I’m sorry to say that only about a third of the force I started out with has, so far, straggled back to Kurna.”

V

I was still chuckling over F——’s account of his experience with the bees when, opening the latest issue of the Sphere the following afternoon, I saw his familiar face smiling back at me from the corner of one of the first pages. “Been getting mentioned in dispatches,” I said to myself; and then the title of the page, on which appeared a score of other portraits, met my eye: “Dead on the Field of Honour; Officers Killed in Action.” There were no particulars, not even a date; nor was anything further to be learned behind the tape-bound portals of Whitehall. To the officers of F——’s regiment, now fighting in Flanders, some few details were ultimately vouchsafed; and from one of these, whom I encountered a few days ago, during his leave in London, I learned all that I have so far been able to gather concerning the death of my friend.

“F——’s work in cutting the bridge of boats across the Tigris,” he said, “is spoken of as one of the most daring things of the Mesopotamian campaign. Undoubtedly he deserved a V.C. for it, and it is just possible one may be awarded posthumously. He was slightly wounded there, but must have been out on duty again within a very few days. According to the account we have received, he was off on some special detail when he came upon a number of imbeciles of the transport trying to ferry several camels and machine-guns across a back channel of the Euphrates on a kalek, a sort of raft consisting of a light platform resting on inflated sheepskins. One of the camels had kicked a hole in the platform and was rapidly demolishing the supporting skins, when F——, fearing the loss of the guns, swam off to try and set things right. In endeavouring to extricate the camel, he ducked under the kalek, where, it seems likely, his wounded head was struck by one of the brute’s sharp hoofs, and he let go his grip and sank before any one could get hold of him. Glorious death, wasn’t it,—for a man who had led the life F—— had, and who, for that particular region, was the most nearly indispensable man with the expedition?”

Two months have gone by since F——’s last letter was written, and the Mesopotamian campaign has been prosecuted along the general lines he forecasted at the outset. Nasire and Amara have fallen, and the early winter will see the armies drawn up for the final fight for Bagdad, probably upon that same Plain of Shinar where the scarlet desert flowers still keep alive the old belief that

Never blows so red

The rose as where some buried Cæsar bled.

For destiny has decreed that once more the might of two rival races shall lock in death-grips for the possession of that age-old prize, the Garden of Eden. Eve was put without the gates when she tasted of the Forbidden Fruit, and right on down through the ages the same undeviating penalty has been inflicted upon the Babylonian, Mede, Assyrian, and other empires that gorged themselves upon the Forbidden Fruit of Corruption. Brave foeman that he is, the Turk, cloyed with the same Forbidden Fruit, has long been marked for the inexorable justice of the ages, and every precedent of tradition, history, and strategy points to the conclusion that the closing hour of his stewardship of the Garden of Eden is about to strike.

“IT’S A WAY THEY HAVE IN THE AIR CORPS”

I

It had been all of nine years since I first met Horne at an estancia house-party in the heart of the Argentine Pampas, and fully seven since I last saw him at a banquet given at the Buenos Aires Jockey Club in his honour, a day or two after he had led his four to victory in the finals of the River Plate polo championships. Yet, in spite of the pallor of a face I had always remembered as bronzed, and a slight hitch in his once swinging gait, I recognised him instantly—it was the keen, piercing glance, I think, and the sudden flash of white teeth in the quick smile—when he hailed me from a passing taxi and came hobbling back along the broad pavement of Whitehall to meet me.

“What does this mean?” I asked, indicating his jaunty Flying Corps uniform, after we had shaken hands. “I thought it was the army you were in before you resigned to become an opulent estanciero and ‘man-about-the-Pampas.’”

“It was the army I came back to,” he replied, “and I was with my old regiment at Neuve Chapelle when a fragment of hand-grenade effected a semi-solution of the continuity of one of my Achilles tendons and put a period on my further usefulness in that branch of the service. The ‘air’ was still open to me, however, and, as I had already dabbled in flying,—I was the first man to pilot an aeroplane across the Plate estuary,—I got a commission almost immediately, and so lost very little time.”

“But your ‘lily-white’ face and hands,” I pressed. “I never heard that the air had a bleaching effect on the complexion.”

“Oh—that—” (Horne looked absently at a blue-veined hand and shuffled uneasily), “that must have come from my spell of ‘C.H.’—confined in hospital. Got knocked up a bit again. Flying over Belgium. Got shot down and hit the edge of Holland a trifle too hard when I volplaned over the boundary. Telescoped a few vertebræ, that’s all. Now, be a good chap and stop asking questions and jump in with me and come along to the Club.”

Horne waited for me while I picked up a few promised figures at the “Lloyd-Georgery,” as he facetiously called the new Ministry of Munitions in Whitehall Gardens, and then took me up to one of the Service clubs in Piccadilly. There, without giving me further chance to “get him up into the air,” he launched at once into news and reminiscence of the Plate and the Pampas. When I left him at six, we had talked for close on two hours without more than the most casual reference to events of the war.

“A keen patriot, like all the rest of these young Britons who have flocked home from overseas to fight for their country,” I reflected as I sauntered down through Green Park; “but certainly not keen on his work.” I even speculated as to whether or not Horne might be in some sort of trouble in the service. Nothing else seemed to account for the man’s reticence regarding everything connected with his special activities.

A few days later Horne called me up to ask me to dine with him that evening at a famous old restaurant in the Strand.

“‘S——’s’ is a bit more ‘merry and bright’ than this old tomb of a Club,” he said, “and a few of the Flying Corps chaps who are in the habit of rendezvousing there while in London on leave you’ll find well worth knowing.”

The gathering was even more informal than I had anticipated. One of the long tables, it appeared, was set aside for “R.F.C.” officers and their friends, and these dropped in by twos and threes, as suited their convenience, all the way from seven to ten o’clock.

There were half-a-dozen men at the table when Horne and I entered, and all of these—they had stalls for a new “revue”—presently took their leave. One of the group was a South African, one a New Zealander, and two Australians. The latter we found bent over the racing page of the Sydney Bulletin, while the New Zealander was evidently trying to persuade the Africander that a dairy herd near Wellington offered better prospects than a general farm in Rhodesia. One of the Australians, whose family was interested in an importing house, lingered behind a moment to ask me if I thought the war was going to force up the price of American agricultural machinery in foreign markets. None of them said a word about flying, and Horne volunteered no more than that they were all “good men—that little chap from New Zealand really ‘topping.’”

Horne, with the fleshpots of Argentina in his mind, ordered solidly and lengthily, and three or four more officers had “wolfed” hasty meals of roast beef and whisky-and-soda before our Chateaubriand (which represents the nearest Anglo-French equivalent to the carne asado of the Pampas) had been done to its proper turn over the coals. These, like the others, rattled on about the music-halls, the homeland, the “rotten London weather”—anything and everything, in fact, save the war in general and the war in the air in particular.

One, it is true,—he had come from France only that afternoon,—in accounting for a bandaged hand, did mention something about getting a finger jammed under the belt of his machine-gun; but it seemed to occur to no one to inquire what he had been shooting at, or whether or not he had hit it, or any of a dozen or so other things concerning which I, for one, was at once consumed with interest.

By nine all of those with theatre or other engagements had come and gone, and the eight or ten still seated at the table were leisurely diners with the evening on their hands. Yet not even among these unhurried ones was there evident any inclination to talk of their work. On the contrary, I fancied I discerned an inclination to avoid, to “side-step” it. When they were reminiscent, it was the friends and events of their old life—“trekking,” “caravanning,” “hiking,” “mushing”; Arctic midnights and tropic dawns; strange odds and ends of adventure by land and sea—that they called up. And when they spoke of the present, it was in connection with little happenings incident to their leaves—with the comparative merits of “kit” shops, Turkish baths, “revue” favourites, the pros and cons of drink restriction, and the extortionate charges of dentists.

Yet every man of them appeared true to what I have since come to recognise as a rapidly-developing type—the “Flying Type.” The army aviator of to-day is picked for his quickness of mind and body, and the first thing that strikes you about him is a sort of feline, wound-up-spring alertness. Then you note his reticence, the cool reserve of a man whose lot it is to express himself in deeds rather than words. And lastly there is the quiet seriousness, verging almost on sadness, of the man who must hold himself ready to look Death between the eyes at any moment, and yet keep his mind detached for other things.

It was the youngest, and therefore the least “formed,” officer of the lot—a lad who had left his cacao plantation in Trinidad to come home and fight—who was responsible for the only “shop” discussion of the evening. Noting that he was eating but little, and constantly passing his hand over his temples, some one asked him banteringly if he was “homesick or only lovesick.”

“Neither,” he answered, relaxing his set lips in a forced smile. “Had a bit of an accident yesterday, and have had a deuce of a headache ever since. Can’t for the life of me make out whether it comes from going up too high or coming down too quick. I went up higher and came down faster than ever before in my experience. Landed all right, but ever since I’ve felt as though I were being blown up by a tire-pump that was driving air into every capillary and nerve-tip. My head feels as though some one was opening up a jack-screw inside of it. Suppose I should have gone to the hospital and found out what was wrong, but I didn’t want to spoil my leave. Maybe some of you chaps can tell me why I feel as though I had to keep holding my head together to stop its flying to pieces,” he concluded, pressing the heels of his hands to his temples to offset the seeming pressure from within.

Every one stopped talking and leaned forward with interest, and for an instant I thought the curtain was going to drop and reveal something of the experiences, if not the minds, of those khaki-clad sphinxes of the air. Horne’s coldly professional diagnosis dashed the hope. “Altitude,” he pronounced laconically. “Got over twelve thousand, didn’t you? Over thirteen thousand? That accounts for it. And you went up wide-open, trying to take ‘pride of place’ away from a Fokker, I suppose? Of course. And when you got there you began to feel like a deep-sea fish looks when you bring him up out of the kelp-beds and his own air-bladders blow him up? A man can go up fifteen thousand feet by rail or on foot without more than a shortness of breath and occasional nose-bleed. But not every man—and not even every seasoned flyer—can stand jumping up to twelve thousand feet in the half-hour that some of the new machines can negotiate that height in. The difficulty’s almost entirely physical, and it all depends upon how a man is made whether or not his flesh and blood will accommodate themselves to the suddenly reduced pressure of the atmosphere. There’s no growing used to it. If it ‘gets’ you once, it’s pretty sure to do it again. At the best you may only have a bad headache and a sort of ‘boiled-owl’ feeling for a week. At the worst you faint, lose control of your machine, and are listed among the casualties of ’cause unknown.’ Did you lose control, by any chance?”

“I think not,” was the reply. “It was a second German machine—one that I hadn’t seen—that brought me down. It came nose-diving down out of a cloud, shaking its tail, and giving me a regular shower-bath of bullets—the usual Fokker trick. I’m almost positive I can remember all the way down. Fact is, with my machine in the shape that it was after its peppering, any ‘lapse’ on my part would have started it somersaulting at once. No. Rotten as I felt, I’m sure I kept ‘connected up’ mentally all the way down.”

Horne shook his head dubiously. “You may be able to stick it,” he said; “but before you try any more big-game shooting among the high places, best have a few practice flights in the upper empyrean. The sooner a man learns his altitude limit the better. There’s plenty of useful work below twelve thousand feet for the man who begins to ‘blow-up’—mentally or physically—above that height.”

Conversation became general again even before Horne had finished speaking, for to most of them there was nothing new in what he was saying. None but the man on the left of the young West Indian ventured an inquiry as to the details of what had happened, and it was only by straining my ears that I was able to catch the drift of the low-voiced, almost monosyllabic exchange.

“Get your petrol tank?”

“No, for a wonder. Got about everything else, though. Propeller all chewed up; wings a pair of sieves. Bumped the bumps all the way down. Ground was about the softest thing I hit.”

“Any one get the Hun?”

“None of us. Got himself, though. He came breezing out of a tuft of cirro-cumuli all of fifteen thousand feet up, and seemed to be going wild; sort of running amuck. Seemed to be trying to ram me when he nose-dived, and the reason he bored me so full of holes was that he didn’t sheer off to give me a berth. Missed me by a hair, and almost upset me with his wind. But he never recovered from his dive. Just seemed to lose control and started going end over end. Fell almost into some of our trenches. I landed five miles away from the wreck of him with nothing shot up but my machine and my nerves.”

“Any one get the first machine—the one you went up after?”

“No. It had the heels of all of us. The Hun’s ‘Archies’[2] brought down one of our machines that tried to follow it.”

[2] Soldiers’ slang for anti-aircraft guns.—The Editors.

“Shop” interest waned at this juncture, and the conversation upon which I had been eavesdropping veered off viâ headache-remedies and a pretty Scotch nurse at a hospital in France to the comparative merits of the “Empire” and “Alhambra” choruses; and I was able to turn both ears to Horne, who had been holding forth learnedly for some minutes on the points of the Andean pony-thoroughbred cross as a polo mount.

II

Our fellow diners drifted away as they had come—singly, and in twos and threes—and by ten o’clock Horne and I were alone in the deserted lounge with our cigars and coffee. He was expecting to be rung up at ten-thirty, he said, and as the time approached I could not help noticing that he became distrait and nervous, palpably anxious. The call came promptly, and it was with a look of ill-concealed apprehension on his face that he rose to follow the summoning flunkey to the telephone booth. A minute later he returned walking on air. Twice or thrice he tried to take up the dropped thread of Argentine reminiscence, finally giving it up as a bad job.

“I can’t help telling you that I’ve just had some very good news,” he exclaimed, with beaming face. “For six weeks now I have been haunted by a fear that that last jarring up I got was going to put me out of the game for good. Yesterday I had the doctors go over me, and now, after being kept all day on tenterhooks, comes word that, so far as flying is concerned, I’m going to be as right as rain. Nothing whatever likely to occur to prevent my going back in a fortnight. I think I must be just about the happiest man in London to-night. I——”

He checked himself with a deprecatory gesture. “Really, you’ll have to pardon my outburst, old chap; but I wasn’t half sure that I wasn’t in line for invaliding out. Besides, I’ve been fairly itching to be ‘up’ all day. There’s been witchery in the air ever since sunrise. I’ve never known more perfect flying weather. Which reminds me, by the way, that the Zepps are expected in this vicinity to-night. They were on the ‘East Coast’ last night, you know. It’s just a little too clear for their purposes; but the air itself is perfect—perfect. There haven’t been more than one or two other such days for flying as this one since the war began. You can’t understand it till you’ve been in the air yourself. It was in the blood of all those chaps at dinner this evening. They talked about everything on earth except flying; and were thinking about nothing else but that. Didn’t you notice that they were as restive as the lions in the Zoo an hour before feeding time?”

Throwing aside all reserve, Horne began to speak of his work—his love of it, the fascination of it, the great and increasingly important part it was playing in the war. This was precisely what, hoping against hope, I had been trying to draw him out on all the evening; and so, lighting a fresh cigar, I sank back contentedly in my armchair to play the part of the appreciative auditor. Scarcely was I well settled, however, when Horne abruptly ceased speaking and leaned forward with his head cocked in an attitude of attentive listening.

“Did you hear that?” he whispered; “and that, and that?”

“Nothing but the chatter of the first dribble of the supper crowd,” I answered. “What is it?”

“Bombs,” was the reply; “three or four of them. And, I think, gun-fire. The Zepps must be nearer London than they have been at any time since last October. Let’s get down to the Embankment. We can see from there, if anywhere. They never wander far from the ‘river road.’”

The Strand, packed with the crowds from the emptying theatres, was plainly oblivious and unalarmed, and I promptly taxed Horne with letting either the wine or the “perfect air conditions” go to his head. He said nothing, but, all the way down the black little canyon of a street along which we threaded our way, appeared to be listening intently. Not until we were about to emerge into the brighter blankness of the Embankment did he speak again.

“There have been no more bombs,” he said, “but I think the guns are going right along. If the sound is too faint for your ‘unattuned’ ear, perhaps the fact that you hear no shunting of trains or whistling at Charing Cross or Waterloo (you know of the new order which halts all trains during air-raids) will convince you that the Zepps are about. Or if not that, then come along here and have some ocular evidence. What do you say to that?” And Horne pointed off down past the looming mass of St. Paul’s to where the stationary beam of a single searchlight laid low along the eastern horizon.

“I see the searchlight plainly enough,” I said, “but where’s the Zepp?”

“Take my glass,” said Horne, handing me a small pair of semi-collapsible binoculars which was evidently a constant companion. “Now focus on that point of brighter glow, with a shadow behind it, half-way down the shaft—right there, straight over the back of the right-hand lion at the foot of the Obelisk.”

I did as directed, fairly to gasp with astonishment as a tiny blur, so indistinct as to go unnoticed by the passers-by on the Embankment, sharpened to a long, yellow-ribbed pencil, with pin-points of light—fireflies escorting a glow-worm—flashing out and disappearing above and below and round about it.

“The first Zepp to get over London in six months,” I ejaculated excitedly. “How long will she take to get here? Hadn’t we better get away from the river and under cover? But no,” I went on, peering through the glass again; “I don’t think she’s coming this way. Seems to be standing still. Probably hovering over W——, the old objective.”

“London! W——!” laughed Horne. “Do you realise that you didn’t hear any bombs, and that none of these people have any idea that there’s a raiding Zeppelin, with shells bursting about it, squarely in their range of vision? That fellow’s all of twenty-five miles away, and as for its ‘hovering,’ you may rest assured that when you see a Zepp with incendiary shells bursting above it, it is either badly hit or else doing seventy miles an hour toward the home hangars. As a matter of fact, I’ve been expecting to see this fellow begin to drop at any moment. He’s evidently run into better guns and gunners than he counted on. Ah! No hope!” (Horne snatched his glass and turned it quickly on the now agitated searchlight beam.) “He’s gone. Even the light’s lost him.”

Horne turned around disgustedly, led the way to a bench by the curb, pushed along a somnolent “match dame” to make room for him, and wearily sat down.

“He’s slippery game—the Zepp,” he observed presently, after watching the futile flounderings of the questing searchlight. “I didn’t tell you, did I, that it was through trying to get a Zepp that I came that last cropper of mine over Belgium?”

“You know perfectly well you didn’t,” I replied, folding a corner of the old match-seller’s straggling cloak back over her knees and sitting down in the space vacated. “Go to it.”

“I was starting on a reconnaissance over a corner of Belgium just as the Zepp was returning from a raid over France. I got above him, and just after I dropped my first bomb the ‘Archies’ opened up on me from the ground and put me out at just about the first shot. Jolly nervy work, with my machine only a couple of hundred feet above the Zepp. A little too nervy, perhaps, for I’ve never been quite certain in my own mind whether it was my bomb or one from the German guns which sent the Zepp—not wrecked but pretty badly messed up—down into a sugar-beet field. I headed——”

“Just a moment,” I interrupted, anticipating the end of the tale at the end of Horne’s next breath. “You’re dumping over your story just the way a Zeppelin under fire dumps over its bombs. Now please back up and tell it properly. The night is young, the raiders are now headed out to sea, and the lady and I are here to follow you to the end.”

III

Horne laughed uneasily, fumbled through his pockets in a vain search for matches, filched a box from the tilted tray of our nodding companion,—leaving a sixpence in its place,—lit his pipe, puffed pensively for a minute or two; and even after all that preparation made his beginning apologetic.

“I don’t know that I’ve ever told the yarn from the beginning,” he said, “and I’m dead sure I’ve never said much about the end. If I chatter a bit to-night, you’ll please check it up against the good news I had a while ago—and the air. A man could pretty nearly walk on the air as it has been to-day, and a machine would slide through it like tearing silk. Funny thing, but it was in the dawn following almost just such a night as this that I went off on the flight I have spoken of.

“There are three main factors in flying,”—Horne spoke more freely again as he digressed upon generalities,—“the man, the machine, and the atmosphere. Theoretically, man and machine are supposed to be sent out in perfect order, ready to take the air as they find it. There are days, of course, when you are ‘off’, your machine ‘cranky,’ and the air all ‘heights’ and ‘hollows,’ and at such times there is pretty sure to be a ‘stormy passage,’ if nothing worse. Usually, however, it’s a fairly fit man and machine against indifferent air. But once or twice a year there comes a period, like the last eighteen hours, when the air is almost absolutely ‘homogeneous,’ and then, with his engine running ‘sweet,’ the man has spells of fancying himself an ‘air god’ in fact as well as in name, and acts accordingly,—invariably either to his own or his enemy’s sorrow.

“It was like that on the morning I am telling you about—man, machine, and air all in harmony—yes, and with the usual result. I would have remembered this flight for several reasons, even if the Zepp hadn’t come along; for one, because of our ride down the wake of a ‘42’ shell; for another, on account of the terrific shelling they gave, or tried to give us, as we passed over the German lines.

“The meeting with the shell was merely one of those freak experiences that might happen to any one, or, just as well, never happen at all. It was during the time I am speaking of that the Germans were amusing themselves by a long-distance bombardment of N—— with their biggest guns, and we—(I had an observation officer along, a chap named K——, whom you may have heard of as a long-distance runner)—simply chanced to meander into the path of one shell somewhere about the last quarter of its trajectory. Watching from a distance, you can always see one of these brutes go hurtling along, but this one we only heard,—and felt,—and it was like two express trains, going in opposite directions, passing at full speed. There was a strange soft sort of a buzz, growing into a rushing roar inside of two or three seconds, a blow from a solid wall of air that was like colliding with the side of a house, and then, for two or three minutes, a series of bumps like going over a corduroy road in a springless cart.

“I don’t know whether we interfered very much with the course of that shell, but the shell pretty nearly brought our flight to an end then and there. Only the fact that we met the first big rush of air head-on saved us. I wouldn’t have had one chance in a thousand of ‘correcting’ if it had caught us sideways—and even as it was, the machine, in spite of its seventy-miles-an-hour headway, was stood up on its rudder like a rearing horse. After that first ‘collision,’ our fluttering flight down the wake of the ‘42’ was only ‘queer,’ but withal a different sensation from anything I had ever experienced.

“I have no idea how close we passed to each-other. My impression of the moment was that the distance was inside of fifty yards, though it was doubtless really much greater. We were not, of course, going in exactly opposite directions, for the shell must have been coming down at a considerably greater angle than that at which we were going up. Yet the ‘aerial surf’ stirred up by the passage of the Hun’s little messenger of goodwill in that smooth stretch of atmosphere was heavy and persistent enough to keep my machine wallowing for over a mile.

“The air was going by us in a swift, steady river as we neared the German lines, and I never recall having been able to climb so quickly and easily. Lucky it was, too, for the enemy—probably in anticipation of a pursuit of their returning raiders—had their whole trench ‘hinterland’ planted with anti-aircraft guns, both stationary and movable. There was one little strip that blossomed out like a poppy garden as they opened up on us, and for a minute or so the smoke from the spreading shell-bursts formed a good-sized little cloud of its own. But they never had any real chance of getting us. My good little engine, singing like the wind in the telephone wires, had enabled me to get up over fourteen thousand feet without turning a hair and at that height you’re a lot safer from shells in an aeroplane than from taxis in crossing the Strand. K—— was feeling the altitude a bit, I think; I saw him wiping blood from his nose and pressing his hands to his ears, but he gave no signs of real distress. As for myself, beyond a little swelling of the fingers and a drumming at the temples, I was quite as usual.

“We passed over the main ‘bouquets’ of the ‘Archies’ without even feeling the kick of the shells bursting beneath us; but in dropping down to ten thousand feet a few miles beyond, we encountered an unexpected ‘plant’ of them and the shrapnel bullets were flying all about us for a minute or two. A score of neat little holes winked out in the wings, and one friendly bit of a bullet—spent, but still hot from its sharp flight—dropped gently into my lap and slightly singed the fold of my coat in which it found lodgment. Then we left that mare’s nest behind and the going grew smoother once more.

“It was only a few minutes later, and before any beginning had been made on the work we had come for, that K—— picked up a Zepp through his glass and began reporting its progress to me over the telephone. At first it was flying very high, doubtless to keep above gun-fire in crossing our lines. Once over, however, it came down rapidly, probably, as K—— suggested, with the purpose of luring the pursuing aeroplanes into easy range of the German ‘Archies.’ If that was the plan, it was eminently successful; for K—— presently reported one of our ‘chasers’ falling in flames, another planing for our own lines, and two or three others turning back. I could see the marauder myself by this time, and noted that it appeared to be heading off about twenty-five degrees to the west of me, and flying already at a level considerably lower than the twelve thousand feet I had run up to in getting away from the last spasm of gun-fire.

“It was this commanding height, together with the fact that my engine was running as sweetly as when it started, that determined me to take a hand in the game at this juncture. Still keeping well up, I promptly headed across to cut off the returning prodigal. For a minute or two the Zepp either didn’t recognise me as ‘enemy,’ or else ignored me entirely. But presently a sharp speeding up of its engines was apparent, and for a moment I thought that it was going to challenge me for a climbing contest, generally a Zepp’s first resort. But a few seconds later it had altered its course through nearly half a quadrant and headed off at top speed, at the same time beginning to descend at what I figured was about an angle of ten per cent., or five hundred feet to the mile. The ruse—to draw me down over some concealed line of ‘Archies’ in that direction—was plain as day; but I had three thousand feet of altitude to the good, power to burn, and, moreover, was bitten deep for the moment with that ‘air-god’ bug I have spoken of. It seemed as natural that I should chase Zepps as that a fox-terrier should chase chickens. Without further thought, I accepted the challenge and launched off in pursuit of the speeding ‘sausage.’

“It really never occurred to me to discuss the thing with K——, but, like the trump he was, he never showed by word or sign that tilting at airships had not been included in our orders. He, also, twigged the game at once.

“‘Guns probably in that thick clump of trees by the little pond,’ his far-away voice said over the telephone. ‘Best catch him as far this side there as you can. One of his engines missing badly, and he’s not going very fast.’

“With a quarter of an hour instead of a couple of minutes to work in, I would have preferred to keep along on a comparatively high level, and only descend, to drop my bombs, at an angle that would have kept me pretty well out of the range of the Zepp’s guns. But K——’s warning was too sound to be disregarded and, in this case, the quickest way was also the only way. As it was, it was really almost a nose-dive, and I did the first half of it with the throttle wide open. So fast did we come up with the Zepp that it seemed almost as if a giant had taken the big gas-bag in his hand and thrown it at us.

“The patter of machine-gun bullets sounded only for a second or two—it wasn’t unlike walking over a lawn-sprinkler—and, so far as I could see, did no harm. Then, cold as ice for the work in hand, I shot straight down along the yellow spine of the airship, letting go a couple of bombs before my terrific speed carried me beyond my mark.

“Now a perfect torrent of shrapnel burst out around me—the smoke-tufts made the still distant clump of trees look like a cotton field—and almost at the same instant there was a strong rush of air from below. The machine teetered giddily on one wing-tip for a moment, and I just managed to right it in time to free a hand to grab the tail of K——’s coat as he, apparently unconscious, started to lurch over the side. I don’t seem to have any very clear recollection of being able to get him back into his seat at all.

“I didn’t have a chance for another good look at the Zepp; I only know that it descended rapidly, although apparently not entirely out of control. My machine, badly shot up as it was, still seemed to have a good deal of ‘kick’ left, though the reek of petrol in the air wasn’t an encouraging indication that its ‘vitality’ would continue. The impetus of my descent quickly carried me out of range of that spiteful but isolated little battery of ‘Archies’—luckily, too, in just the direction I wanted to go.

“Just before I flew over the Zepp—it was while the machine-gun bullets were still pattering, I have since recalled—K—— ’phoned me the compass bearing of the nearest point of the Dutch boundary, and said something about it being our only chance if things went wrong. (That they had already ‘gone wrong’ with him he gave no hint.) Strangely, the figures had stuck in my head, and it was in that direction I sheered as soon as the machine was on an even keel again. It was not far, thank heaven, and, partly planing, partly under the power of that brave little half-fed engine, I somehow managed to keep up long enough to clear the top wire of the boundary fence and pile up in a heap in the hospitable silt of good old Holland.”

A dozen questions tumbled after each other off the tip of my eager tongue, and the old “match dame,” who had snored peacefully all through Horne’s even narration, stirred and muttered petulantly at the unwonted disturbance. But Horne, rising and working his stiff joints, essayed to answer all in a single breath.

“I don’t know how much harm was done to the Zepp, or whether it was I or the Hun’s own ‘Archies’ that did it. K—— died in a Dutch hospital, without regaining full consciousness, two days later. (It was a bullet from one of the Zepp’s machine-guns that did for him.) I can’t tell you how I managed to get out of Holland; and”—as a low whistle sounded from Charing Cross and a hooded eye peeped cautiously out of the black shed—“the trains are running again; so we may take it that the little visitor we were watching is now out over the North Sea and on its way home to bed. I think it’s high time that we followed its good example on the latter score. Good-night and sweet dreams, mother.” And he took my arm and began piloting me back to the Strand to waylay a taxi.

Horne has been back at work for a month now, and, so far as I have heard, with no recurrence of ill luck. Last week I met another friend from Argentina—a doctor, returned to “do his bit” with the Red Cross. “Horne has made a brilliant success of his flying,” he said; “did he tell you anything of his exploits?”

“Only a little about a brush with a Zeppelin,” I replied, “and scant details of that.”

“That’s all he has ever told any one. Yet the Dutch patrol swear that he came down in Holland with the tail of his half-dead observation officer’s coat in his teeth (only thing that kept the chap from falling out); and there is also every reason to believe that it was his bombs that brought that Zepp down, and badly knocked up, too. Either one of them would bring him anything from the Military Cross to the V.C. if he would tell even the plain, unvarnished tale of it. But the quixotic idiot made his report so confoundedly non-committal that there was simply nothing for his commander to go by. Was hardly enough to merit mention in dispatches the way it stood, much less to award a decoration on. Queer thing, but they say they’ve had the same sort of trouble with a number of the flying chaps. Seems to be a sort of cult with them. Can’t say it’s a wholly bad one, either.”

SHARKS OF THE AIR

The sea raid, the land raid, the airship raid—this was the trio of bugaboos under the menace of which Britain, uninvaded, almost unthreatened, for a thousand years, stirred uneasily at the outbreak of the war and turned anxious eyes toward the leaden mist curtain which veiled the North Sea. Then the bulldog of the Navy after a tentative snap or two, set its teeth in an ever-tightening strangle-hold, and with the dying gasps of German sea-power the threat of the sea and land raids disappeared for good. So far as England was concerned, only the ways of the air were left open to Germany; only the menace of the Zeppelin remained.

And when weeks had lengthened to months, and summer had given way to autumn, and autumn to winter, without the threatened bombing from the sky, the name of Zeppelin ceased to have interest for the stolid Briton, now just awakening to the fact that he had a mighty task to perform beyond the sea. Continued immunity bred contempt, and even the fore-running aids of the spring of 1915 failed to stir London from her impassive calm. By midsummer she was showing signs of being bored with the whole subject, and the sky-searching antics of the comedians in her packed music halls began to be greeted with yawns from the stalls. She was becoming impatient of her darkened streets, and captious “Pro Bono Publicos” wrote to the papers demanding more illumination and a general return to “Business as Usual.”

The “authorities” still kept up a pretence of preparedness. The so-called anti-aircraft guns—really a nondescript lot of ordnance, left over after the fittest of the few available pieces had been requisitioned for use in France, on the coast, or by the Navy—still had their crews of half-trained amateurs, and the golden beams of the searchlights continued to whirl and dip and curtsey in their nocturnal minuets. Buckets of water and boxes of sand stood ready for emergency use in the art galleries and museums, and on the hoardings conspicuous posters gave with meticulous articularity instructions as to how one should act if Zeppelin bombs began raining in his vicinity. At the first sight of a hostile airship, we were told, we should repair at once to the nearest cellar, and in case a smarting sensation in the nostrils indicated the release of deleterious gas, the mouth and nose should be covered with a moist double bandage containing a layer of carbonate of soda. Some of the pharmacies displayed patent anti-gas respirators in their windows, but none would admit ever having had an inquiry for one.

“We’ve got a war to fight. Zepps ain’t war; fergit ’em.” So a London bus conductor summed up the situation to me, and so seemed to feel the majority of his fellow townsmen of all classes.

Such, as regards Zeppelins, was the spirit of “London and the Eastern Counties”—to use the official phrase—as the summer of 1915 waxed and began to wane. Something of how this spirit met the trying events of the months which followed, I shall try to show by a few extracts from my journal. In deference to the wishes of the British Censorship the names of several points in London have been slightly altered.

I

On Board Yacht ——
en voyage,
Wroxham Broad to Hickling Broad.

August—.

We sailed and poled along the river and canal yesterday, and in the afternoon moored to the bank at this point, which is but a mile or two from the North Sea. The morning papers, which we picked up as we passed through the little village of Potter Heigham, contained an official bulletin telling of a Zeppelin raid on the “Eastern Counties” the previous night; and later in the day word was brought us that Lowestoft, the great trawlers’ port about twenty miles to the south-east, had been heavily bombed. A second raid in this vicinity seemed, therefore, anything but likely.

The afternoon closed in one of those characteristic butterfly chases of sunshine and showers so familiar to the August voyageur on The Broads, and, lounging at ease on deck after dinner, we had watched the twilight aeroplane patrol, stencilled in black silhouette against the glowing western clouds, pass north from Yarmouth to meet its fellow from the Cromer hangars. A half-hour later the sharp staccato of its engine, rather than its blurred image against the paling afterglow, told us of its homeward flight.

It was a good two hours after the drumming of the aeroplane’s engine had ceased to be heard that a strange new sound became audible, first distantly, in the puffs of the quickening night breeze, soon more imminent and with steady insistence. It was apparently the booming explosions of powerful gas engines, and presently, blending with this, could be distinguished a buzzing clackity-clack that suggested whirring propellers.

“Another aeroplane,” suggested one. “A fleet of aeroplanes,” hazarded another. “A dirigible threshing-machine,” opined a third. And, judging by the now almost overpowering rush of sound, the latter was nearest to the truth.

The whole universe seemed to have resolved itself into one mighty roar, and I distinctly recall that the mainsail halyard by which I steadied myself vibrated to the beat of the pulsating grind from above. For a moment—sensing rather than seeing—I was aware of a great black bulk blotting out the stars above the river, and then, stabbing the darkness like a flaming sword, the yellow flash of a search light leapt forth from the dusky void and ran in swift zigzags back and forth across the marshes and canals beneath. Now a herd of cows could be seen staggering dazedly to their feet, now the startled bridge-players on the deck of the houseboat moored above were revealed, and now our own eyes blinked blindly in the yellow glare before the questing shaft darted on down the river to spot-light an eel-fisher’s shanty on the dyke and the gaunt frame of a towering Dutch windmill beyond.

Now it found the sharp right-angling bend of the river, quivered there for a second or two and then flashed out, leaving a blanker blackness behind. At almost the same instant the “Thing of Terror”—a hurtling mass of roaring engines and clattering propellers—shot by overhead, followed by a confused wake of conflicting air-currents. It passed straight down above the middle of the river at a height of not over 300 feet, and beneath the dimly guessed bulk of it bright chinks and squares of light, broken by the shadows of moving men, plotted the lines of two under-slung cars. A Zeppelin had passed almost within a stone’s throw.

The lights of the car leaped sharply upward almost as soon as the bend of the river was reached, and at the end of a couple of minutes the roar of the engines dwindled to a distant buzz and died away completely. Ten minutes passed, during which the old eel-fisher went on stringing his traps across the river and the house-boaters resumed their interrupted bridge. Then a red signal light flashed out in the heavens in the direction of Yarmouth, and at almost the same moment, clear and sharp, came the sound of furious light-artillery fire. This lasted for only a minute or two, and there was another eight- or ten-minute interval before a still more distant sound of gun-fire became faintly audible. Drowning the crack of these latest shots suddenly came the roll of a heavy boom, quickly to be followed by another, and another, and another, until a dozen or more had sounded. Then the peaceful silence of the early evening resumed its sway.

The eel-fisher finished sinking his traps before paddling up the gangway of the yacht and venturing a casual inquiry as to whether or not we had “chanct to see the Zepp.” “’Er do this onct befoor,” he chirruped. “’Er gets bearin’s from ’e’ riv’r an’ then ’eds off fu No’ich o’ Ya’muth. I be thinkin’ if ’er knowed this grouse moor b’longed tu Ser Edderd Grey, ’er’d a bombed it good as ’er goed by.”

This morning the London papers have the bulletin of still another raid on the “Eastern Counties,” with a good many casualties; also an account of how a Zeppelin was brought down in the North Sea and destroyed by aeroplanes from Nieuport.

II

London, September—.

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.)

Tremendous as was the spectacle of the long line of fires extending out of eyescope to the City and beyond, there is no denying that the dominating feature of the climax of the raid was the Zeppelins themselves. Emboldened perhaps, by the absence of gun-fire, these had slowed down for their parting salvo so as to be almost “hovering” when the bombs were dropped opposite my vantage point. Brilliantly illuminated by the searchlights, whose beams wove about below them like the ribbons in a Maypole dance, the clean lines of their gaunt frameworks stood out like bas-reliefs in yellow wax. Every now and then one of them would lurch violently upward,—probably at the release of a heavy bomb,—but, controlled by rudders and planes, the movement had much of the easy power of the dart of a great fish. Indeed, there was strong suggestion of something strangely familiar in the lithe grace of those sleek yellow bodies, in the swift swayings and rightings, in the powerful guiding movements of those hinged “tails,” and all at once the picture of a gaunt “man-eater” nosing his terribly purposeful way below the keel of a South-Sea pearler flashed to my mind, and the words “Sharks! Sharks of the air!” leaped to my lips.

While the marauders still floated with bare steerage-way in flaunting disdain, the inexplicably delayed firing order to the guns was flashed around, and—like a pack of dogs baying the moon, and with scarcely more effect—London’s “air defence” came into action. Everything from machine-guns to three-and four-inchers,—not one in the lot built for anti-aircraft work,—belched forth the best it had. Up went the bullets and shrapnel, and down they came again, down on the roofs and streets of London. Far, far below the contemptuous airships the little stars of bursting shrapnel spat forth their steel bullets in spiteful impotence, and back they rained on the tiles and cobbles.

Suddenly a gruffer growl burst forth from the yelping pack, as the gunners of some hitherto unleashed piece of ordnance received orders to join the attack. At the first shot a star-burst pricked the night in the rear of the second airship, and well on a line with it; a second exploded fairly above it; and then—all at once I was conscious that the searchlights were playing on a swelling cloud of white mist which was trailing away into the north-east. The Zeppelin had evidently taken a leaf from the book of the squid.

The tinkle of shrapnel bullets on the roof sent me down at this juncture to join the gathering of my fellow guests on the ground floor, where, on the manager’s calling attention to the fact that my knees were shaking from the cold, I was glad to avail myself of the loan of his overcoat. I was not unappreciative of his delicacy in attributing the undeniable shiver in my frame to the cold, and I have not yet entirely made up my mind just to what extent the chill night air, standing in a twisted and cramped position in order to look up, and sheer funk shared the responsibility for it.

I have been under shell-fire on several occasions, and I confess quite frankly that I never before felt anywhere near so “panicky” as during that long half-minute in which the airships appeared certain to pass directly overhead. The explanation of this, it seems to me, may be found in the fact that, in the trenches or in a fort which is under fire, one is among cool, determined, and often callous men who are meeting the expected as a part of the day’s work, while in a Zeppelin raid one is more or less unconsciously affected by the unexpectedness of it, and by the very natural terror of the unhardened non-combatants. At any rate, to say that there was not a very contagious brand of terror “in the air” in the immediate vicinity of the swath of last night’s raid would be to say something that was not true of my own neighbourhood.

As soon as the firing ceased I slipped into my street clothes and hurried out, reaching the “Square” perhaps ten minutes after the last bomb had fallen. That terror still brooded was evident from the white, anxious faces at street doors and basement gratings, but a mounting spirit was recorded in the gratuitous advice shouted out by the “Boots” at a hotel entrance to a portly and not un-Teutonic-looking gentleman who went puffing under a street-light.

“No use hurryin’, mister,” chirped the young irrepressible. “Last Zepp fer Berlin’s just pulled out.”

At the end of a block my feet were crunching glass at every step, and a few moments later I was in the direct track of the raid. By a strange chance—it is impossible that it could have happened by intent—that last fierce rain of bombs had descended upon the one part of London where the hospitals stand thicker than in any other; and yet, while every one of these was windowless and scarred from explosions in streets and adjacent squares, not one appeared to have been hit. One large building devoted entirely to nervous disorders was a bedlam of hysteria, and the nurses are said to have had a terrible time in getting their patients in hand. From another, given over to infantile paralysis, hip-disease, and other ailments of children, came a pitiful chorus of wails in baby treble. The other hospitals, including one or two foreign ones, appeared to be proceeding quietly with their share of the work of succour, receiving and caring for the victims as fast as they could be hurried in.

The fires, except for a couple of wide glows in the direction of the City and a gay geyser of flame from a broken gas main in the next block, had disappeared as by magic, and most of the places where bombs had dropped in this vicinity could be located only by the little knots of people before the barred doors, or by following a line of hose from an engine.

Except for an occasional covered stretcher being borne out to a waiting ambulance, the killed and maimed were little in evidence; and but for a chance encounter with a friend who was doing some sort of volunteer surgical work, I should have failed entirely to have an intimate glimpse of the grimmer side of the raid. I jostled him at a barrier where the crowd was being held back from a bombed tenement, and he pressed me into service forthwith.

“They are trying to uncover some kiddies on the second floor. Four of them—all in one room,” he explained. “Two floors above smashed in on them. Everybody fagged out, and I’m after some brandy to buck ’em up. You’re fresh. Take this armlet and tell the police at the door I sent you.”

The little lettered khaki band passed me by the police cordon, and I found myself in the lantern-lighted hallway of a rickety brick building such as they erected as tenements in London thirty or forty years ago. Two blanket-covered bodies lay on the floor waiting to be removed to the morgue, and a third, hideously mangled, but still breathing, was being hastily bandaged by a doctor before sending on to the hospital. A dozen children were crying in a room which opened off the hall, and there, too, a hysterical woman in a nightgown, her face and hands streaming blood, was being restrained by a couple of uniformed police-women from rushing up the sagging stairway.

A fireman who had collapsed on the floor gave me his axe, and a special constable with a lantern guided me up the quaking stairs to a little back flat, where several men, distinguished by armlets as some kind of volunteers, were hacking away at the pile of débris which filled most of one of the rooms. Four children had been sleeping in that room, explained the policeman, and one of them had been heard whimpering a while back. There was no light but a lantern and a flash torch, he added, and every one was dead played out; but just the same, they were going to stick to it as long as there was a chance that the “nipper” was alive.

This must have been somewhere around midnight, and it was by the first light of dawn leaking in through the shattered beams and rafters that we reached the last of the little bruised bodies buried under the débris. The ghastly interval between was in many respects the most trying I have ever experienced. Somebody’s strength, or nerves, or courage was giving way every few minutes, and there was one dreadful quarter hour during which we all had to knock off and help hold down the now stark-mad mother who had somehow escaped from the room below. For our reward we found that the youngest child was breathing, and might continue to do so, according to the doctor, for several hours. Its two brothers and its sister had mercifully been killed outright in the first crash.

Same day, 7.30 p.m.

I wrote the foregoing after a couple of hours of sleep; then went out and spent the rest of the day back-tracking the raiders. As the swath was largely cut through the tenement and slum districts of the East End, the property damage was not great, but, for the same reason, the loss of life must have been considerable. Pathetic little funerals—the kind one sees advertised on posters of enterprising Shoreditch and Whitechapel undertakers as costing two pounds ten shillings, with hearse and two carriages, with an extra carriage added for an even three pounds—were to be seen here and there; but withal there was a remarkable absence of “hate” observable in the crowds that thronged from far and near to view the work of the nocturnal visitors from beyond the North Sea.

It is, indeed, well said that the Briton is a poor hater, and almost the only evidence that I could see of his being stirred by the events of last night was in the heightened activity of recruiting. The astute authorities, quick to see the advantage of taking the tide at flood, kept speakers—both civilians and soldiers—all day at the barriers where the crowds were held back in the vicinities of the points bombed, and many hitherto wavering volunteers were gathered in as a consequence. Here and there threatening crowds gathered in front of bakeries and butcher shops which bore German names; but their leaders were half-tipsy cockney dames whom the ever imperturbable “Bobbies” had no trouble in hustling on out of the way. No, stubborn fighter that he is, the Briton is only the most indifferent of haters.

III

From the time of the big raid, in early September, until the second week in October there was not a single night on which the moon, wind, clouds, or some combination of meteorological conditions was not unfavourable to Zeppelin action, and it was not until this date that they tried to come again. Although rather nearer than before to two or three of the explosions, I had no such opportunity to view the progress of the raid as on the previous occasion, and this latest bombing is, perhaps, most memorable to me as having served to shake the monumental calm of two of the most famous and impressive of all London’s institutions, the “Bobby” and the Frivolity chorus girl. I turn again to my journal.

London, October—

I was at the Frivolity last night with my friend Captain J——, of the Royal Artillery, home from France on a week’s leave, to see an oculist. About nine-thirty the nearing boom of heavy explosions heralded another Zeppelin attack. I started for the door at once, but J——, an old Londoner, pulled me down into my stall by the coat-tail, dryly observing that, right before us under the Frivolity footlights, there was transpiring an infinitely more epochal event than anything that could possibly be seen outside.

“We have had other Zeppelin raids,” he shouted close to my ear, to make himself heard above the uneasy bustle which filled the theatre as the bombs boomed more imminent, “but never before in history has man beheld the Frivolity chorus shaken from its traditional languor. But now look! They faint to left and right, and I’m jolly certain that M—— doesn’t get her cue to embrace G—— until the next act. ’Pon my word, I never expected to live to see the waters of this fount of brides for the British peerage so disturbed.” J——’s voice trailed off into wondering speechlessness.

“Boom!” This time it was close at hand, and the rattle of falling débris could be heard above the discordant wail of the mechanically labouring orchestra. Utterly unable to sit still any longer, I shook off J——’s restraining arm, and reached a side exit just as two bombs fell in quick succession, a hundred yards up the Avenue. Again I was conscious of those strange rushes of air from the “wrong” direction which I had experienced during the previous raid. The panes of the upper windows shivered to bits, but the fragments, striking the reinforced glass of the marquee, were robbed of their force before they had caromed to the sidewalk.

On both sides of the Avenue glass was falling in countless tons,—in one great corner building alone 25,000 pounds of plate glass are estimated to have been shattered,—and there is no doubt that many were killed and injured by being caught under the vitreous avalanche.

Almost immediately three or four more bombs fell beyond the Avenue, there was another crescendo of falling glass, and then a lone Zeppelin—apparently at the end of its ammunition—headed up and off to the north-east pursued by a single searchlight beam and a scattering gun-fire.

The Frivolity chorus, having been soothed and revived, resumed its wonted demeanour and took up the dropped thread of the performance, and J——, no longer held a fascinated captor by the wonder of its lapse, joined me on the sidewalk to see what had been happening outside. It is a remarkable fact that the great majority of the audience, many of whom had not stirred from their seat, elected to remain and see the show out. From the three theatres opposite, however, one of which had been struck, considerable numbers were pouring forth. But not in all the now dense crowd in the Avenue were there the symptoms of a panic.

As we stepped from the curb something tinkled against my foot. Picking it up, it turned out to be a still warm piece of torn steel which J—— identified at once as a fragment of the casing of an incendiary bomb. It was not over an eighth of an inch thick, but of such superlative quality that it rang like a silver bell even to the tap of a finger-nail. A far more murderous fragment of shivered metal, which J—— kicked into a few minutes later, was a piece of shrapnel casing, and there is no doubt that the casualties from anti-aircraft-gun projectiles are very considerable.

The police and fire department work was even more remarkable than in the September raid. Not a single tell-tale glow marked the path by which the Zeppelin had come, and the only fire in our immediate vicinity was the spout from another sundered gas main. Barriers already shut off the crowds from the points where the worst damage had been done, and the work of removing the dead and wounded was being carried on quickly and expeditiously.

A bomb falling in the Avenue midway between a motor bus and a taxi had taken a heavy toll of the passengers of both, while the two vehicles, still standing upright, had been flattened until their appearance was not unlike that of their respective “property” prototypes occasionally employed to give perspective to the stage-setting of a street. A dozen or more dead and wounded lay in a row in front of a gin palace which had collapsed under a bomb; but, as far as we could see or learn, there had been little, if any, loss of life in the historic old theatre which had been struck.

A sinister coincidence had landed one bomb on a temporary wooden building occupied as Belgian Refugee headquarters. Miraculously however, although the rickety frame was blown quite out of shape, no fire was started among the small mountains of highly inflammable baggage on which the bomb exploded.

“The ’Uns ain’t satisfied with wot they did to ’em in Belg’um,” snorted an indignant coster, viewing the wreck; “the baby-killers ’ad to follow ’em to Lunnon.” This was, I believe, about the nearest thing to “hate” that I heard expressed during the several hours we mingled with the crowds on the streets.

Faring on down the “bomb-track” into that historic section of Old London which lies to the east of the Avenue, we came upon an apparition quite as astounding to me as the spectacle of the “panicky” Frivolity girls had been to J——. It was nothing less than a London police constable, hatless, breathless, and so little master of himself that he was unable to respond with the customary “First to the right, second to the left, and so on” formula when we asked him the way to the B—— Court, where we had heard there had been heavy damage. Slamming down on the pavement a heavy burden which he carried by a loop of wire, he began jabbering something to the effect that the “bloomin’ pill” came down “’arf a rod” from where he stood, and that orders called for the instant fetching of all “evidences” to the nearest station. I switched on my electric-torch—everybody here has carried them since the streets were darkened,—to recoil before the sight of the pear-shaped cone of dented steel toppled over on the cobbles at my feet.

“Good heavens, man, you’ve got an unexploded bomb!” I gasped, backing against the wall. “What do you mean by slamming it around in that way?”

“If she didn’t go off after fallin’ from the sky, I fancy she can stand a drop of a few inches,” was the reply. “It isn’t ’avin’ ’er ’ere, sir, that gets my nerves. They went to pieces when she came down and bounced along the pavement in front of where I stood.”

“Perhaps she has a time fuse, set to go off when she gets a crowd around her,” said the irrepressible J—— by way of encouragement. “The Huns are adepts at just such forms of subtlety. Better leave her alone for a spell.”

Shaking in every limb, but still resolved to carry out “orders” to the last, the doughty chap slipped his bleeding fingers through the wire loop and trudged off on his way to the station, staggering under the weight of half a hundred pounds of “T.N.T.”[3] That he reached there without mishap is evidenced by a flashlight in one of the “penny pictorials” this morning showing both him and his booty at the wicket of the B—— Street Police Station.

[3] Trinitrotoluol.

Two or three times during the next couple of hours searchlights flashed out to the east and south, and the blink of shrapnel bursting under barely defined patches of pale yellow indicated that the raid was an ambitious one, participated in by many airships. The heart of the city, however, was not reached again. I have it on good authority this morning that a number of bombs were exploded on the works at Woolwich, but, even if true, this only goes to show that Britain’s great arsenal, if not less, is at least not more vulnerable than the non-military areas.

If possible, London took this latest raid even more calmly than the previous one, and the level-headed practicality of the remark of the bus conductor I have quoted—“We’ve got a war to fight. Zepps ain’t war; fergit ’em!”—may be taken as fairly representing the frame of mind in which the metropolis awaits the really frightful visitation that Germany has promised.

For three months following the October visitation there were no further air raids on England, and it was known that this immunity was due to one or more of four things: the strengthening of Britain’s anti-aircraft defences, unfavourable weather, the efficacy of the Allies’ reprisals on South German cities, or a dawning realisation on the part of Germany that the maximum physical damage which can possibly be inflicted on Great Britain by air raids can never be more than an insignificant fraction of the damage done to the Teutonic cause as a consequence of resorting to this form of terrorism.

As weeks lengthened to months without an attack—even though incessant reports from a score of sources told of feverish Zeppelin construction in all parts of the Kaiser’s dominions—there awakened a hope in the breasts of Germany’s enemies and her friends that the humanitarian consideration had been the moving one. This hope was rudely crushed by the mid-January aeroplane raid—evidently a scouting reconnaissance—upon Kent, and the renewed Zeppelin attacks on Paris and the Midland counties. Subject only to the weather, then, and to such defensive measures as may be taken in France and England, we now know that this least warranted and most cruel of all forms of Teutonic “frightfulness” may be expected to continue until the end of the war.

TO BRITISH MERCHANT CAPTAINS

All yesterday evening I came upon little knots of sailor men gathered along the quay or at the corners of the streets of Harwich and Dovercourt. Their weather-beaten parchment-brown faces were drawn and troubled, and they spoke in the jerkily lowered voices of men not wont to hold their tongues or passions in restraining leash. There was something in the half-stunned, half-angry looks suggestive of the expressions I had seen on the faces of the sailors at a North Wales port on the evening that a carelessly-framed despatch had tricked them into transient belief that the British Fleet had been beaten by the Germans in the North Sea. But I had been with naval men all afternoon, and knew that there was nothing fresh to report from behind the grey fog-curtain to the north. The trouble was of another kind, but from past experience I knew that the moment when the British sailor man spoke through clenched teeth in those jerkily lowered tones, with his brow corrugated in mahogany wrinkles of perturbation and his blue eyes fixed absently on the fingers of his working hands, was not the one for even the most sympathetically curious to intrude upon him.

Enlightenment came later, when I asked the maid who lowered the shutters and drew the double curtains of my room in the little hotel on the Dovercourt cliff, why it was that the children playing in a narrow street that branched off diagonally below my window hushed their voices and tiptoed as they came down toward the seaward end, and why many of even belated and hurrying delivery carts were pulling up and taking another way on their clattering rounds.

“Is somebody sick?” I asked, “or is one of the neighbours dead?”

“Didn’t you know, sir?” faltered the girl. “That is Captain Fryatt’s ’ome down there. It’s the little red-brick ’ouse—the fourth or fifth from the corner, sir. We all o’ us ’ere knew ’im, sir, an’ loved ’im; an’—you’ll excuse me, sir” (her voice broke for a moment and the starting tears glistened in the flickering light of her candle)—“but I was thinkin’ o’ the missus an’ the nippers. They’s waitin’ down there for more news from Belg’um. I hates to think o’ ’em, sir. It makes me want to scream an’—an’ to fight. I’ll be going now, sir; it gets me all wrought up w’en I talks about it.”

It came to me all at once what those stunned angry sailors on the street were talking of, and the hot wave of indignation—checked for an hour or two by the excitement of meeting and boarding a returning submarine—that had surged over me that afternoon when I first read the news of Captain Fryatt’s execution in the paper, welled up anew inside me and throbbed against my temples. I was conscious of the passing of one of a class of men whom I had learned to know and love during many years of intimate association—in craft stout and frail, on seas fair and stormy—and the fact that the death of this man had been compassed with a cold-blooded cynicism scarcely paralleled in modern history brought the significance of it home to me with especial poignancy. In a dull sort of way I had been conscious of a similar feeling every time I had read of the loss of merchant officers and crews from the inauguration of the submarine campaign, but only now had I come to understand how much of a hold these same sailor men had on my affection, what parts they had played in scores of the vivid incidents of my life that I cared most to dwell upon in memory.

Three of the last ten years of my life had been spent upon the sea, I reflected, and of this time perhaps six months had been put in on one or another of the “floating palaces” of the main tourist routes, and not more than that aboard ships under the German, French, Dutch, or American flag. That left a good two years—more than seven hundred days and nights—spent aboard the smaller British merchantmen—tramps, coasters, colliers, traders, flat-bottomed river stern-wheelers—in out-of-the-way water-lanes of the world.

Two years of my life—and what treasured years they were, too!—spent in the care of the bold, bluff, bronzed British merchant captains who drove “the swift shuttles of an Empire’s loom.” What strange seas they had steered me through, and what strange corners in the ports that served those seas! And what adventures they had run me into, and what scrapes got me out of! And what courtesy, what consideration—aye, even what tenderness in times of misadventure and sickness—had I not enjoyed at their hands!

Pulling on my cardigan jacket, I “stood-by” at the hour of one—midnight by the sun-time, by which the ships of the sea still sail—and at the instant when the steamers in the harbour would have been sounding “Eight bells” had there been no lurking Zeppelins to guard against, leaned out of the open window till the indrifting fog blew sharp against my face and began my “watch.”

Just so—with a rough blue sleeve brushing against my own—had I leaned over the bridge or taffrail of a hundred steamers ploughing a hundred sea-ways, and now, with the familiar breath of the sea in my nostrils and the familiar mist of the sea damping my hair again, old friends of other days strode down the corridors of memory and ranged themselves, one at a time, by my side. At first I tried to muster them chronologically, in the order I had known them from my first tentative coastal voyages in the Pacific—(B——, of the Vancouver-Seattle packet, who let me sleep on his cabin couch one night when the rooms were all taken in order that I might be rested for the tennis tournament I was engaging in at Tacoma on the morrow; R——, of the old Alaska “Inland Passage” coaster, who taught me to “box” the compass and awoke the slumbering love o’ the sea in my blood with tales of the Victoria sealing fleet; P——, of the Mexican trader, who smuggled me out of Guaymas when the Sonora authorities were trying to arrest me for landing on Tiburon without a permit)—but presently the magnet of my quickened memory began drawing them forward out of turn, and ere long they were crowding on like guests at a reception.

Now I would think of the bravery of them, and instantly a series of pictures took shape before my eyes, a score of names leapt to my lips, a score of hands—hard brown hands, with a world of warmth in their steady grip—reached out to clasp my own. Who was the bravest among men that had all been brave? I asked myself; and then how the pictures formed and dissolved as one stirring incident after another flashed across my mind! What could have been finer than the way Captain K——, of that cranky clipper-bowed old “C.N.” steamer, had stuck out that typhoon off Taiwan, lashed to the bridge for three days, and subsisting on coffee and rum and pilot bread? I could see his brine-white face (as I saw it when I took a timid peep up the companion way on the day the “twister” began to die down) taking shape out there in the drifting fog even as the recollection of that fearsome storm crystallised in my memory, and then fancy turned another cog, and it was a sun-blistered South Pacific trader that I seemed to see, with a sallow, fever-wracked figure at the wheel, and two or three dozen naked blacks writhing in agony on the forrard deck. How old B——, of the Cora Andrews, took his load of plague-stricken Papuans through the Barrier Reef and into the quarantine station at Townsville is a South Sea epic.

Then came memories with a more personal touch, and I dwelt for a few moments over the shifting scenes of the mix-up I started the time I tried to take a flashlight of the smokers in the “Opium Den” of the old Yo San, plying on the Hongkong-Bangkok run. Some of the Chinese crew were smuggling opium that voyage, and, taking me for a Secret Service officer on search, started to wipe up the deck with my protesting anatomy. Curled round my camera under a bunk in the corner of the opium den, with nothing but the fact that my assailants were so numerous that they got in each other’s way saving me from instant annihilation, and expecting every moment that one of them would gather his wits together sufficiently to pounce down on me through the slats, I cowered in terror, and was ever music sweeter than the raucous bellow of bluff old Captain G—— when, cursing like a pirate and banging right and left with the belaying pins he held in either hand, he ploughed his way into the den and yanked me out by the scruff of the neck. Poor old G——! he was lost with his ship two voyages later, when the ancient Yo San was piled up by a typhoon on the Tongking coast.

Then the recollection of the ignominious way in which old G—— had pulled me out from under the bunk by the coat collar recalled the time when another British skipper—his command was only a “P.S.N.C.” tender in Valparaiso, and I had long since forgotten his name—saved my life by handling me in quite the same unceremonious manner. The schooner on which I had planned to sail to Juan Fernandez had broken loose in a violent “Norther” and was fast driving before the mountainous swells upon the malecon or seawall, when the “Navigation Company’s” tender, out to salve some drifting barges, came nosing cautiously in toward where the hollow waves were curling over into crashing breakers. The barges and their cargoes were probably worth more than our walty old hooker, but the skipper of the tender, noting only that there were lives to be saved on the latter, hesitated not an instant about deciding to try and stand-by. Unfortunately, we had a lot of German colonistas aboard, and the panic among them prevented many from the schooner being saved. I was one of the half-dozen who did not fail in their leaps for the tender’s outreaching starboard bow, but my hold on the slippery rail was so precarious that only the mighty hand of the skipper on my neck prevented my slipping back into the sea. For a moment now, out in the drifting fog, I saw his round red face, under its “sou’wester,” just as I had peered up into it after he dragged me over the rail and slammed me down on the heeling deck.

At times memories crowded so that they became confused. I was not sure, for instance, whether it was T——, of the Eimoo, or P——, of the Levuka, whom I had seen go over the rail into shark-infested Rotrura Lagoon to jerk the kink out of an air-hose before his diver strangled; or which of two otherwise well-remembered “B.I.” skippers it was that waded in, barehanded, and floored every one of a bunch of Lascars who were fighting with their knives; or whether it was the mate or the skipper of the East African coaster who, with one of his thighs being torn to ribbons by the beast’s hind claws, kept his grip on the throat of a young leopard that had slipped from its cage, and which he was afraid might become panic-stricken and jump overboard before it could be recaptured; or whether it was the captain of a “Burns, Philips” or a “Union” steamer that I had seen put out through the tortuous passage of Suva Bay when the wind was snapping the tops from the coconut palms, and the barometer was at 28.50 and still falling, just because the wife of the missionary on some obscure little bit of the Fijian Archipelago to the north was expecting to become a mother and needed the attention of the ship’s doctor.

I would have gone on to the end of my “watch” thinking of the bravery—moral and physical—the ready nerve and the general “sufficiency unto occasion” of my old friends, but most that had been brave had also been kind and considerate, and every now and then I found my mind occupied with recollections of the little things they had done for me, or that I had seen them do for others. There was B——, of the old Changsha, running from Yokohama to Sydney, who went miles off his course just to satisfy my whim to pass over the spot where Mary Gloster was buried at sea. What an afternoon that was! The Straits of Macassar “oily and treacly,” just as Kipling had described them, and the milk-warm land breeze wafting the odours of the spice groves of Celebes. B—— had his volume of Kipling and I had mine, and between us was the reef-freckled chart of Macassar Straits with Borneo to starboard, Celebes to port, and a thousand dotted lines indicating islets and reefs and rocks—mostly lurking, half-submerged—in between.

“By the Little Paternosters, as you come to the Union Bank,

We dropped her—I think I told you—and I pricked it off where she sank—

(Tiny she looked on the grating—that oily, treacly sea—)

Hundred and eighteen East, remember, and South just three.

Easy bearings to carry....”

read B——, running his finger along the chart.

“Aye, easy to carry. Here’s the spot,” and he marked it with a circled dot. Then we “dead reckoned” the latitude from the noon sight, and “shot” for the longitude as we “came to the Union Bank.” And finally, when we were over the spot as near as might be determined from hasty reckoning, nothing would do but B—— must start the lead going to determine the depth. Never shall I forget the way his face lit up when the leadsmen droned out “Fourteen,” and there were tears glistening in his eyes as he turned back a couple of pages and read—

“And we dropped her in fourteen fathoms; I pricked it off where she sank.”

“I might have known that Kipling worked it out with a chart,” he exclaimed; “but what a thrill it gives one to find it exact, even to the soundings!”

The margins of “The Mary Gloster,” in my “Seven Seas,” bear the pencilled records—now thumbed and fingered into dim blurs—of our “mid-sea madness” to this day, and there is nothing that I treasure more. B—— would never have taken his 5,000-ton freighter miles off her course, at the cost of some hours of time and a number of tons of good Nagasaki coal, had he been any less daft about Kipling than I was. But all British sailors love Kipling; as a class, I have always felt that they had a fuller appreciation of the message of “the uncrowned Laureate” than have any others.

For an hour at least I must have turned in fancy the pages of Kipling, now with this well-remembered skipper, now with that, until the recollection of how kind old N——, of a Liverpool Para-Manaos freighter, had read to me “The Hymn Before Action” one night when I was half delirious from the Amazon “black-water” fever he had been nursing me through set the current of my thought on another tack. N—— was only one of a dozen who had coddled me through some sort of tropical illness or patched me up after some sort of a smash-up.

It was R——, of the Valparaiso-Panama coaster, who had put my hand in splints after it had been crushed between the gangway and a dug-out full of ivory nuts off some pile-built village of Ecuador, and it was my fault rather than his that the little finger was still crooked. And it was H——, of the big White Star freighter on the Australia-South Africa run, who laboured for an hour in helping the ship’s doctor worry back into place the shoulder I had dislocated in the “sports” one afternoon; and it was D——, of the Rangoon-Calcutta “B.I.,” who had reduced with horse-liniment the ankle I had sprained in dodging out of the path of a temperamental water-buffalo while ashore at Akyab; and it was A——, of the Lynch river boat plying from Basra to Bagdad, who stitched up my scalp after the Arabs of the bazaar of then almost unheard-of Kut-el-Amara had amused themselves with bouncing rocks off my head because (this was during the Turco-Italian war) they imagined I looked like an “alien enemy.”

A—— was killed when the Turks shelled his ship—then a transport—early in the Mesopotamian operations, I remembered, and this led my thoughts off to the long watch I kept by the bedside of poor old Y——, on whose “B.P.” steamer I had been roaming in and out among the Solomons, New Hebrides, Fijis and other islands of western Polynesia for two months. Y——’s heart had been giving out for a number of years, and now very hot weather following, the excitement of seeing his ship through an unusually heavy hurricane had hastened an end long inevitable. He knew his “number was up,” and so he told me, that night, of things he wanted me to explain and set right for him in Australia. It was the thinking of these, and the visit that I subsequently paid to his wife and children in the Illawara, that finally brought my mind back to that other bereaved family in the little red house beneath my window.

The short night had passed, the fog had lifted, and now in the early morning light I saw a milkman stop his cart a half-dozen doors from the Fryatt home and go softly tip-toeing on his near-by deliveries to avoid making unnecessary noise. Out of the retreating fog-bank to seaward two small freighters took sharpened line and headed for the harbour mouth. They were much of a size and type, but the gay red and white splashes on the bows of the more northerly ones indicated she sailed under the flag of an enterprising Scandinavian country, while the unbroken black of the side of the other told just as plainly that she was British. As I watched, the shifting of the shadows on the sides of the Norwegian told me that she was altering her course sharply every few hundred yards—“zigzagging” to minimise the danger from submarine attacks. A wise precaution, I told myself; now what about the other? I took up my glass and held it on the Briton. One, two, three, four, five minutes passed. All the time the wave curled evenly back from her forefoot; not a ripple of shifting light or shadow told of deviation in her course of the fraction of a point.

“Straight on to your goal, little ship,” I said, saluting with my glass.

But I might have known as much. That was Fryatt’s way, and that was the way all my friends of the Red Ensign did, and always will do. “Good luck, fair weather and snug berths to you all; aye, and a quiet haven when the last watch, the long watch, is finally over!”

Knots of troubled sailor men still gathered along Harwich quay this morning, but now that I understood by what they were moved I no longer hesitated to mingle and talk with them. Their slow anger was steadily mounting—gradually crowding out all other feelings—with every word that was spoken, with every hour that passed; but among them were still men who were stunned and dazed, who could not understand how a thing so monstrous really could have happened.

“But w’y, w’y ha’ the ’Uns done it?” persisted a grizzled old salt, turning his troubled eyes to mine after all the others had shaken their heads perplexedly.

“It is just possible,” I said, “that the Germans believe that the execution of one skipper who attempted to ram one of their submarines will make the others think twice before trying to do the same thing.”

Two or three of the older men fairly snorted in their incredulity that even the Germans should thus cheaply rate the British sailor, but the plausibility of the theory soon convinced even these.

“Do you re’ly believe the ’Uns think that o’ us?” one of them finally ventured.

“I do,” I replied, “for there is nothing else to think.”

The old man took a deep breath and turned his eyes away to sea. “God pity all ’Uns!” he muttered, and “God pity ’em!” “God pity ’em!” echoed his mates.

THE PASSING OF A ZEPPELIN

In the year that had gone by since the first great air-raid on London we knew that much had been done in the way of strengthening the defences. Just what had been done we did not, of course, and do not, know. We knew that there were more and better guns and searchlights, and probably greatly improved means of anticipating the coming of the raiders and of following and reporting their movements after they did come. At the same time we also knew that the latest Zeppelin had been greatly improved; that it was larger, faster, capable of ascending to a greater altitude, and probably able to stand more and heavier gun-fire than its prototype of a year ago. It seemed to be a question, therefore, of whether or not the guns could range the raiders, and, if so, do them any vital damage when they did hit them. The aeroplane was an unknown quantity, and, in the popular mind at least, not seriously reckoned with. London knew that the crucial test would not come until an airship tried again to penetrate to the heart of the metropolitan area, and awaited the result calmly if not quite indifferently.

The Zeppelin raids of the spring and early summer, numerous as they had been, had done a negligible amount of military damage and scarcely more to civil property. The death list, too, had, mercifully, been very low. It seemed significant, however, that the main London defences had been avoided during all of this time, indicating, apparently, that the raiders were reluctant to lift the lid of the Pandora’s box that was laid out so temptingly before them for fear of the possible consequences. Twice or thrice, watching with my glasses after I had been awakened by distant bomb explosions or gun-fire, I had seen a shell-pocketed airship draw back, as a yellow dog refuses the challenge that his intrusion has provoked, and glide off into the darkness of some safer area. “Would they try it again?” was the question Londoners asked themselves as the dark of the moon came round each month, and, except for the comparatively few who had had personal experience of the terror and death that follow the swath of an air-raider, most of them seemed rather anxious to have the matter put to the test.

Last night—just twelve “darks-of-the-moon” after the first great raid of 1915—the test came. It was hardly a conclusive one, perhaps (though that may well have come before these lines find their way into print), but it was certainly highly illuminative. I write this on my return to London from viewing—twenty miles away—a tangled mass of wreckage and a heap of charred trunks that are all that remain of a Zeppelin and its crew which—whether by accident, intent, or the force of circumstances will probably never be known—rushed in where two others of its aerial sisters feared to fly, and paid the cost.

There was nothing of the surprise (to London, at least; as regards the ill-starred Zeppelin crew none can say) in last night’s raid. The night grew more heavily overcast as the darkness deepened, and towards midnight stealthy little beams of hooded searchlights pirouetting on the eastern clouds told the home-wending Saturday night theatre crowd that, with the imminent approach of the raiders, London was lifting a corner of its mask of blackness and throwing out an open challenge to the enemy. This was the first time I had known the lights to precede the actual explosion of bombs, and the cool confidence of the thing suggested (as I heard one policeman tell another) that the defence had something “up their sleeves.”

It was towards one in the morning when I finished my supper at a West End restaurant and started walking through the almost deserted streets to my hotel. London is anything but a bedlam after midnight, but the silence in the early hours of this morning was positively uncanny. Now, with the last of the ’buses gone and all trains stopped, only the muffled buzz of an occasional belated taxi—pushing on cautiously with hooded lights—broke the stillness.

Reaching my room I pulled on a sweater, ran up the curtain, laid my glass ready and seated myself at the window, the same window from which, a year ago, I had watched those two insolently contemptuous raiders sail across overhead and leave a blazing wake of death and destruction behind them. On that night, I reflected, I had felt the rush of air from the bombs, and—later—had watched the firemen extinguishing the flames and the ambulances carrying the wounded to the hospitals. Would it be like that to-night? I wondered (there was now no doubt that the raiders were near, for the searchlights had multiplied, and far to the south-east, though no detonations were audible, quick flashes told of scattering gun-fire), or would the defence have more of a word to say for itself this time? I looked to the eastern heavens where the shifting clouds were now “polka-dotted” with the fluttering golden motes of a score of searchlights, and thought I had found my answer.

There was no wheeling and reeling of the lights in wide circles, as a year ago, but rather a steady persistent stabbing at the clouds, each one appearing to keep to an allotted area of its own. “Stabbing” expresses the action exactly, and it recalled to me an occasion, a month ago, when a “Tommy,” who was showing me through some captured dug-outs on the Somme, illustrated, with bayonet thrusts, the manner in which they had originally searched for Germans hiding under the straw mattresses. There was nothing “panicky” in the work of the lights this time, but only the suggestion of methodical, ordered, relentless vigilance.

“Encouraging as a preliminary,” I said to myself; “now” (for the night was electric with import) “for the main event!”

There was not long to wait. To the south-east the gun-flashes had increased in frequency, followed by mist-dulled blurs of brightness in the clouds that told of bursting shells. Suddenly, through a rift in the clouds, I saw a new kind of glare—the earthward-launched beam of an airship’s searchlight groping for its target—but the shifting mist-curtain intervened again even as one of the defending lights took up the challenge and flashed its own rapier ray in quick reply. Presently the muffled boom of bombs fleeted to my ears, and then the sharper rattle of a sudden gust of gun-fire. This was quickly followed by a confused roar of sound, evidently from many bombs dropped simultaneously or in quick succession, and I knew that one of two things had happened—either the raider had found its mark and was delivering “rapid fire,” or the guns were making it so hot for the visitor that it had been compelled to dump its explosives and seek safety in flight. When a minute or more had gone by I felt sure that the latter had been scuttled, and that it was now only a question of which direction the flight was going to take.

Again the eastward searchlights gave me the answer. By twos and threes—I could not follow the order of the thing—the lights that had been “patrolling” the eastern sky moved over and took their station around a certain low-hanging cloud to the south. The murky sheet of cumulonimbus seemed to pale and dissolve in the concentrated rays, and then, right into the focus of golden glow formed by the dancing light motes, running wild and blind as a bull charges the red mantle masking the matador, darted a huge Zeppelin.

Perhaps never before in all time has a single object been the centre of so blinding a glare. It seemed that the optic nerve must wither in so fierce a light, and certainly no unprotected eye could have opened to it. Dark glasses might have made it bearable, but could not possibly have resolved the earthward prospect into anything less than the heart of a fiery furnace. Indeed, it is very doubtful if the bewildered fugitive knew, in more than the most general way, where it was. Cut off by the guns to the south-east from retreat in that direction, but knowing that the North Sea and safety could be reached by driving to the north-east, it is more than probable that the harried raider found itself over the “Lion’s Den” rather because it could not help it than by deliberate intent.

What a contrast was this blinded, reeling thing to those arrogantly purposeful raiders of a year ago! Supremely disdainful of gun and searchlight, these had prowled over London till the last of their bombs had been planted, and one of them had even circled back the better to see the ruin its passing had wrought. But this raider—far larger than its predecessors and flying at over twice as great a height though it was—dashed on its erratic course as though pursued by the vengeful spirits of those its harpy sisters had bombed to death in their beds. If it still had bombs to drop its commander either had no time or no heart for the job. Never have I seen an inanimate thing typify terror—the terror that must have gripped the hearts of its palpably flustered (to judge by the airship’s movements) crew—like that staggering helpless maverick of a Zeppelin, when it finally found itself clutched in the tentacles of the searchlights of the aerial defences of London.

All this time the weird, uncanny silence that brooded over the streets before I had come indoors held the city in its spell. The watching thousands—nay, millions—kept their excitement in leash, and the propeller of the raider—muffled by the mists intervening between the earth and the 12,000 feet at which it whirred—dulled to a drowsy drone. Into this tense silence the sudden fire of a hundred anti-aircraft guns—opening in unison as though at the pull of a single lanyard—cut in a blended roar like the Crack o’ Doom; indeed, though few among those hushed watching millions realised it, it was literally the Crack o’ Doom that was sounding. For perhaps a minute or a minute and a half the air was vibrant with the roar of hard-pumped guns and the shriek of speeding shell, the great sound from below drowning the sharper cracks from the steel-cold flashes in the upper air.

It was guns that were built for the job—not the hastily gathered and wholly inadequate artillery of a year ago—that were speaking now, and the voice was one of ordered, imperious authority. Range-finders had the marauder’s altitude, and the information was being put at the disposal of guns that had the power to “deliver the goods” at that level. What a contrast the sequel was to that pitiful firing of the other raid! Only the opening shots were “shorts” or “wides” now, and ten seconds after the first gun a diamond-clear burst blinking out through a rift in the upper clouds told that the raider—to use a naval term—was “straddled,” had shells exploding both above and below it. From that instant till the guns ceased to roar, seventy or eighty seconds later, the shells burst, lacing the air with golden glimmers, and meshed the flying raider in a fiery net.

For a few seconds it seemed to me that, close-woven as was the net of shell-bursts, the flashes came hardly as fast as the roar of the guns would seem to warrant, and I swept the heavens with my glasses in a search for other possible targets. But no other raider was in sight; there was no other “nodal centre” of gun-fire and searchlights. Suddenly the reason for the apparent discrepancy was clear to me. The flashes I saw (except for a few of the shrapnel bullets they were releasing) were only the misses; the hits I could not see. The long-awaited test was at its crucial stage. Empty of bombs and with half of its fuel consumed, the raider was at the zenith of its flight, and yet the guns were ranging it with ease. It was now a question of how much shell-fire the Zeppelin could stand.

In spite of the fact that the airship—so far as I could see through my glasses—did not appear to slow down or to be perceptibly racked by the gun-fire, I have no doubt what the end would have been if the test could have been pressed to its conclusion in an open country. But bringing a burning Zeppelin down across three or four blocks of thickly settled London was hardly a thing the Air Defence desired to do if it could possibly be avoided. The plan was carried to its conclusion with the almost mathematical precision that marked the preliminary searchlight work and gunnery.

From the moment that it had burst into sight the raider had been emitting clouds of white gas to hide itself from the searchlights and guns, while the plainly visible movements of its lateral planes seemed to indicate that it was making desperate efforts to climb still higher into the thinning upper air. Neither expedient was of much use. The swirling gas clouds might well have obscured a hovering airship, but never one that was rushing through the air at seventy miles an hour, while, far from increasing its altitude, there seemed to be a slight but steady loss from the moment the guns ceased until, two or three miles further along, it was hidden from sight for a minute by a low-hanging cloud. Undoubtedly the aim of the gunners had been to “hole,” not to fire the marauder, and it must have been losing gas very rapidly even—as the climacteric moment of the attack approached—at the time increased buoyancy was most desirable.

The “massed” searchlights of London “let go” shortly after the gun-fire ceased, and now, as the raider came within their field, the more scattered lights of the northern suburbs wheeled up and “fastened on.” The fugitive changed its course from north to north-easterly about this time, and the swelling clouds of vapour left behind presently cut off its foreshortened length entirely from my view. A heavy ground mist appeared to prevail beyond the heights to the north, and in the diffused glow of the searchlights that strove to pierce this mask my glasses showed the ghostly shadows of flitting aeroplanes—manœuvring for the death-thrust.

The ground mist (which did not, however, cover London proper) kept the full strength of the searchlights from the upper air, and it was in a sky of almost Stygian blackness that the final blow was sent home. The farmers of Hertfordshire tell weird stories of the detonations of bursting bombs striking their fields, but all these sounds were absorbed in the twenty-mile air-cushion that was now interposed between my vantage point and the final scene of action.

Not a sound, not a shadow, heralded the flare of yellow light which suddenly flashed out in the north-eastern heavens and spread latitudinally until the whole body of a Zeppelin—no small object even at twenty miles—stood out in glowing incandescence. Then a great sheet of pink-white flame shot up, and in the ripples of rosy light which suffused the earth for scores of miles I could read the gilded lettering on my binoculars. This was undoubtedly the explosion of the ignited hydrogen of the main gas-bags, and immediately following it the great frame collapsed in the middle and began falling slowly toward the earth, burning now with a bright yellow flame, above which the curl of black smoke was distinctly visible. A lurid burst of light—doubtless from the exploding petrol tanks—flared up as the flaming mass struck the earth, and half a minute later the night, save for the questing searchlights to east and south, was as black as ever again.

Then perhaps the strangest thing of all occurred. London began to cheer. I should have been prepared for it in Paris, or Rome, or Berlin, or even New York, but that the Briton—who of all men in the world most fears the sound of his own voice lifted in unrestrained jubilation—was really cheering, and in millions, was almost too much. I pinched my arm to be sure that I had not dozed away, and, lost in wonder, forgot for a minute or two the great drama just enacted.