14 
LAND & WATER 
beptcmber 21, 1916 
immediately 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-li>her went on 
stringing his traps^ across the river and the house-boaters 
resumecl their interrupted bridge. Theji at almost the 
same moment, clear and sfiarp, cajiie 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 round of gun 
lire became faintly audible. Drowning the crack of 
these latc»st 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. 
* * * ' t * * 
My ne.xt glimpse of a Zeppelin was two months later, 
o\er London.- The night was clear, calm and moonless 
— ideal Zeppelin conclitions — and walking down from 
my hotel to a music-hall at eight o'clock I noticed that 
the searchlights were turning the dome of the sky into 
one great kaleidoscope witii 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 lialos 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. 
;l*'(>r 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 abo\e the dim bulks of the domes 
and spires. 
Swiftly, undeviatingly, relentlessly, the^e 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 singlj' at intervals, 
but with never more than a few seconds between. Always 
a splash of lurid light preceded the sound of the ex- 
plosion, 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 cmcoming airships— then at about twenty-five 
degrees from directly overhead— between the thumb 
and forefinger of my outstretched right arm, 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 base- 
ment—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 point or 
two of change was made in the course of the approaching 
airships. This meant that the swath of the bombs 
would he cut at least a hundred yards to the north- 
east and, impelled by the fascination of the unfolding 
spectacle, 1 remained at my window. During the next 
half minute or thereabouts the bombs fell singly at 
three or four second intervals ; and immediately after- 
wards a number of sputtering fire-balls — 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 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 
half way 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 ex- 
plosion and the rolling boom were practically simul- 
taneous. 
Between eight and a dozen bombs fell, 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 Zeppehn 
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.) 
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 have been almost 
" hovering " when the bombs were dropped opposite 
my vantage point. Brilliantly illfiminated by the 
searchlights, whose beams wove about belovV 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 move- 
ment 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 power- 
ful directing 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 ! " leapt to my hps. 
A star-burst pricked the night in the rear of the 
second airship, and well on' a fine with it ; a second ex- 
ploded fairly above it ; and then— all at once I was con- 
scious that the searchlights were playing on a swelling 
cloud of white mist which was trailing awiiy into the north- 
east. The Zeppelin had evidently taken a leaf from the 
book of the squid. 
****** 
Many months passed before a Zeppelin was again over 
us, and so stealthily did it come and go, and so 
completely was it foiled of whatever its purpose might have 
been— that hardly one in a thousand of the inhabitants 
of the metropolis could have known of the swift nocturnal 
visitation. It was only by the sheerest luck that I 
chanced to be a witness of it, and the entry in my journal 
recording the event is as brief and colourless as the raid 
itself. 
" I went to see ' Madame Butterfly ' at a theatre 
last night, and on coming out to the street, a little after 
eleven, my attention was attracted by the distant sound 
of small calibre guns. The reports were so faint as to 
be audible only in the lulls of the traffic, and few of the 
home-wending after-theatre crowd appeared to notice 
them. In passing the corner of a little street that broke 
the even skyline, however, I came upon a knot of 
men watching a faintly luminous ball of brightness that 
floundered up and down at the tip of a searchlight 
