I thought so too. I went indoors, calling out to the boy as I passed his
room upstairs, and went to where the girls were asleep. Three miles,
three minutes! It appears to be harder to waken children when a Zeppelin
is coming your way. I got the elder girl awake, lifted her, and sat her
on the bed, for she had become heavier, I noticed. Then I put her small
sister over my shoulder, as limp and indifferent as a half-filled bag. By
this time the elder one had snuggled into the foot of her bed, resigned
to that place if the other end were disputed, and was asleep again. I
think I became annoyed, and spoke sharply. We were in a hurry. The boy
was waiting for us at the top of the stairs.

"What's up?" he asked with merry interest, hoisting his slacks.

"Come on down," I said.

We went into a central room, put coats round them, answering eager and
innocent questions with inconsequence, had the cellar door and a light
ready, and then went out to inspect affairs. There were more searchlights
at work. Bright diagonals made a living network on the overhead dark. It
was remarkable that those rigid beams should not rest on the roof of
night, but that their ends should glide noiselessly about the invisible
dome. The nearest of them was followed, when in the zenith, by a faint
oval of light. Sometimes it discovered and broke on delicate films of
high fair-weather clouds. The shells were still twinkling brilliantly,
and the guns were making a rhythmless baying in the distance, like a
number of alert and indignant hounds. But the Zeppelin had gone. The
firing diminished and stopped.

They went to bed again, and as I had become acutely depressed, and the
book now had no value, I turned in myself, assuring everyone, with the
usual confidence of the military expert, that the affair was over for the
night. But once in bed I found I could see there only the progress
humanity had made in its movement heavenwards. That is the way with us;
never to be concerned with the newest clever trick of our enterprising
fellow-men till a sudden turn of affairs shows us, by the immediate
threat to our own existence, that that cleverness has added to the peril
of civilized society, whose house has been built on the verge of the pit.
War now would be not only between soldiers. In future wars the place of
honour would be occupied by the infants, in their cradles. For war is not
murder. Starving children is war, and it is not murder. What treacherous
lying