done a greater thing than any other
in all his existence.

[Sidenote: The German revenge.]

That by his act the Germans in their speeding sky-craft were baffled
there is no doubt. They had lost their trail of fire; their involuntary
guide had disappeared in the gloom. The airmen's long journey had
suddenly become fruitless; their peril from hidden British guns and
flying scouts was increased tenfold. The heat of the night was as
nothing to the hot surge of disappointment that must have swept the
brains of the Zeppelin crew. Their commander, too, must have lost his
judgment utterly, forgotten his sense of military effectiveness.
Whatever happened, he sacrificed his soul when he turned his cloud-ship
aside from the railway line, steered over the shabby roofs of
Walthamstow and, at less than two thousand feet, unloosed his iron dogs
of destruction.

[Sidenote: Bombing tenements of a defenseless town.]

I have it on the authority of experienced aviators that it is not
impossible on a dark night to distinguish buildings of importance like
St. Paul's or the Houses of Parliament or a great gun factory or a river
as broad as the Thames with its uprearing and frequent bridges. The
crowding tenements of Walthamstow could have had no semblance to any of
these, at any height. It would seem a cheap and worthless revenge, then,
to wreck an unimportant and defenceless town, having failed to wreck the
military nerve-center of the world's metropolis. But this is what one of
Count Zeppelin's soaring dreadnoughts did in this night, in this
blood-drenched year.

[Sidenote: When a bomb explodes.]

Like the mirage of a tropical island the dirigible hung motionless in
space for a breathless minute. There was a wavering pin-prick of light
in the carriage suspended from the leviathan's belly--a light that
fluttered fore and aft as of a man with a fairy lantern running to and
fro giving orders or taking them. Then faintly discernible against the
sky, like a rope hung down for anchorage, came a thin, gray streak--the
tail of a bomb with all hell in its wake. From somewhere near the town's
centre the earth split and roared apart. The world reeled and a
brain-shattering crash compounded of all the elements of pain and hurled
from the shoulders of a thousand thunderclaps smote the senses. It was a
blast of sickening and malignant fury. It did not so much stun as it
stopped one--stopped the breath and the heart's beat, suspending
thought, h