World's War Events Volume I Part 43

Somehow, by sight or intuition or the instant commingling of the two, old Tom c.u.mbers became aware of the danger above him; for he sprang to his switch, shut off all the cheery blue and white lights along "the line" and swung on with a mighty jerk the ruby signal of danger. The engineer in the on-rushing train jammed down his brakes and brought up his locomotive with a complaining, grinding moan, a hundred yards beyond Walthamstow station. Tom c.u.mbers had 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 s.p.a.ce for a breathless minute. There was a wavering pin-p.r.i.c.k 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 h.e.l.l 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, halting life itself for a fraction of time. One was, somehow, aware of existence but without sensation. And then came reaction and the realization of what was really taking place. The German's bomb landed fully ten blocks away, but you would have taken oath in court that it had fallen at your feet, behind you, above you and into your very brain.

[Sidenote: Terror of the people.]

[Sidenote: A broken gas main.]

An air raid on Walthamstow, which drab town can boast neither ammunition works nor the ownership of war material of any description, could not be at once realized. But here was the cyclonic fact, hideously real, appallingly actual; and there in the heavens was the buoyant Zeppelin maneuvering for further mischief. The reverberation of the first explosion was still grumbling back in Epping Forest when all Walthamstow, rubbing its eyes, tumbled out into the black streets. Men, women, children, all ludicrously clotheless, swarmed aimlessly like bees in an overturned hive. Stark terror gripped them. It distorted their faces and set their legs quivering. The dullest among these toil-dulled people knew what that explosion meant, knew that it was part of the punishment promised by the German foe. "Gott strafe England" had come to pa.s.s. But they could not understand why the enemy had singled them out for such drastic distinction. The more alert and cool-headed of the men battled with their fellows and shouted instructions to get the women folks and the kiddies back indoors and down into their cellars. The night-gowned and pajamaed throng could not be persuaded that safety lay not in sight of the Zeppelin but away from it. The hypnotism of horror lured them on to where twelve houses lay spread about in smoking chaos, a plateau of blazing and noisome havoc. Somewhere a gas-main burst with a roar and drove the crowd back with its choking fumes as no human hands could have done. Women frankly hysterical or swooning were roughly thrust aside. Children shrieking in uncomprehending panic were swept along with the crowd or trodden upon. Lumbering men ran and shouted and cursed and shook hairy fists at the long blot on the clouds. Some of the men leaped over iron palings like startled rabbits and flung themselves in the gra.s.s, face downward and quaking. And yet, I dare say that most of these would have walked straight into a familiar danger without the waver of an eyelash; it was the unknown peril, the doubt as to how and whence this hurtling death might spring upon them out of the night, that unhinged their manhood. And while Walthamstow's walls went down and great flame-tongues spouted where homes had stood, while the thick, hot air was tortured with agonized and inhuman cries, the enemy up above let loose another bolt.

[Sidenote: The second bomb as the town blazes.]

[Sidenote: Effects of the explosion.]

More terrible than the first explosion was, or seemed, this second one.

It mowed down half a hundred shrieking souls. And it was curious to note the lateral action of the blast when it hit a resisting surface.

Dynamite explodes with a downward or upward force, lyddite and nitro-glycerine and what not other devil's own powers act more or less in the same set manner. But the furious ingredients of these bombs hurled on Walthamstow contained stuff that released a discharge which swept all things from it horizontally, in a quarter-mile, lightning sweep, like a scythe of flame. A solid block of shabby villas was laid out as flat as your palm by the explosion of this second bomb. Scarcely a brick was left standing upright. What houses escaped demolition around the edge of the convulsion had their doors and windows splintered into rubbish. The concussion of this chemical frenzy was felt, like an earthquake, in a ten-mile circle. Wherever the scorching breath of the bombs breathed on stone or metal it left a sulphurous, yellow-white veneer, acrid in odor and smooth to the touch. Whole street-lengths of twisted iron railings were coated with this murderous white-wash.

[Sidenote: More bombs as the Zeppelin rises.]

[Sidenote: Freaks of the explosion.]

Having made sure of its mark, the ravaging Zeppelin rose higher on the discharge of its first bomb and still higher after firing the second. At the safe distance of four thousand feet it dropped three more sh.e.l.ls recklessly, haphazard. One of these bored cleanly through a slate-tiled roof, through furniture and two floorings and burrowed ten feet into the ground without exploding. This intact sh.e.l.l has since been carefully a.n.a.lyzed by the experts of the Board of Explosions at the British War Office. Another bomb detonated on the steel rails of the Walthamstow tram-line and sent them curling skyward from their rivetted foundations like serpentine wisps of paper. Great cobblestones were heaved through shop windows and part.i.tions and out into the flower-beds of rear gardens; some of the cobbles were flung through solid attic blinds and others were catapulted through brick walls a foot in thickness. A hole as big as a moving-van burned into the road at one place. In a side street an impromptu fountain squirted playfully into the dust-burdened air, the result of a central water-pipe punctured by a slug from one of the bomb's iron entrails. But these things were not noted until dawn and comparative peace had returned to Walthamstow and men could count with some degree the cost of the reckless invasion.

[Sidenote: British aeroplanes pursue.]

Before the clouds had swallowed up the hateful visitant the noise of its attack had aroused the military guards across Epping Forest, in Chingford village, and, aided by a search-light, the anti-aircraft-gun opened its unavailing fire on the Zeppelin--ineffective, except that its returning shrapnel smashed up several roofs and battered some innocent heads. The Germans had gauged their skyward path to London along which, apparently, they felt reasonably safe from gun-reach. But they had barely headed homeward before a flock of army aeroplanes, rising from all points of the compa.s.s, were in hot pursuit. One of the Britishers was shot down by the men aboard the Zeppelin. Neither speed nor daring counts for much in an encounter between flying-machines and swift dirigibles of the latest types. The advantage lies solely with the one that can overfly his adversary. This can be achieved by a biplane or monoplane pilot only if he has a long start from the ground and time enough to surmount his opponent. This is difficult even in daylight with a cloudless sky. Given darkness and clouds, the chances for success are tremendously against the smaller craft.

[Sidenote: The old switchman a victim.]

Eight bombs in all were launched on Walthamstow--two of them ineffectual. The sixth bomb fell into a field close beside the railway line and worked a hideous wonder. It blew into never-to-be-gathered fragments all that was mortal of old Tom c.u.mbers, the signalman. They found only his left hand plastered gruesomely against the gra.s.sy bank of the railway cut--not a hair nor b.u.t.ton else.

The great series of attacks by the ma.s.sed German Army against the mighty forces of Verdun began in February, 1917, and continued throughout the following months. Taken as a whole, it was the most dramatic effort in all its phases which took place between the German and French forces.

The French showed during these terrible months, the spirit of devotion and sacrifice which was never excelled during the war.