WAR-TIME SECRETS

Gisborne Times, Volume LXXI, Issue 11280, 9 August 1930, Page 9

WAR-TIME SECRETS

LONDON terrors;

When the Graf Zeppelin flew over Paris a few weeks ago on her journey round the world the Parisians, watched her with impassive indifference. but Londoners winced as tncy watchcd. Loudon felt her old warwounds opening, and she took scant pleasure in the spectacle. Germans dropped a satchel with a long red aiid white streamer at Wembley High ' School, near the stadium. It contained postcards with the mes'sage'v “Please post these cards.' Postcards instead of high explosives. This generation cannot envisage those war days. It cannot see Piccadilly Circus as I saw it early one morning, after a Zeppelin had dropped a bomb at Swan and Edgar's, itjio ; plateglass windows shattered, and the arms and. legs and heads of the gailv-dressed .’dummies, spattered grotesquely in the debris (writes James' Douglas in the “Sunday Exj pfesisP).- *•"It cannot' setTWarrihgton i Crescent .as I saw it, whole houses i dembMslied and others with their in- | tei'icfiph'(daid. bare* wardrobes with doors-swinging’ in the air, and beds hanigiig perilously in . the air. The raid-death-rolls were kept secret during the war. But- one night 24 men, women, and children were killed, and 30 injured. Her five propellors were revolving slowly, and the great ship was moving hardly .faster than a motor omnibus. She was so low as she rounded the dome of St. Paul’s that the golden cross towered over her. ■ Then she rose a little, dipped her nqse. turned, and steered straight up Fleet street to Trafalgar Square. Then sh'e turned to the right and sailed over Oxford street, a sinister shadow in the haze, and melted in the murk. • • . “Sho- was dun-colored like the London smoke, not silvery.” “I could see the seams of her fabric, lier great fins and rudder, and her huge conical nose. Tire, first Zeppelin seen in London since the. war fanned the cold ashes of memory into a flame of rebellious' resentment Tiro war emotions surged. up. I bristled with the old anger. A man beside me muttered, ‘A fine show, but I was better pleased when 1 saw the Eepp. at Potter’s Bar falling in a golden rain of flames.’ “Then. I remembered the raids, the shrapnel, the bursting shells, the iron fragments pattering on the walls the reverebrating boom of tire bursting bombs, the dug-outs, the roof screens, and the wild rushes for shelter in the tubes. “I recalled the night when the FEpp. dropped a \bomb on Wood street, another that smashed a watermain in Cliancey lane, and a third that blew a taxicab driver to pieces and wrecked a tavern near the Lyceum Theatre. .. . “I watched the soldiers digging out the dead in Wood street. 1 saw the wreckablo of the tavern bar in Aldwycli, the splintered glass, _ and. the poor little pile of blood-stained caps swept into a corner after the dead men had been carried out.”