LONDON'S AIR DEFENCES.

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume LII, Issue 115, 21 May 1918, Page 7

LONDON'S AIR DEFENCES.

There is a man in London to-d.-iy with a never-ending duty, and upon his broad shoulders rests the responsibility of the safety of the lives of 15,000,000 people. At»any insatnt night or day he must be ready to act. The safety of the people depends upon the quickness of his action. Me is Major-General Edward Baildy AshmorC, C.8., M.V.0., C.M.G.. clilof of tho London Air Defences. By training lie is gunner and airmail, too. In a barely furnished 1 office, this tall, blue-eyed soldier, with a calm, determjtT/adl face—an. auiodrat of t3ie old Army schol in dress and speech—plans against the coming of the Hun. Day and night be is never away from the telephone which links him up with the cordon of defences he has so cunningly drawn . It takes but a few short minutes for a Gotha to aproach London from the mists of the North Sea, and during a raid General Ashmore takes sole charge of the chess-board 01 the defences. While the guns are booming he is "somewhere in the operating room" closely following on his maps the course of the raiders.

•General Ashmore carries his 46 years lightly. He has seen service with the guns in South Africa, where he was •severely Avounded, and) he went to France with the R.F'.C at the outbreak of war.

There is no trace of war weariness in his alert figure. The morning after a. trying night raid' finds him at his office ready for a, fast drive of inspection around the defences long beloie most people have read the official communique. He knows all his guns and fal his gunners, and. he talks with affectionate pride of his night fliers who have "reached the highest attainments in airmanship.'' With every word he lets fall General ' Ashmore unconsciously shows his supreme confidence in the ability, of Bri- | tish airmen and guns to beat the raiders. "The Germans don't like coming now," he says. If there are any timorous folk in "London, they, would do well to talk with General Ashmore. One leaves him with the feeling of the man who, imagining himself to be suffering from some incurable disease, has visited, the .specialist only to be told that his complaint is nothing more serious than indigestion. Everything about the man—the maps on the wail, the plain flat desk cleared of papers, the simple furniture —speaks of preparation and efficiency. "No defence," he says, 'can make it_ certain that a single raider in a- combined attack will be prevented from getting through, but I don't envy him his job, and now, night or day, the more machines the Germans send the more they are likely to lose.