LONDON'S MUTED LIGHTS.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LI, Issue 15748, 24 October 1914, Page 4 (Supplement)

LONDON'S MUTED LIGHTS.

STREET LAMPS OUT.

HUMOURS OF THE EYE.

London has been a city of muted lights owing to the possibility nf an attack by airships. Not only were street lights dimmed, but the authorities requested that in order to render more difficult the identification of particular parts of London arc lights, sky signs, illuminated facias, and powerful lights of all descriptions used outside for advertising or brilliantly illuminating shop fronts be dispensed with. Where the shop front con- , sisted of a considerable area of glass brilliantly lit from inside a reduction of lighting intensity was effected. In its general effect London might be an enormous household practising economy. The unnecessary lights are riot used, and those which must be are at a peep. Along the main streets half the standards and swung lamps are not lit, and the others only glow instead of glare. Taxis and cabs form a maze in the obscurity of the yards outside Charing Cross and Victoria Stations, which are under half-lights within also, while the staging of their platforms runs out darkly into the night. At Cannon Street, the glass roof of which makes it a notable mark, electricity is being discarded, and there is a return to gas and the gloom of 30 years ago. The Embankment tramcars run out from the shrouded riverside with windows curtained and lights screened. The band in the Embankment Gardens plays in the dark. The face of Big Ben is black.

Merely to the eye London masked in this way presents memorable effects. While on the main routes the 'buses seem to grope a staccato way among the shadows, side streets flash unusually vivid vistas of coster stalls under flares. • One gets puzzled in the broad spaces of the chief thoroughfares. The viscid courts and alleys remain familiar. The street traffic is a pattern of monochrome blotches. About the grey precincts of the great buildings, at Westminster or St. Paul's, figures steal like shadows. There is more than a humour of the eye, however, about masked London. All are aware of a tension that causes the mind to leap to figures and . symbols. The densest has been shaken into an imaginative mood. Anyone who has, followed public meetings in the past five' weeks knows that. One of the strangest incidents in this month of strange incidents was to hear in a city hall a merchant apologise with a tremor in his voice for a reference to Sir John French's despatch, which his heart was too full of to keep out of a discussion of interests on foreign bills. It is this shaken and uplifted mood which makes one susceptible to the muted lights of London; and it is the same mood that sent the crowds to the Embankment to watch the searchlight at Charing Cross.

The remark of a workman going home from that sight showed tnat its significance was translated in the popular mind to the searchlights of the fleet that guards the darkened coast of our island. The air of rumour is full of Zeppelins, but so it is of Cossocks; and, rightly or wrongly, the one is as much a matter of mere curious speculation as the other. There is nothing but a strange contrast between the murk of their town and the hopes of the Londoner. British fortunes in the war have undergone at least a rare amendment, and though London has not celebrated by a shout the victorv the placards proclaim, she holds elation in her heart. So her citizen takes a last look, before turning in, at the wakeful eye searching the sky, and thinks of the ever-wakeful Fleet; and so to bed. secure, an. hour or two before his usual.