hastily the police began to
clear the assembled crowds. "Go to your homes," they said; and the word
was passed from mouth to mouth, "There's going to be trouble." A chill
of apprehension ran through the city, and men hurrying in the unwonted
darkness across City Hall Park and Union Square came upon the dim forms
of soldiers and guns, and were challenged and sent back. In half an
hour New York had passed from serene sunset and gaping admiration to a
troubled and threatening twilight.

The first loss of life occurred in the panic rush from Brooklyn Bridge
as the airship approached it. With the cessation of the traffic an
unusual stillness came upon New York, and the disturbing concussions of
the futile defending guns on the hills about grew more and more audible.
At last these ceased also. A pause of further negotiation followed.
People sat in darkness, sought counsel from telephones that were dumb.
Then into the expectant hush came a great crash and uproar, the breaking
down of the Brooklyn Bridge, the rifle fire from the Navy Yard, and the
bursting of bombs in Wall Street and the City Hall. New York as a whole
could do nothing, could understand nothing. New York in the darkness
peered and listened to these distant sounds until presently they died
away as suddenly as they had begun. "What could be happening?" They
asked it in vain.

A long, vague period intervened, and people looking out of the windows
of upper rooms discovered the dark hulls of German airships, gliding
slowly and noiselessly, quite close at hand. Then quietly the electric
lights came on again, and an uproar of nocturnal newsvendors began in
the streets.

The units of that vast and varied population bought and learnt what
had happened; there had been a fight and New York had hoisted the white
flag.

4

The lamentable incidents that followed the surrender of New York seem
now in the retrospect to be but the necessary and inevitable consequence
of the clash of modern appliances and social conditions produced by
the scientific century on the one hand, and the tradition of a crude,
romantic patriotism on the other. At first people received the fact
with an irresponsible detachment, much as they would have received the
slowing down of the train in which they were travelling or the erection
of a public monument by the city to which they belonged.

"We have surrendered. Dear me! HAVE we?" was rather the manner in which
the first news was met. They took