different noise, when you
get used to it. You'd better step out of that window. It's against the
law to show light, and if a bomb falls in the street you'd be filled
with glass." I overcame my fascination and obeyed. "It isn't only the
bombs," my friend went on, "it's the falling shrapnel, too."

The noise made by those bombs is unmistakable, unforgetable, and quite
distinct from the chorus of the guns and shrapnel--a crashing note,
reverberating, sustained, like the E minor of some giant calliope.

In face of the raids, which coincide with the coming of the moon, London
is calm, but naturally indignant over such methods of warfare. The
damage done is ridiculously small; the percentage of deaths and injuries
insignificant. There exists, in every large city, a riffraff to get
panicky: these are mostly foreigners; they seek the Tubes, and some
the crypt of St. Paul's, for it is wise to get under shelter during the
brief period of the raids, and most citizens obey the warnings of the
police. It is odd, indeed, that more people are not hurt by shrapnel.
The Friday following the raid I have described I went out of town for a
week-end, and returned on Tuesday to be informed that a shell had gone
through the roof outside of the room I had vacated, and the ceiling
and floor of the bedroom of one of the officers who lived below. He was
covered with dust and debris, his lights went out, but he calmly stepped
through the window. "You'd best have your dinner early, sir," I was told
by the waiter on my return. "Last night a lady had her soup up-stairs,
her chicken in the office, and her coffee in the cellar." It is worth
while noting that she had all three. Another evening, when I was dining
with Sir James Barrie, he showed me a handful of shrapnel fragments. "I
gathered them off the roof," he informed me. And a lady next to whom I
sat at luncheon told me in a matter-of-fact tone that a bomb had
fallen the night before in the garden of her town house. "It was quite
disagreeable," she said, "and broke all our windows on that side."
During the last raids before the moon disappeared, by a new and
ingenious system of barrage fire the Germans were driven off. The
question of the ethics of reprisals is agitating London.

One "raid," which occurred at midday, is worth recording. I was on my
way to our Embassy when, in the residential quarter through which I
passed, I found all the housemaids in the areas gazing up at the sky,
and I was