I felt that my suburban street, secluded
in trees and unimportance, was as remote from the evil I knew of as
though it were in Alaska. When I came to that street I could not see my
neighbours' homes. It was with some doubt that I found my own. And there,
with three hours to go to midnight, and a book, and some circumstances
that certainly had not changed, I had retired thankfully into a fragment
of that world I had feared we had completely lost.

"What a strange moaning the birds in the shrubbery are making!" my
companion said once. I listened to it, and thought it was strange. There
was a long silence, and then she looked up sharply. "What's that?" she
asked. "Listen!"

I listened. My hearing is not good.

"Nothing!" I assured her.

"There it is again." She put down her book with decision, and rose, I
thought, in some alarm.

"Trains," I suggested. "The gas bubbling. The dog next door. Your
imagination." Then I listened to the dogs. It was curious, but they all
seemed awake and excited.

"What is the noise like?" I asked, surrendering my book on the antiquity
of man.

She twisted her mouth in a comical way most seriously, and tried to mimic
a deep and solemn note.

"Guns," I said to myself, and went to the front door.

Beyond the vague opposite shadows of some elms lights twinkled in the
sky, incontinent sparks, as though glow lamps on an invisible pattern of
wires were being switched on and off by an idle child. That was shrapnel.
I walked along the empty street a little to get a view between and beyond
the villas. I turned to say something to my companion, and saw then my
silent neighbours, shadowy groups about me, as though they had not
approached but had materialized where they stood. We watched those
infernal sparks. A shadow lit its pipe and offered me its match. I heard
the guns easily enough now, but they were miles away.

A slender finger of brilliant light moved slowly across the sky, checked,
and remained pointing, firmly accusatory, at something it had found in
the heavens. A Zeppelin!

There it was, at first a wraith, a suggestion on the point of vanishing,
and then illuminated and embodied, a celestial maggot stuck to the round
of a cloud like a caterpillar to the edge of a leaf. We gazed at it
silently, I cannot say for how long. The beam of light might have pinned
the bright larva to the sky for the inspection of interested Londoners.
Then somebody spoke. "I think it is coming our way."