ized that the monstrous thing hovering in the darkness overhead
was one of the dirigibles of which we had read and talked so much,
and that it was actually raining death upon the sleeping city from the
sky. I suppose it was blind instinct that caused me to run to the door
and down the corridor with the idea of getting into the street, never
stopping to reason, of course, that there was no protection in the
street from Zeppelins. But before I had gone a dozen paces I had
my nerves once more in hand. "Perhaps it isn't a Zeppelin, after all,"
I argued to myself. "I may have been dreaming. And how perfectly
ridiculous I should look if I were to dash downstairs in my pyjamas
and find that nothing had happened. At least I'll go back and put
some clothes on." And I did. No fireman, responding to a night
alarm, ever dressed quicker. As I ran through the corridors the
doors of bedrooms opened and sleepy-eyed, tousle-headed
diplomatists and Government officials called after me to ask if the
Germans were bombarding the city.

"They are," I answered, without stopping. There was no time to
explain that for the first time in history a city was being bombarded
from the air.

I found the lobby rapidly filling with scantily clad guests, whose teeth
were visibly chattering. Guided by the hotel manager and
accompanied by half a dozen members of the diplomatic corps in
pyjamas, I raced upstairs to a sort of observatory on the hotel roof. I
remember that one attache of the British Legation, ordinarily a most
dignified person, had on some sort of a night-robe of purple silk and
that when he started to climb the iron ladder of the fire-escape he
looked for all the world like a burglarious suffragette.

By the time we reached the roof of the hotel Belgian high-angle and
machine-guns were stabbing the darkness with spurts of flame, the
troops of the garrison were blazing away with rifles, and the
gendarmes in the streets were shooting wildly with their revolvers:
the noise was deafening. Oblivious of the consternation and
confusion it had caused, the Zeppelin, after letting fall a final bomb,
slowly rose and disappeared in the upper darkness.

The destruction wrought by the German projectiles was almost
incredible. The first shell, which I had seen fall, struck a building in
the Rue de la Bourse, barely two hundred yards in a straight line
from my window. A hole was not merely blown through the roof, as
would have been the case with a shel