But this is judging the Zeppelins purely as offensive weapons of war. Even as such they forced the British Empire to maintain a large standing army and a huge armament of guns and aeroplanes in England by threatening to land a mammoth army of invasion there from Belgium. What they did to spread terror in Belgium and to keep the German army informed by wireless of the conditions behind the British and French and Belgian lines in the first advance to the Marne is a matter of history. Also what they performed in disorganizing the armies and in disconcerting the people of Antwerp and Bucharest, not to mention many Russian cities and Paris itself, during the Hun advance against those cities, is almost too horrible to relate. Over the Rumanian capital alone they descended so low—because there were no antiaircraft guns to defend the city—that they scarcely flew clear of the buildings as they rained down hundreds of tons of high explosives on the frightened inhabitants, and even bombed a part of the imperial palace, where the Queen was nursing the Crown Prince. This unlawful use of these giant aircraft does not detract from what they demonstrated could be done in the way of aerial navigation and transportation under the frightful opposition of war, and it is only an augury of what will be accomplished when the same vessels of the air will be put to carrying man up and down the aerial highways of the heavens, which know no barriers, obstructions, or hostile opposition. Their greatest service to the Germans was as aerial scouts rather than as ethereal battleships or cruisers; and if these rigid dirigibles had performed no other feats for the Huns, from the Teutonic point of view at least, their work in planning and directing every move of the German high-seas fleet in the great naval battle off Jutland amply repaid Germany for the time and money and effort expended in building those air cruisers. On May 30 in the first stage of that battle it will be recalled that Admiral Sir David Beatty was cruising with his scout fleet looking for the Germans several hundred miles east of the British grand fleet, which was under Admiral Sir John Jellicoe, somewhere off the Orkney Islands. Flying out under the protection of a fog-bank that was moving down over the North Sea a German naval Zeppelin discovered the isolated position of Admiral Beatty’s scout fleet and sent a wireless message to the German high-seas fleet, which came out under Admiral Von Scheer with the sole object of cutting off and destroying Admiral Beatty’s fleet before it could unite with the British grand fleet. Undoubtedly, had it not been for a seaplane launched from the mother ship _Engadine_ and flown by Flight Lieutenant Frederick J. Rutland, who discovered the entire German navy coming out, the British scout fleet might have been cut off and completely destroyed before Admiral Jellicoe could come to the rescue.