‘Suddenly a flame flashed out from one end of the airship, and almost at the same time she began a nose dive towards the earth, the flame growing and spreading throughout the whole length of her immense body. It was a wonderful, unforgettable sight. The flames lit up the sky and land for miles and miles around with a brilliant red hue as the million and half or so cubic feet of hydrogen were being devoured by the hungry flames. I could read a newspaper with ease in this light, though I was more than ten miles away. The airship took quite two minutes dropping to earth, but during those two minutes mad, deafening cheers rose out of the night from all sides. Hooters from works and from vessels in the Thames and railways shrieked and whistled and screeched, all joining in the general pandemonium of joy. Even from a distance of five miles away I could hear the deep-throated cheers of the Irish Guards in camp there. For a full half-hour the cheering continued, echoing and re-echoing from all sides, and in the intervals of the joyous shouts of half-dressed men, women, and children could be heard the humming of an aeroplane’s uncommonly powerful engines. Again the mysterious red light appeared: then a white light and again a red light, and so on alternately, until the multitude realized that the victor of a great air battle was returning, signalling the story of his success as he made for his aerodrome head quarters, guided by friendly searchlights. Then again such cheers rent the air as may not have ever been heard before anywhere on earth in the blackness of a very early September morning.’ A crowd of persons from a radius of almost twenty miles flocked hastily to the scene of the wreckage. One records how ‘an engine, salved with the two halves of a propeller from the wreckage, lay by the side of a hedge. Men were measuring them with their walking-sticks and women by the length of their umbrellas. Pieces of wood and aluminium had been shot helter-skelter all over the field and were being gathered up as grim yet precious treasures. A cordon, half military, half constabulary, kept the onlookers at a distance of some twenty yards. And all the time the flames were steadily consuming the framework of the terror of the air.’