While the marauders still floated with bare steerage-way in flaunting disdain, the inexplicably delayed firing order to the guns was flashed around, and--like a pack of dogs baying the moon, and with scarcely more effect--London’s “air defence” came into action. Everything from machine-guns to three-and four-inchers,--not one in the lot built for anti-aircraft work,--belched forth the best it had. Up went the bullets and shrapnel, and down they came again, down on the roofs and streets of London. Far, far below the contemptuous airships the little stars of bursting shrapnel spat forth their steel bullets in spiteful impotence, and back they rained on the tiles and cobbles. Suddenly a gruffer growl burst forth from the yelping pack, as the gunners of some hitherto unleashed piece of ordnance received orders to join the attack. At the first shot a star-burst pricked the night in the rear of the second airship, and well on a line with it; a second exploded fairly above it; and then--all at once I was conscious that the searchlights were playing on a swelling cloud of white mist which was trailing away into the north-east. The Zeppelin had evidently taken a leaf from the book of the squid. The tinkle of shrapnel bullets on the roof sent me down at this juncture to join the gathering of my fellow guests on the ground floor, where, on the manager’s calling attention to the fact that my knees were shaking from the cold, I was glad to avail myself of the loan of his overcoat. I was not unappreciative of his delicacy in attributing the undeniable shiver in my frame to the cold, and I have not yet entirely made up my mind just to what extent the chill night air, standing in a twisted and cramped position in order to look up, and sheer funk shared the responsibility for it. I have been under shell-fire on several occasions, and I confess quite frankly that I never before felt anywhere near so “panicky” as during that long half-minute in which the airships appeared certain to pass directly overhead. The explanation of this, it seems to me, may be found in the fact that, in the trenches or in a fort which is under fire, one is among cool, determined, and often callous men who are meeting the expected as a part of the day’s work, while in a Zeppelin raid one is more or less unconsciously affected by the unexpectedness of it, and by the very natural terror of the unhardened non-combatants. At any rate, to say that there was not a very contagious brand of terror “in the air” in the immediate vicinity of the swath of last night’s raid would be to say something that was not true of my own neighbourhood.