Shaking in every limb, but still resolved to carry out “orders” to the last, the doughty chap slipped his bleeding fingers through the wire loop and trudged off on his way to the station, staggering under the weight of half a hundred pounds of “T.N.T.”[3] That he reached there without mishap is evidenced by a flashlight in one of the “penny pictorials” this morning showing both him and his booty at the wicket of the B---- Street Police Station. [3] Trinitrotoluol. Two or three times during the next couple of hours searchlights flashed out to the east and south, and the blink of shrapnel bursting under barely defined patches of pale yellow indicated that the raid was an ambitious one, participated in by many airships. The heart of the city, however, was not reached again. I have it on good authority this morning that a number of bombs were exploded on the works at Woolwich, but, even if true, this only goes to show that Britain’s great arsenal, if not less, is at least not more vulnerable than the non-military areas. If possible, London took this latest raid even more calmly than the previous one, and the level-headed practicality of the remark of the bus conductor I have quoted--“We’ve got a war to fight. Zepps ain’t war; fergit ’em!”--may be taken as fairly representing the frame of mind in which the metropolis awaits the really frightful visitation that Germany has promised. For three months following the October visitation there were no further air raids on England, and it was known that this immunity was due to one or more of four things: the strengthening of Britain’s anti-aircraft defences, unfavourable weather, the efficacy of the Allies’ reprisals on South German cities, or a dawning realisation on the part of Germany that the maximum physical damage which can possibly be inflicted on Great Britain by air raids can never be more than an insignificant fraction of the damage done to the Teutonic cause as a consequence of resorting to this form of terrorism. As weeks lengthened to months without an attack--even though incessant reports from a score of sources told of feverish Zeppelin construction in all parts of the Kaiser’s dominions--there awakened a hope in the breasts of Germany’s enemies and her friends that the humanitarian consideration had been the moving one. This hope was rudely crushed by the mid-January aeroplane raid--evidently a scouting reconnaissance--upon Kent, and the renewed Zeppelin attacks on Paris and the Midland counties. Subject only to the weather, then, and to such defensive measures as may be taken in France and England, we now know that this least warranted and most cruel of all forms of Teutonic “frightfulness” may be expected to continue until the end of the war. TO BRITISH MERCHANT CAPTAINS