“I shall want you to-night,” repeated the Herr Baron, “and you will meet me at ten o’clock, let us say, in St. Paul’s Churchyard.” “Himmel! Herr Baron!” I exploded, “that would be in the very centre of the raid!” “Did I ever say that it would not?” he asked coldly, “of course it will be in the centre of the raid. You understand, at ten o’clock. The War Office require a detailed account by eye-witnesses of the damage which is done.” “But my messenger arrives at Fishguard to-night,” I said with a tremor in my voice. “Forgive me if I am agitated, Herr Baron, but I realize the terrible importance, the absolute necessity, of meeting that boat.” “At ten o’clock you will be in St. Paul’s Churchyard,” said the Baron. How I loathed and hated this tyrant. We Germans are naturally lovers of freedom. We despise the sycophant and the toady. Tyranny to us is a pestilential disease to be stamped out with an iron heel. Woe to those who endeavour to enslave the German, for they are biting on granite! I told the Baron that I would meet him at the appointed time. “Don’t come before ten,” he said. “We will remain until the raid is over.” I lifted my hat and bowed as I parted from him in Piccadilly, and I prayed, most fervently, that the earth would open and swallow this pig, whose abominable manners and low attitude to men not so well born as himself (though of that I am not sure, for there were many stories about my mother’s friendship for the Graf von Maldesee, which I sometimes reflect upon with a certain amount of satisfaction) aroused in me the deepest scorn. I could eat no dinner that night, I could do no work that afternoon. I sat in my office until a quarter to ten, suffering, I think, from a touch of malaria and ague which I contracted in America. I arrived in St. Paul’s Churchyard, dark and gloomy and silent, on the stroke of ten. I had arranged to meet the Baron at the corner of one of the lanes which slope down to Upper Thames Street, and here I took my station. At quarter-past ten he had not arrived. At twenty minutes past ten a hundred searchlights flashed into the sky and the first gun-shot woke the sleeping city. The Zeppelin was coming straight to the City, but was west of where I stood. I heard the thud of its bombs and the devil’s chorus of the guns. I saw the skies speckled with shrapnel bursts, but much of what happened in that brief space of time between its appearance and its disappearance is blotted from my memory.