Another interesting admission of a Zeppelin officer at Nordholz was to the effect that one of their greatest difficulties had arisen through the fact that it had been found practicable and desirable to increase the size of airships far more rapidly than had been contemplated when most of the existing sheds were designed. Thus many hangars--even at Nordholz, where practice was most advanced--had become almost useless for housing the latest Zeppelins. The proof of this was seen at one of the older sheds which we visited, where both of the airships it contained had been cut off fore and aft to reduce their lengths sufficiently to allow them inside. Thirty or forty feet of the framework of the bows and sterns of each, stripped of their covering fabric, were standing in the corners. They assured us that while an airship thus "bobbed" at both ends was not necessarily considered out of commission, it would take several days of rush work to get it ready for flight, and that during most of this time sixty to eighty feet of it--the combined length of the nose and tail which had to be cut off to bring it inside--would have to remain sticking out, exposed to the weather. To any one who, like myself, was not an airship expert, but had been "among those present" at a number of the earlier raids on London, the last shed visited was the most interesting of all, for it contained what is in many respects Germany's most historic Zeppelin, the famous "L-14." Twenty-four bombing flights over England were claimed for this remarkable veteran, besides many scores of reconnaissance voyages. All of the surviving pilots appeared to have an abiding belief in her invulnerability--a not unnatural attitude of the fatalist toward an instrument which has succeeded in defying fate. This is the way one of them expressed it, who came and stood by my side during the quarter-hour in which the inspecting officers were climbing about inside the glistening yellow shell of the historic raider in an endeavour to satisfy themselves, that she was, temporarily at least, incapable of further activities:--