To Kiel in the 'Hercules'Freeman, Lewis R. (Lewis Ransome)
History
To Kiel in the 'Hercules'
Freeman, Lewis R. (Lewis Ransome)
Allied Naval Armistice Commission; Hercules (Battleship); World War, 1914-1918 -- Air-fleet bases, Naval -- Germany
The ragged silhouettes of the bombed sheds were in plain sight, but a
mile or so distant, when (the German officers having arrived and taken
their places in a spare compartment) the train, with much wheezing and
clanking, started up again and ran slowly out on to the spur towards
the airship station. It would be but a few minutes more, we told
ourselves, and there would still be light enough to see the general
lay of things. The engine never increased its snail's-pace of three
miles an hour all the way, and when it came to a stop at last, close
beside a towering wall of steel, there was barely light enough to show
the top of the wall against the dusky, low-hanging clouds of the early
twilight. Our conductor had maintained his schedule to the minute. When
we alighted he was voluble in his explanation of how the track of the
spur was in such a state of disrepair that a greater speed would have
been attended by the risk of derailment. There was nothing that we could
say to refute this specious protestation, until, on our return journey
an hour or two later, the engine (which had been making steam in the
interim) whisked the two cars over that same spur at the giddy rate of
twenty miles an hour--a good six times as fast as we had come.
The commander of the station, saying that, as the hour was late,
we doubtless would desire to get the inspection over as quickly
as possible, started off into the darkness at a brisk pace, the
rest--British, Americans, and Germans--stumbling along in pursuit as
best they could. Entering the shed by a side door near which the
train had stopped, we found it so poorly lighted that the opposite
wall showed but dimly, while the ends and the soaring arches of the
roof were lost in dusky obscurity. At that first glimpse--probably the
fresh smell of the cement under foot and the palpable newness of the
pressed asbestos siding under one of the lights had something to do
with it--the shed gave one the impression of being just on the point of
completion. The description of the station furnished to us mentioned no
such structure, so that we were rather at a loss. No explanation was
volunteered, however, and our guide pushed on straight across, with the
evident intention of passing out through the opposite door. But the
senior Allied officer, an American, of commander's rank, stopped him
with a request for more light. Half a dozen switches were then thrown
over, and flooded the great structure with the brilliant radiance of
countless incandescent globes. At once the huge building was revealed as
a double Zeppelin shed of the largest size, just at the end of a long
spell of restoration after being badly damaged. Fragments of duraluminum
and charred pieces of wood and fabric, swept together in great heaps at
the sides, told more of the story, and great fresh patches at several
points in the roof the rest of it. This was the shed in which the two
Zeppelins, which the Germans admitted losing when the station was bombed
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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