ZEPPELIN DESTROYED.

Taranaki Daily News, 22 January 1916, Page 12

ZEPPELIN DESTROYED.

FALLS INTO CHANNEL AFTER BOMBARDMENT AT DOVER. THRILLING NIGHT SCENES. (New York Herald Correspondent), "Hoit, lioit, hoit, lio-oit!" The signal of death and destruction had come at last to Dover —three short, shrill blasts on the harbor siren and then a long, wailing one. ''To your cellars," it meant, when translated. Not a soul in the great English seaport who did not know the grim significance of it, for notices in bold type warning the populace what to do when the psychological moment arrived had been stuck on the walls everywhere. "Hoit, hoit, hoit, ho-o-it!" had long been a message discussed by parents in subdued tones so that the children should not understand. War is not a game for children. But the siren had been silent for many months and "hoit" had become a joke. On a still day the incessant roar of giant guns pounding the Belgian coast two score miles away or more could sometimes be heard for hours at a time, and men would put their heads on one side, listening with tense expression, for that was the real thing. Human bodies were being torn there into shapeless, living fragments of quivering flesh and blood—fragments like those which were landed by the hundred at Dover every day in the stately white hospital ships. 'But that was all taking place miles away, in another country. No bombardment could ever pulverise humanity in DoVer, THE "ZEP" ARRIVES. "Hoit, hoit, hoit, ho-o-it." The incredible had been achieved. A super-Zeppelin was at our gates, if indeed not actually within them, and the hour was twenty minutes past midnight. "To your cellars," was the authorised programme, but the official programme went awry that night, and the inhabitant? of Dover were to see the sight of their lives —the destruction by anti-aircraft guns of the only Zeppelin that has come to grief so far in England. It was by the merest cittmce that I happened to be at that corner of the couatry during a flying trip from the blood-soaked fields of Flanders. War pursues one everywhere in Europe. After one day in America one oegins to feel the delightful sensation of breathing without its choking influence. But that midnight shriek brought in its train to 'Dover all the hideous memories of the previous months. If anyone scuttled, rabbit fashion, to a cellar, no mention has been made of the fact. In eight seconds all the bedroom windows for miles around were flung wide open. "It's a Zep! It's a Zep!" one heard on every hand. The curtain was being rung up on the long-expected pantomime at last. Nobody even remembered there were any cellars. There was an ear-splitting "boom" that threatened to smash every pane of glass, and a brilliant whip of silver cracked across the darkened sky—the first of the wonderful searchlights that had been nursed for a twelve-month in readiness for this red-letter day. Two other silver streaks, and then two more flashed out, stealing like gargantuan luminous fingers over the black space above. Somewhere up there lurked that relentless enemy one had read of. WHOLE (POPULATION TURNS OUT. The devilish work had started. A full minute has passed since the song ol the siren, and now the cobbled streets resounded with clattering footsteps. Cellars were for unhappy mortals like laggards in Ypres. This was the night of nights. Almost as soon as the first of the mighty sky fingers had battened on to the Zeppelin, picking it out from darkness, a thousand good citizens were scurrying down to the seafront to see this mysterious thing that had come to destroy them. And they were only the advance guard. In four minutes a quarter of the population had joined in the mad scramble to itlie beach, and most of them were women.

Far, far up, two miles over tlieir heads, was poised the very last word in death-dealing contrivances, more brilliantly illuminated than ever was stage drenched in limelight. All six searchlignts had got it, in a phanta3inagorical grip from which there was no escape.

There was an eerie silence over the vast crowd. The quick intake of a woman's breath, a, stifled moan from someone whose emotions struggled for expression, the po"p-pop of anti-aircraft weapons and the swish on the beach of waves that go on for ever, however nations may differ; these were the only sounds now that England and Germany had got their fingers around one another's throats.

The guns were missing their matlc, and the Zeppelin remained as stationary as though held by some invisible anchor.

"Danged impidence, eh?" muttered a burly fisherman at my shoulder. Impudence to send to England a Zeppelin whose commander Tjung in mid-air like a hawk when he was being fired on!

More guns had got to work. Lead, steel and fire seemed to be belching forth from forts all along the cliff, and still the commander of the airship kept his craft motionless while he peered down, blinded 'by the flood of light, to see where he could no most damage. GRIM PYROTECHNICS. Suddenly a new phase opened in the grisly game. Hitherto the crack of big calibre guns and the pop-pop of lesser fry had been awe-inspiring but mystifying, for there was darkness everywherj save in those narrow lanes of light that converged on the aerial monster. Gunners could not see where their shells were going. The great audience on the beach was not getting its money's worth. Every one of these projectiles bad to come down again, shattered by explosion to a thousand pieces, and people who forgot they had cellars somewhere forgot also what effect ten pounds of steel after dropping a couple of miles have on an unprotested pate. But it was not the dropping fragments they were concerned with, ft was the upward flight of the missiles upon which everything depended. And just when they were growing impatient the air was filled with trailer lights—sureiy the prettiest device in all t!ic- machinery of man killing. No mad-brained designer of a epoch-marking fireworks diiphy ever conceived such an effect in his wildest moments. A trailer consists of a cunningly contrived light fixed to the base of n shell so that gunnery officers may judge at night how faulty their aim may be; and as though the war stage manager had resolved upon a stupendous surprise to make the audience tingle, a cloud of sh>?e will o' the vrbUjit ghet huvjg'

ward simultaneously. It was b.ewilder-1 ing; it was beautiful; but it wa? notlike war. It suggested a pyroteehni.'Al spectacle grossly exaggerated. Oniy the boo-oom of the metal-throated guns and the nerve-shattering sound of bombs, dropped with mechanical regularity from the War Lord's sky chariot, carried conviction. It Is the unsojn thing in war that terrifies.

A woman or two fainted, a man shook his list at cloudland in futile indignation. Sometimes a spectator tore his eyes from the gaudy scene overhead and looked out across the black water for a sign of those sinister grey hulks that c-arry Britain's fighters afloat, but none was visible. Most of the warships had slipped their cable hurriedly and were now lying a little way off land. There was work ahead for them when tile lireworks had stopped. For twenty-five minutes, counted on ten hundred watches, the Zeppelin hung as steady as a star, and even those whom it had come to murder began to wonder what manner of men formed a Zeppelin crew, for the guns were getting the range and splashes of red flame where shell bursts were visiblt told how thirty or forty souls in mid-air were on the brink of a cataclysm. THE ZEPPELIN HIT. A new form of thunder drowned all the rest. It was the voice of some mighty gun perched in a cliff cranny away on the left and a trailer light described a lialF-cirele across the theatre. The muzzle was four miles, or perhaps live, from the target, and the first shot told the officer in charge that he was likely to win his laurels that night. An infinitesimal elevation of the weapon and the nc:ot shell, perfectly timed, burst under the stern of 'the Zeppelin, which tilted downward ominously at the nose.

"Why don't the aeroplanes butt inf queried the fisherman. "I thought we'd have a score of 'em up by now." Not a dozen yards from him aerolieutenants were being held back, almost by brute force, from certain destruction in the welter of flying metal until the command "Cease fire" was signalled. A second shot got home, this time from one of the little anti-aircraft guns. It seemed to bite into the vitals of the Zeppelin, which careened over perilously, and a dull roar of approbation went up from the audience. Before those on board could have recovered sufficiently to realise what damage had been done the mammoth gun on the left spoke again. For four or five long seconds the crowd" saw the shell's trailer rushing like some Satanic bird across the darkened dome.

A hit; a. palpable hit. The Zeppelin lurched frantically. Hearts almost stood still while their owners waited for tlic Huns to come crashing headlong down through sheer space. And while they waited, holding tTieir breath, the. Zeppelin faded away into a smoke cloud of its own making.

It was a ludicrous anti-climax. The fingers of light scratched and clawed at the baffling cloud, and for a time there was an agony of uncertainty, a frenzied moment in which it was feared that the maimed creature might utter away. The guns were silent. Instead one heard the sharp, fierce note of aeroplane propellers cutting the air. A swarm of these hornets had teen unleashed to soar battleward in pitch darkness excepting- when ing like some Satanic bird across the searchlight. KILLING THE MONSTER. Slowly the Zeppelin cloud drifted toward the sea, pursued every inch by the remorseless fingers of light, until one end of the fugitive peeped out. Then an aerial hell broke loose. The naval gunners, who had waited with itching fingers for their chance to hurl massive shells in the air without wrecking Dover at the same time, poured projectiles of every description up at the wounded prey, and a fresh (lock of aeroplanes, summoned out of the unknowa by wireless messages, swooped down on it with a hail of hand bombs.

Almost beyond control, with her gear mangled, the Zeppelin struggled further from the gaping crowd on the beach, but, without those swirling, graceful movements of lightning rapidity which form its chief protection, it was doomed Savagely it was attacked in turn by aircraft and seaoraft driving slowly to the east the while, toward the distant shore which it had left for the last time. No quarter was given; perhaps none was expected.

Men who stay dropping death engines over a town for nearly half an hour while a tornado of bursting sh#Ss is raging round them do not hope for pity if the games goes against them When at last their stricken machine fell into the water the darting aeropls.iies kept up their grim work until the Zeppelin lay on the sea a mangled wreck. Nobody outside the charmed inner circle knows what happened to tho crew. This is a war of silence.

The crowd on the beach waited until it was definitely ascertained that Germany had one Zeppelin the less, and then it went home, yawning but satisfled. Only a few heads had been cracked by falling splinters of shell. It had been a great show.