THE GREAT AIR RAID.

Taranaki Daily News, 20 October 1916, Page 5

THE GREAT AIR RAID.

THROUGH GERMAN EYES. ENGLAXD "DEVASTATED." LONDON'S 'KDESCRIBiBLE TERROR." London, Sept."]). We in England, and Londoners in particular, have been pluming ourselves on the fact that 'the great air raid on the night of September 2-3 was, in view of the number of airships employed, a rather bigger, fiasco than that of its predecessors, and that the utter destruction of the liun craft known as L2l was quite a handsome offset to Jhc material damage efl'ectcd either by her pr her twelve known consorts. It appears, however, that we do not know the worst, which, according to the Leipzig Naehrichten, was very bad indeed. Accarding to this veracious newspaper poor old England suffered ''devastation on an unheard of scale," and is dotted with ruined towns from the shores of the English Channel to the north-eastern most part of our coast, whilst London itself was the scene of terrible fires caused by the Huns' bombs. It would be a. shame to spoil a good story, so here is the Maehrichten's outburst rendered into plain English: "A most welcome message of joy! An air raid on England with the co-opera-tion of t.n unprecedented number of air cruisers! Several naval and arnjy air squadrons' have sown the land of, our worst foe with bombs, causing devastation on an unheard-of scale, and sp'reading a horror bordering on insanity everywhere from the north-easternmost extremity of the English coast to the south-western districts of London/ DESOLATION'. "We can picture the desolation that must reign jn Colchester, Ipswich, Sheerness, Margate and Ramsgate, where day and night the work for England's Army, and Navy goes on, and where the German air weapon has now completed its pitiless task of destruction, "London above all has been most generously dealt with in the way of bombs. Our unapproachable king of the air distinctly saw the immense flames rising up into the night sky as with many a mighty crash blocks of houses were torn asunder. Pilled with proud satisfaction our heroes could wend their way homeward, because they knew that tiieir bombs had done excellently well. Old England's constantly improved defences once again proved a glorious failure.

"How the inhabitants of Dover and Folkestone must have trembled, how the holiday-makers at Brighton and Hastings must have broken out in n cold sweat of terror when the iron thunderstorm broke over their heads! LONDON'S TERROR.

" 'ln London the terror at tile Zeppelin attacks is indescribable.' Thus only yesterday wrote a friend who had spoken with neutral witnesses of the Gorman air raids. Once again the merciless lords of the Island Empire have been filled with this uncanny, overwhelming horror, and wherever their stricken, hunted eyes turn they behold fresh pictures of ghastly destruction. :; We must see to it, however, that their fears are constantly aggravated. They must find not a moment'* seenvity anywhere. They must be made to comprehend that their insular aloofness lielongs to the past, and that we are in a position to clutch by the throat the unscrupulous incendiaries of the world conflagration. Even though the whole of London had to be beaten into one gigantic heap of ruins, we must hammer it into their addled brains with' utter ruthlessness that the German people have the iron will to overthrow their worst foe."