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7 2 London, and an Airplane Bombing. LONDON, FRIDAY, MARCH 8 I spent Wednesday night, after a most trying wait upon the crowded and disordered docks at Liverpool, in the Adelphi Hotel. There were no cabs to be had and no lights in the streets. A universal feeling of excitement and strain seemed to pervade everything. The war is like a boding black cloud over all the land. And yet when I at last reached the hotel I found a noisy ragtime concert going at full blast and couples dancing! One of the most noticeable things, coming freshly from America, is the scarcity of food. I have had no sugar since I came here! Two pieces of black war bread, no meat without a coupon, which I have not yet obtained, and very little butter. Plenty of fish. I came down to London yesterday, arriving at four o’clock, and finding that the pleasant small hotels where I had stopped on former occasions had been taken over by the War Office, I found refuge in the Savoy, which is excessively crowded. I went to bed early, being very tired. About eleven-thirty I was aroused by the terrific booming of guns, deep and ominous. At first I was not certain what it was. It recalled mistily the Fourth of July mornings of my boyhood, when the village blacksmiths at dawn fired their anvils. I went to the window over which the curtains had been closely drawn (by strict orders) and, looking upward, saw the great dipper there in the clear black sky. An instant later a flash of light leaped like a drawn blade above the tops of the buildings and began thrusting and probing among the stars. It found light fleecy clouds not visible to the eye without that penetrating gleam. A moment later another shaft appeared and then another and another, feeling restlessly like fingers through the Heavens. Following each rift of cloud, then darting swiftly for- 8 | Reporting on Public Opinion in Great Britain, France, and Italy ward and pouncing upon some other suspicious spot in the sky. There could be no doubt that we were in the midst of an air raid. Straightway there were other bursts of the anti-aircraft guns, near and more terrific, and far in the sky. As the searchlights crossed them, I could see the star-like bursting of the shells. But no airplanes were visible. I heard running and talking in the halls outside, and quickly dressing myself, I went downstairs. An Englishman in the lift remarked: “Fritzy is at it again!” In the rooms below, the late diners were pouring out, but without excitement . Taxicabs were huddled under the arches outside, and the strand in front was as deserted as a road in Arizona. A lone policeman at the corner told me it was the first raid they had had in two or three weeks. Evidently staged for my first night in London! I had met on the ship a nervously energetic young fellow named Herbert Brenon, an expert moving picture director, who was coming over to take charge of a huge government scheme for making a propagandist picture from a scenario by Hall Caine.5 He made that remarkable sea “movie” called Neptune ’s Daughter, with the first pictures taken under water, and has a long scar on his arm cut by the breaking glass of the diving bell in which he went down. He reminded me of S. S. McClure. Read the New Testament in his steamer chair on the deck, and talked to me before he had known me five minutes about his belief in an almighty God and his hatred of Jews! I ran across this man in the lobby of the hotel, and he and I picked each other up like old acquaintances and went out into the dark streets. A few dim lights were visible, but they were covered over at the tops so as not to throw any illumination upward. We saw a number of dimly illuminated signs—“Shelter During Air Raids”—with an arrow pointing to the places where one might dive to cover. We found that the entire population had dived into subways, under bridges, into basements. Trains and taxis were crowded under the arches along the embankment. Every time there was a new salvo of guns, there was a fresh rush for protection, Brenon and I with the others. The danger is not so much from the...

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