could have half an hour in which to read history.

Her belief was that the war would be terminated by the Zeppelins.
"When our humane King really gives the word, the English ships and
towns will all be destroyed by our Zeppelins. He is holding back
his great secret of destruction out of kindness."

The remark of that simple, but intelligent old woman as to the
restraint imposed by the Kaiser upon the Zeppelins constituted the
universal belief of all Germany until the British doggedly built up
an air service under the stress of necessity, which has brilliantly
checked the aerial carnival of frightfulness. People in Great
Britain seem to have no conception of the great part the Zeppelins
were to play in the war, according to German imagination. That
simple old peasant lady expressed the views that had been uttered
to me by intelligent members of the Reichstag--bankers, merchants,
men and women of all degrees. The first destruction of
Zeppelins--that by Lieutenant Warneford, and the bringing down of
LZ77 at Revigny, did not produce much disappointment. The war was
going well in other directions. But the further destruction of
Zeppelins has had almost as much to do with the desire for peace,
in the popular mind, as the discomfort and illness caused by food
shortage and the perpetual hammerings by the French and British
Armies in the West.

It should be realised that the Zeppelin has been a fetish of the
Germans for the last ten years. The Kaiser started the worship by
publicly kissing Count Zeppelin, and fervently exclaiming that he
was the greatest man of the century. Thousands of pictures have
been imagined of Zeppelins dropping bombs on Buckingham Palace, the