The night was cold and bleak, but full of stars.  He had already mastered the local topography, and he knew now exactly where all the bombs that had been showered upon the place had fallen.  Here was the corner of blackened walls and roasted beams where three wounded horses had been burnt alive in a barn, here the row of houses, some smashed, some almost intact, where a mutilated child had screamed for two hours before she could be rescued from the debris that had pinned her down, and taken to the hospital.  Everywhere by the dim light of the shaded street lamps he could see the black holes and gaps of broken windows; sometimes abundant, sometimes rare and exceptional, among otherwise uninjured dwellings.  Many of the victims he had visited in the little cottage hospital where Aunt Wilshire had just died.  She was the eleventh dead.  Altogether fifty-seven people had been killed or injured in this brilliant German action.  They were all civilians, and only twelve were men.

Two Zeppelins had come in from over the sea, and had been fired at by an anti-aircraft gun coming on an automobile from Ipswich.  The first intimation the people of the town had had of the raid was the report of this gun.  Many had run out to see what was happening.  It was doubtful if any one had really seen the Zeppelins, though every one testified to the sound of their engines.  Then suddenly the bombs had come streaming down.  Only six had made hits upon houses or people; the rest had fallen ruinously and very close together on the local golf links, and at least half had not exploded at all and did not seem to have been released to explode.

A third at least of the injured people had been in bed when destruction came upon them.

The story was like a page from some fantastic romance of Jules Verne’s; the peace of the little old town, the people going to bed, the quiet streets, the quiet starry sky, and then for ten minutes an uproar of guns and shells, a clatter of breaking glass, and then a fire here, a fire there, a child’s voice pitched high by pain and terror, scared people going to and fro with lanterns, and the sky empty again, the raiders gone....

Five minutes before, Aunt Wilshire had been sitting in the boarding-house drawing-room playing a great stern “Patience,” the Emperor Patience ("Napoleon, my dear!—­not that Potsdam creature”) that took hours to do.  Five minutes later she was a thing of elemental terror and agony, bleeding wounds and shattered bones, plunging about in the darkness amidst a heap of wreckage.  And already the German airmen were buzzing away to sea again, proud of themselves, pleased no doubt—­like boys who have thrown a stone through a window, beating their way back to thanks and rewards, to iron crosses and the proud embraces of delighted Fraus and Fraeuleins....