OF all city dwellers I am sure the Londoner is the most orderly and the most capable of self-government, as he likewise is the most phlegmatic. Because of these common traits among the masses of the populace an air raid over London, considering its potential possibilities for destruction, is comparatively an unexciting episode everywhere in the metropolis, save and except only in those districts of the East End where the bulk of the foreign-born live. There, on the first wail of the shrieking sirens, before the warning “maroon” bombs go up or the barrage fire starts from protecting batteries in the suburbs and along the Thames, these frightened aliens, carrying their wives and children, flock pell-mell into the stations of the Underground. They spread out bedclothes on the platforms and camp in the Tube, which is the English name for what Americans call a subway, and sometimes refuse to budge until long after the danger has passed. At the height of the bombardment they pray and shriek, and the women often beat their breasts and tear at their hair in a very frenzy.

This is true only of the emotional Rus-and Rumanians. The native Londoners'ed in the most leisurely fashion walk to the subterranean shelters. Indeed, the chief task of the police is to keep them from exposing themselves in the open in efforts to get a sight the enemy. People who live on the lower floors of stoutly built houses mainly bide where they are, their argument—and a very sane one it is—being that since the chances of a man's being killed in his home at such a time are no greater than of his roof being pierced by lightning during a thunderstorm he is almost as safe and very much more comfortable staying in his bed than he would be squatting for hours in a damp Cellar.

No matter how intense the bombardment the busses keep on running, though they have few enough passengers. From one's window one may see the big double-deckers lumbering by like frightened elephants, empty of all but the drivers and the plucky women conductors, who invariably stick to their posts and carry on. The London bobby promenades at his usual deliberate pace no matter how thick the shrapnel from the defender guns may splash down about him in the darkened street; and the night postman calmly goes his rounds too.

One night in London after the alarm had been sounded I invaded the series of walled caverns and wine vaults known as the Adelphi Arches, which are just off the Strand, near Charing Cross. Several hundred men, women and children had already taken refuge there. Near one of the entrances a young mother was singing her baby to sleep; a little farther on a group of Australian soldiers were trying, rather unsuccessfully, to open beer bottles with their finger nails; and at the mouth of a side basement opening off a layer cave half a dozen typical Londoner civilians, of the sort who wear flat caps instead of hats and woollen neckerchiefs instead of collars, were warmly discussing politics in high nasal notes. Nowhere was there evident any concern or distress, or even any considerable amount of irritation at our enforced inconvenience.

Still, any man who figures that the Englishman is not stimulated to stouter resistance by these visitations from the German would be mistaken. Beneath the surface of his apparent indifference there is produced at each recurrent attack an enhanced current of hate ior the government that first inaugurated this system of barbaric warfare against unfortified communities. There is something so radically wrong in the Prussian propaganda it is inconceivable that any mind save a Prussian's mind could have conceived it. His imagination is on backward and he thinks hind part before. In the folly of his besetting madness he figures that he can subjugate a man by mangling that man's wife and baby to bits—the one thing that has always been potent to make a valiant fighter out of the veriest coward that lives.

They may not waste their rage in vain and vulgar mouthings—that would be the German, not the English way—but one may be sure that the people of London will never forgive the Kaiser for the hideous things his agents, in accordance with his policy of frightfulness, have wrought among innocent noncombatants in their city and in their island. They are entering up the balance in the ledgers of their righteous indignation against the day of final reckoning.

After I had seen personally some of the results of one of the nocturnal onslaughts I too could share in the feelings of those more directly affected, for I could realise that, given an opportunity now denied him by the mercy of distance and much intervening salt water, the Hun would be doing unto American cities what he had done to this English city; and I could picture the same unspeakable atrocities perpetrated upon New Haven or Asbury Park or Charleston as have been perpetrated upon London and Dover and Margate.

There was an old clergyman of the Established Church who lived in a rectory not far from Covent Garden, a man near seventy, who probably had never wittingly done an evil thing or a cruel thing in all his correct and godly life. He came to have the name of the Raid Preacher, because at every aerial attack he went forth fearlessly from his home, making the tour of all the shelters in the neighbourhood. At each place he would cheer and quiet the crowds there assembled, telling them there was no real danger, reading to them comforting passages of the Scriptures and encouraging them to sing homely and familiar songs. He had been doing this from the time when the Zeppelins first invaded the London district. He had held funeral services over the bodies of hundreds of raid victims, so they told me. Regardless of the religious affiliations of the dead, or the lack of church ties, their families almost invariably asked him to conduct the burials.

One night in the present year—I am forbidden to give the exact date or the exact place, though neither of them matters now—the raiders came. The old clergyman hurried to a cellar under a near-by business establishment, where a swarm of tenement dwellers of the quarter had congregated for safety. He was standing in their midst in the darkened place, bidding them to be of good and tranquil faith, when a two-hundred pound bomb of high explosives, sped from a Gotha eight thousand feet above and aimed by chance, came through the building, bringing the roof and the upper floors with it.

A great many persons were killed or wounded.

When the rescuers came almost the first body they brought out of the burning ruins was that of the Raid Preacher. They had found him, with torn flesh and broken bones, but with his face unmarred, lying on the floor. His thumbed leather Bible was under him, open at a certain page, and there was blood upon its leaves.

Men who saw his funeral cortÈge told me of it with tears in their eyes. They said that people of all faiths walked in the rain behind the hearse, and that the biggest of all the funeral wreaths was a gift from a little colony of poor Jewish folk in the district, and that one whole section of the sorrowful procession was made up of cripples and convalescents—pale, lame, halt men and women and children who limped on crutches or marched with bandaged heads or with twisted trunks; and these were the injured survivors of previous raids, to whom the dead man had ministered in their time of suffering.

In a hospital I saw a little girl who had been most terribly maimed by the same missile that killed the old rector. I am not going to dwell on the state of this child. When I think of her I have not the words to express the feelings that I have. But one of her hands was gone at the wrist, and the other hand was badly shattered; so she was just a wan little brutally abbreviated fragment of humanity, a living fraction, most grievously afflicted.

There was the pitiable wraith of a smile on her poor little pinched commonplace face, and to her breast, with the bandaged stump of one arm and with her remaining hand that was swarthed in a clump of wrapping, she cuddled up a painted china doll which somebody had brought her; and she was singing to it. The sight, I take it, would have been very gracious in the eyes of His Imperial Majesty of Prussia—except, of course, that the little girl still lived; that naturally would be a drawback to his complete enjoyment of the spectacle.