THIS is an artist’s fanciful version of the headlong fall of one of those inflated monsters on which the enemy had set such high hopes. Well, we have been inconvenienced not a little by them in our goings and comings by night, and no one need pretend that he likes bombs being dropped on his or his children’s heads out of a midnight sky. But in the old glorious volunteering days we never had such a recruiting sergeant, so that the military value of the Zeppelin need not be denied.

Apart from this manifest effect, there has transpired in this whole business little to disturb the verdict of our optimists that there was nothing to worry about. They venture only under cover of a darkness which prevents them hitting what they dimly see from their once safe heights, which is little, or seeing what they hit, which is much—England being a biggish mark.

And advertising their presence as burglars who knock over coal-scuttles, a boy in an aeroplane flies over them and their miles of aluminium and acres of silk make a Brock’s benefit for an awakened city to cheer. We should cheer less, thinking with some pity of the imprisoned crews, if the affair were conceived with less reckless vagueness, without such disproportion between aim and result. A blind ape with a ton of high explosives could do a good deal of damage in a city with ordinary luck.

But Raemaekers sees this in symbol: “a vulnerable gasbag,” he seems to say, “flaming, spectacular always, to destruction.”

JOSEPH THORP.