The
very word of Zeppelin was heard with hilarity. There were comic
articles in the newspapers, taunting the German Count who had
made those gas-bags. There were also serious articles proving the
impossibility of a raid by airships. They would be chased by French
aviators as soon as they were sighted. They would be like the
Spanish Armada, surrounded by the little English warships, pouring
shot and shell into their unwieldy hulks. Not one would escape down
the wind.
The police of Paris, more nervous than the public, devised a system
of signals if Zeppelins were sighted. There were to be bugle-calls
throughout the city, and the message they gave would mean "lights
out!" in every part of Paris. For several nights there were rehearsals
of darkness, without the bugle-calls, and the city was plunged into
abysmal gloom, through which people who had been dining in
restaurants lost themselves in familiar streets and groped their way
with little shouts of laughter as they bumped into substantial shadows.
Paris enjoyed the adventure, the thrill of romance in the mystery of
darkness, the weird beauty of it. The Tuileries gardens, without a
single light except the faint gleams of star-dust, was an enchanted
place, with the white statues of the goddesses very vague and
tremulous in the shadow world above banks of invisible flowers which
drenched the still air with sweet perfumes.
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