To Kiel in the 'Hercules'

from the Allied Naval Commission, and that of those in the remaining German warships, accounting for the difference by the fact that the former had been kept busie

, but, whatever may be the reason for it, we found the morale of the great Zeppelin stations suffered ve

own were the odds against them after the night when the destruction of the first Zeppelin over Cuffley, in September, 1916, proved that the British had effectually solved the problem of igniting the hydrogen of the inner ballonettes-one cannot but conclude that the morale of the whole personnel must have been very high during even this trying period. If it had not been high, there would undoubtedly have been mutinies at the airship stations, such as are

f a bombing raid by aeroplanes launched from the Furious. It was known that little had been done to rehabilitate it as a service station since that time, and the Commission's airship experts' desire to visit what was left of the sheds was actuated by a wish to see what damage

nd Zeppelins-was vastly greater even than that from the British raid on Tondern. The Germans speak of this disaster with a good deal of bitterness, usually alluding to the cause as "mysterious," but rather giving the impression that they believe it to have been the work of "Allied agents." If this is true, the job will stand as a fair offset against any single piece of work of the same character that German agents perpetrated in France, Britai

that practically all of the Zeppelin raids over England were launched from there. The popular idea at the time-which even appears to have persisted with most Londoners down to the present-was that airship stations had been constructed in Belgium, and that these alternated with those of Germany in dispatching raiders across the North Sea to England. A single glimpse of such a station as Nordholz is enough to show that the huge amount of labour and expense involved in building even a comparat

most effective of it, was done from there. There were grim tales to be told by that band of hard-eyed, straight-mouthed, bull-necked pilots-all that survived some scores of raids over England and some hundreds of reconnaissance flights over the North S

e south or east. It was through the same low-lying, dyked-in country, however, where the water difficulty, unlike most other parts of the world, was one of drainage rather than of irrigation. Great Dutch windmills turned ponderously under the impulse of the light sea-breeze

al, cast off as soon as the last of the party had clambered over its side, and the short run across the grey-green tide of the estuary was made in less than a quarter of an hour. Four powerful army cars-far better machines, these, than the dirigible junk heaps we had been compelled to use at Wilhelmshaven-were waiting beside the slip, and another ten minutes of what struck

nanted-and the nuclei of what had been budding suburbs were more suggestive of the appearance of a Western American mushroom metropolis after the collapse of a boom than a town of Europe. The railway station-a fine example of Germany's so-called "New Art" architecture-in its spacious waiting-rooms, broad subways, and commodious train shed

their hands as our cars drove up, and a goodly number of men solemnly bared their heads as we filed past. The special which awaited us at a platform reached after walking through a long vaulted subway running beneath the tracks consisted, like the one we had left on the other side of the river, of an e

end of an hour, however, the patches of standing water disappeared, and presently the bulk of the great sheds of Nordholz began to notch the northern skyline, where they stood crowning the crest of the first rising ground in the littoral betwee

lin officers was an ancient individual of a type which seemed to recall the fatherly old Jehus of the piping days of Oberammergau. Every time the officers saluted, he raised his hat, bowed low from the waist, and exc

ng into the motor to precede us as pilot, he asked the party to dispose itself as best it could in the horse-drawn vehicles. Then, with old "Jehu" holding the re

any" kimono of pale mauve, her Brunhildian brow was crowned with a "permanently Marcelled" coiffure of the kind one sees in hairdressers' windows-disdained all cover, and so stepped out upon her veranda just in time to see the elder of her blonde-braided offspring in the act of waving a Teddy Bear-or it may have been a woolly lamb or a dachshund-at the tail of the proces

laconically observed the Yankee Ensign sitting next me

nd with what care the site had been chosen and laid out. Occupying the only rising ground near the coast south of the Kiel Canal, it is quite free from the constant inundations which threaten the alluvial plain along the sea. The sheds are visible from a great distance, but it is only when one draws near them that their truly gigantic s

ir on the circumference from the huge revolving shed in the centre of the circle. The whole plan has something of the mystic symmetry of an ancient temple of the sun. Of the half-dozen pairs of sheds necessary to complete the circle, four had been constructed and were in use. Each shed was built

ilment of some far-reaching plan. Costly and scarce as asphalt must have been in Germany, the many miles of roads connecting the various sheds were laid deep with it, and, as I had a chance to see where repairs were going on, on a heavy base of concrete. The sheds were steel-framed, concrete-fl

ilt very recently, many in the by no means uneffective "New Art" style, to the simple solidity of which the Germans seemed to have turned in reaction from the Gothic. Beyond all doubt Germany was planning years ahead with Nordholz, both as to war and peace service. They

nting its shifting in the heavy winds. Wherever the trees had encroached too closely upon the hangars, the plantations had been burned off. Over one considerable area the accumulations of ash in the depressions showed the destruction to have been comparatively recent, an

the officers of the station were waiting to receive and conduct us round. A hard, fit, capable-looking lot of chaps they were. Every one of them had at least one decoration, most of them many, and among these were two or three Orders Pour de Mérite, the German V.C. One at least of them-the great long-distance pilot,

the same wide, thin-lipped mouth that had predominated right through the officers we had met at Norderney. These, I should say, are characteristic of the great majority of the outstanding men of both of Germany's air services. The steady eye

ks of their collars. A Major of the R.A.F., who had been walking at my side and doing a bit of "sizing up" on his own account, put the difference rather well when he said, as we waited our turn to pass in through the small side door of the great grey wall of the shed: "If I was taking temporary refuge in a hospital, convent, or orphan asylum during a German air raid, I'd feel a

ingsway) were comparable to the sheer wave of amazement which swept over me when, having passed from the cold grey light of the winter morning into the warm golden glow of the interior of the big shed to which we had come, I looked up and beheld the towering loom of the starboard side of "L-68," with the sweeping lines of her, fining to points at both ends, exaggerating monstrously a length which was sufficiently startling even when expressed in figures. The secret of the hold which the Zeppelin had for

me was supported by a number of heavy wooden props evenly distributed along either side from end to end. Its mate, on the other hand, being full of hydrogen and practically ready for flight, had to be prevented from rising and bumping against the yellow skylights by a series of light cables, the upper ends of which were

to destroy Zeppelins by bomb had invariably-with the exception of the one brought down by Warneford in Belgium in 1915-resulted in failure, was doubtless largely responsible for this belief in the existence of a protecting net, whereas the reason for those failures is probably to be found in the fact that only about one bomb in a hundred will find enough resistance in striking an airship to detonate. At any rate,

ams of the searchlights was proved by the uncharred fragments of fabric one had picked up at Cuffley and Potters' Bar. But the German designers had been giving a good deal of study to in

the numbered "switchboard" in the rearmost car, from which they could be released, still remained. The cars, free from every kind of protuberance that could meet the resistance of the air, were effectively and gracefully "stream-lined." The framework and bodies of the cars were made of the light but strong "duraluminum" alloy, which the Germans have spent many years

bulging ballonettes obstruct the view considerably-is quite as impressive in its way as the premier survey of it from the outside. No 'tween decks prospect in the largest ship afloat, cut down as it is by bulkheads, offers a fifth of the unbroken sweep of vision that one finds opened before him as he climbs up inside the tail of a modern airship. Although airy ladders and soaring lengths of framework intervene, they are no more than lace-work fretting the vast space, and the eye roams free to where the side-braces of the narrow "walk" seem to run together in the no

that the inspection of "L-68" having reached the rearmost car, was near its finish. Clambering back to earth, I found the

pression about ten feet deep and seven hundred feet in diameter. The floors of both sheds (which stand side by side, with only a few feet between) are flush with the level of the ground, so that the airships they house may be run out and in without a jolt. The turning mechanism, whi

em to be used on days when it would be out of the question to launch them from, or return them to, an ordinary hangar. The one point against it seems to be its almost prohibitive cost. This central shed at Nordholz was designed some time before the war, and was compl

-had become almost useless for housing the latest Zeppelins. The proof of this was seen at one of the older sheds which we visited, where both of the airships it contained had been cut off fore and aft to reduce their lengths sufficiently to allow them inside. Thirty or forty feet of the framework of the bows and sterns of each, stripped of their covering fabric, were standing in the corn

flights over England were claimed for this remarkable veteran, besides many scores of reconnaissance voyages. All of the surviving pilots appeared to have an abiding belief in her invulnerability-a not unnatural attitude of the fatalist toward an instrument which has succeeded in defying fate. This is th

ith one of the smaller swift types of half-rigids when it was brought down north of London-the first to be destroyed over England-had flown L-14 many times, and come home safe, and so had, --, our greatest pilot, who was also lost north of London, very near where the other was brought down, and where we think you had some kind of trap. L-14 saw these and many other Zeppelins fall in flames and the more times she came home the more was our belief in her strength. The pilot who flew her was supposed to take more chances (because she really ran no risks, you see), and if you have ever read of how one Zeppelin in each raid always swooped low to drop her bombs, you now know that she was that one. Because we had

he "protecting flight" of aeroplanes) mentioned that he had taken part in a number of the 1916 raids over the Midland industrial centres. Knowing the Stygian blackness in which this

, a town is a very large mark, and you seem to 'sense' the nearness of great masses of people, anyhow. Perhaps the great anxiety they are in establ

I saw rather more tha

ces our "hosts" of the day had acquiesced in the plainly expressed desire of the senior officer of the party that we should confine our menu to what we carried in our own "nose-bags." Nordholz, however-quite possibly with no more than an enlarged idea of what were its duties under the circumstances-was not to be denied. A couple of plates of very appetizing German red-cabbage sauerkraut, with slices of ham and blood sausage, were waiting upon a large sidetable as we entered the reception-room, and to these, as fast as a very nervous waiter could br

r pilots and commissioners in the Hercules, however, I suppose there's no valid reason why we should hesitate to partake of this banquet. I'll leave you free to decide for yourselves what you want to do on that score." We did. It was the American Ensign who, smacking his lips over the last of his

jaw that would have made that of a wolf-trap look soft and flexible in comparison-I recognized at once as having been reproduced in the German papers as the portrait of the great Schramm, who had been killed when his Zeppelin was brought down at Potters' Bar. Another-the bust of a man of rather a bulkier figure than the first, but with a face a shade less brutal-was also strangel

uished himself by landing from R-34, after

ht down in England could have landed safely instead of being burned in the air. Of the remains of the

streaking earthward across the north-western heavens. After walking all the rest of the night-with a lift from an early morning milk cart-I had arrived on the scene at daybreak, and before the cordon of soldiers which later kept the crowds back had been drawn. They had just cut a way through the wreckage to one of the cars, and were cooling down the glowing metal with a stream pumped by a little village fire-engine. Then they began taking out what remained of the bodies of the crew. Some had been almost entirely consumed by the fierce flames, and it is literally true that many of the blackened fragments were hardly recognizable as human. But there was one notable