Zeppelins had flown over the coast towns and hurled bombs upon its defenceless inhabitants. Each raid had been more and more audacious in its range, and in its general scheme. London and the cities of the Midlands had been, more than once in sight of the enemys airships. Yet a certain section of the Press were still pooh-poohing the real significance of the attempt to demoralise us at home.
Out in St. Jamess Square on the cab-rank which the Club had taken for its own I jumped into my car and drove away down to Gunnersbury, beyond Chiswick, where, in a market-garden, I rented a long shed of corrugated iron, a place wherein, with Teddy, I conducted the experiments which we were making into the scientific and only way by which Zeppelins could be destroyed.
While the world had been wondering, we had worked, and in our work Roseye constantly assisted us. It was hard and secret work, entailing long and patient study, many experiments, and sometimes flights necessitating much personal risk.
Failures? Oh! yes, we had many! Our failures were, indeed, of daily occurrence. More than once, when we thought ourselves within an ace of success, we found that we were faced with the usual failure.
Many, alas! were the disappointments. Yet we all three had one goal in view, keeping it ever before us the fighting of the Zeppelin.
Little did we dream of the strange, dramatic events which were to result from our secret scientific investigations, undertaken in all our enthusiasm.
Could we but have foreseen what the future held for us or the power put forth against us by the Invisible Hand!
Chapter Three
The Brown Deal Box
Six days had gone by.
The weather having continued bright and fine, with a high and steady barometer, all of us at Hendon, quirks and pilots alike, had been up on many occasions.
In secret, I had placed upon my machine a Breguet monoplane with a 200 horse-power Salmson another new invention which, with Teddys aid, I had devised, and was testing. We were keeping the affair a profound secret. Nobody knew of the contrivance evolved out of my knowledge of wireless, save we two, Roseye and my mechanic Harry Theed.
Carefully concealed from the eye it was carried in a large locked box, while, as further precaution, after testing it each time, I put it on my car and took it away to my chambers with me, for we were not at all anxious for any of the mixed crowd at the aerodrome to pry into what we were doing, or to ascertain the true direction of our constant experiments.
One afternoon down at Gunnersbury Teddy, in mechanics brown overalls, was busily engaged repairing a portion of the apparatus which I had broken that morning owing to an unfortunately bad landing.
To the uninitiated the long shed with its two lathes, its tangle of electric wires across the floor, the great induction coils some of them capable of giving a fourteen-inch spark the small dynamo with its petrol engine, and other electrical appliances, would no doubt have been puzzling.
Upon the benches stood some strange-looking wireless condensers, radiometers, detectors and other objects which we had constructed. Also dressed in overalls, as was my chum and fellow-experimenter, I was engaged in assisting him to adjust a small vacuum tube within that heavy, mysterious-looking wooden box which I daily carried aloft with me in the fuselage of my aeroplane.
We smoked gaspers and chatted merrily, as we worked on, until at last we had completed the job.
Now lets put a test on it again eh, Claude? my friend suggested.
Right ho! I acquiesced.
It was already dusk, for the repair had taken us nearly four hours, and during the past half-hour we had worked beneath the electric light.
The shed was on one side of the large market-garden, at a considerable distance from any house. Indeed, as one stood at the door there spread northward several flat market-gardens and orchards, almost as far as the eye could reach.
Presently, when we had adjusted the many heavily-insulated wires, I started the dynamo, and on turning on the current a bright blue blinding flash shot, with a sharp fierce crackling, across the place.
Gad! thats bad! gasped Teddy, pale in alarm. Somethings wrong!
Yes, and confoundedly dangerous to ourselves and to the petrol eh? I cried, shutting off the dynamo instantly.
Phew! It was a real narrow shave! remarked Teddy. One of the narrowest weve ever had!
Yes, my dear fellow, but it tells us something, I said. Weve made an accidental discovery that spark shows that we can increase our power a thousandfold, when we like.
It has, no doubt, given the wireless operators at the Admiralty, at Marconi House, and elsewhere a very nasty jar, laughed Teddy. Theyll wonder whats up, wont they?
Well, we cant help their troubles. I laughed.
I expect weve jammed them badly, Teddy said. Look the aerial is connected up!
By Jove! so it is? I said.
I saw what I had not noticed before, that the network of phosphor-bronze aerial wires strung beneath the roof of the shed had remained connected up with the coils from an experiment we had conducted on the previous afternoon.
Ill pump Treeton about it to-morrow. Hell be certain to have heard if there has been any unusual signals at Marconi House, I said. Theyll no doubt believe that spark to be signals from some new Zeppelin!
No doubt. But we may thank our stars that were safe. Both of us could very easily have been either struck down, or blown up by the petrol-tank. Well have to exercise far more caution in the future, declared Teddy.
Caution! Why, Teddy had risked his life in the air a hundred times in the past four months, flying by day and also by night, and experimenting with that apparatus of ours by which we hoped to defy the Zeppelin.
Those were no days for personal caution. The long dark shadow of the Zeppelin had been over London. Women and babes in arms had been blown to pieces in East Anglia, on the north-east coast, and every one knew, from the threats of the Huns, that worse was intended to follow.
Our searchlights and aerial guns had been proved of little use. London, the greatest capital of the civilised history, the hub of the whole world, seemed to lie at the mercy of the bespectacled night-pirate who came and went as he pleased.
As is usual, the public were saying things but were not acting. Both Teddy and I had foreseen this long ago, for both of us had realised to the full the deadly nature of the Zeppelin menace. It was all very well for a Cabinet Minister to assure us on March 17, 1915, that Any hostile aircraft, airships, or aeroplanes which reached our coast during the coming year would be promptly attacked in superior force by a swarm of very formidable hornets.
Events had shown that the British authorities at that time did not allow sufficiently for the great height at which Zeppelins could travel, or for the fact that, while the airship could operate successfully at night-time, darkness was the least suitable time for aeroplanes in the stage of development which they had reached, on account of the difficulties of starting and of landing in the dark, as well as of seeing or hearing the airship from a machine flying aloft.
The German Government and the German people had thrown their fullest energies into the development of aircraft for war. Unfortunately we had not, and it is not too much to say that, during the first few months of the war, the responsible authorities in this country did not take the aerial menace seriously.
We, as practical airmen, had taken it up seriously very seriously, and, as result, had devoted all our time and all our limited private means for my governor was not too generous in the matter of an allowance towards combating the rapidly increasing peril of air attack.