As for our searchlights, it would have been lunacy to
give away the position of London in these circumstances by using them. French accounts inform us that when the pilots of the Zeppelins. tried to switch their engines on again the petrol was frozen. The huge gasbags were thus at the complete merry of such storms as often occur at great altitudes when people on the earth know nothing. whatever about these convulsions of Nature. Tho crews, in spite of their thick clothing, lost toes and fingers from frostbite. Alto gether the break-up of the largest Zeppelin fleet which Germany ever despatched was comparable with that of the Spanish Armada under the storm that scattered and smashed it on the Scottish and Irish coasts. From every point of view the night and the following day went very heavily against the Germans. Our casualties were thirty.four killed and fifty-six injured, and the Germans lost, say, five Zeppelins worth a quarter of a million pounds each and each carrying a crew of about twenty men.
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