At eleven minutes past one o’clock on the morning of August 25 death came to Antwerp out of the air.  Some one had sent a bundle of English and American newspapers to my room in the Hotel St. Antoine and I had spent the evening reading them, so that the bells of the cathedral had already chimed one o’clock when I switched off my light and opened the window.  As I did so my attention was attracted by a curious humming overhead, like a million bumblebees.  I leaned far out of the window, and as I did so an indistinct mass, which gradually resolved itself into something resembling a gigantic black cigar, became plainly apparent against the purple-velvet sky.  I am not good at estimating altitudes, but I should say that when I first caught sight of it it was not more than a thousand feet above my head—­and my room was on the top floor of the hotel, remember.  As it drew nearer the noise, which had at first reminded me of a swarm of angry bees, grew louder, until it sounded like an automobile with the muffler open.  Despite the darkness there was no doubting what it was.  It was a German Zeppelin.

Even as I looked something resembling a falling star curved across the sky.  An instant later came a rending, shattering crash that shook the hotel to its foundations, the walls of my room rocked and reeled, about me, and for a breathless moment I thought that the building was going to collapse.  Perhaps thirty seconds later came another splitting explosion, and another, and then another—­ten in all—­each, thank Heaven, a little farther removed.  It was all so sudden, so utterly unexpected, that it must have been quite a minute before I realized that the monstrous thing hovering in the darkness overhead was one of the dirigibles of which we had read and talked so much, and that it was actually raining death upon the sleeping city from the sky.  I suppose it was blind instinct that caused me to run to the door and down the corridor with the idea of getting into the street, never stopping to reason, of course, that there was no protection in the street from Zeppelins.  But before I had gone a dozen paces I had my nerves once more in hand.  “Perhaps it isn’t a Zeppelin, after all,” I argued to myself.  “I may have been dreaming.  And how perfectly ridiculous I should look if I were to dash downstairs in my pyjamas and find that nothing had happened.  At least I’ll go back and put some clothes on.”  And I did.  No fireman, responding to a night alarm, ever dressed quicker.  As I ran through the corridors the doors of bedrooms opened and sleepy-eyed, tousle-headed diplomatists and Government officials called after me to ask if the Germans were bombarding the city.

“They are,” I answered, without stopping.  There was no time to explain that for the first time in history a city was being bombarded from the air.

I found the lobby rapidly filling with scantily clad guests, whose teeth were visibly chattering.  Guided by the hotel manager and accompanied by half a dozen members of the diplomatic corps in pyjamas, I raced upstairs to a sort of observatory on the hotel roof.  I remember that one attache of the British Legation, ordinarily a most dignified person, had on some sort of a night-robe of purple silk and that when he started to climb the iron ladder of the fire-escape he looked for all the world like a burglarious suffragette.