I had walked long and was about to eat my picnic lunch, and stopped and spoke with her.  We soon came to the one topic in Germany—­the war.  She was eighty-four years of age, she told me, and she worked for twelve hours a day.  Her mother had seen Napoleon pass through the red-roofed village hard by.  She well remembered what she called “the Bismarck wars.”  She was of the old generation, for she spoke of the Kaiser as “the King.”

“No,” she said, “this war is not going like the Bismarck wars—­not like the three that happened in 1864, 1866, 1870, within seven years when I was a young woman.”  She was referring, of course, to Denmark, Austria, and France.  “We have lost many in our village—­food is hard to get.”  Here she pointed to the two thin slices of black bread which were to form her mid-day meal.  She did not grumble at her twelve hours’ day in the fields, which were in addition to the work of her little house, but she wished that she could have half an hour in which to read history.

Her belief was that the war would be terminated by the Zeppelins.  “When our humane King really gives the word, the English ships and towns will all be destroyed by our Zeppelins.  He is holding back his great secret of destruction out of kindness.”

The remark of that simple, but intelligent old woman as to the restraint imposed by the Kaiser upon the Zeppelins constituted the universal belief of all Germany until the British doggedly built up an air service under the stress of necessity, which has brilliantly checked the aerial carnival of frightfulness.  People in Great Britain seem to have no conception of the great part the Zeppelins were to play in the war, according to German imagination.  That simple old peasant lady expressed the views that had been uttered to me by intelligent members of the Reichstag—­bankers, merchants, men and women of all degrees.  The first destruction of Zeppelins—­that by Lieutenant Warneford, and the bringing down of LZ77 at Revigny, did not produce much disappointment.  The war was going well in other directions.  But the further destruction of Zeppelins has had almost as much to do with the desire for peace, in the popular mind, as the discomfort and illness caused by food shortage and the perpetual hammerings by the French and British Armies in the West.

It should be realised that the Zeppelin has been a fetish of the Germans for the last ten years.  The Kaiser started the worship by publicly kissing Count Zeppelin, and fervently exclaiming that he was the greatest man of the century.  Thousands of pictures have been imagined of Zeppelins dropping bombs on Buckingham Palace, the Bank of England, and the Grand Fleet.  For a long time, owing to the hiding of the facts in England of the Zeppelin raids, even high German officials believed that immense damage had been done.  The French acted more wisely.  They allowed full descriptions of the aeroplane and Zeppelin raids in France to be published, and the