[Sidenote:  Lights are extinguished in the war zone.]

In towns in the war zone, great precaution is taken to prevent even a thin line or dot of light from showing at night.  Only the railroad shows its signal lights, and these are put out at the first alarm, while all moving trains come to a standstill and extinguish what lights they carry.  The lamps in passenger coaches are always put out when the train enters the war zone.  So the bombing aviator has a rather difficult task in getting his bombs exactly where he wants them.  The bomb must be released about a thousand feet in advance of the object aimed at, and the plane must pass over and reverse its course before a second bomb can be thrown at the same target.  The course of a plane can be followed by tracing its bombs.

My position during a bombing raid was most unenviable.  A torpedo cast at the railway station and going a bit too far was likely to land on the two-story brick house in which I was lodged.  One cast at the canteen, and falling short, was likely to do the same.

[Sidenote:  Anticipating air raids.]

It is fashionable among the workers in France to affect great indifference to danger.  I am free to confess that I am not a particularly courageous woman.  My imagination is active, and on nights when we expect a bombing raid I always go through a period of misery before going to bed.  I would not for anything leave the war zone, but I have always a lively vision of coming out of slumber to the accompaniment of fearful noise and the crashing of the building atop, and then my coward imagination paints pictures of lying torn and anguished under settling weights of being burned alive while disabled and unable to extricate myself.  Oddly enough, all my terrors vanish with the falling of the first bomb.  I cannot remember being in what the English call a “blue funk” while a raid is going on, though many a time I have been in one beforehand.

[Sidenote:  Premonition of danger.]

Tuesday night some subtle instinct warned that trouble might come.  In accordance with a natural forethought I slipped into a suit of underwear and woollen stockings under my nightdress.  I must have been asleep in three minutes after my head touched the pillow, for I was dead tired.

[Sidenote:  A bomb lands close by.]

[Sidenote:  The sky blazes with shells.]

I wakened with the sense that I had heard a gun, and, with one stockinged foot thrust out of bed, wondered sleepily whether it was the first, second or third of the alerte, or whether indeed I had not wakened from a dream of a gun.  Probably it was the last gun of the alerte, for the next sound was the thunderous roar of a bomb which clearly had landed close by (it got a railway shed and a freight car on the tracks behind me).  The terrific noise and the shock to our building, which rattled as if it were coming down, considerably accelerated my movements.  I snapped