For a few moments all was silent; the battle seemed to be over.  The great airship, which had swung sharply to the left, was triumphantly leaving for home.  Then it was that Robinson dropped his incendiary bomb.  Suddenly there was an explosion.  A flame of burning gas leaped into the sky.  London was lit up for ten miles round-about.  Our room was instantly as bright as though a searchlight had flashed into the window.  Far above us was the Zeppelin in flames.  Now it began to sink—­first it was in a blaze of white light, then its outline turned to a dull red, finally it crumpled to a glowing cinder, sank from sight, and fell crashing to the earth.  Then all was dark again.  Death had fallen suddenly upon the men in the Zeppelin and upon some in the sleeping city below.

As we drove through London we passed the draper’s shop, near St. Paul’s Cathedral, where George Williams and a group of twelve young men met in a little upper room on June 6, 1844, to organize the first Young Men’s Christian Association.  A dozen young men with little wealth, influence, or education might not seem a very formidable force, but twelve men have upset the world and changed the course of history before now.  They had only thirteen shillings, or $3.25, in the treasury, and were too poor even to print and send out a circular announcing their little organization.  But George Williams brought his fist down on the table, with the confident words, “If this movement is of God, the money will come.”

It has come.  The twelve men have been multiplied now to a million and a half, scattered in forty lands.  Girded with new strength and with the dauntless optimism of youth, the movement has risen up to minister not only to the millions of British and American soldiers and munition workers, but also to the men in the camps, hospitals, or prisons in most of the nations now at war.  The thirteen shillings have been multiplied until now the permanent Y M C A buildings are worth over a hundred million dollars.  An average of two new huts or centers have been erected and opened by the British or American Associations every day since war was declared; while two permanent buildings in brick or stone rise each week in some part of the world.

Wars are the birth-pangs of new eras.  A new day dawned for the Young Men’s Christian Association with the present war.  At midnight on August 4, 1914, the British Association as it had been for seventy years was buried and forgotten, and a new movement arose on the ruins of the old.  Ninety per cent of its former workers left to join the colors, but a new army of over thirty thousand men and women was mustered and trained within its huts for the service of the British soldiers.  The Y M C A had suddenly to “think imperially,” and to minister to a world at war.