In Charing Cross Road I thought of Mary, and the brigade seemed suddenly less attractive.  I hoped the war wouldn’t last much longer, though with Russia heading straight for the devil I didn’t know how it was going to stop very soon.  I was determined to see Mary before I left, and I had a good excuse, for I had taken my orders from her.  The prospect entranced me, and I was mooning along in a happy dream, when I collided violently with in agitated citizen.

Then I realized that something very odd was happening.

There was a dull sound like the popping of the corks of flat soda-water bottles.  There was a humming, too, from very far up in the skies.  People in the street were either staring at the heavens or running wildly for shelter.  A motor-bus in front of me emptied its contents in a twinkling; a taxi pulled up with a jar and the driver and fare dived into a second-hand bookshop.  It took me a moment or two to realize the meaning of it all, and I had scarcely done this when I got a very practical proof.  A hundred yards away a bomb fell on a street island, shivering every window-pane in a wide radius, and sending splinters of stone flying about my head.  I did what I had done a hundred times before at the Front, and dropped flat on my face.

The man who says he doesn’t mind being bombed or shelled is either a liar or a maniac.  This London air raid seemed to me a singularly unpleasant business.  I think it was the sight of the decent civilized life around one and the orderly streets, for what was perfectly natural in a rubble-heap like Ypres or Arras seemed an outrage here.  I remember once being in billets in a Flanders village where I had the Maire’s house and sat in a room upholstered in cut velvet, with wax flowers on the mantelpiece and oil paintings of three generations on the walls.  The Boche took it into his head to shell the place with a long-range naval gun, and I simply loathed it.  It was horrible to have dust and splinters blown into that snug, homely room, whereas if I had been in a ruined barn I wouldn’t have given the thing two thoughts.  In the same way bombs dropping in central London seemed a grotesque indecency.  I hated to see plump citizens with wild eyes, and nursemaids with scared children, and miserable women scuttling like rabbits in a warren.

The drone grew louder, and, looking up, I could see the enemy planes flying in a beautiful formation, very leisurely as it seemed, with all London at their mercy.  Another bomb fell to the right, and presently bits of our own shrapnel were clattering viciously around me.  I thought it about time to take cover, and ran shamelessly for the best place I could see, which was a Tube station.  Five minutes before the street had been crowded; now I left behind me a desert dotted with one bus and three empty taxicabs.