Dickey wrote on a pad: "There must be the devil of a big air-raid on." And MacLauren nodded.
When things got more or less quiet MacLauren ventured in again, saw a place which looked like Harwich harbour, and landed. But it wasn't. However, he shut off the engines. Then he heard night-flying machines passing overhead, and knowing that if he met up with any of the eager young pilots bent on bloodshed they would shoot first and inquire afterwards, he lay snug on the water. The sandwiches and the thermos flask were got out and the chart was carefully examined.
As soon as the hick-boo was over MacLauren had the engines started and took off. Once in the air he saw that the batteries had started up again. But he now knew where he was and flew straight up the coast to Felixstowe, landing outside, as he did not want to knock over a ship or two in the mist.
As we were rising from the table to go to our cabins the door of the mess opened. There stood the I.O. drooping with fatigue, but with a neatly filed and indexed bundle of signals six inches thick in his hand. He went up to MacLauren and said--
"There were no Gothas. Do you realise, young man, that this night you have put everybody in London into their cellars twice?"
At early breakfast next morning the I.O. received an urgent order from the Powers That Be to report elsewhere immediately for important duties, and an hour later as he was departing he said to me--
"I am sorry to go. I had no idea that a flying-boat station was such a busy place."
With lustful pride the Huns called the North Sea the German Ocean, and if there was any part of this dirty sheet of water which justified the name, it was that portion known as the Bight of Heligoland.
Here before the war were the growing harbours and shipyards with which she was challenging the British supremacy of the sea; and during the war her yards which turned out submarines, her seaplane and Zeppelin bases, and the refuges of her High Seas Fleet.
Climbing into a flying-boat and crossing a hundred miles of sea, brings you to the Hook of Holland. Turning north you pass Scheveningen, which is near The Hague, where peace conferences met to mitigate the horrors of war, or do away with it entirely, and supplied the Hun with a ready-made list of forbidden atrocities--atrocities which he immediately made haste to perpetrate.