Page:The Zeppelin Destroyer.djvu/80

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80
THE ZEPPELIN DESTROYER

the insurance people—we concealed the truth. Lionel, who lived in Albemarle Street, not far away often came in to cheer me up, sitting with me, consuming cigarettes, expressing wonder at the reason of my accident, and gossiping technicalities, as airmen will always gossip. Indeed, at the Royal Automobile Club the air 'boys' are the biggest gossips in that institution—which, not so long ago, Prince Henry of Prussia so completely 'nobbled.'

Reminiscences of the 'Prince Henry Motor Tour' through England have not been exactly popular since August 1914—and any member mentioning His Imperial Highness's name had become at once taboo. The remembrance of that tour through the heat and dust of the Moselle valley, and afterwards from south to north of England, is still with me. My pilot in Germany was a certain Uhlan captain, who afterwards distinguished himself as responsible for the atrocities committed upon the poor inoffensive Belgians in Dinant, on the Meuse. The lives of seven hundred of those poor victims, men, women and children butchered in cold blood in the Grand Place outside the church with the bulgy spire cries out for vengeance upon that fair-haired spick-and-span Prussian who sat beside me for many days chatting so amiably in English, and assuring me that Germany would ever be Great Britain's firmest friend and ally.

Ah! How cleverly were we all bamboozled! Whenever I entered the portals of the club I remembered, as many of my fellow-members did, how completely we were gulled and blinded by that