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.
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