German Surprises 235 prehension than London knew in Napoleon's time. From the outbreak of the present war, before it, Germans had threatened great and terrible things with their Zeppelins. It was true that they had met with many accidents in peace time. It was a fact that technical men in France and England had as- serted that the Zeppelin was too dependent upon air conditions to be an efficient weapon. Yet year after year Germany, by no means reckless with her money, had sunk millions in Zeppelins. To this very hour, too, the general public at least w^as ignorant of what these monsters might accomplish either in an attack upon British ships in the German Ocean or upon London and Paris. On land, under the water and now in the air, Ger- many had provided terrible weapons. Should the Zeppelins, despite all its critics, even approximate the success of the howitzer and the submarine, it was plain that the civilized world would soon see in actual life a realization of the most terrible and tremendous things which the imagination of novel- ists had described in recent years. Certainly the fancied approach of the Zeppelin gave London a keener realization of the meaning of war than it had yet known. It is appropriate, too, to point out once more how thoroughly Germany had so far distanced her op- ponents on the technical side of war making.