succumbed to hysteria.
As the explosions and rumbles outside grew fainter, voices that had sung out of terror sang out of defiance, and by the time the orchestra played ‘Keep the Home Fires Burning’ the audience was a chorus of patriotic fervour. Soon, a Boy Scout appeared in the emergency exit to call the all-clear, and they ended with ‘God Save the King.’
When Denham, Sidney, and Aunt Joan followed the crowd in single file through the wreckage of the foyer someone was again screaming. Outside, they stared in disbelief. People bloodied by flying glass were being tended on the steps until ambulances arrived. The grand crescent of the Aldwych, lit by the blazing roof of a building, was strewn with masonry and cobblestones. An acrid stench of cordite hung in the air. In his shock Denham was not certain what he was seeing among the flames and shadows. An omnibus overturned, its axle shattered. A dying horse’s snorting and whinnying. A number of clothed forms, limbs at unfamiliar angles, sprawled over a mosaic of smashed glass.
‘Oh, gosh, look,’ said Sidney.
In the distance to the east were the cigar shapes of four Zeppelins, golden in the lights of the fires, the drone of their propeller engines clear on the night air. Arc lights swept the sky, holding one gleaming ship, then another, in the fingers of their beams. Artillery fire boomed, making chrysanthemum blooms of flame in the sky beneath them, but nothing touched them.
‘It’s a battlefield,’ said Aunt Joan, holding a handkerchief to her mouth. ‘London’s a battlefield.’
Denham continued to stare, after his aunt and Sidney had turned to leave. He could not take his eyes off the four magnificent messengers of death.
H e awoke clammy with sweat. Sheets writhed around his body, leaving striations and gullies across his neck and chest, like an artist’s impression of the canals on Mars. His dream of the Zeppelins had merged-as his dreams often did-into one of the trenches. After a few weeks’ training in the London Rifle Brigade he’d been shipped to France. Only a few days after that he’d seen his first man killed. And then more men killed than he could ever count.
A breeze from the lake moved the curtains, and light bouncing off water played on the ceiling of the elegant room.
He looked at his watch, and leapt out of bed.
‘Damn.’
He had a Zeppelin to catch.
A t eleven o’clock Denham found the hangar in a frenzy. Beneath the vast tethered bulk of the Hindenburg, hundreds of ground crew were moving through the shadows, preparing the ship for the voyage to Berlin. Surfaces buzzed with the roar of the propeller engine cars, which were running a thunderous preflight test. The ship almost filled the hangar’s cathedral space. From the rows of tall windows along the right-hand wall, shafts of light were given mass and texture by the dust in the air. Where the ceiling could be glimpsed above the leviathan, a galaxy of electric lights twinkled.
Dr Eckener was directing proceedings from the top of a truck loaded with hydrogen canisters, booming through a megaphone his demands for pressure readings, weather reports, and general haste. How soon all this purposeful mayhem would become chaos, Denham thought, without the concentrating effect of the old man’s magnetism-the force that kept the whole enterprise going.
Behind him a whistle sounded, and with an echoing clang the building’s great doors began to roll apart. Denham saw rays of sunshine blaze across the ship’s nose and along the streamlined ridges of its hull, and felt his suitcase become light in his hands.
Eckener spotted him, and climbed down from his perch.
‘Good morning, good morning,’ he bellowed, without the megaphone. He was wearing his commander’s cap, an old leather flying jacket over his tweed suit, and a waistcoat smudged with cigar ash.
‘My dear Richard,’ he said, shaking Denham’s hand warmly. ‘I hope everything on board will be to your comfort and satisfaction.’
‘I don’t doubt it. How are the skies looking?’
‘A low drizzle over the Reich capital this morning. Also a stiff northeasterly. So we’d better depart before the weather plays any dirty tricks-and hope the clouds clear for our moviemakers. They’re on board, together with a pair of our local Party big shots, along for the champagne and the free ride.’
Eckener held up his pocket watch for all to see and shouted, ‘Ten minutes.’
‘I don’t know how to thank you,’ Denham said.
‘Richard, my boy, just come back and see your old friend soon. I hope you get the story you want. You’re in Captain Lehmann’s hands now.’
‘You’re not commanding the ship?’
‘Unfortunately, no…’ The old man hesitated. ‘It seems I’m being moved aside for incurring the wrath of the Propaganda Ministry once too often.’ Eckener chuckled, but there was worry in his eyes. ‘I have apparently “alienated myself from the Reich,” and you reporters are no longer to mention me in the newspapers.’
Before Denham could respond, a young steward was beside them, pointing at the leather case hanging from his neck.
‘No personal cameras permitted on board.’
‘Oh for goodness’ sake, man,’ Eckener barked. ‘He has my authorisation to take his camera on board.’ The young man stepped back, smarting, and Denham noticed the small Party pin in his lapel. ‘Make yourself useful by offering Herr Denham whatever information he requires to write his article.’
‘Yes, sir.’
Eckener smiled at Denham apologetically. ‘You will have to hand him your matches, however. Not even you are exempt from that rule.’
The noise of the engine test stopped, filling the hangar with an iron silence. Eckener leaned towards Denham’s ear.
‘I’m sure I don’t need to advise caution to you of all people. The Party has members among the crew. They’ll be watching you…’
Denham winked. ‘Don’t you worry. I won’t tell them your joke about a little girl going up to Hitler and-’
‘Till we meet again,’ Eckener said in a loud voice, cocking his head towards the offended steward, and then giving a wheezy laugh despite himself. ‘That was a good one. If you hear any more, remember them for me… now hurry.’
Denham turned and climbed the narrow aluminium stairway, thinking of the joke Eckener had told him. A little girl approaches Hitler and his entourage with a bouquet of flowers but stumbles. Hitler catches her, cups her face in his hands, and kneels down to say a few quiet words. Afterwards people crowd around her. ‘What did the Fuhrer say to you?’ they ask. The little girl is puzzled. ‘He said, “Quick, Hoffmann, a photo!” ’
He was concerned about Eckener. Why did he have to go on making a stand like that, jeopardising his life’s work? It would not make one iota of difference.
Denham continued up into the belly of the ship. It was like boarding a flying ocean liner. He nodded to a bust of old Hindenburg on the landing, then turned the corner into a lounge furnished with modern, comfortable armchairs. On the wall a large mural map of the world traced the routes of the great expeditions, from the voyages of Magellan to the globe-trotting flight of the Graf Zeppelin.
The lounge was separated by a low rail from a long promenade, where wide windows slanting outwards offered panoramic views. Most improbable of all in a craft where everything was designed to save weight, a baby grand piano built of aluminium stood at the far side of the lounge. Above it hung the obligatory portrait of the dictator, whose hyperthyroid glare followed Denham across the room. The soft red carpet deadened his footsteps. The area was deserted.
The Hindenburg was truly an airborne hotel, and a luxurious hotel at that. It was the mother lode of his fantasies, and even greater than he’d imagined-more beautiful, more spacious. He touched the Plexiglas window, almost expecting it to dissolve as he woke from a dream.
‘Zeppelin marsch! ’
Outside, Eckener shouted the order to move, and the hundreds of ground crew picked up the ropes and pulled, walking the giant craft out through the hangar doors like Lilliputians heaving Gulliver into the sun.
In the open, as the men waited for the signal from the control car, Denham caught himself wondering
