The Terror of the Zeppelins page 4

For nearly two years no one knew which night would be the last. Death, sighing through the air unheralded, had claimed more than five hundred victims, many of them children; and many hundreds more still suffered from wounds, thinking themselves lucky to be alive to suffer. On more than two score nights the people in towns, villages, and even isolated hamlets had come to dread the crashing, blazing explosions which tore asunder the earth, razed their homes to the ground, and snatched their dear ones from sleep to sudden oblivion. Now the Zeppelin menace was broken. Though the raiders were still to come, stealthfully as before, and loaded with the power of death, their greatest weapon was already blunted - the weapon of panic. Before, their potential victims were defenceless, and at the mercy of the fates; now the forces of the country were united, able and ready to strike blow for blow. And this the enemy knew and understood, even better than the British people.

Between February 17 and September 25, 1917, although no fewer than eighteen Zeppelins took part in six raids, only four were killed and twenty-one injured; and that as a result of over three hundred bombs. The cost to the enemy, however, was two more airships. Eleven ships set out in October, for what was to be the last raid of 1917, and though their straff was far more deadly, only six of the airships got home in safety. The last year of the war saw four raids by the Zeppelins, two of which accounted for one death only, out of nearly fifty bombs dropped by a total of five raiders; and again one of the ships failed to return, being shot down by a British machine. And so, as the war thundered on across the sea, dragging its weary way through the autumn and winter, at least the ones who lived at home - the wives, children, and the aged, were safe once more from one of the most terrifying forms of aerial warfare.