Hallie Miles was in her London flat one Wednesday evening when she heard a terrible noise. She wrote in her diary:
“[I] crept cautiously upstairs, and peeped, with frightened eyes, out of the open front door, and up at the sky … I saw the shrapnel bursting … as if a star had suddenly exploded. It was very beautiful, but awful too. The sounds were so ghastly and the knowledge that each thud of a bomb falling to earth carried death and destruction with it added to the horror of it all.”
Miles could easily be describing the Blitz of the Second World War, but that is not the case - the incident occurred on 13 October 1915. It was during the First World War that, for the first time in history, a sustained campaign of aerial bombardment took place, initially carried out by giant German rigid airships called Zeppelins
