thingsmagazine.net‘s jpl mentioned that his fambly posesses a fragment of the zeppelin L32, shot down over England the 23rd of September 1916. A police account may be found here, and entertainingly, an illustration of Lt. Sowrey’s victory over the L32 may be found within the deep reservoir of Rosebud’s WWI and Early Aviation Image Archive, the link that prompted my discussion with jpl in the first place.

(Rosebud is a former comrade-in-pixels of mine from my days as a kite-wrassler in the underpopulated massively-multiplayer online sim Dawn of Aces.)

I’m pretty sure it’s a different 23rd of September than the one the song is about. It’s also worth noting that this is not the Great Zeppelin Raid, which took place in February 1916.

jpl notes that it’s uncertain how the object came to his family. If our cousins over there behaved as we did when one of these huge things came down in our countryside, I’d guess a relative came as a part of a crowd and took the cross away as a souvenir. I would particularly direct new readers to the comments on the linked entry which feature personal anecdotes relating to souvenirs and at least one eyewitness acount of the death of the airship in question, the USS Shenandoah.

In this instance, there is a song.