CHAPTER XXXVIII.
THE BEGINNING OF THE END.
It is now time to return to Britain, to the land which the course ofevents had so far appeared to single out as the battle-ground uponwhich was to be fought the Armageddon of the Western World--thatconflict of the giants, the issue of which was to decide whether theAnglo-Saxon race was still to remain in the forefront of civilisationand progress, or whether it was to fall, crushed and broken, beneaththe assaults of enemies descending upon the motherland of theAnglo-Saxon nations; whether the valour and personal devotion, whichfor a thousand years had scarcely known a defeat by flood or field,was still to pursue its course of victory, or whether it was tosuccumb to weight of numbers and mechanical discipline, reinforced bymeans of assault and destruction which so far had turned theworld-war of 1904 into a succession of colossal and unparalleledbutcheries, such as had never been known before in the history ofhuman strife.
When the Allied fleets, bearing the remains of the British and Germanarmies which had been driven out of the Netherlands, reached England,and the news of the crowning disaster of the war in Europe waspublished in detail in the newspapers, the popular mind seemedsuddenly afflicted with a paralysis of stupefaction.
Men looked back over the long series of triumphs in which Britishvalour and British resolution had again and again proved themselvesinvulnerable to the assaults of overwhelming numbers. They thought ofthe glories of the Peninsula, of the unbreakable strength of the thinred line at Waterloo, of the magnificent madness of Balaclava, andthe invincible steadiness and discipline that had made Inkermann aword to be remembered with pride as long as the English name endured.
Then their thoughts reverted to the immediate past, and they heardthe shock of colossal armaments, compared with which the armies ofthe past appeared but pigmies in strength. They saw empires defendedby millions of soldiers crushed in a few weeks, and a wave ofconquest sweep in one unbroken roll from end to end of a continent inless time than it would have taken Napoleon or Wellington to havefought a single campaign. Huge fortresses, rendered, as men hadbelieved, impregnable by the employment of every resource known tothe most advanced military science, had been reduced to heaps ofdefenceless ruins in a few hours by a bombardment, under which theirmagnificent guns had lain as impotent as though they had been theculverins of three hundred years ago.
It seemed like some hideous nightmare of the nations, in which Europehad gone mad, revelling in superhuman bloodshed and destruction,--aconflict in which more than earthly forces had been let loose,accomplishing a carnage so immense that the mind could only form adim and imperfect conception of it. And now this red tide ofdesolation had swept up to the western verge of the Continent, andwas there gathering strength and volume day by day against the hourwhen it should burst and oversweep the narrow strip of water whichseparated the inviolate fields of England from the blackened andblood-stained waste that it had left behind it from the Russianfrontier to the German Ocean.
It seemed impossible, and yet it was true. The first line of defence,the hitherto invincible fleet, magnificently as it had been managed,and heroically as it had been fought, had failed in the supreme hourof trial. It had failed, not because the sailors of Britain had donetheir duty less valiantly than they had done in the days of Rodneyand Nelson, but simply because the conditions of naval warfare hadbeen entirely changed, because the personal equation had been almosteliminated from the problem of battle, and because the new warfare ofthe seas had been waged rather with machinery than with men.
In all the war not a single battle had been fought at close quarters;there had been plenty of instances of brilliant manoeuvring, oftorpedo-boats running the gauntlet and hurling their deadly missilesagainst the sides of battleships and cruisers, and of ships rammedand sunk in a few instants by consummately-handled opponents; but thedays of boarding and cutting out, of night surprises and fire-ships,had gone by for ever.
The irresistible artillery with which modern science had armed thewarships of all nations had made these feats impossible, and so hadplaced the valour which achieved them out of court. Within the lastfew weeks scarcely a day had passed but had witnessed the return ofsome mighty ironclad or splendid cruiser, which had set out a miracleof offensive and defensive strength, little better than a floatingruin, wrecked and shattered almost beyond recognition by the awfulbattle-storm through which she had passed.
The magnificent armament which had held the Atlantic route had comeback represented only by a few crippled ships almost unfit for anyfurther service. True, they and those which never returned hadrendered a splendid account of themselves before the enemy, but thefact remained--they were not defeated, but they were no longer ableto perform the Titanic task which had been allotted to them.
So, too, with the Mediterranean fleet, which, so far as sea-fightingwas concerned, had achieved the most splendid triumph of the war. Ithad completely destroyed the enemy opposed to it, but the victory hadbeen purchased at such a terrible price that, but for the squadronwhich had come to its aid, it would hardly have been able to reachhome in safety.
In a word, the lesson of the struggle on the sea had been, thatmodern artillery was just as effective whether fired by Englishmen,Frenchmen, or Russians; that where a torpedo struck a warship wascrippled, no matter what the nationality or the relative valour ofher crew; and that where once the ram found its mark the ship that itstruck went down, no matter what flag she was flying.
And then, behind and beyond all that was definitely known in Englandof the results of the war, there were vague rumours of calamities andcatastrophes in more distant parts of the world, which seemed topromise nothing less than universal anarchy, and the submergence ofcivilisation under some all-devouring wave of barbarism.
All regular communications with the East had been stopped for severalweeks; that India was lost, was guessed by intuition rather thanknown as a certainty. Australia was as isolated from Britain asthough it had been on another planet, and now every one of theAtlantic cables had suddenly ceased to respond to the stimulus of theelectric current. No ships came from the East, or West, or South. TheBritish ports were choked with fleets of useless merchantmen, towhich the markets of the world were no longer open.
Some few venturesome craft that had set out to explore the now silentocean had never returned, and every warship that could be made fitfor service was imperatively needed to meet the now inevitable attackon the shores of the English Channel and the southern portions of theNorth Sea. Only one messenger had arrived from the outside worldsince the remains of Admiral Beresford's fleet had returned from theMediterranean, and she had come, not by land or sea, but through theair.
On the 6th of October an air-ship had been seen flying at anincredible speed across the south of England. She had reached London,and touched the ground during the night on Hampstead Heath; the nextday she had descended again in the same place, taken a single man onboard, and then vanished into space again. What her errand had beenis well known to the reader; but outside the members of the CabinetCouncil no one in England, save the King and his Ministers, knew theobject of her mission.
For fifteen days after that event the enemy across the water made nosign, although from the coast of Kent round about Deal and Dovercould be seen fleets of transports and war-vessels hurrying along theFrench coast, and on clear days a thousand telescopes turned towardsthe French shore made visible the ominous clusters of moving blackspots above the land, which betokened the presence of the terriblemachines which had wrought such havoc on the towns and fortresses ofEurope.
It was only the calm before the final outburst of the storm. The Tsarand his allies were marshalling their hosts for the invasion, andcollecting transports and fleets of war-vessels to convoy them. Forseveral days strong north-westerly gales had made the sea impassablefor the war-balloons, as though to the very last the winds and waveswere conspiring to defend their ancient mistress. But this could notlast for ever.
Sooner or later the winds must sink or change, a
nd then thesewar-hawks of the air would wing their flight across the silverstreak, and Portsmouth, and Dover, and London would be as defencelessbeneath their attack as Berlin, Vienna, and Hamburg had been. Andafter them would come the millions of the League, descending like alocust swarm upon the fields of eastern England; and after that wouldcome the deluge.
But the old Lion of the Seas was not skulking in his lair, ortrembling at the advent of his enemies, however numerous and mightythey might be. On sea not a day passed but some daring raid was madeon the transports passing to and fro in the narrow seas, and all thewhile a running fight was kept up with cruisers and battleships thatapproached too near to the still inviolate shore. So surely as theydid so the signals flashed along the coast; and if they escaped atall from the fierce sortie that they provoked, it was withshot-riddled sides and battered top-works, sure signs that the Lionstill had claws, and could strike home with them.
On shore, from Land's End to John o' Groats, and from Holyhead to theForelands, everything that could be done was being done to preparefor the struggle with the invader. It must, however, be confessedthat, in comparison with the enormous forces of the League, the ranksof the defenders were miserably scanty. Forty years of universalmilitary service on the Continent had borne their fruits.
Soldiers are not made in a few weeks or months; and where the Leaguehad millions in the field, Britain, even counting the remnant of herGerman allies, that had been brought over from Antwerp, could hardlymuster hundreds of thousands. All told, there were little more than amillion men available for the defence of the country; and should thelanding of the invaders be successfully effected, not less than sixmillions of men, trained to the highest efficiency, and flushed witha rapid succession of unparalleled victories, would be hurled againstthem.
This was the legitimate outcome of the policy to which Britain hadadhered since first she had maintained a standing army, instead ofpursuing the ancient policy of making every man a soldier, which hadwon the triumphs of Crecy and Agincourt. She had trusted everythingto her sea-line of defence. Now that was practically broken, and itseemed inevitable that her second line, by reason of its miserableinadequacy, should fail her in a trial which no one had ever dreamtit would have to endure.
A very grave aspect was given to the situation by the fact that thegreat mass of the industrial population seemed strangely indifferentto the impending catastrophe which was hanging over the land. Itappeared to be impossible to make them believe that an invasion ofBritain was really at hand, and that the hour had come when every manwould be called upon to fight for the preservation of his own hearthand home.
Vague threats of "eating the Russians alive" if they ever did dare tocome, were heard on every hand; but beyond this, and apart from theregular army and the volunteers, men went about their dailyavocations very much as usual, grumbling at the ever-increasing priceof food, and here and there breaking out into bread riots wherever itwas suspected that some wealthy man was trying to corner food for hisown commercial benefit, but making no serious or combined efforts toprepare for a general rising in case the threatened invasion became afact.
Such was the general state of affairs in Britain when, on the nightof the 27th of October, the north-west gales sank suddenly to a calm,and the dawn of the 28th brought the news from Dover to London thatthe war-balloons of the League had taken the air, and were crossingthe Straits.