CHAPTER XL.
BELEAGUERED LONDON.
A month had passed since the battle of Dover. It had been a month ofincessant fighting, of battles by day and night, of heroic defencesand dearly-bought victories, but still of constant triumphs andirresistible progress for the ever-increasing legions of the League.From sunrise to sunrise the roar of artillery, the rattle ofmusketry, and the clash of steel had never ceased to sound to thenorth and south of London as, over battlefield after battlefield, thetwo hosts which had poured in constant streams through Harwich andDover had fought their way, literally mile by mile, towards thecapital of the modern world.
Day and night the fighting never stopped. As soon as two hostiledivisions had fought each other to a standstill, and from sheerweariness of the flesh the battle died down in one part of the hugearena, the flame sprang up in another, and raged on with ever renewedfury. Outnumbered four and five to one in every engagement, and withthe terrible war-balloons raining death on them from the clouds, theBritish armies had eclipsed all the triumphs of the long array oftheir former victories by the magnificent devotion that they showedin the hour of what seemed to be the death-struggle of the Empire.
The glories of Inkermann and Balaclava, of Albuera and Waterloo,paled before the achievements of the whole-souled heroism displayedby the British soldiery standing, as it were, with its back to thewall, and fighting, not so much with any hope of victory, for thatwas soon seen to be a physical impossibility, but with the invincibledetermination not to permit the invader to advance on London saveover the dead bodies of its defenders.
Such a gallant defence had never been made before in the face of suchirresistible odds. When the soldiers of the League first set foot onBritish soil the defending armies of the North and South had, withthe greatest exertions, been brought up to a fighting strength ofabout twelve hundred thousand men. So stubborn had been the heroismwith which they had disputed the progress of their enemies that bythe time that the guns of the League were planted on the heights thatcommanded the Metropolis, more than a million and a half of men hadgone down under the hail of British bullets and the rush of Britishbayonets.
Of all the battlefields of this the bloodiest war in the history ofhuman strife, none had been so deeply dyed with blood as had been thefair and fertile English gardens and meadows over which the hosts ofthe League had fought their way to the confines of London. Only theweight of overwhelming numbers, reinforced by engines of destructionwhich could strike without the possibility of effective retaliation,had made their progress possible.
Had they met their heroic foes as they had met them in the days ofthe old warfare, their superiority of numbers would have availed thembut little. They would have been hurled back and driven into the sea,and not a man of them all would have left British soil alive had itbeen but a question of military attack and defence.
But this was not a war of men. It was a war of machines, and thosewho wielded the most effective machinery for the destruction of lifewon battle after battle as a matter of course, just as a man armedwith a repeating rifle would overcome a better man armed with a bowand arrow.
Natas had formed an entirely accurate estimate of the policy of theleaders of the League when he told Tremayne, in the library atAlanmere, that they would concentrate all their efforts on thereduction of London. The rest of the kingdom had been for the presententirely ignored.
London was the heart of the British Empire and of theEnglish-speaking world, for the matter of that, and therefore it hadbeen determined to strike one deadly blow at the vital centre of thewhole huge organism. That paralysed, the rest must fall to pieces ofnecessity. The fleet was destroyed, and every soldier that Britaincould put into the field had been mustered for the defence of London.Therefore the fall of London meant the conquest of Britain.
After the battles of Dover and Harwich the invading forces advancedupon London in the following order: The Army of the South had landedat Deal, Dover, and Folkestone in three divisions, and after a seriesof terrific conflicts had fought its way _via_ Chatham, Maidstone,and Tunbridge to the banks of the Thames, and occupied all thecommanding positions from Shooter's Hill to Richmond. These threeforces were composed entirely of French and Italian army corps, andnumbered from first to last nearly four million men.
On the north the invading force was almost wholly Russian, and wasunder the command of the Tzar in person, in whom the supreme commandof the armies of the League had by common consent been now vested. Aconstant service of transports, plying day and night between Antwerpand Harwich, had placed at his disposal a force about equal to thatof the Army of the South, although he had lost over seven hundredthousand men before he was able to occupy the line of heights fromHornsey to Hampstead, with flanking positions at Brondesbury andHarlesden to the west, and at Tottenham, Stratford, and Barking tothe east.
By the 29th of November all the railways were in the hands of theinvaders. A chain of war-balloons between Barking and Shooter's Hillclosed the Thames. The forts at Tilbury had been destroyed by anaerial bombardment. A flotilla of submarine torpedo-vessels had blownup the defences of the estuary of the Thames and Medway, and led tothe fall of Sheerness and Chatham, and had then been docked atSheerness, there being no further present use for them.
The other half of the squadron, supported by a few battleships andcruisers which had survived the battle of Dover, had proceeded toPortsmouth, destroyed the booms and submarine defences, while adetachment of aerostats shelled the land defences, and then in amoment of wanton revenge had blown up the venerable hulk of the_Victory_, which had gone down at her moorings with her flag stillflying as it had done a hundred years before at the fight ofTrafalgar. After this inglorious achievement they had been laid up indock to wait for their next opportunity of destruction, should itever occur.
London was thus cut off from all communication, not only with theoutside world, but even from the rest of England. The remnants of thearmies of defence had been gradually driven in upon the vastwilderness of bricks and mortar which now held more than eightmillions of men, women, and children, hemmed in by long lines ofbatteries and entrenched camps, from which thousands of guns hurledtheir projectiles far and wide into the crowded masses of the houses,shattering them with bursting shells, and laying the whole streets inruins, while overhead the war-balloons slowly circled hither andthither, dropping their fire-shells and completing the ruin and havocwrought by the artillery of the siege-trains.
Under such circumstances surrender was really only a matter of time,and that time had very nearly come. The London and North-WesternRailway, which had been the last to fall into the hands of theinvaders, had been closed for over a week, and food was running veryshort. Eight millions of people massed together in a space of thirtyor forty square miles' area can only be fed and kept healthy underthe most favourable conditions. Hemmed in as London now was, frombeing the best ordered great city in the world, it had degeneratedwith frightful rapidity into a vast abode of plague and famine, amass of human suffering and misery beyond all conception orpossibility of description.
Defence there was now practically none; but still the invaders didnot leave their vantage ground on the hills, and not a soldier of theLeague had so far set foot in London proper. Either the besiegerspreferred to starve the great city into surrender at discretion, andthen extort ruinous terms, or else they hesitated to plunge into thattremendous gulf of human misery, maddened by hunger and madedesperate by despair. If they did so hesitate they were wise, forLondon was too vast to be carried by assault or by any series ofassaults.
No army could have lived in its wilderness of streets swarming withenemies, who would have fought them from house to house and street tostreet. Once they had entered that mighty maze of streets and squaresboth their artillery and their war-balloons would have been useless,for they would only have buried friend and foe in common destruction.There were plenty of ways into London, but the way out was a verydifferent matter.
Had a general assault been attempted
, not a man would ever have gotout of London alive. The commanders of the League saw this clearly,and so they kept their position on the heights, wasted the city withan almost constant bombardment, and, while they drew their suppliesfrom the fertile lands in their rear, lay on their arms and waitedfor the inevitable.
Within the besieged area martial law prevailed universally. Riotswere of daily, almost hourly, occurrence, but they were repressedwith an iron hand, and the rioters were shot down in the streetswithout mercy; for, though siege and famine were bad enough, anarchybreaking out amidst that vast sweltering mass of human beings wouldhave been a thousand times worse, and so the King, who, assisted bythe Prime Minister and the Cabinet Council, had assumed the controlof the whole city, had directed that order was to be maintained atany price.
The remains of the army were quartered in the parks under canvas, andbilleted in houses throughout the various districts, in order tosupport the police in repressing disorder and protecting property.Still, in spite of all that could be done, matters were rapidlycoming to a terrible pass. In a week, at the latest, the horses ofthe cavalry would be eaten. For a fortnight London had almost livedupon horse-flesh. In the poorer quarters there was not a dog to beseen, and a sewer rat was considered a delicacy.
Eight million mouths had made short work of even the vast suppliesthat had been hurriedly poured into the city as soon as the invasionhad become a certainty, and absolute starvation was now a matter of afew days at the outside. There were millions of money lying idle, butvery soon a five-pound note would not buy even a little loaf ofbread.
But famine was by no means the only horror that afflicted Londonduring those awful days and nights. All round the heights the boomingof cannon sounded incessantly. Huge shells went screaming through theair overhead to fall and burst amidst some swarming hive of humanity,scattering death and mutilation where they fell; and high up in theair the fleet of aerostats perpetually circled, dropping theirfire-shells and blasting cartridges on the dense masses of houses,until a hundred conflagrations were raging at once in different partsof the city.
No help had come from outside. Indeed none was to be expected. Therewas only one Power in the world that was now capable of coping withthe forces of the victorious League, but its overtures had beenrejected, and neither the King nor any of his advisers had now theslightest idea as to how those who controlled it would now use it. Noone knew the real strength of the Terrorists, or the Federation whichthey professed to control.
All that was known was that, if they choose, they could with theiraerial fleet sweep the war-balloons from the air in a few moments anddestroy the batteries of the besiegers; but they had made no signafter the rejection of their President's offer to prevent the landingof the forces of the League on condition that the British Governmentaccepted the Federation, and resigned its powers in favour of itsExecutive.
The refusal of those terms had now cost more than a million Britishlives, and an incalculable amount of human suffering and destructionof property. Until the news of the disaster of Dover had actuallyreached London, no one had really believed that it was possible foran invading force to land on British soil and exist for twenty-fourhours. Now the impossible had been made possible, and the lastcrushing blow must fall within the next few days. After that who knewwhat might befall?
So far as could be seen, Britain lay helpless at the mercy of herfoes. Her allies had ceased to exist as independent Powers, and theRussian and the Gaul were thundering at her gates as, fifteen hundredyears before, the Goth had thundered at the gates of the Eternal Cityin the last days of the Roman Empire.
If the terms of the Federation could have been offered again, it isprobable that the King of England would have been the first man toown his mistake and that of his advisers and accept them, for now thechoice lay between utter and humiliating defeat and the breaking upof the Empire, and the recognition of the Federation. After all, thekinship of a race was a greater fact in the supreme hour of nationaldisaster than the maintenance of a dynasty or the perpetuation of aparticular form of government.
It was not now a question of nation against nation, but of raceagainst race. The fierce flood of war had swept away all smallerdistinctions. It was necessary to rise to the altitude of the problemof the Government, not of nations, but of the world. Was the geniusof the East or of the West to shape the future destinies of the humanrace? That was the mighty problem of which the events of the next fewweeks were to work out the solution, for when the sun set on theField of Armageddon the fate of Humanity would be fixed for centuriesto come.