CHAPTER VIII. A WORLD AT WAR
1
It was only very slowly that Bert got hold of this idea that thewhole world was at war, that he formed any image at all of the crowdedcountries south of these Arctic solitudes stricken with terror anddismay as these new-born aerial navies swept across their skies. Hewas not used to thinking of the world as a whole, but as a limitlesshinterland of happenings beyond the range of his immediate vision. Warin his imagination was something, a source of news and emotion, thathappened in a restricted area, called the Seat of War. But now the wholeatmosphere was the Seat of War, and every land a cockpit. So closely hadthe nations raced along the path of research and invention, so secretand yet so parallel had been their plans and acquisitions, that it waswithin a few hours of the launching of the first fleet in Franconiathat an Asiatic Armada beat its west-ward way across, high above themarvelling millions in the plain of the Ganges. But the preparationsof the Confederation of Eastern Asia had been on an altogether morecolossal scale than the German. "With this step," said Tan Ting-siang,"we overtake and pass the West. We recover the peace of the world thatthese barbarians have destroyed."
Their secrecy and swiftness and inventions had far surpassed those ofthe Germans, and where the Germans had had a hundred men at work theAsiatics had ten thousand. There came to their great aeronautic parksat Chinsi-fu and Tsingyen by the mono-rails that now laced the wholesurface of China a limitless supply of skilled and able workmen, workmenfar above the average European in industrial efficiency. The news of theGerman World Surprise simply quickened their efforts. At the time of thebombardment of New York it is doubtful if the Germans had three hundredairships all together in the world; the score of Asiatic fleets flyingeast and west and south must have numbered several thousand. Moreoverthe Asiatics had a real fighting flying-machine, the Niais as they werecalled, a light but quite efficient weapon, infinitely superior to theGerman drachenflieger. Like that, it was a one-man machine, but itwas built very lightly of steel and cane and chemical silk, with atransverse engine, and a flapping sidewing. The aeronaut carried a gunfiring explosive bullets loaded with oxygen, and in addition, and trueto the best tradition of Japan, a sword. Mostly they were Japanese, andit is characteristic that from the first it was contemplated that theaeronaut should be a swordsman. The wings of these flyers had bat-likehooks forward, by which they were to cling to their antagonist'sgas-chambers while boarding him. These light flying-machines werecarried with the fleets, and also sent overland or by sea to the frontwith the men. They were capable of flights of from two to five hundredmiles according to the wind.
So, hard upon the uprush of the first German air-fleet, these Asiaticswarms took to the atmosphere. Instantly every organised Government inthe world was frantically and vehemently building airships and whateverapproach to a flying machine its inventors' had discovered. There was notime for diplomacy. Warnings and ultimatums were telegraphed to and fro,and in a few hours all the panic-fierce world was openly at war, and atwar in the most complicated way. For Britain and France and Italy haddeclared war upon Germany and outraged Swiss neutrality; India, at thesight of Asiatic airships, had broken into a Hindoo insurrectionin Bengal and a Mohametan revolt hostile to this in the North-westProvinces--the latter spreading like wildfire from Gobi to the GoldCoast--and the Confederation of Eastern Asia had seized the oil wells ofBurmha and was impartially attacking America and Germany. In a week theywere building airships in Damascus and Cairo and Johannesburg; Australiaand New Zealand were frantically equipping themselves. One unique andterrifying aspect of this development was the swiftness with which thesemonsters could be produced. To build an ironclad took from two to fouryears; an airship could be put together in as many weeks. Moreover,compared with even a torpedo boat, the airship was remarkably simple toconstruct, given the air-chamber material, the engines, the gas plant,and the design, it was really not more complicated and far easier thanan ordinary wooden boat had been a hundred years before. And now fromCape Horn to Nova Zembla, and from Canton round to Canton again, therewere factories and workshops and industrial resources.
And the German airships were barely in sight of the Atlantic waters, thefirst Asiatic fleet was scarcely reported from Upper Burmah, before thefantastic fabric of credit and finance that had held the world togethereconomically for a hundred years strained and snapped. A tornado ofrealisation swept through every stock exchange in the world; banksstopped payment, business shrank and ceased, factories ran on for aday or so by a sort of inertia, completing the orders of bankrupt andextinguished customers, then stopped. The New York Bert Smallways saw,for all its glare of light and traffic, was in the pit of an economicand financial collapse unparalleled in history. The flow of the foodsupply was already a little checked. And before the world-war had lastedtwo weeks--by the time, that is, that mast was rigged in Labrador--therewas not a city or town in the world outside China, however far fromthe actual centres of destruction, where police and government were notadopting special emergency methods to deal with a want of food and aglut of unemployed people.
The special peculiarities of aerial warfare were of such a nature asto trend, once it had begun, almost inevitably towards socialdisorganisation. The first of these peculiarities was brought hometo the Germans in their attack upon New York; the immense power ofdestruction an airship has over the thing below, and its relativeinability to occupy or police or guard or garrison a surrenderedposition. Necessarily, in the face of urban populations in a stateof economic disorganisation and infuriated and starving, this led toviolent and destructive collisions, and even where the air-fleet floatedinactive above, there would be civil conflict and passionate disorderbelow. Nothing comparable to this state of affairs had been known inthe previous history of warfare, unless we take such a case as that ofa nineteenth century warship attacking some large savage or barbaricsettlement, or one of those naval bombardments that disfigure thehistory of Great Britain in the late eighteenth century. Then, indeed,there had been cruelties and destruction that faintly foreshadowed thehorrors of the aerial war. Moreover, before the twentieth century theworld had had but one experience, and that a comparatively light one,in the Communist insurrection of Paris, 1871, of the possibilities of amodern urban population under warlike stresses.
A second peculiarity of airship war as it first came to the world thatalso made for social collapse, was the ineffectiveness of the earlyair-ships against each other. Upon anything below they could rainexplosives in the most deadly fashion, forts and ships and cities lay attheir mercy, but unless they were prepared for a suicidal grapple theycould do remarkably little mischief to each other. The armament of thehuge German airships, big as the biggest mammoth liners afloat, was onemachine gun that could easily have been packed up on a couple of mules.In addition, when it became evident that the air must be fought for, theair-sailors were provided with rifles with explosive bullets of oxygenor inflammable substance, but no airship at any time ever carried asmuch in the way of guns and armour as the smallest gunboat on the navylist had been accustomed to do. Consequently, when these monsters met inbattle, they manoeuvred for the upper place, or grappled and fought likejunks, throwing grenades fighting hand to hand in an entirely medievalfashion. The risks of a collapse and fall on either side came near tobalancing in every case the chances of victory. As a consequence, andafter their first experiences of battle, one finds a growing tendency onthe part of the air-fleet admirals to evade joining battle, and to seekrather the moral advantage of a destructive counter attack.
And if the airships were too ineffective, the early drachenflieger wereeither too unstable, like the German, or too light, like the Japanese,to produce immediately decisive results. Later, it is true, theBrazilians launched a flying-machine of a type and scale that wascapable of dealing with an airship, but they built only three or four,they operated only in South America, and they vanished from historyuntraceably in the time when world-bankruptcy put a stop to all furtherengineering production on any considerable scale
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The third peculiarity of aerial warfare was that it was at onceenormously destructive and entirely indecisive. It had this uniquefeature, that both sides lay open to punitive attack. In all previousforms of war, both by land and sea, the losing side was speedily unableto raid its antagonist's territory and the communications. One foughton a "front," and behind that front the winner's supplies and resources,his towns and factories and capital, the peace of his country, weresecure. If the war was a naval one, you destroyed your enemy's battlefleet and then blockaded his ports, secured his coaling stations, andhunted down any stray cruisers that threatened your ports of commerce.But to blockade and watch a coastline is one thing, to blockade andwatch the whole surface of a country is another, and cruisers andprivateers are things that take long to make, that cannot be packed upand hidden and carried unostentatiously from point to point. In aerialwar the stronger side, even supposing it destroyed the main battle fleetof the weaker, had then either to patrol and watch or destroy everypossible point at which he might produce another and perhaps a novel andmore deadly form of flyer. It meant darkening his air with airships. Itmeant building them by the thousand and making aeronauts by the hundredthousand. A small uninitated airship could be hidden in a railwayshed, in a village street, in a wood; a flying machine is even lessconspicuous.
And in the air are no streets, no channels, no point where one cansay of an antagonist, "If he wants to reach my capital he must come byhere." In the air all directions lead everywhere.
Consequently it was impossible to end a war by any of the establishedmethods. A, having outnumbered and overwhelmed B, hovers, a thousandairships strong, over his capital, threatening to bombard it unless Bsubmits. B replies by wireless telegraphy that he is now in the act ofbombarding the chief manufacturing city of A by means of three raiderairships. A denounces B's raiders as pirates and so forth, bombards B'scapital, and sets off to hunt down B's airships, while B, in a state ofpassionate emotion and heroic unconquerableness, sets to work amidst hisruins, making fresh airships and explosives for the benefit of A.The war became perforce a universal guerilla war, a war inextricablyinvolving civilians and homes and all the apparatus of social life.
These aspects of aerial fighting took the world by surprise. There hadbeen no foresight to deduce these consequences. If there had been, theworld would have arranged for a Universal Peace Conference in 1900.But mechanical invention had gone faster than intellectual and socialorganisation, and the world, with its silly old flags, its sillyunmeaning tradition of nationality, its cheap newspapers and cheaperpassions and imperialisms, its base commercial motives and habitualinsincerities and vulgarities, its race lies and conflicts, was taken bysurprise. Once the war began there was no stopping it. The flimsy fabricof credit that had grown with no man foreseeing, and that had held thosehundreds of millions in an economic interdependence that no man clearlyunderstood, dissolved in panic. Everywhere went the airships droppingbombs, destroying any hope of a rally, and everywhere below wereeconomic catastrophe, starving workless people, rioting, and socialdisorder. Whatever constructive guiding intelligence there had beenamong the nations vanished in the passionate stresses of the time. Suchnewspapers and documents and histories as survive from this periodall tell one universal story of towns and cities with the food supplyinterrupted and their streets congested with starving unemployed; ofcrises in administration and states of siege, of provisional Governmentsand Councils of Defence, and, in the cases of India and Egypt,insurrectionary committees taking charge of the re-arming of thepopulation, of the making of batteries and gun-pits, of the vehementmanufacture of airships and flying-machines.
One sees these things in glimpses, in illuminated moments, as if througha driving reek of clouds, going on all over the world. It was thedissolution of an age; it was the collapse of the civilisation thathad trusted to machinery, and the instruments of its destruction weremachines. But while the collapse of the previous great civilisation,that of Rome, had been a matter of centuries, had been a thing of phaseand phase, like the ageing and dying of a man, this, like his killing byrailway or motor car, was one swift, conclusive smashing and an end.
2
The early battles of the aerial war were no doubt determined by attemptsto realise the old naval maxim, to ascertain the position of the enemy'sfleet and to destroy it. There was first the battle of the BerneseOberland, in which the Italian and French navigables in their flankraid upon the Franconian Park were assailed by the Swiss experimentalsquadron, supported as the day wore on by German airships, and thenthe encounter of the British Winterhouse-Dunn aeroplanes with threeunfortunate Germans.
Then came the Battle of North India, in which the entire Anglo-Indianaeronautic settlement establishment fought for three days againstoverwhelming odds, and was dispersed and destroyed in detail.
And simultaneously with the beginning of that, commenced the momentousstruggle of the Germans and Asiatics that is usually known as the Battleof Niagara because of the objective of the Asiatic attack. But it passedgradually into a sporadic conflict over half a continent. Such Germanairships as escaped destruction in battle descended and surrendered tothe Americans, and were re-manned, and in the end it became a series ofpitiless and heroic encounters between the Americans, savagely resolvedto exterminate their enemies, and a continually reinforced army ofinvasion from Asia quartered upon the Pacific slope and supported byan immense fleet. From the first the war in America was fought withimplacable bitterness; no quarter was asked, no prisoners were taken.With ferocious and magnificent energy the Americans constructed andlaunched ship after ship to battle and perish against the Asiaticmultitudes. All other affairs were subordinate to this war, the wholepopulation was presently living or dying for it. Presently, as I shalltell, the white men found in the Butteridge machine a weapon that couldmeet and fight the flying-machines of the Asiatic swordsman.
The Asiatic invasion of America completely effaced the German-Americanconflict. It vanishes from history. At first it had seemed to promisequite sufficient tragedy in itself--beginning as it did in unforgettablemassacre. After the destruction of central New York all America hadrisen like one man, resolved to die a thousand deaths rather than submitto Germany. The Germans grimly resolved upon beating the Americans intosubmission and, following out the plans developed by the Prince, hadseized Niagara--in order to avail themselves of its enormous powerworks;expelled all its inhabitants and made a desert of its environs as far asBuffalo. They had also, directly Great Britain and France declare war,wrecked the country upon the Canadian side for nearly ten miles inland.They began to bring up men and material from the fleet off the eastcoast, stringing out to and fro like bees getting honey. It was thenthat the Asiatic forces appeared, and it was in their attack upon thisGerman base at Niagara that the air-fleets of East and West first metand the greater issue became clear.
One conspicuous peculiarity of the early aerial fighting arose from theprofound secrecy with which the airships had been prepared. Each powerhad had but the dimmest inkling of the schemes of its rivals, and evenexperiments with its own devices were limited by the needs of secrecy.None of the designers of airships and aeroplanes had known clearly whattheir inventions might have to fight; many had not imagined they wouldhave to fight anything whatever in the air; and had planned them onlyfor the dropping of explosives. Such had been the German idea. The onlyweapon for fighting another airship with which the Franconian fleet hadbeen provided was the machine gun forward. Only after the fight overNew York were the men given short rifles with detonating bullets.Theoretically, the drachenflieger were to have been the fighting weapon.They were declared to be aerial torpedo-boats, and the aeronaut wassupposed to swoop close to his antagonist and cast his bombs as hewhirled past. But indeed these contrivances were hopelessly unstable;not one-third in any engagement succeeded in getting back to the motherairship. The rest were either smashed up or grounded.
The allied Chino-Japanese fleet made the same distinction as the Germansbetween airshi
ps and fighting machines heavier than air, but the type inboth cases was entirely different from the occidental models, and--itis eloquent of the vigour with which these great peoples took up andbettered the European methods of scientific research in almost everyparticular the invention of Asiatic engineers. Chief among these, itis worth remarking, was Mohini K. Chatterjee, a political exile who hadformerly served in the British-Indian aeronautic park at Lahore.
The German airship was fish-shaped, with a blunted head; the Asiaticairship was also fish-shaped, but not so much on the lines of a cod orgoby as of a ray or sole. It had a wide, flat underside, unbroken bywindows or any opening except along the middle line. Its cabins occupiedits axis, with a sort of bridge deck above, and the gas-chambers gavethe whole affair the shape of a gipsy's hooped tent, except that it wasmuch flatter. The German airship was essentially a navigable balloonvery much lighter than air; the Asiatic airship was very little lighterthan air and skimmed through it with much greater velocity if withconsiderably less stability. They carried fore and aft guns, the lattermuch the larger, throwing inflammatory shells, and in addition they hadnests for riflemen on both the upper and the under side. Light as thisarmament was in comparison with the smallest gunboat that ever sailed,it was sufficient for them to outfight as well as outfly the Germanmonster airships. In action they flew to get behind or over the Germans:they even dashed underneath, avoiding only passing immediately beneaththe magazine, and then as soon as they had crossed let fly with theirrear gun, and sent flares or oxygen shells into the antagonist'sgas-chambers.
It was not in their airships, but, as I have said, in theirflying-machines proper, that the strength of the Asiatics lay. Nextonly to the Butteridge machine, these were certainly the most efficientheavier-than-air fliers that had ever appeared. They were the inventionof a Japanese artist, and they differed in type extremely from thebox-kite quality of the German drachenflieger. They had curiouslycurved, flexible side wings, more like BENT butterfly's wings thananything else, and made of a substance like celluloid and of brightlypainted silk, and they had a long humming-bird tail. At the forwardcorner of the wings were hooks, rather like the claws of a bat, by whichthe machine could catch and hang and tear at the walls of an airship'sgas-chamber. The solitary rider sat between the wings above a transverseexplosive engine, an explosive engine that differed in no essentialparticular from those in use in the light motor bicycles of the period.Below was a single large wheel. The rider sat astride of a saddle, as inthe Butteridge machine, and he carried a large double-edged two-handedsword, in addition to his explosive-bullet firing rifle.
3
One sets down these particulars and compares the points of the Americanand German pattern of aeroplane and navigable, but none of these factswere clearly known to any of those who fought in this monstrouslyconfused battle above the American great lakes.
Each side went into action against it knew not what, under novelconditions and with apparatus that even without hostile attacks wascapable of producing the most disconcerting surprises. Schemes ofaction, attempts at collective manoeuvring necessarily went to piecesdirectly the fight began, just as they did in almost all the earlyironclad battles of the previous century. Each captain then had to fallback upon individual action and his own devices; one would see triumphin what another read as a cue for flight and despair. It is as true ofthe Battle of Niagara as of the Battle of Lissa that it was not a battlebut a bundle of "battlettes"!
To such a spectator as Bert it presented itself as a series ofincidents, some immense, some trivial, but collectively incoherent. Henever had a sense of any plain issue joined, of any point struggledfor and won or lost. He saw tremendous things happen and in the end hisworld darkened to disaster and ruin.
He saw the battle from the ground, from Prospect Park and from GoatIsland, whither he fled.
But the manner in which he came to be on the ground needs explaining.
The Prince had resumed command of his fleet through wireless telegraphylong before the Zeppelin had located his encampment in Labrador. By hisdirection the German air-fleet, whose advance scouts had been in contactwith the Japanese over the Rocky Mountains, had concentrated uponNiagara and awaited his arrival. He had rejoined his command early inthe morning of the twelfth, and Bert had his first prospect of the Gorgeof Niagara while he was doing net drill outside the middle gas-chamberat sunrise. The Zeppelin was flying very high at the time, and far belowhe saw the water in the gorge marbled with froth and then away to thewest the great crescent of the Canadian Fall shining, flickering andfoaming in the level sunlight and sending up a deep, incessant thuddingrumble to the sky. The air-fleet was keeping station in an enormouscrescent, with its horns pointing south-westward, a long array ofshining monsters with tails rotating slowly and German ensigns nowtrailing from their bellies aft of their Marconi pendants.
Niagara city was still largely standing then, albeit its streets wereempty of all life. Its bridges were intact; its hotels and restaurantsstill flying flags and inviting sky signs; its power-stations running.But about it the country on both sides of the gorge might have beenswept by a colossal broom. Everything that could possibly give coverto an attack upon the German position at Niagara had been levelled asruthlessly as machinery and explosives could contrive; houses blown upand burnt, woods burnt, fences and crops destroyed. The mono-rails hadbeen torn up, and the roads in particular cleared of all possibility ofconcealment or shelter. Seen from above, the effect of this wreckage wasgrotesque. Young woods had been destroyed whole-sale by dragging wires,and the spoilt saplings, smashed or uprooted, lay in swathes like cornafter the sickle. Houses had an appearance of being flattened down bythe pressure of a gigantic finger. Much burning was still going on, andlarge areas had been reduced to patches of smouldering and sometimesstill glowing blackness.
Here and there lay the debris of belated fugitives, carts, and deadbodies of horses and men; and where houses had had water-supplies therewere pools of water and running springs from the ruptured pipes. Inunscorched fields horses and cattle still fed peacefully. Beyond thisdesolated area the countryside was still standing, but almost all thepeople had fled. Buffalo was on fire to an enormous extent, and therewere no signs of any efforts to grapple with the flames. Niagara cityitself was being rapidly converted to the needs of a military depot.A large number of skilled engineers had already been brought from thefleet and were busily at work adapting the exterior industrial apparatusof the place to the purposes of an aeronautic park. They had made agas recharging station at the corner of the American Fall above thefunicular railway, and they were, opening up a much larger area tothe south for the same purpose. Over the power-houses and hotels andsuchlike prominent or important points the German flag was flying.
The Zeppelin circled slowly over this scene twice while the Princesurveyed it from the swinging gallery; it then rose towards the centreof the crescent and transferred the Prince and his suite, Kurt included,to the Hohenzollern, which had been chosen as the flagship during theimpending battle. They were swung up on a small cable from the forwardgallery, and the men of the Zeppelin manned the outer netting as thePrince and his staff left them. The Zeppelin then came about, circleddown and grounded in Prospect Park, in order to land the wounded andtake aboard explosives; for she had come to Labrador with her magazinesempty, it being uncertain what weight she might need to carry. Shealso replenished the hydrogen in one of her forward chambers which hadleaked.
Bert was detailed as a bearer and helped carry the wounded one by oneinto the nearest of the large hotels that faced the Canadian shore. Thehotel was quite empty except that there were two trained American nursesand a negro porter, and three or four Germans awaiting them. Bert wentwith the Zeppelin's doctor into the main street of the place, and theybroke into a drug shop and obtained various things of which they stoodin need. As they returned they found an officer and two men making arough inventory of the available material in the various stores. Exceptfor them the wide, main street of the town was quite d
eserted, thepeople had been given three hours to clear out, and everybody,it seemed, had done so. At one corner a dead man lay against thewall--shot. Two or three dogs were visible up the empty vista, buttowards its river end the passage of a string of mono-rail cars brokethe stillness and the silence. They were loaded with hose, and werepassing to the trainful of workers who were converting Prospect Parkinto an airship dock.
Bert pushed a case of medicine balanced on a bicycle taken from anadjacent shop, to the hotel, and then he was sent to load bombs into theZeppelin magazine, a duty that called for elaborate care. From this jobhe was presently called off by the captain of the Zeppelin, who senthim with a note to the officer in charge of the Anglo-American PowerCompany, for the field telephone had still to be adjusted. Bert receivedhis instructions in German, whose meaning he guessed, and saluted andtook the note, not caring to betray his ignorance of the language. Hestarted off with a bright air of knowing his way and turned a corner orso, and was only beginning to suspect that he did not know where he wasgoing when his attention was recalled to the sky by the report of a gunfrom the Hohenzollern and celestial cheering.
He looked up and found the view obstructed by the houses on either sideof the street. He hesitated, and then curiosity took him back towardsthe bank of the river. Here his view was inconvenienced by trees, andit was with a start that he discovered the Zeppelin, which he knew hadstill a quarter of her magazines to fill, was rising over Goat Island.She had not waited for her complement of ammunition. It occurred to himthat he was left behind. He ducked back among the trees and bushes untilhe felt secure from any after-thought on the part of the Zeppelin'scaptain. Then his curiosity to see what the German air-fleet facedovercame him, and drew him at last halfway across the bridge to GoatIsland.
From that point he had nearly a hemisphere of sky and got his firstglimpse of the Asiatic airships low in the sky above the glitteringtumults of the Upper Rapids.
They were far less impressive than the German ships. He could notjudge the distance, and they flew edgeways to him, so as to conceal thebroader aspect of their bulk.
Bert stood there in the middle of the bridge, in a place that mostpeople who knew it remembered as a place populous with sightseers andexcursionists, and he was the only human being in sight there. Abovehim, very high in the heavens, the contending air-fleets manoeuvred;below him the river seethed like a sluice towards the American Fall. Hewas curiously dressed. His cheap blue serge trousers were thrust intoGerman airship rubber boots, and on his head he wore an aeronaut's whitecap that was a trifle too large for him. He thrust that back to revealhis staring little Cockney face, still scarred upon the brow. "Gaw!" hewhispered.
He stared. He gesticulated. Once or twice he shouted and applauded.
Then at a certain point terror seized him and he took to his heels inthe direction of Goat Island.
4
For a time after they were in sight of each other, neither fleetattempted to engage. The Germans numbered sixty-seven great airshipsand they maintained the crescent formation at a height of nearly fourthousand feet. They kept a distance of about one and a half lengths, sothat the horns of the crescent were nearly thirty miles apart. Closelyin tow of the airships of the extreme squadrons on either wing wereabout thirty drachenflieger ready manned, but these were too small anddistant for Bert to distinguish.
At first, only what was called the Southern fleet of the Asiatics wasvisible to him. It consisted of forty airships, carrying all togethernearly four hundred one-man flying-machines upon their flanks, and forsome time it flew slowly and at a minimum distance of perhaps a dozenmiles from the Germans, eastward across their front. At first Bertcould distinguish only the greater bulks, then he perceived the one-manmachines as a multitude of very small objects drifting like motes in thesunshine about and beneath the larger shapes.
Bert saw nothing then of the second fleet of the Asiatics, thoughprobably that was coming into sight of the Germans at the time, in thenorth-west.
The air was very still, the sky almost without a cloud, and the Germanfleet had risen to an immense height, so that the airships seemed nolonger of any considerable size. Both ends of their crescent showedplainly. As they beat southward they passed slowly between Bert and thesunlight, and became black outlines of themselves. The drachenfliegerappeared as little flecks of black on either wing of this aerial Armada.
The two fleets seemed in no hurry to engage. The Asiatics went far awayinto the east, quickening their pace and rising as they did so, and thentailed out into a long column and came flying back, rising towards theGerman left. The squadrons of the latter came about, facing this obliqueadvance, and suddenly little flickerings and a faint crepitating soundtold that they had opened fire. For a time no effect was visible tothe watcher on the bridge. Then, like a handful of snowflakes, thedrachenflieger swooped to the attack, and a multitude of red speckswhirled up to meet them. It was to Bert's sense not only enormouslyremote but singularly inhuman. Not four hours since he had been on oneof those very airships, and yet they seemed to him now not gas-bagscarrying men, but strange sentient creatures that moved about and didthings with a purpose of their own. The flight of the Asiatic and Germanflying-machines joined and dropped earthward, became like a handfulof white and red rose petals flung from a distant window, grew larger,until Bert could see the overturned ones spinning through the air,and were hidden by great volumes of dark smoke that were rising in thedirection of Buffalo. For a time they all were hidden, then two or threewhite and a number of red ones rose again into the sky, like a swarm ofbig butterflies, and circled fighting and drove away out of sight againtowards the east.
A heavy report recalled Bert's eyes to the zenith, and behold, the greatcrescent had lost its dressing and burst into a disorderly long cloud ofairships! One had dropped halfway down the sky. It was flaming fore andaft, and even as Bert looked it turned over and fell, spinning over andover itself and vanished into the smoke of Buffalo.
Bert's mouth opened and shut, and he clutched tighter on the rail ofthe bridge. For some moments--they seemed long moments--the two fleetsremained without any further change flying obliquely towards each other,and making what came to Bert's ears as a midget uproar. Then suddenlyfrom either side airships began dropping out of alignment, smitten bymissiles he could neither see nor trace. The string of Asiatic shipsswung round and either charged into or over (it was difficult to sayfrom below) the shattered line of the Germans, who seemed to open outto give way to them. Some sort of manoeuvring began, but Bert couldnot grasp its import. The left of the battle became a confused danceof airships. For some minutes up there the two crossing lines of shipslooked so close it seemed like a hand-to-hand scuffle in the sky. Thenthey broke up into groups and duels. The descent of German air-shipstowards the lower sky increased. One of them flared down and vanishedfar away in the north; two dropped with something twisted and crippledin their movements; then a group of antagonists came down from thezenith in an eddying conflict, two Asiatics against one German, and werepresently joined by another, and drove away eastward all together withothers dropping out of the German line to join them.
One Asiatic either rammed or collided with a still more gigantic German,and the two went spinning to destruction together. The northern squadronof Asiatics came into the battle unnoted by Bert, except that themultitude of ships above seemed presently increased. In a little whilethe fight was utter confusion, drifting on the whole to the southwestagainst the wind. It became more and more a series of group encounters.Here a huge German airship flamed earthward with a dozen flat Asiaticcraft about her, crushing her every attempt to recover. Here anotherhung with its screw fighting off the swordsman from a swarm offlying-machines. Here, again, an Asiatic aflame at either end swoopedout of the battle. His attention went from incident to incident in thevast clearness overhead; these conspicuous cases of destruction caughtand held his mind; it was only very slowly that any sort of schememanifested itself between those nearer, more striking episodes.
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nbsp; The mass of the airships that eddied remotely above was, however,neither destroying nor destroyed. The majority of them seemed tobe going at full speed and circling upward for position, exchangingineffectual shots as they did so. Very little ramming was essayed afterthe first tragic downfall of rammer and rammed, and what ever attemptsat boarding were made were invisible to Bert. There seemed, however,a steady attempt to isolate antagonists, to cut them off from theirfellows and bear them down, causing a perpetual sailing back andinterlacing of these shoaling bulks. The greater numbers of the Asiaticsand their swifter heeling movements gave them the effect of persistentlyattacking the Germans. Overhead, and evidently endeavouring to keepitself in touch with the works of Niagara, a body of German airshipsdrew itself together into a compact phalanx, and the Asiatics becamemore and more intent upon breaking this up. He was grotesquely remindedof fish in a fish-pond struggling for crumbs. He could see puny puffs ofsmoke and the flash of bombs, but never a sound came down to him....
A flapping shadow passed for a moment between Bert and the sun and wasfollowed by another. A whirring of engines, click, clock, clitter clock,smote upon his ears. Instantly he forgot the zenith.
Perhaps a hundred yards above the water, out of the south, riding likeValkyries swiftly through the air on the strange steeds the engineeringof Europe had begotten upon the artistic inspiration of Japan, camea long string of Asiatic swordsman. The wings flapped jerkily, click,block, clitter clock, and the machines drove up; they spread and ceased,and the apparatus came soaring through the air. So they rose and felland rose again. They passed so closely overhead that Bert could heartheir voices calling to one another. They swooped towards Niagara cityand landed one after another in a long line in a clear space beforethe hotel. But he did not stay to watch them land. One yellow face hadcraned over and looked at him, and for one enigmatical instant met hiseyes....
It was then the idea came to Bert that he was altogether too conspicuousin the middle of the bridge, and that he took to his heels towards GoatIsland. Thence, dodging about among the trees, with perhaps an excessiveself-consciousness, he watched the rest of the struggle.
5
When Bert's sense of security was sufficiently restored for him to watchthe battle again, he perceived that a brisk little fight was inprogress between the Asiatic aeronauts and the German engineers for thepossession of Niagara city. It was the first time in the whole course ofthe war that he had seen anything resembling fighting as he had studiedit in the illustrated papers of his youth. It seemed to him almost asthough things were coming right. He saw men carrying rifles and takingcover and running briskly from point to point in a loose attackingformation. The first batch of aeronauts had probably been under theimpression that the city was deserted. They had grounded in the opennear Prospect Park and approached the houses towards the power-worksbefore they were disillusioned by a sudden fire. They had scattered backto the cover of a bank near the water--it was too far for them to reachtheir machines again; they were lying and firing at the men in thehotels and frame-houses about the power-works.
Then to their support came a second string of red flying-machinesdriving up from the east. They rose up out of the haze above the housesand came round in a long curve as if surveying the position below. Thefire of the Germans rose to a roar, and one of those soaring shapes gavean abrupt jerk backward and fell among the houses. The others swoopeddown exactly like great birds upon the roof of the power-house. Theycaught upon it, and from each sprang a nimble little figure and rantowards the parapet.
Other flapping bird-shapes came into this affair, but Bert had not seentheir coming. A staccato of shots came over to him, reminding him ofarmy manoeuvres, of newspaper descriptions of fights, of all that wasentirely correct in his conception of warfare. He saw quite a number ofGermans running from the outlying houses towards the power-house. Twofell. One lay still, but the other wriggled and made efforts for a time.The hotel that was used as a hospital, and to which he had helped carrythe wounded men from the Zeppelin earlier in the day, suddenly ran upthe Geneva flag. The town that had seemed so quiet had evidentlybeen concealing a considerable number of Germans, and they werenow concentrating to hold the central power-house. He wondered whatammunition they might have. More and more of the Asiatic flying-machinescame into the conflict. They had disposed of the unfortunate Germandrachenflieger and were now aiming at the incipient aeronauticpark,--the electric gas generators and repair stations which formedthe German base. Some landed, and their aeronauts took cover and becameenergetic infantry soldiers. Others hovered above the fight, their menever and again firing shots down at some chance exposure below. Thefiring came in paroxysms; now there would be a watchful lull and now arapid tattoo of shots, rising to a roar. Once or twice flying machines,as they circled warily, came right overhead, and for a time Bert gavehimself body and soul to cowering.
Ever and again a larger thunder mingled with the rattle and remindedhim of the grapple of airships far above, but the nearer fight held hisattention.
Abruptly something dropped from the zenith; something like a barrel or ahuge football.
CRASH! It smashed with an immense report. It had fallen among thegrounded Asiatic aeroplanes that lay among the turf and flower-beds nearthe river. They flew in scraps and fragments, turf, trees, and gravelleapt and fell; the aeronauts still lying along the canal bank werethrown about like sacks, catspaws flew across the foaming water. All thewindows of the hotel hospital that had been shiningly reflecting bluesky and airships the moment before became vast black stars. Bang!--asecond followed. Bert looked up and was filled with a sense of a numberof monstrous bodies swooping down, coming down on the whole affair likea flight of bellying blankets, like a string of vast dish-covers. Thecentral tangle of the battle above was circling down as if to comeinto touch with the power-house fight. He got a new effect of airshipsaltogether, as vast things coming down upon him, growing swiftly largerand larger and more overwhelming, until the houses over the way seemedsmall, the American rapids narrow, the bridge flimsy, the combatantsinfinitesimal. As they came down they became audible as a complex ofshootings and vast creakings and groanings and beatings and throbbingsand shouts and shots. The fore-shortened black eagles at the fore-endsof the Germans had an effect of actual combat of flying feathers.
Some of these fighting airships came within five hundred feet of theground. Bert could see men on the lower galleries of the Germans,firing rifles; could see Asiatics clinging to the ropes; saw one manin aluminium diver's gear fall flashing headlong into the waters aboveGoat Island. For the first time he saw the Asiatic airships closely.From this aspect they reminded him more than anything else of colossalsnowshoes; they had a curious patterning in black and white, in formsthat reminded him of the engine-turned cover of a watch. They had nohanging galleries, but from little openings on the middle line peepedout men and the muzzles of guns. So, driving in long, descending andascending curves, these monsters wrestled and fought. It was like cloudsfighting, like puddings trying to assassinate each other. They whirledand circled about each other, and for a time threw Goat Island andNiagara into a smoky twilight, through which the sunlight smote inshafts and beams. They spread and closed and spread and grappled anddrove round over the rapids, and two miles away or more into Canada,and back over the Falls again. A German caught fire, and the whole crowdbroke away from her flare and rose about her dispersing, leaving her todrop towards Canada and blow up as she dropped. Then with renewed uproarthe others closed again. Once from the men in Niagara city came a soundlike an ant-hill cheering. Another German burnt, and one badly deflatedby the prow of an antagonist, flopped out of action southward.
It became more and more evident that the Germans were getting theworst of the unequal fight. More and more obviously were they beingpersecuted. Less and less did they seem to fight with any object otherthan escape. The Asiatics swept by them and above them, ripped theirbladders, set them alight, picked off their dimly seen men in divingclothes, who struggled against fire and
tear with fire extinguishers andsilk ribbons in the inner netting. They answered only with ineffectualshots. Thence the battle circled back over Niagara, and then suddenlythe Germans, as if at a preconcerted signal, broke and dispersed, goingeast, west, north, and south, in open and confused flight. The Asiatics,as they realised this, rose to fly above them and after them. Onlyone little knot of four Germans and perhaps a dozen Asiatics remainedfighting about the Hohenzollern and the Prince as he circled in a lastattempt to save Niagara.
Round they swooped once again over the Canadian Fall, over the waste ofwaters eastward, until they were distant and small, and then round andback, hurrying, bounding, swooping towards the one gaping spectator.
The whole struggling mass approached very swiftly, growing rapidlylarger, and coming out black and featureless against the afternoon sunand above the blinding welter of the Upper Rapids. It grew like a stormcloud until once more it darkened the sky. The flat Asiatic airshipskept high above the Germans and behind them, and fired unansweredbullets into their gas-chambers and upon their flanks--the one-manflying-machines hovered and alighted like a swarm of attacking bees.Nearer they came, and nearer, filling the lower heaven. Two of theGermans swooped and rose again, but the Hohenzollern had suffered toomuch for that. She lifted weakly, turned sharply as if to get out ofthe battle, burst into flames fore and aft, swept down to the water,splashed into it obliquely, and rolled over and over and came downstream rolling and smashing and writhing like a thing alive, halting andthen coming on again, with her torn and bent propeller still beating theair. The bursting flames spluttered out again in clouds of steam. It wasa disaster gigantic in its dimensions. She lay across the rapids likean island, like tall cliffs, tall cliffs that came rolling, smoking, andcrumpling, and collapsing, advancing with a sort of fluctuating rapidityupon Bert. One Asiatic airship--it looked to Bert from below like threehundred yards of pavement--whirled back and circled two or three timesover that great overthrow, and half a dozen crimson flying-machinesdanced for a moment like great midges in the sunlight before they swepton after their fellows. The rest of the fight had already gone over theisland, a wild crescendo of shots and yells and smashing uproar. It washidden from Bert now by the trees of the island, and forgotten by him inthe nearer spectacle of the huge advance of the defeated German airship.Something fell with a mighty smashing and splintering of boughs unheededbehind him.
It seemed for a time that the Hohenzollern must needs break her backupon the Parting of the Waters, and then for a time her propellerflopped and frothed in the river and thrust the mass of buckling,crumpled wreckage towards the American shore. Then the sweep of thetorrent that foamed down to the American Fall caught her, and in anotherminute the immense mass of deflating wreckage, with flames spurting outin three new places, had crashed against the bridge that joined GoatIsland and Niagara city, and forced a long arm, as it were, in a heavingtangle under the central span. Then the middle chambers blew up with aloud report, and in another moment the bridge had given way and the mainbulk of the airship, like some grotesque cripple in rags, staggered,flapping and waving flambeaux to the crest of the Fall and hesitatedthere and vanished in a desperate suicidal leap.
Its detached fore-end remained jammed against that little island, GreenIsland it used to be called, which forms the stepping-stone between themainland and Goat Island's patch of trees.
Bert followed this disaster from the Parting of the Waters to the bridgehead. Then, regardless of cover, regardless of the Asiatic airshiphovering like a huge house roof without walls above the SuspensionBridge, he sprinted along towards the north and came out for the firsttime upon that rocky point by Luna Island that looks sheer down uponthe American Fall. There he stood breathless amidst that eternal rush ofsound, breathless and staring.
Far below, and travelling rapidly down the gorge, whirled something likea huge empty sack. For him it meant--what did it not mean?--the Germanair-fleet, Kurt, the Prince, Europe, all things stable and familiar,the forces that had brought him, the forces that had seemed indisputablyvictorious. And it went down the rapids like an empty sack and left thevisible world to Asia, to yellow people beyond Christendom, to all thatwas terrible and strange!
Remote over Canada receded the rest of that conflict and vanished beyondthe range of his vision....