By July 1, 1916, the war had involved every civilized nation upon the
globe except the United States of North and of South America, which had
up to that time succeeded in maintaining their neutrality. Belgium,
Holland, Denmark, Switzerland, Poland, Austria Hungary, Lombardy, and
Servia, had been devastated. Five million adult male human beings had
been exterminated by the machines of war, by disease, and by famine. Ten
million had been crippled or invalided. Fifteen million women and
children had been rendered widows or orphans. Industry there was none.
No crops were harvested or sown. The ocean was devoid of sails.
Throughout European Christendom women had taken the place of men as
field hands, labourers, mechanics, merchants, and manufacturers. The
amalgamated debt of the involved nations, amounting to more than
$100,000,000,000, had bankrupted the world. Yet the starving armies
continued to slaughter one another.
Siberia was a vast charnel-house of Tartars, Chinese, and Russians.
Northern Africa was a holocaust. Within sixty miles of Paris lay an army
of two million Germans, while three million Russians had invested
Berlin. In Belgium an English army of eight hundred and fifty thousand
men faced an equal force of Prussians and Austrians, neither daring to
take the offensive.
The inventive genius of mankind, stimulated by the exigencies of war,
had produced a multitude of death-dealing mechanisms, most of which had
in turn been rendered ineffective by some counter-invention of another
nation. Three of these products of the human brain, however, remained
unneutralized and in large part accounted for the impasse at which the
hostile armies found themselves. One of these had revolutionized warfare
in the field, and the other two had destroyed those two most important
factors of the preliminary campaign--the aeroplane and the submarine.
The German dirigibles had all been annihilated within the first ten
months of the war in their great cross-channel raid by Pathé contact
bombs trailed at the ends of wires by high-flying French planes. This,
of course, had from the beginning been confidently predicted by the
French War Department. But by November, 1915, both the allied and the
German aerial fleets had been wiped from the clouds by Federston's
vortex guns, which by projecting a whirling ring of air to a height of
over five thousand feet crumpled the craft in mid-sky like so many
butterflies in a simoon.
The second of these momentous inventions was Captain Barlow's device for
destroying the periscopes of submarines, thus rendering them blind and
helpless. Once they were forced to the surface such craft were easily
destroyed by gun fire or driven to a sullen refuge in protecting
harbours.
The third, and perhaps the most vital, invention was Dufay's
nitrogen-iodide pellets, which when sown by pneumatic guns upon the
slopes of a battlefield, the ground outside intrenchments, or round the
glacis of a fortification made approach by an attacking army impossible
and the position impregnable. These pellets, only the size of No. 4 bird
shot and harmless out of contact with air, became highly explosive two
minutes after they had been scattered broadcast upon the soil, and any
friction would discharge them with sufficient force to fracture or
dislocate the bones of the human foot or to put out of service the leg
of a horse. The victim attempting to drag himself away inevitably
sustained further and more serious injuries, and no aid could be given
to the injured, as it was impossible to reach them. A field well planted
with such pellets was an impassable barrier to either infantry or
cavalry, and thus any attack upon a fortified position was doomed to
failure. By surprise alone could a general expect to achieve a victory.
Offensive warfare had come almost to a standstill.
Germany had seized Holland, Denmark, and Switzerland. Italy had annexed
Dalmatia and the Trentino; and a new Slav republic had arisen out of
what had been Hungary, Croatia, Bosnia, Herzegovina, Servia, Roumania,
Montenegro, Albania, and Bulgaria. Turkey had vanished from the map of
Europe; while the United States of South America, composed of the
Spanish-speaking South American Republics, had been formed. The
mortality continued at an average of two thousand a day, of which 75 per
cent. was due to starvation and the plague. Maritime commerce had ceased
entirely, and in consequence of this the merchant ships of all nations
rotted at the docks.
The Emperor of Germany, and the kings of England and of Italy, had all
voluntarily abdicated in favour of a republican form of government.
Europe and Asia had run amuck, hysterical with fear and blood. As well
try to pacify a pack of mad and fighting dogs as these frenzied myriads
with their half-crazed generals. They lay, these armies, across the fair
bosom of the earth like dying monsters, crimson in their own blood, yet
still able to writhe upward and deal death to any other that might
approach. They were at a deadlock, yet each feared to make the first
overtures for peace. There was, in actuality, no longer even an English
or a German nation. It was an orgy of homicide, in which the best of
mankind were wantonly destroyed, leaving only the puny, the
feeble-minded, the deformed, and the ineffectual to perpetuate the race.
I
It was three minutes past three postmeridian in the operating room of
the new Wireless Station recently installed at the United States Naval
Observatory at Georgetown. Bill Hood, the afternoon operator, was
sitting in his shirt sleeves with his receivers at his ears, smoking a
corncob pipe and awaiting a call from the flagship _Lincoln_ of the
North Atlantic Patrol with which, somewhere just off Hatteras, he had
been in communication a few moments before. The air was quiet.
Hood was a fat man, and so of course good-natured; but he was serious
about his work and hated all interfering amateurs. Of late these
wireless pests had become particularly obnoxious, as practically
everything was sent out in code and they had nothing with which to
occupy themselves. But it was a hot day and none of them seemed to be at
work. On one side of his desk a tall thermometer indicated that the
temperature of the room was 91 degrees Fahrenheit; on the other a big
clock, connected with some extraneous mechanism by a complicated system
of brass rods and wires, ticked off the minutes and seconds with a
peculiar metallic self-consciousness, as if aware of its own importance
in being the official timepiece, as far as there was an official
timepiece, for the entire United States of America.
Hood from time to time tested his converters and detector, and then
resumed his non-official study of the adventures of a great detective
who pursued the baffling criminal by the aid of all the latest
scientific discoveries. Hood thought it was good stuff, although at the
same time he knew, of course, that it was rot. He was a practical man of
little imagination, and, though the detective did not interest him
particularly, he liked the scientific part of the stories. He was
thrifty, of Scotch-Irish descent, and at two minutes past three had
never had an adventure in his life. At three minutes past three he began
his career as one of the celebrities of the world.
As the minute hand of the official clock dropped into its slot somebody
called the Naval Observatory. The call was so faint as to be barely
audible, in spite of the fact that Hood's instrument was tuned for a
three-thousand-metre wave. Supposing quite naturally that the person
calling had a shorter wave, he gradually cut out the inductance of his
receiver; but the sound faded out entirely, and he returned to his
original inductance and shunted in his condenser, upon which the call
immediately increased in volume. Evidently the other chap was using a
big wave, bigger than Georgetown.
Hood puckered his brows and looked about him. Lying on a shelf above his
instrument was one of the new ballast coils that Henderson had used with
the long waves from lightning flashes, and he leaned over and connected
the heavy spiral of closely wound wire, throwing it into his circuit.
Instantly the telephones spoke so loud that he could hear the shrill cry
of the spark even from where the receivers lay beside him on the table.
Quickly fastening them to his ears he listened. The sound was clear,
sharp, and metallic, and vastly higher in pitch than a ship's call. It
couldn't be the _Lincoln_.
"By gum!" muttered Hood. "That fellow must have a twelve-thousand-metre
wave length with fifty kilowatts behind it, sure! There ain't another
station in the world but this can pick him up!"
"NAA--NAA--NAA," came the call.
Throwing in his rheostat he sent an "O.K" in reply, and waited
expectantly, pencil in hand. A moment more and he dropped his pencil in
disgust.
"Just another bug!" he remarked aloud to the thermometer. "Ought to be
poisoned! What a whale of a wave length, though!"
For several minutes he listened intently, for the amateur was sending
insistently, repeating everything twice as if he meant business.
"He's a jolly joker all right," muttered Hood, this time to the clock.
"Must be pretty hard up for something to do!"
Then he laughed out loud and took up the pencil again. This amateur,
whoever he was, was almost as good as his detective story. The "bug"
called the Naval Observatory once more and began repeating his entire
message for the third time.
"To all mankind"--he addressed himself modestly--"To all mankind--To all
mankind--I am the dictator--of human destiny--Through the earth's
rotation--I control--day and night--summer and winter--I command
the--cessation of hostilities and--the abolition of war upon the
globe--I appoint the--United States--as my agent for this purpose--As
evidence of my power I shall increase the length of the day--from
midnight to midnight--of Thursday, July 22d, by the period of five
minutes.--PAX."
The jolly joker, having repeated thus his extraordinary message to all
mankind, stopped sending.
"Well, I'll be hanged!" gasped Bill Hood. Then he wound up his magnetic
detector and sent an answering challenge into the ether.
"Can--the--funny--stuff!" he snapped. "And tune out--or--we'll
revoke--your license!"
"What a gall!" he grunted, folding up the yellow sheet of pad paper upon
which he had taken down the message to all mankind and thrusting it into
his book for a marker. "All the fools aren't dead yet!"
Then he picked up the _Lincoln_ and got down to real work. The "bug" and
his message passed from memory.