Eight days out of the ten calculated by the president and Doctor
Lamson for the progress of the Great Experiment had expired, and
Europe presented the extraordinary spectacle of a continent armed to
the teeth, possessing the mightiest weapons of destruction that human
science and skill could invent and construct--and divided into two
hostile camps which were practically unable to hurt each other.
Away in the far northern wilderness the giant engines purred on
remorselessly, continually drawing away more and more of the vital
earth-spirit from Europe and Asia. In Great Britain and North America
nothing had happened, except a succession of abnormally violent
thunderstorms, and certain other minor electrical disturbances which
were only detected by instruments at the observatories; but all cables
had ceased to work, and the only sea communication possible was by
means of wooden sailing ships, for every steamer, whether warship,
liner, or tramp, broke down when she got about fifteen miles from the
English or American coasts. What was happening in the Southern
Hemisphere no one knew till long afterwards.
Throughout Europe and Asia a most extraordinary condition of things
was coming to pass. What had happened at Kiel happened also at all the
great fortresses along the German frontier which were invested by the
French and Russians. Guns of all calibres on both sides burst, killing
those who used them, but doing no damage to the enemy. Quick-firing
guns jammed or burst and became useless. If a man tried to fire a
rifle, the breech-lock blew out and killed or maimed him, until French
and Germans, Russians, Austrians, and Italians alike refused to fire a
shot, and even on the rare occasions when bodies of men got near
enough to each other for a cavalry or bayonet charge, lance-points,
sabres, and bayonets cracked and splintered like so many icicles.
By the tenth day every officer and man in Europe had recognised that
if the war was to go on at all it would have to be fought out with
fists and feet. All modern weapons of warfare had suddenly become
useless. Moreover, communication had become so difficult, that the
feeding of the vast armies in the field was rapidly approaching
impossibility, and the helpless, hostile battalions were beginning to
starve in sight of each other. Locomotives broke down or blew up,
bridges collapsed under the weight of the trains, and now horses and
men had become afflicted with a deadly languor which made severe
exertion an impossibility.
From the war lords of the nations to the raw conscripts and the
camp-followers it was the same. Neither mind nor body would do its
work. The soul of the world was leaving it--drawn out by those
remorseless engines into the vast receivers of the Storage Works--and
men were beginning to find that without it they could neither think
nor work any more than they could fight.
There was not a cable or a telegraph line in Europe or Asia that could
be operated, not a stationary or locomotive engine that would work
without breaking down or blowing up. Electric lighting and traction
had for two or three days been things of the past. Throughout two
continents industries and commerce, like war, were at a standstill; a
sort of creeping paralysis had spread from the Straits of Dover to the
Sea of Japan.
There were no exceptions, from the rulers of the highest civilisations
down to the sampan men of Canton and the fur-clad Samoyeds of the
northern wilderness. Great fleets and squadrons were either drifting
about the ocean or lying helpless on rock or sand or mud-bank, like
the silenced forts full of guns and ammunition and yet unable to fire
a single shot either in attack or defence.
On the morning of the eleventh day the French President, who had been
drawn along the useless railway from Paris to Calais by relays of
horses harnessed to a light truck running on wheels of papier-mache,
embarked for Dover on board a fishing-lugger. Twelve hours before the
German Emperor had sailed from Cuxhaven, which he had reached by rail
with infinite difficulty, and after a dozen breakdowns, for Harwich in
a fast wood-built schooner-yacht.
During the last four or five days there had been very little
communication between the Continent and England. All English steamers,
including warships, had been forbidden to pass the three-mile limit.
By a happy accident the Channel Fleet and the Home Defence Squadron
had anchored in British waters after the manoeuvres just before Miss
Chrysie pulled that fatal lever. The Mediterranean Fleet was at Malta,
powerless to move an engine or fire a gun. Communication across the
narrow seas was still possible by wooden sailing craft, and it was the
news which these had brought from England that had induced the Kaiser
and the President to go and see the miracle for themselves.
The moment that they set foot on English soil, which they did almost
about the same time, the growing lassitude of the last few days
vanished.
"These are truly the Fortunate Isles just now," exclaimed the Kaiser,
as he drew his first breath of the cool English air. "A few moments
and I am a man again. Then that circular which we all laughed at so
was true!" he went on, to himself. "Yes, everything seems going on as
usual. They seem to be caring as little about the state of Europe as
they did about the African war. Why, there's a train running as easily
as though the railways of Europe were not strewn with wrecks."
Then he turned to the aide-de-camp who had accompanied him, and said:
"Von Kritzener, see if you can get me a special to London--but no, we
had better keep incognito. Be good enough to go and see when there is
a fast train to London, and then we will get something to eat."
The Emperor and his aide were both in ordinary yachting costume, and
the points of the famous moustache had been drooped downwards. The
aide came back to the yacht in a few minutes, saying that there was a
fast train to London in forty minutes; so his majesty dined briefly
but well at the Great Eastern Hotel, and presently found himself
speeding swiftly and smoothly and with an unwonted sense of security
towards London.
The French President experienced practically the same sensations when
he landed at Dover and took the train to Charing Cross. Everything was
going on just as usual. They were even doing target practice with the
big guns from Dover Castle; and as he heard the boom of the cannon, he
thought with a shudder of what had happened only a day or two before
to the great French siege-guns before Metz and Strassburg.
All he noticed out of the common was what the Kaiser noticed
too--lines of great steel masts along the coast and clumps of them on
every elevation inland. From what he had already learnt from General
Ducros, he half-guessed that these were the means through which the
earth received the vast volumes of electricity given off from the
works in Boothia Land, and that it was thus that the magnetic
equilibrium was kept undisturbed.
In London nothing seemed altered. Everybody was going about his daily
business as though no such continent as Europe existed; so the
President and the Kaiser, wondering greatly, both went and put up at
Claridge's, and there, to their mutual astonishment, recognised each
other. Both were strictly incognito, both recognised that the state of
affairs in Europe had reached the limits of the possible, and both
guessed that they had come practically on the same errand. Wherefore
Kaiser bowed to President and President bowed to Kaiser, after which
they shook hands, took wine together, and, like a couple of good
sportsmen, proceeded a little later on to discuss the situation in the
Kaiser's private sitting-room.
The result of an interesting and momentous conversation was that the
Kaiser sent his aide with an autograph letter to Marlborough House
requesting the honour of an interview with King Edward for himself and
the President.
The answer was a royal brougham and pair, and a cordial invitation to
the two potentates whom fate and the great Storage Trust had brought
so strangely together to sleep at Marlborough House.
Nearly the whole of the next day was occupied in interviews between
the three rulers, and also with the Ministers of the great Powers who
were still in London. The American Minister and the English manager of
the Great Storage Trust were present at most of them. At the end of a
lengthy discussion on the _status quo_, the Kaiser confessed, in his
usual frank, manly fashion, that not only Germany, but Europe, was
helpless in face of the invisible but tremendous force which the Trust
had shown itself capable of exercising.
"We are beaten," he said, "and it would be only foolishness to hide
the fact. Our ships are helpless hulks, most of them wrecks, our
trains will not run, our machinery will not work, our guns will not
shoot. Within three days we have gone back to the Middle Ages, or
beyond them, for, even if we had armour, you could break it with your
fist, and you would not even want a mailed one," he added, with a
laugh at his own expense.
"There are over ten millions of men carrying arms they cannot use, and
hundreds of thousands of these men are starving because the railways
are useless and no food can be got to them. It would be absurd were it
not so great a tragedy; but since we cannot fight, we must arrange our
differences some other way. What do you say, Monsieur le President?"
"I say as your Majesty does," replied Monsieur Loubet, in his blunt,
common-sense fashion; "and since these gentlemen of the Trust have
shown us how helpless fleets and armies may be rendered, perhaps
Europe may be induced to seek for some more reasonable method of
arranging disputes than by the shedding of blood."
"I most sincerely hope so," said King Edward; "and if these gentlemen
are prepared to endorse these sentiments on behalf of their august
masters, I think there will be little difficulty in arranging matters
satisfactorily and putting an end to what may be justly described as
an intolerable and impossible condition of affairs. What do you say,
gentlemen?" he went on, turning to the Ministers.
"I fear, your Majesty, it would be necessary for me to communicate
with my imperial master before I could pledge him to any course
resembling surrender."
"My dear count," said the Kaiser, turning towards him with a laugh, "I
am afraid you hardly realise the position. It would take you at the
very least three weeks, possibly six, to reach Petersburg. You forget
that all the mechanical triumphs of civilisation are for the present
things of the past. There are no cables, no telegraphs, no railways.
Neither horses nor men are capable of any great exertion, and their
strength is becoming less every hour. Petersburg is farther from
London to-day than Pekin was a month ago."
"And even from Paris," added the President when the Emperor had
finished, "I have been four days travelling. I came to Calais in a
truck drawn by horses along the railway, and from Calais in a fishing
boat. Gentlemen, if I may venture to advise, I would suggest that the
best, nay, the only thing that Europe, in your persons, can do, is to
place itself in the hands of His Majesty King Edward. We have been
enemies, but he is the friend of all of us, and if any man on earth
can and will do right it is he."
"I entirely agree with Monsieur le President," said the Kaiser. "We
are helpless, and he can help us. For my own part, I place the
interests of Germany unreservedly in his hands."
After this it was impossible for the Ministers of the other Powers to
hold back, and so a joint-note was drawn up there and then, praying
King Edward to accept the office of mediator between the signatory
Powers and those uncrowned monarchs who, from their citadel in the
midst of the far-off northern wilderness, had proved their title to
sovereignty by demonstrating their power to render the nation helpless
at their will.
The only communication that was now possible with Canada, and
therefore with Boothia Land, was by means of aerographic messages
transmitted from one station to another _via_ the north of Scotland,
The Faroes, Iceland, Greenland, and Newfoundland, where the cable was
working as usual. It took nearly twelve hours for the messages to
reach the works, and the president had scarcely communicated its
contents to his colleagues when the _Nadine_ came rushing full speed
into Adelaide Bay with the news that the great Russian ice-breaker,
with three other vessels in her wake, was steaming down from the
northward about twenty miles away.