1
The Prince Karl Albert had made a profound impression upon Bert. He was
quite the most terrifying person Bert had ever encountered. He filled
the Smallways soul with passionate dread and antipathy. For a long time
Bert sat alone in Kurt's cabin, doing nothing and not venturing even
to open the door lest he should be by that much nearer that appalling
presence.
So it came about that he was probably the last person on board to hear
the news that wireless telegraphy was bringing to the airship in throbs
and fragments of a great naval battle in progress in mid-Atlantic.
He learnt it at last from Kurt.
Kurt came in with a general air of ignoring Bert, but muttering to
himself in English nevertheless. “Stupendous!” Bert heard him say.
“Here!” he said, “get off this locker.” And he proceeded to rout out two
books and a case of maps. He spread them on the folding-table, and stood
regarding them. For a time his Germanic discipline struggled with his
English informality and his natural kindliness and talkativeness, and at
last lost.
“They're at it, Smallways,” he said.
“At what, sir?” said Bert, broken and respectful.
“Fighting! The American North Atlantic squadron and pretty nearly
the whole of our fleet. Our Eiserne Kreuz has had a gruelling and is
sinking, and their Miles Standish--she's one of their biggest--has sunk
with all hands. Torpedoes, I suppose. She was a bigger ship than the
Karl der Grosse, but five or six years older. Gods! I wish we could see
it, Smallways; a square fight in blue water, guns or nothing, and all of
'em steaming ahead!”
He spread his maps, he had to talk, and so he delivered a lecture on the
naval situation to Bert.
“Here it is,” he said, “latitude 30 degrees 50 minutes N. longitude 30
degrees 50 minutes W. It's a good day off us, anyhow, and they're all
going south-west by south at full pelt as hard as they can go. We shan't
see a bit of it, worse luck! Not a sniff we shan't get!”
2
The naval situation in the North Atlantic at that time was a peculiar
one. The United States was by far the stronger of the two powers upon
the sea, but the bulk of the American fleet was still in the Pacific.
It was in the direction of Asia that war had been most feared, for the
situation between Asiatic and white had become unusually violent
and dangerous, and the Japanese government had shown itself quite
unprecedentedly difficult. The German attack therefore found half the
American strength at Manila, and what was called the Second Fleet strung
out across the Pacific in wireless contact between the Asiatic station
and San Francisco. The North Atlantic squadron was the sole American
force on her eastern shore, it was returning from a friendly visit
to France and Spain, and was pumping oil-fuel from tenders in
mid-Atlantic--for most of its ships were steamships--when the
international situation became acute. It was made up of four battleships
and five armoured cruisers ranking almost with battleships, not one of
which was of a later date than 1913. The Americans had indeed grown so
accustomed to the idea that Great Britain could be trusted to keep the
peace of the Atlantic that a naval attack on the eastern seaboard
found them unprepared even in their imaginations. But long before the
declaration of war--indeed, on Whit Monday--the whole German fleet of
eighteen battleships, with a flotilla of fuel tenders and converted
liners containing stores to be used in support of the air-fleet, had
passed through the straits of Dover and headed boldly for New York. Not
only did these German battleships outnumber the Americans two to one,
but they were more heavily armed and more modern in construction--seven
of them having high explosive engines built of Charlottenburg steel, and
all carrying Charlottenburg steel guns.
The fleets came into contact on Wednesday before any actual declaration
of war. The Americans had strung out in the modern fashion at distances
of thirty miles or so, and were steaming to keep themselves between the
Germans and either the eastern states or Panama; because, vital as it
was to defend the seaboard cities and particularly New York, it was
still more vital to save the canal from any attack that might prevent
the return of the main fleet from the Pacific. No doubt, said Kurt, this
was now making records across that ocean, “unless the Japanese have had
the same idea as the Germans.” It was obviously beyond human possibility
that the American North Atlantic fleet could hope to meet and defeat
the German; but, on the other hand, with luck it might fight a delaying
action and inflict such damage as to greatly weaken the attack upon
the coast defences. Its duty, indeed, was not victory but devotion,
the severest task in the world. Meanwhile the submarine defences of New
York, Panama, and the other more vital points could be put in some sort
of order.
This was the naval situation, and until Wednesday in Whit week it was
the only situation the American people had realised. It was then they
heard for the first time of the real scale of the Dornhof aeronautic
park and the possibility of an attack coming upon them not only by
sea, but by the air. But it is curious that so discredited were the
newspapers of that period that a large majority of New Yorkers, for
example, did not believe the most copious and circumstantial accounts of
the German air-fleet until it was actually in sight of New York.
Kurt's talk was half soliloquy. He stood with a map on Mercator's
projection before him, swaying to the swinging of the ship and talking
of guns and tonnage, of ships and their build and powers and speed, of
strategic points, and bases of operation. A certain shyness that
reduced him to the status of a listener at the officers' table no longer
silenced him.
Bert stood by, saying very little, but watching Kurt's finger on the
map. “They've been saying things like this in the papers for a long
time,” he remarked. “Fancy it coming real!”
Kurt had a detailed knowledge of the Miles Standish. “She used to be
a crack ship for gunnery--held the record. I wonder if we beat her
shooting, or how? I wish I was in it. I wonder which of our ships beat
her. Maybe she got a shell in her engines. It's a running fight! I
wonder what the Barbarossa is doing,” he went on, “She's my old ship.
Not a first-rater, but good stuff. I bet she's got a shot or two home
by now if old Schneider's up to form. Just think of it! There they
are whacking away at each other, great guns going, shells exploding,
magazines bursting, ironwork flying about like straw in a gale, all
we've been dreaming of for years! I suppose we shall fly right away to
New York--just as though it wasn't anything at all. I suppose we shall
reckon we aren't wanted down there. It's no more than a covering fight
on our side. All those tenders and store-ships of ours are going on
south-west by west to New York to make a floating depot for us. See?” He
dabbed his forefinger on the map. “Here we are. Our train of stores goes
there, our battleships elbow the Americans out of our way there.”
When Bert went down to the men's mess-room to get his evening ration,
hardly any one took notice of him except just to point him out for
an instant. Every one was talking of the battle, suggesting,
contradicting--at times, until the petty officers hushed them, it rose
to a great uproar. There was a new bulletin, but what it said he did not
gather except that it concerned the Barbarossa. Some of the men stared
at him, and he heard the name of “Booteraidge” several times; but no one
molested him, and there was no difficulty about his soup and bread when
his turn at the end of the queue came. He had feared there might be no
ration for him, and if so he did not know what he would have done.
Afterwards he ventured out upon the little hanging gallery with the
solitary sentinel. The weather was still fine, but the wind was rising
and the rolling swing of the airship increasing. He clutched the rail
tightly and felt rather giddy. They were now out of sight of land,
and over blue water rising and falling in great masses. A dingy old
brigantine under the British flag rose and plunged amid the broad blue
waves--the only ship in sight.
3
In the evening it began to blow and the air-ship to roll like a porpoise
as it swung through the air. Kurt said that several of the men were
sea-sick, but the motion did not inconvenience Bert, whose luck it was
to be of that mysterious gastric disposition which constitutes a good
sailor. He slept well, but in the small hours the light awoke him, and
he found Kurt staggering about in search of something. He found it at
last in the locker, and held it in his hand unsteadily--a compass. Then
he compared his map.
“We've changed our direction,” he said, “and come into the wind. I can't
make it out. We've turned away from New York to the south. Almost as if
we were going to take a hand--”
He continued talking to himself for some time.
Day came, wet and windy. The window was bedewed externally, and they
could see nothing through it. It was also very cold, and Bert decided
to keep rolled up in his blankets on the locker until the bugle summoned
him to his morning ration. That consumed, he went out on the little
gallery; but he could see nothing but eddying clouds driving headlong
by, and the dim outlines of the nearer airships. Only at rare intervals
could he get a glimpse of grey sea through the pouring cloud-drift.
Later in the morning the Vaterland changed altitude, and soared up
suddenly in a high, clear sky, going, Kurt said, to a height of nearly
thirteen thousand feet.
Bert was in his cabin, and chanced to see the dew vanish from the window
and caught the gleam of sunlight outside. He looked out, and saw once
more that sunlit cloud floor he had seen first from the balloon, and the
ships of the German air-fleet rising one by one from the white, as fish
might rise and become visible from deep water. He stared for a moment
and then ran out to the little gallery to see this wonder better. Below
was cloudland and storm, a great drift of tumbled weather going hard
away to the north-east, and the air about him was clear and cold
and serene save for the faintest chill breeze and a rare, drifting
snow-flake. Throb, throb, throb, throb, went the engines in the
stillness. That huge herd of airships rising one after another had
an effect of strange, portentous monsters breaking into an altogether
unfamiliar world.
Either there was no news of the naval battle that morning, or the Prince
kept to himself whatever came until past midday. Then the bulletins came
with a rush, bulletins that made the lieutenant wild with excitement.
“Barbarossa disabled and sinking,” he cried. “Gott im Himmel! Der alte
Barbarossa! Aber welch ein braver krieger!”
He walked about the swinging cabin, and for a time he was wholly German.
Then he became English again. “Think of it, Smallways! The old ship we
kept so clean and tidy! All smashed about, and the iron flying about
in fragments, and the chaps one knew--Gott!--flying about too! Scalding
water squirting, fire, and the smash, smash of the guns! They smash
when you're near! Like everything bursting to pieces! Wool won't stop
it--nothing! And me up here--so near and so far! Der alte Barbarossa!”
“Any other ships?” asked Smallways, presently.
“Gott! Yes! We've lost the Karl der Grosse, our best and biggest. Run
down in the night by a British liner that blundered into the fighting
in trying to blunder out. They're fighting in a gale. The liner's
afloat with her nose broken, sagging about! There never was such a
battle!--never before! Good ships and good men on both sides,--and a
storm and the night and the dawn and all in the open ocean full steam
ahead! No stabbing! No submarines! Guns and shooting! Half our ships we
don't hear of any more, because their masts are shot away. Latitude,
30 degrees 40 minutes N.--longitude, 40 degrees 30 minutes W.--where's
that?”
He routed out his map again, and stared at it with eyes that did not
see.
“Der alte Barbarossa! I can't get it out of my head--with shells in her
engine-room, and the fires flying out of her furnaces, and the stokers
and engineers scalded and dead. Men I've messed with, Smallways--men
I've talked to close! And they've had their day at last! And it wasn't
all luck for them!
“Disabled and sinking! I suppose everybody can't have all the luck in a
battle. Poor old Schneider! I bet he gave 'em something back!”
So it was the news of the battle came filtering through to them all that
morning. The Americans had lost a second ship, name unknown; the Hermann
had been damaged in covering the Barbarossa.... Kurt fretted like an
imprisoned animal about the airship, now going up to the forward gallery
under the eagle, now down into the swinging gallery, now poring over his
maps. He infected Smallways with a sense of the immediacy of this battle
that was going on just over the curve of the earth. But when Bert went
down to the gallery the world was empty and still, a clear inky-blue
sky above and a rippled veil of still, thin sunlit cirrus below, through
which one saw a racing drift of rain-cloud, and never a glimpse of sea.
Throb, throb, throb, throb, went the engines, and the long, undulating
wedge of airships hurried after the flagship like a flight of swans
after their leader. Save for the quiver of the engines it was as
noiseless as a dream. And down there, somewhere in the wind and rain,
guns roared, shells crashed home, and, after the old manner of warfare,
men toiled and died.
4
As the afternoon wore on the lower weather abated, and the sea became
intermittently visible again. The air-fleet dropped slowly to the middle
air, and towards sunset they had a glimpse of the disabled Barbarossa
far away to the east. Smallways heard men hurrying along the passage,
and was drawn out to the gallery, where he found nearly a dozen officers
collected and scrutinising the helpless ruins of the battleship through
field-glasses. Two other vessels stood by her, one an exhausted petrol
tank, very high out of the water, and the other a converted liner. Kurt
was at the end of the gallery, a little apart from the others.
“Gott!” he said at last, lowering his binocular, “it is like seeing
an old friend with his nose cut off--waiting to be finished. Der
Barbarossa!”
With a sudden impulse he handed his glass to Bert, who had peered
beneath his hands, ignored by every one, seeing the three ships merely
as three brown-black lines upon the sea.
Never had Bert seen the like of that magnified slightly hazy image
before. It was not simply a battered ironclad that wallowed helpless,
it was a mangled ironclad. It seemed wonderful she still floated. Her
powerful engines had been her ruin. In the long chase of the night
she had got out of line with her consorts, and nipped in between the
Susquehanna and the Kansas City. They discovered her proximity, dropped
back until she was nearly broadside on to the former battleship, and
signalled up the Theodore Roosevelt and the little Monitor. As dawn
broke she had found herself hostess of a circle. The fight had not
lasted five minutes before the appearance of the Hermann to the east,
and immediately after of the Furst Bismarck in the west, forced the
Americans to leave her, but in that time they had smashed her iron
to rags. They had vented the accumulated tensions of their hard day's
retreat upon her. As Bert saw her, she seemed a mere metal-worker's
fantasy of frozen metal writhings. He could not tell part from part of
her, except by its position.
“Gott!” murmured Kurt, taking the glasses Bert restored to him--“Gott!
Da waren Albrecht--der gute Albrecht und der alte Zimmermann--und von
Rosen!”
Long after the Barbarosa had been swallowed up in the twilight and
distance he remained on the gallery peering through his glasses, and
when he came back to his cabin he was unusually silent and thoughtful.
“This is a rough game, Smallways,” he said at last--“this war is a rough
game. Somehow one sees it different after a thing like that. Many men
there were worked to make that Barbarossa, and there were men in it--one
does not meet the like of them every day. Albrecht--there was a man
named Albrecht--played the zither and improvised; I keep on wondering
what has happened to him. He and I--we were very close friends, after
the German fashion.”
Smallways woke the next night to discover the cabin in darkness, a
draught blowing through it, and Kurt talking to himself in German. He
could see him dimly by the window, which he had unscrewed and opened,
peering down. That cold, clear, attenuated light which is not so much
light as a going of darkness, which casts inky shadows and so often
heralds the dawn in the high air, was on his face.
“What's the row?” said Bert.
“Shut up!” said the lieutenant. “Can't you hear?”
Into the stillness came the repeated heavy thud of guns, one, two, a
pause, then three in quick succession.
“Gaw!” said Bert--“guns!” and was instantly at the lieutenant's side.
The airship was still very high and the sea below was masked by a thin
veil of clouds. The wind had fallen, and Bert, following Kurt's pointing
finger, saw dimly through the colourless veil first a red glow, then
a quick red flash, and then at a little distance from it another. They
were, it seemed for a while, silent flashes, and seconds after, when
one had ceased to expect them, came the belated thuds--thud, thud. Kurt
spoke in German, very quickly.
A bugle call rang through the airship.
Kurt sprang to his feet, saying something in an excited tone, still
using German, and went to the door.
“I say! What's up?” cried Bert. “What's that?”
The lieutenant stopped for an instant in the doorway, dark against the
light passage. “You stay where you are, Smallways. You keep there and do
nothing. We're going into action,” he explained, and vanished.
Bert's heart began to beat rapidly. He felt himself poised over the
fighting vessels far below. In a moment, were they to drop like a hawk
striking a bird? “Gaw!” he whispered at last, in awestricken tones.
Thud!... thud! He discovered far away a second ruddy flare flashing guns
back at the first. He perceived some difference on the Vaterland for
which he could not account, and then he realised that the engines
had slowed to an almost inaudible beat. He stuck his head out of the
window--it was a tight fit--and saw in the bleak air the other airships
slowed down to a scarcely perceptible motion.
A second bugle sounded, was taken up faintly from ship to ship. Out went
the lights; the fleet became dim, dark bulks against an intense blue sky
that still retained an occasional star. For a long time they hung, for
an interminable time it seemed to him, and then began the sound of air
being pumped into the balloonette, and slowly, slowly the Vaterland sank
down towards the clouds.
He craned his neck, but he could not see if the rest of the fleet was
following them; the overhang of the gas-chambers intervened. There
was something that stirred his imagination deeply in that stealthy,
noiseless descent. The obscurity deepened for a time, the last fading
star on the horizon vanished, and he felt the cold presence of cloud.
Then suddenly the glow beneath assumed distinct outlines, became flames,
and the Vaterland ceased to descend and hung observant, and it would
seem unobserved, just beneath a drifting stratum of cloud, a thousand
feet, perhaps, over the battle below.
In the night the struggling naval battle and retreat had entered upon a
new phase. The Americans had drawn together the ends of the flying line
skilfully and dexterously, until at last it was a column and well to the
south of the lax sweeping pursuit of the Germans. Then in the darkness
before the dawn they had come about and steamed northward in close order
with the idea of passing through the German battle-line and falling
upon the flotilla that was making for New York in support of the German
air-fleet. Much had altered since the first contact of the fleets. By
this time the American admiral, O'Connor, was fully informed of the
existence of the airships, and he was no longer vitally concerned for
Panama, since the submarine flotilla was reported arrived there from Key
West, and the Delaware and Abraham Lincoln, two powerful and entirely
modern ships, were already at Rio Grande, on the Pacific side of the
canal. His manoeuvre was, however, delayed by a boiler explosion on
board the Susquehanna, and dawn found this ship in sight of and indeed
so close to the Bremen and Weimar that they instantly engaged. There was
no alternative to her abandonment but a fleet engagement. O'Connor chose
the latter course. It was by no means a hopeless fight. The Germans,
though much more numerous and powerful than the Americans, were in a
dispersed line measuring nearly forty-five miles from end to end, and
there were many chances that before they could gather in for the fight
the column of seven Americans would have ripped them from end to end.
The day broke dim and overcast, and neither the Bremen nor the Weimar
realised they had to deal with more than the Susquehanna until the whole
column drew out from behind her at a distance of a mile or less and
bore down on them. This was the position of affairs when the Vaterland
appeared in the sky. The red glow Bert had seen through the column of
clouds came from the luckless Susquehanna; she lay almost immediately
below, burning fore and aft, but still fighting two of her guns and
steaming slowly southward. The Bremen and the Weimar, both hit in
several places, were going west by south and away from her. The American
fleet, headed by the Theodore Roosevelt, was crossing behind them,
pounding them in succession, steaming in between them and the big modern
Furst Bismarck, which was coming up from the west. To Bert, however,
the names of all these ships were unknown, and for a considerable time
indeed, misled by the direction in which the combatants were moving, he
imagined the Germans to be Americans and the Americans Germans. He saw
what appeared to him to be a column of six battleships pursuing three
others who were supported by a newcomer, until the fact that the Bremen
and Weimar were firing into the Susquehanna upset his calculations.
Then for a time he was hopelessly at a loss. The noise of the guns, too,
confused him, they no longer seemed to boom; they went whack, whack,
whack, whack, and each faint flash made his heart jump in anticipation
of the instant impact. He saw these ironclads, too, not in profile,
as he was accustomed to see ironclads in pictures, but in plan and
curiously foreshortened. For the most part they presented empty decks,
but here and there little knots of men sheltered behind steel bulwarks.
The long, agitated noses of their big guns, jetting thin transparent
flashes and the broadside activity of the quick-firers, were the chief
facts in this bird's-eye view. The Americans being steam-turbine ships,
had from two to four blast funnels each; the Germans lay lower in the
water, having explosive engines, which now for some reason made an
unwonted muttering roar. Because of their steam propulsion, the American
ships were larger and with a more graceful outline. He saw all these
foreshortened ships rolling considerably and fighting their guns over
a sea of huge low waves and under the cold, explicit light of dawn. The
whole spectacle waved slowly with the long rhythmic rising and beat of
the airship.
At first only the Vaterland of all the flying fleet appeared upon the
scene below. She hovered high, over the Theodore Roosevelt, keeping
pace with the full speed of that ship. From that ship she must have
been intermittently visible through the drifting clouds. The rest of the
German fleet remained above the cloud canopy at a height of six or seven
thousand feet, communicating with the flagship by wireless telegraphy,
but risking no exposure to the artillery below.
It is doubtful at what particular time the unlucky Americans realised
the presence of this new factor in the fight. No account now survives of
their experience. We have to imagine as well as we can what it must have
been to a battled-strained sailor suddenly glancing upward to discover
that huge long silent shape overhead, vaster than any battleship, and
trailing now from its hinder quarter a big German flag. Presently, as
the sky cleared, more of such ships appeared in the blue through the
dissolving clouds, and more, all disdainfully free of guns or armour,
all flying fast to keep pace with the running fight below.
From first to last no gun whatever was fired at the Vaterland, and only
a few rifle shots. It was a mere adverse stroke of chance that she had
a man killed aboard her. Nor did she take any direct share in the fight
until the end. She flew above the doomed American fleet while the Prince
by wireless telegraphy directed the movements of her consorts. Meanwhile
the Vogel-stern and Preussen, each with half a dozen drachenflieger in
tow, went full speed ahead and then dropped through the clouds, perhaps
five miles ahead of the Americans. The Theodore Roosevelt let fly at
once with the big guns in her forward barbette, but the shells burst far
below the Vogel-stern, and forthwith a dozen single-man drachenflieger
were swooping down to make their attack.
Bert, craning his neck through the cabin port-hole, saw the whole of
that incident, that first encounter of aeroplane and ironclad. He saw
the queer German drachenflieger, with their wide flat wings and square
box-shaped heads, their wheeled bodies, and their single-man riders,
soar down the air like a flight of birds. “Gaw!” he said. One to the
right pitched extravagantly, shot steeply up into the air, burst with a
loud report, and flamed down into the sea; another plunged nose forward
into the water and seemed to fly to pieces as it hit the waves. He
saw little men on the deck of the Theodore Roosevelt below, men
foreshortened in plan into mere heads and feet, running out preparing
to shoot at the others. Then the foremost flying-machine was rushing
between Bert and the American's deck, and then bang! came the thunder
of its bomb flung neatly at the forward barbette, and a thin little
crackling of rifle shots in reply. Whack, whack, whack, went the
quick-firing guns of the Americans' battery, and smash came an answering
shell from the Furst Bismarck. Then a second and third flying-machine
passed between Bert and the American ironclad, dropping bombs also, and
a fourth, its rider hit by a bullet, reeled down and dashed itself to
pieces and exploded between the shot-torn funnels, blowing them apart.
Bert had a momentary glimpse of a little black creature jumping from the
crumpling frame of the flying-machine, hitting the funnel, and falling
limply, to be instantly caught and driven to nothingness by the blaze
and rush of the explosion.
Smash! came a vast explosion in the forward part of the flagship, and a
huge piece of metalwork seemed to lift out of her and dump itself
into the sea, dropping men and leaving a gap into which a prompt
drachenflieger planted a flaring bomb. And then for an instant Bert
perceived only too clearly in the growing, pitiless light a number of
minute, convulsively active animalcula scorched and struggling in the
Theodore Roosevelt's foaming wake. What were they? Not men--surely not
men? Those drowning, mangled little creatures tore with their clutching
fingers at Bert's soul. “Oh, Gord!” he cried, “Oh, Gord!” almost
whimpering. He looked again and they had gone, and the black stem of the
Andrew Jackson, a little disfigured by the sinking Bremen's last
shot, was parting the water that had swallowed them into two neatly
symmetrical waves. For some moments sheer blank horror blinded Bert to
the destruction below.
Then, with an immense rushing sound, bearing as it were a straggling
volley of crashing minor explosions on its back, the Susquehanna, three
miles and more now to the east, blew up and vanished abruptly in a
boiling, steaming welter. For a moment nothing was to be seen but
tumbled water, and--then there came belching up from below, with immense
gulping noises, eructations of steam and air and petrol and fragments of
canvas and woodwork and men.
That made a distinct pause in the fight. It seemed a long pause to Bert.
He found himself looking for the drachenflieger. The flattened ruin of
one was floating abeam of the Monitor, the rest had passed, dropping
bombs down the American column; several were in the water and apparently
uninjured, and three or four were still in the air and coming round
now in a wide circle to return to their mother airships. The American
ironclads were no longer in column formation; the Theodore Roosevelt,
badly damaged, had turned to the southeast, and the Andrew Jackson,
greatly battered but uninjured in any fighting part was passing between
her and the still fresh and vigorous Furst Bismarck to intercept and
meet the latter's fire. Away to the west the Hermann and the Germanicus
had appeared and were coming into action.
In the pause, after the Susquehanna's disaster Bert became aware of a
trivial sound like the noise of an ill-greased, ill-hung door that falls
ajar--the sound of the men in the Furst Bismarck cheering.
And in that pause in the uproar too, the sun rose, the dark waters
became luminously blue, and a torrent of golden light irradiated the
world. It came like a sudden smile in a scene of hate and terror. The
cloud veil had vanished as if by magic, and the whole immensity of the
German air-fleet was revealed in the sky; the air-fleet stooping now
upon its prey.
“Whack-bang, whack-bang,” the guns resumed, but ironclads were not built
to fight the zenith, and the only hits the Americans scored were a few
lucky chances in a generally ineffectual rifle fire. Their column was
now badly broken, the Susquehanna had gone, the Theodore Roosevelt had
fallen astern out of the line, with her forward guns disabled, in a heap
of wreckage, and the Monitor was in some grave trouble. These two had
ceased fire altogether, and so had the Bremen and Weimar, all four ships
lying within shot of each other in an involuntary truce and with their
respective flags still displayed. Only four American ships now, with the
Andrew Jackson leading, kept to the south-easterly course. And the Furst
Bismarck, the Hermann, and the Germanicus steamed parallel to them and
drew ahead of them, fighting heavily. The Vaterland rose slowly in the
air in preparation for the concluding act of the drama.
Then, falling into place one behind the other, a string of a dozen
airships dropped with unhurrying swiftness down the air in pursuit of
the American fleet. They kept at a height of two thousand feet or more
until they were over and a little in advance of the rearmost ironclad,
and then stooped swiftly down into a fountain of bullets, and going just
a little faster than the ship below, pelted her thinly protected decks
with bombs until they became sheets of detonating flame. So the airships
passed one after the other along the American column as it sought
to keep up its fight with the Furst Bismarck, the Hermann, and the
Germanicus, and each airship added to the destruction and confusion
its predecessor had made. The American gunfire ceased, except for a few
heroic shots, but they still steamed on, obstinately unsubdued, bloody,
battered, and wrathfully resistant, spitting bullets at the airships
and unmercifully pounded by the German ironclads. But now Bert had but
intermittent glimpses of them between the nearer bulks of the airships
that assailed them....
It struck Bert suddenly that the whole battle was receding and growing
small and less thunderously noisy. The Vaterland was rising in the air,
steadily and silently, until the impact of the guns no longer smote
upon the heart but came to the ear dulled by distance, until the four
silenced ships to the eastward were little distant things: but were
there four? Bert now could see only three of those floating, blackened,
and smoking rafts of ruin against the sun. But the Bremen had two boats
out; the Theodore Roosevelt was also dropping boats to where the drift
of minute objects struggled, rising and falling on the big, broad
Atlantic waves.... The Vaterland was no longer following the fight. The
whole of that hurrying tumult drove away to the south-eastward, growing
smaller and less audible as it passed. One of the airships lay on
the water burning, a remote monstrous fount of flames, and far in the
south-west appeared first one and then three other German ironclads
hurrying in support of their consorts....
5
Steadily the Vaterland soared, and the air-fleet soared with her and
came round to head for New York, and the battle became a little thing
far away, an incident before the breakfast. It dwindled to a string of
dark shapes and one smoking yellow flare that presently became a mere
indistinct smear upon the vast horizon and the bright new day, that was
at last altogether lost to sight...
So it was that Bert Smallways saw the first fight of the airship and the
last fight of those strangest things in the whole history of war:
the ironclad battleships, which began their career with the floating
batteries of the Emperor Napoleon III in the Crimean war and lasted,
with an enormous expenditure of human energy and resources, for seventy
years. In that space of time the world produced over twelve thousand
five hundred of these strange monsters, in schools, in types, in series,
each larger and heavier and more deadly than its predecessors. Each in
its turn was hailed as the last birth of time, most in their turn were
sold for old iron. Only about five per cent of them ever fought in a
battle. Some foundered, some went ashore, and broke up, several rammed
one another by accident and sank. The lives of countless men were spent
in their service, the splendid genius, and patience of thousands of
engineers and inventors, wealth and material beyond estimating; to their
account we must put, stunted and starved lives on land, millions of
children sent to toil unduly, innumerable opportunities of fine living
undeveloped and lost. Money had to be found for them at any cost--that
was the law of a nation's existence during that strange time. Surely
they were the weirdest, most destructive and wasteful megatheria in the
whole history of mechanical invention.
And then cheap things of gas and basket-work made an end of them
altogether, smiting out of the sky!...
Never before had Bert Smallways seen pure destruction, never had he
realised the mischief and waste of war. His startled mind rose to the
conception; this also is in life. Out of all this fierce torrent of
sensation one impression rose and became cardinal--the impression of the
men of the Theodore Roosevelt who had struggled in the water after the
explosion of the first bomb. “Gaw!” he said at the memory; “it might
'ave been me and Grubb!... I suppose you kick about and get the water in
your mouf. I don't suppose it lasts long.”
He became anxious to see how Kurt was affected by these things. Also he
perceived he was hungry. He hesitated towards the door of the cabin and
peeped out into the passage. Down forward, near the gangway to the men's
mess, stood a little group of air sailors looking at something that
was hidden from him in a recess. One of them was in the light diver's
costume Bert had already seen in the gas chamber turret, and he was
moved to walk along and look at this person more closely and examine the
helmet he carried under his arm. But he forgot about the helmet when he
got to the recess, because there he found lying on the floor the dead
body of the boy who had been killed by a bullet from the Theodore
Roosevelt.
Bert had not observed that any bullets at all had reached the Vaterland
or, indeed, imagined himself under fire. He could not understand for a
time what had killed the lad, and no one explained to him.
The boy lay just as he had fallen and died, with his jacket torn and
scorched, his shoulder-blade smashed and burst away from his body and
all the left side of his body ripped and rent. There was much blood.
The sailors stood listening to the man with the helmet, who made
explanations and pointed to the round bullet hole in the floor and the
smash in the panel of the passage upon which the still vicious missile
had spent the residue of its energy. All the faces were grave and
earnest: they were the faces of sober, blond, blue-eyed men accustomed
to obedience and an orderly life, to whom this waste, wet, painful thing
that had been a comrade came almost as strangely as it did to Bert.
A peal of wild laughter sounded down the passage in the direction of the
little gallery and something spoke--almost shouted--in German, in tones
of exultation.
Other voices at a lower, more respectful pitch replied.
“Der Prinz,” said a voice, and all the men became stiffer and less
natural. Down the passage appeared a group of figures, Lieutenant Kurt
walking in front carrying a packet of papers.
He stopped point blank when he saw the thing in the recess, and his
ruddy face went white.
“So!” said he in surprise.
The Prince was following him, talking over his shoulder to Von
Winterfeld and the Kapitan.
“Eh?” he said to Kurt, stopping in mid-sentence, and followed the
gesture of Kurt's hand. He glared at the crumpled object in the recess
and seemed to think for a moment.
He made a slight, careless gesture towards the boy's body and turned to
the Kapitan.
“Dispose of that,” he said in German, and passed on, finishing his
sentence to Von Winterfeld in the same cheerful tone in which it had
begun.
6
The deep impression of helplessly drowning men that Bert had brought
from the actual fight in the Atlantic mixed itself up inextricably with
that of the lordly figure of Prince Karl Albert gesturing aside the dead
body of the Vaterland sailor. Hitherto he had rather liked the idea of
war as being a jolly, smashing, exciting affair, something like a
Bank Holiday rag on a large scale, and on the whole agreeable and
exhilarating. Now he knew it a little better.
The next day there was added to his growing disillusionment a third
ugly impression, trivial indeed to describe, a mere necessary everyday
incident of a state of war, but very distressing to his urbanised
imagination. One writes “urbanised” to express the distinctive
gentleness of the period. It was quite peculiar to the crowded townsmen
of that time, and different altogether from the normal experience of any
preceding age, that they never saw anything killed, never encountered,
save through the mitigating media of book or picture, the fact of lethal
violence that underlies all life. Three times in his existence, and
three times only, had Bert seen a dead human being, and he had never
assisted at the killing of anything bigger than a new-born kitten.
The incident that gave him his third shock was the execution of one
of the men on the Adler for carrying a box of matches. The case was
a flagrant one. The man had forgotten he had it upon him when coming
aboard. Ample notice had been given to every one of the gravity of this
offence, and notices appeared at numerous points all over the airships.
The man's defence was that he had grown so used to the notices and
had been so preoccupied with his work that he hadn't applied them to
himself; he pleaded, in his defence, what is indeed in military affairs
another serious crime, inadvertency. He was tried by his captain, and
the sentence confirmed by wireless telegraphy by the Prince, and it was
decided to make his death an example to the whole fleet. “The Germans,”
the Prince declared, “hadn't crossed the Atlantic to go wool gathering.”
And in order that this lesson in discipline and obedience might be
visible to every one, it was determined not to electrocute or drown but
hang the offender.
Accordingly the air-fleet came clustering round the flagship like carp
in a pond at feeding time. The Adler hung at the zenith immediately
alongside the flagship. The whole crew of the Vaterland assembled
upon the hanging gallery; the crews of the other airships manned the
air-chambers, that is to say, clambered up the outer netting to the
upper sides. The officers appeared upon the machine-gun platforms. Bert
thought it an altogether stupendous sight, looking down, as he was, upon
the entire fleet. Far off below two steamers on the rippled blue water,
one British and the other flying the American flag, seemed the minutest
objects, and marked the scale. They were immensely distant. Bert stood
on the gallery, curious to see the execution, but uncomfortable, because
that terrible blond Prince was within a dozen feet of him, glaring
terribly, with his arms folded, and his heels together in military
fashion.
They hung the man from the Adler. They gave him sixty feet of rope, so
that he should hang and dangle in the sight of all evil-doers who might
be hiding matches or contemplating any kindred disobedience. Bert
saw the man standing, a living, reluctant man, no doubt scared and
rebellious enough in his heart, but outwardly erect and obedient, on
the lower gallery of the Adler about a hundred yards away. Then they had
thrust him overboard.
Down he fell, hands and feet extending, until with a jerk he was at the
end of the rope. Then he ought to have died and swung edifyingly, but
instead a more terrible thing happened; his head came right off, and
down the body went spinning to the sea, feeble, grotesque, fantastic,
with the head racing it in its fall.
“Ugh!” said Bert, clutching the rail before him, and a sympathetic grunt
came from several of the men beside him.
“So!” said the Prince, stiffer and sterner, glared for some seconds,
then turned to the gang way up into the airship.
For a long time Bert remained clinging to the railing of the gallery. He
was almost physically sick with the horror of this trifling incident.
He found it far more dreadful than the battle. He was indeed a very
degenerate, latter-day, civilised person.
Late that afternoon Kurt came into the cabin and found him curled up
on his locker, and looking very white and miserable. Kurt had also lost
something of his pristine freshness.
“Sea-sick?” he asked.
“No!”
“We ought to reach New York this evening. There's a good breeze coming
up under our tails. Then we shall see things.”
Bert did not answer.
Kurt opened out folding chair and table, and rustled for a time with
his maps. Then he fell thinking darkly. He roused himself presently, and
looked at his companion. “What's the matter?” he said.
“Nothing!”
Kurt stared threateningly. “What's the matter?”
“I saw them kill that chap. I saw that flying-machine man hit the
funnels of the big ironclad. I saw that dead chap in the passage. I seen
too much smashing and killing lately. That's the matter. I don't like
it. I didn't know war was this sort of thing. I'm a civilian. I don't
like it.”
“_I_ don't like it,” said Kurt. “By Jove, no!”
“I've read about war, and all that, but when you see it it's different.
And I'm gettin' giddy. I'm gettin' giddy. I didn't mind a bit being up
in that balloon at first, but all this looking down and floating over
things and smashing up people, it's getting on my nerves. See?”
“It'll have to get off again....”
Kurt thought. “You're not the only one. The men are all getting strung
up. The flying--that's just flying. Naturally it makes one a little
swimmy in the head at first. As for the killing, we've got to be
blooded; that's all. We're tame, civilised men. And we've got to get
blooded. I suppose there's not a dozen men on the ship who've really
seen bloodshed. Nice, quiet, law-abiding Germans they've been so far....
Here they are--in for it. They're a bit squeamy now, but you wait till
they've got their hands in.”
He reflected. “Everybody's getting a bit strung up,” he said.
He turned again to his maps. Bert sat crumpled up in the corner,
apparently heedless of him. For some time both kept silence.
“What did the Prince want to go and 'ang that chap for?” asked Bert,
suddenly.
“That was all right,” said Kurt, “that was all right. QUITE right. Here
were the orders, plain as the nose on your face, and here was that fool
going about with matches--”
“Gaw! I shan't forget that bit in a 'urry,” said Bert irrelevantly.
Kurt did not answer him. He was measuring their distance from New York
and speculating. “Wonder what the American aeroplanes are like?” he
said. “Something like our drachenflieger.... We shall know by this time
to-morrow.... I wonder what we shall know? I wonder. Suppose, after all,
they put up a fight.... Rum sort of fight!”
He whistled softly and mused. Presently he fretted out of the cabin, and
later Bert found him in the twilight upon the swinging platform, staring
ahead, and speculating about the things that might happen on the morrow.
Clouds veiled the sea again, and the long straggling wedge of air-ships
rising and falling as they flew seemed like a flock of strange new
births in a Chaos that had neither earth nor water but only mist and
sky.