1
It was only very slowly that Bert got hold of this idea that the
whole world was at war, that he formed any image at all of the crowded
countries south of these Arctic solitudes stricken with terror and
dismay as these new-born aerial navies swept across their skies. He
was not used to thinking of the world as a whole, but as a limitless
hinterland of happenings beyond the range of his immediate vision. War
in his imagination was something, a source of news and emotion, that
happened in a restricted area, called the Seat of War. But now the whole
atmosphere was the Seat of War, and every land a cockpit. So closely had
the nations raced along the path of research and invention, so secret
and yet so parallel had been their plans and acquisitions, that it was
within a few hours of the launching of the first fleet in Franconia
that an Asiatic Armada beat its west-ward way across, high above the
marvelling millions in the plain of the Ganges. But the preparations
of the Confederation of Eastern Asia had been on an altogether more
colossal scale than the German. “With this step,” said Tan Ting-siang,
“we overtake and pass the West. We recover the peace of the world that
these barbarians have destroyed.”
Their secrecy and swiftness and inventions had far surpassed those of
the Germans, and where the Germans had had a hundred men at work the
Asiatics had ten thousand. There came to their great aeronautic parks
at Chinsi-fu and Tsingyen by the mono-rails that now laced the whole
surface of China a limitless supply of skilled and able workmen, workmen
far above the average European in industrial efficiency. The news of the
German World Surprise simply quickened their efforts. At the time of the
bombardment of New York it is doubtful if the Germans had three hundred
airships all together in the world; the score of Asiatic fleets flying
east and west and south must have numbered several thousand. Moreover
the Asiatics had a real fighting flying-machine, the Niais as they were
called, a light but quite efficient weapon, infinitely superior to the
German drachenflieger. Like that, it was a one-man machine, but it
was built very lightly of steel and cane and chemical silk, with a
transverse engine, and a flapping sidewing. The aeronaut carried a gun
firing explosive bullets loaded with oxygen, and in addition, and true
to the best tradition of Japan, a sword. Mostly they were Japanese, and
it is characteristic that from the first it was contemplated that the
aeronaut should be a swordsman. The wings of these flyers had bat-like
hooks forward, by which they were to cling to their antagonist's
gas-chambers while boarding him. These light flying-machines were
carried with the fleets, and also sent overland or by sea to the front
with the men. They were capable of flights of from two to five hundred
miles according to the wind.
So, hard upon the uprush of the first German air-fleet, these Asiatic
swarms took to the atmosphere. Instantly every organised Government in
the world was frantically and vehemently building airships and whatever
approach to a flying machine its inventors had discovered. There was no
time 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 at
war in the most complicated way. For Britain and France and Italy had
declared war upon Germany and outraged Swiss neutrality; India, at the
sight of Asiatic airships, had broken into a Hindoo insurrection
in Bengal and a Mohametan revolt hostile to this in the North-west
Provinces--the latter spreading like wildfire from Gobi to the Gold
Coast--and the Confederation of Eastern Asia had seized the oil wells of
Burmha and was impartially attacking America and Germany. In a week they
were building airships in Damascus and Cairo and Johannesburg; Australia
and New Zealand were frantically equipping themselves. One unique and
terrifying aspect of this development was the swiftness with which these
monsters could be produced. To build an ironclad took from two to four
years; an airship could be put together in as many weeks. Moreover,
compared with even a torpedo boat, the airship was remarkably simple to
construct, given the air-chamber material, the engines, the gas plant,
and the design, it was really not more complicated and far easier than
an ordinary wooden boat had been a hundred years before. And now from
Cape Horn to Nova Zembla, and from Canton round to Canton again, there
were factories and workshops and industrial resources.
And the German airships were barely in sight of the Atlantic waters, the
first Asiatic fleet was scarcely reported from Upper Burmah, before the
fantastic fabric of credit and finance that had held the world together
economically for a hundred years strained and snapped. A tornado of
realisation swept through every stock exchange in the world; banks
stopped payment, business shrank and ceased, factories ran on for a
day or so by a sort of inertia, completing the orders of bankrupt and
extinguished customers, then stopped. The New York Bert Smallways saw,
for all its glare of light and traffic, was in the pit of an economic
and financial collapse unparalleled in history. The flow of the food
supply was already a little checked. And before the world-war had lasted
two weeks--by the time, that is, that mast was rigged in Labrador--there
was not a city or town in the world outside China, however far from
the actual centres of destruction, where police and government were not
adopting special emergency methods to deal with a want of food and a
glut of unemployed people.
The special peculiarities of aerial warfare were of such a nature as
to trend, once it had begun, almost inevitably towards social
disorganisation. The first of these peculiarities was brought home
to the Germans in their attack upon New York; the immense power of
destruction an airship has over the thing below, and its relative
inability to occupy or police or guard or garrison a surrendered
position. Necessarily, in the face of urban populations in a state
of economic disorganisation and infuriated and starving, this led to
violent and destructive collisions, and even where the air-fleet floated
inactive above, there would be civil conflict and passionate disorder
below. Nothing comparable to this state of affairs had been known in
the previous history of warfare, unless we take such a case as that of
a nineteenth century warship attacking some large savage or barbaric
settlement, or one of those naval bombardments that disfigure the
history of Great Britain in the late eighteenth century. Then, indeed,
there had been cruelties and destruction that faintly foreshadowed the
horrors of the aerial war. Moreover, before the twentieth century the
world had had but one experience, and that a comparatively light one,
in the Communist insurrection of Paris, 1871, of the possibilities of a
modern urban population under warlike stresses.
A second peculiarity of airship war as it first came to the world that
also made for social collapse, was the ineffectiveness of the early
air-ships against each other. Upon anything below they could rain
explosives in the most deadly fashion, forts and ships and cities lay at
their mercy, but unless they were prepared for a suicidal grapple they
could do remarkably little mischief to each other. The armament of the
huge German airships, big as the biggest mammoth liners afloat, was one
machine 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, the
air-sailors were provided with rifles with explosive bullets of oxygen
or inflammable substance, but no airship at any time ever carried as
much in the way of guns and armour as the smallest gunboat on the navy
list had been accustomed to do. Consequently, when these monsters met in
battle, they manoeuvred for the upper place, or grappled and fought like
junks, throwing grenades fighting hand to hand in an entirely medieval
fashion. The risks of a collapse and fall on either side came near to
balancing in every case the chances of victory. As a consequence, and
after their first experiences of battle, one finds a growing tendency on
the part of the air-fleet admirals to evade joining battle, and to seek
rather the moral advantage of a destructive counter attack.
And if the airships were too ineffective, the early drachenflieger were
either too unstable, like the German, or too light, like the Japanese,
to produce immediately decisive results. Later, it is true, the
Brazilians launched a flying-machine of a type and scale that was
capable of dealing with an airship, but they built only three or four,
they operated only in South America, and they vanished from history
untraceably in the time when world-bankruptcy put a stop to all further
engineering production on any considerable scale.
The third peculiarity of aerial warfare was that it was at once
enormously destructive and entirely indecisive. It had this unique
feature, that both sides lay open to punitive attack. In all previous
forms of war, both by land and sea, the losing side was speedily unable
to raid its antagonist's territory and the communications. One fought
on a “front,” and behind that front the winner's supplies and resources,
his towns and factories and capital, the peace of his country, were
secure. If the war was a naval one, you destroyed your enemy's battle
fleet and then blockaded his ports, secured his coaling stations, and
hunted down any stray cruisers that threatened your ports of commerce.
But to blockade and watch a coastline is one thing, to blockade and
watch the whole surface of a country is another, and cruisers and
privateers are things that take long to make, that cannot be packed up
and hidden and carried unostentatiously from point to point. In aerial
war the stronger side, even supposing it destroyed the main battle fleet
of the weaker, had then either to patrol and watch or destroy every
possible point at which he might produce another and perhaps a novel and
more deadly form of flyer. It meant darkening his air with airships. It
meant building them by the thousand and making aeronauts by the hundred
thousand. A small uninitated airship could be hidden in a railway
shed, in a village street, in a wood; a flying machine is even less
conspicuous.
And in the air are no streets, no channels, no point where one can
say of an antagonist, “If he wants to reach my capital he must come by
here.” In the air all directions lead everywhere.
Consequently it was impossible to end a war by any of the established
methods. A, having outnumbered and overwhelmed B, hovers, a thousand
airships strong, over his capital, threatening to bombard it unless B
submits. B replies by wireless telegraphy that he is now in the act of
bombarding the chief manufacturing city of A by means of three raider
airships. A denounces B's raiders as pirates and so forth, bombards B's
capital, and sets off to hunt down B's airships, while B, in a state of
passionate emotion and heroic unconquerableness, sets to work amidst his
ruins, making fresh airships and explosives for the benefit of A.
The war became perforce a universal guerilla war, a war inextricably
involving civilians and homes and all the apparatus of social life.
These aspects of aerial fighting took the world by surprise. There had
been no foresight to deduce these consequences. If there had been, the
world would have arranged for a Universal Peace Conference in 1900.
But mechanical invention had gone faster than intellectual and social
organisation, and the world, with its silly old flags, its silly
unmeaning tradition of nationality, its cheap newspapers and cheaper
passions and imperialisms, its base commercial motives and habitual
insincerities and vulgarities, its race lies and conflicts, was taken by
surprise. Once the war began there was no stopping it. The flimsy fabric
of credit that had grown with no man foreseeing, and that had held those
hundreds of millions in an economic interdependence that no man clearly
understood, dissolved in panic. Everywhere went the airships dropping
bombs, destroying any hope of a rally, and everywhere below were
economic catastrophe, starving workless people, rioting, and social
disorder. Whatever constructive guiding intelligence there had been
among the nations vanished in the passionate stresses of the time. Such
newspapers and documents and histories as survive from this period
all tell one universal story of towns and cities with the food supply
interrupted and their streets congested with starving unemployed; of
crises in administration and states of siege, of provisional Governments
and Councils of Defence, and, in the cases of India and Egypt,
insurrectionary committees taking charge of the re-arming of the
population, of the making of batteries and gun-pits, of the vehement
manufacture of airships and flying-machines.
One sees these things in glimpses, in illuminated moments, as if through
a driving reek of clouds, going on all over the world. It was the
dissolution of an age; it was the collapse of the civilisation that
had trusted to machinery, and the instruments of its destruction were
machines. But while the collapse of the previous great civilisation,
that of Rome, had been a matter of centuries, had been a thing of phase
and phase, like the ageing and dying of a man, this, like his killing by
railway or motor car, was one swift, conclusive smashing and an end.
2
The early battles of the aerial war were no doubt determined by attempts
to realise the old naval maxim, to ascertain the position of the enemy's
fleet and to destroy it. There was first the battle of the Bernese
Oberland, in which the Italian and French navigables in their flank
raid upon the Franconian Park were assailed by the Swiss experimental
squadron, supported as the day wore on by German airships, and then
the encounter of the British Winterhouse-Dunn aeroplanes with three
unfortunate Germans.
Then came the Battle of North India, in which the entire Anglo-Indian
aeronautic settlement establishment fought for three days against
overwhelming odds, and was dispersed and destroyed in detail.
And simultaneously with the beginning of that, commenced the momentous
struggle of the Germans and Asiatics that is usually known as the Battle
of Niagara because of the objective of the Asiatic attack. But it passed
gradually into a sporadic conflict over half a continent. Such German
airships as escaped destruction in battle descended and surrendered to
the Americans, and were re-manned, and in the end it became a series of
pitiless and heroic encounters between the Americans, savagely resolved
to exterminate their enemies, and a continually reinforced army of
invasion from Asia quartered upon the Pacific slope and supported by
an immense fleet. From the first the war in America was fought with
implacable bitterness; no quarter was asked, no prisoners were taken.
With ferocious and magnificent energy the Americans constructed and
launched ship after ship to battle and perish against the Asiatic
multitudes. All other affairs were subordinate to this war, the whole
population was presently living or dying for it. Presently, as I shall
tell, the white men found in the Butteridge machine a weapon that could
meet and fight the flying-machines of the Asiatic swordsman.
The Asiatic invasion of America completely effaced the German-American
conflict. It vanishes from history. At first it had seemed to promise
quite sufficient tragedy in itself--beginning as it did in unforgettable
massacre. After the destruction of central New York all America had
risen like one man, resolved to die a thousand deaths rather than submit
to Germany. The Germans grimly resolved upon beating the Americans into
submission and, following out the plans developed by the Prince, had
seized Niagara--in order to avail themselves of its enormous powerworks;
expelled all its inhabitants and made a desert of its environs as far as
Buffalo. 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 east
coast, stringing out to and fro like bees getting honey. It was then
that the Asiatic forces appeared, and it was in their attack upon this
German base at Niagara that the air-fleets of East and West first met
and the greater issue became clear.
One conspicuous peculiarity of the early aerial fighting arose from the
profound secrecy with which the airships had been prepared. Each power
had had but the dimmest inkling of the schemes of its rivals, and even
experiments with its own devices were limited by the needs of secrecy.
None of the designers of airships and aeroplanes had known clearly what
their inventions might have to fight; many had not imagined they would
have to fight anything whatever in the air; and had planned them only
for the dropping of explosives. Such had been the German idea. The only
weapon for fighting another airship with which the Franconian fleet had
been provided was the machine gun forward. Only after the fight over
New 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 was
supposed to swoop close to his antagonist and cast his bombs as he
whirled past. But indeed these contrivances were hopelessly unstable;
not one-third in any engagement succeeded in getting back to the mother
airship. The rest were either smashed up or grounded.
The allied Chino-Japanese fleet made the same distinction as the Germans
between airships and fighting machines heavier than air, but the type in
both cases was entirely different from the occidental models, and--it
is eloquent of the vigour with which these great peoples took up and
bettered the European methods of scientific research in almost every
particular the invention of Asiatic engineers. Chief among these, it
is worth remarking, was Mohini K. Chatterjee, a political exile who had
formerly served in the British-Indian aeronautic park at Lahore.
The German airship was fish-shaped, with a blunted head; the Asiatic
airship was also fish-shaped, but not so much on the lines of a cod or
goby as of a ray or sole. It had a wide, flat underside, unbroken by
windows or any opening except along the middle line. Its cabins occupied
its axis, with a sort of bridge deck above, and the gas-chambers gave
the whole affair the shape of a gipsy's hooped tent, except that it was
much flatter. The German airship was essentially a navigable balloon
very much lighter than air; the Asiatic airship was very little lighter
than air and skimmed through it with much greater velocity if with
considerably less stability. They carried fore and aft guns, the latter
much the larger, throwing inflammatory shells, and in addition they had
nests for riflemen on both the upper and the under side. Light as this
armament was in comparison with the smallest gunboat that ever sailed,
it was sufficient for them to outfight as well as outfly the German
monster airships. In action they flew to get behind or over the Germans:
they even dashed underneath, avoiding only passing immediately beneath
the magazine, and then as soon as they had crossed let fly with their
rear gun, and sent flares or oxygen shells into the antagonist's
gas-chambers.
It was not in their airships, but, as I have said, in their
flying-machines proper, that the strength of the Asiatics lay. Next
only to the Butteridge machine, these were certainly the most efficient
heavier-than-air fliers that had ever appeared. They were the invention
of a Japanese artist, and they differed in type extremely from the
box-kite quality of the German drachenflieger. They had curiously
curved, flexible side wings, more like _bent_ butterfly's wings than
anything else, and made of a substance like celluloid and of brightly
painted silk, and they had a long humming-bird tail. At the forward
corner of the wings were hooks, rather like the claws of a bat, by which
the machine could catch and hang and tear at the walls of an airship's
gas-chamber. The solitary rider sat between the wings above a transverse
explosive engine, an explosive engine that differed in no essential
particular 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 in
the Butteridge machine, and he carried a large double-edged two-handed
sword, in addition to his explosive-bullet firing rifle.
3
One sets down these particulars and compares the points of the American
and German pattern of aeroplane and navigable, but none of these facts
were clearly known to any of those who fought in this monstrously
confused battle above the American great lakes.
Each side went into action against it knew not what, under novel
conditions and with apparatus that even without hostile attacks was
capable of producing the most disconcerting surprises. Schemes of
action, attempts at collective manoeuvring necessarily went to pieces
directly the fight began, just as they did in almost all the early
ironclad battles of the previous century. Each captain then had to fall
back upon individual action and his own devices; one would see triumph
in what another read as a cue for flight and despair. It is as true of
the Battle of Niagara as of the Battle of Lissa that it was not a battle
but a bundle of “battlettes”!
To such a spectator as Bert it presented itself as a series of
incidents, some immense, some trivial, but collectively incoherent. He
never had a sense of any plain issue joined, of any point struggled
for and won or lost. He saw tremendous things happen and in the end his
world darkened to disaster and ruin.
He saw the battle from the ground, from Prospect Park and from Goat
Island, 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 telegraphy
long before the Zeppelin had located his encampment in Labrador. By his
direction the German air-fleet, whose advance scouts had been in contact
with the Japanese over the Rocky Mountains, had concentrated upon
Niagara and awaited his arrival. He had rejoined his command early in
the morning of the twelfth, and Bert had his first prospect of the Gorge
of Niagara while he was doing net drill outside the middle gas-chamber
at sunrise. The Zeppelin was flying very high at the time, and far below
he saw the water in the gorge marbled with froth and then away to the
west the great crescent of the Canadian Fall shining, flickering and
foaming in the level sunlight and sending up a deep, incessant thudding
rumble to the sky. The air-fleet was keeping station in an enormous
crescent, with its horns pointing south-westward, a long array of
shining monsters with tails rotating slowly and German ensigns now
trailing from their bellies aft of their Marconi pendants.
Niagara city was still largely standing then, albeit its streets were
empty of all life. Its bridges were intact; its hotels and restaurants
still flying flags and inviting sky signs; its power-stations running.
But about it the country on both sides of the gorge might have been
swept by a colossal broom. Everything that could possibly give cover
to an attack upon the German position at Niagara had been levelled as
ruthlessly as machinery and explosives could contrive; houses blown up
and burnt, woods burnt, fences and crops destroyed. The mono-rails had
been torn up, and the roads in particular cleared of all possibility of
concealment or shelter. Seen from above, the effect of this wreckage was
grotesque. Young woods had been destroyed whole-sale by dragging wires,
and the spoilt saplings, smashed or uprooted, lay in swathes like corn
after the sickle. Houses had an appearance of being flattened down by
the pressure of a gigantic finger. Much burning was still going on, and
large areas had been reduced to patches of smouldering and sometimes
still glowing blackness.
Here and there lay the debris of belated fugitives, carts, and dead
bodies of horses and men; and where houses had had water-supplies there
were pools of water and running springs from the ruptured pipes. In
unscorched fields horses and cattle still fed peacefully. Beyond this
desolated area the countryside was still standing, but almost all the
people had fled. Buffalo was on fire to an enormous extent, and there
were no signs of any efforts to grapple with the flames. Niagara city
itself was being rapidly converted to the needs of a military depot.
A large number of skilled engineers had already been brought from the
fleet and were busily at work adapting the exterior industrial apparatus
of the place to the purposes of an aeronautic park. They had made a
gas recharging station at the corner of the American Fall above the
funicular railway, and they were, opening up a much larger area to
the south for the same purpose. Over the power-houses and hotels and
suchlike prominent or important points the German flag was flying.
The Zeppelin circled slowly over this scene twice while the Prince
surveyed it from the swinging gallery; it then rose towards the centre
of the crescent and transferred the Prince and his suite, Kurt included,
to the Hohenzollern, which had been chosen as the flagship during the
impending battle. They were swung up on a small cable from the forward
gallery, and the men of the Zeppelin manned the outer netting as the
Prince and his staff left them. The Zeppelin then came about, circled
down and grounded in Prospect Park, in order to land the wounded and
take aboard explosives; for she had come to Labrador with her magazines
empty, it being uncertain what weight she might need to carry. She
also replenished the hydrogen in one of her forward chambers which had
leaked.
Bert was detailed as a bearer and helped carry the wounded one by one
into the nearest of the large hotels that faced the Canadian shore. The
hotel was quite empty except that there were two trained American nurses
and a negro porter, and three or four Germans awaiting them. Bert went
with the Zeppelin's doctor into the main street of the place, and they
broke into a drug shop and obtained various things of which they stood
in need. As they returned they found an officer and two men making a
rough inventory of the available material in the various stores. Except
for them the wide, main street of the town was quite deserted, the
people had been given three hours to clear out, and everybody,
it seemed, had done so. At one corner a dead man lay against the
wall--shot. Two or three dogs were visible up the empty vista, but
towards its river end the passage of a string of mono-rail cars broke
the stillness and the silence. They were loaded with hose, and were
passing to the trainful of workers who were converting Prospect Park
into an airship dock.
Bert pushed a case of medicine balanced on a bicycle taken from an
adjacent shop, to the hotel, and then he was sent to load bombs into the
Zeppelin magazine, a duty that called for elaborate care. From this job
he was presently called off by the captain of the Zeppelin, who sent
him with a note to the officer in charge of the Anglo-American Power
Company, for the field telephone had still to be adjusted. Bert received
his instructions in German, whose meaning he guessed, and saluted and
took the note, not caring to betray his ignorance of the language. He
started off with a bright air of knowing his way and turned a corner or
so, and was only beginning to suspect that he did not know where he was
going when his attention was recalled to the sky by the report of a gun
from the Hohenzollern and celestial cheering.
He looked up and found the view obstructed by the houses on either side
of the street. He hesitated, and then curiosity took him back towards
the bank of the river. Here his view was inconvenienced by trees, and
it was with a start that he discovered the Zeppelin, which he knew had
still a quarter of her magazines to fill, was rising over Goat Island.
She had not waited for her complement of ammunition. It occurred to him
that he was left behind. He ducked back among the trees and bushes until
he felt secure from any after-thought on the part of the Zeppelin's
captain. Then his curiosity to see what the German air-fleet faced
overcame him, and drew him at last halfway across the bridge to Goat
Island.
From that point he had nearly a hemisphere of sky and got his first
glimpse of the Asiatic airships low in the sky above the glittering
tumults of the Upper Rapids.
They were far less impressive than the German ships. He could not
judge the distance, and they flew edgeways to him, so as to conceal the
broader aspect of their bulk.
Bert stood there in the middle of the bridge, in a place that most
people who knew it remembered as a place populous with sightseers and
excursionists, and he was the only human being in sight there. Above
him, very high in the heavens, the contending air-fleets manoeuvred;
below him the river seethed like a sluice towards the American Fall. He
was curiously dressed. His cheap blue serge trousers were thrust into
German airship rubber boots, and on his head he wore an aeronaut's white
cap that was a trifle too large for him. He thrust that back to reveal
his staring little Cockney face, still scarred upon the brow. “Gaw!” he
whispered.
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 in
the direction of Goat Island.
4
For a time after they were in sight of each other, neither fleet
attempted to engage. The Germans numbered sixty-seven great airships
and they maintained the crescent formation at a height of nearly four
thousand feet. They kept a distance of about one and a half lengths, so
that the horns of the crescent were nearly thirty miles apart. Closely
in tow of the airships of the extreme squadrons on either wing were
about thirty drachenflieger ready manned, but these were too small and
distant for Bert to distinguish.
At first, only what was called the Southern fleet of the Asiatics was
visible to him. It consisted of forty airships, carrying all together
nearly four hundred one-man flying-machines upon their flanks, and for
some time it flew slowly and at a minimum distance of perhaps a dozen
miles from the Germans, eastward across their front. At first Bert
could distinguish only the greater bulks, then he perceived the one-man
machines as a multitude of very small objects drifting like motes in the
sunshine about and beneath the larger shapes.
Bert saw nothing then of the second fleet of the Asiatics, though
probably that was coming into sight of the Germans at the time, in the
north-west.
The air was very still, the sky almost without a cloud, and the German
fleet had risen to an immense height, so that the airships seemed no
longer of any considerable size. Both ends of their crescent showed
plainly. As they beat southward they passed slowly between Bert and the
sunlight, and became black outlines of themselves. The drachenflieger
appeared 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 away
into the east, quickening their pace and rising as they did so, and then
tailed out into a long column and came flying back, rising towards the
German left. The squadrons of the latter came about, facing this oblique
advance, and suddenly little flickerings and a faint crepitating sound
told that they had opened fire. For a time no effect was visible to
the watcher on the bridge. Then, like a handful of snowflakes, the
drachenflieger swooped to the attack, and a multitude of red specks
whirled up to meet them. It was to Bert's sense not only enormously
remote but singularly inhuman. Not four hours since he had been on one
of those very airships, and yet they seemed to him now not gas-bags
carrying men, but strange sentient creatures that moved about and did
things with a purpose of their own. The flight of the Asiatic and German
flying-machines joined and dropped earthward, became like a handful
of 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 the
direction of Buffalo. For a time they all were hidden, then two or three
white and a number of red ones rose again into the sky, like a swarm of
big butterflies, and circled fighting and drove away out of sight again
towards the east.
A heavy report recalled Bert's eyes to the zenith, and behold, the great
crescent had lost its dressing and burst into a disorderly long cloud of
airships! One had dropped halfway down the sky. It was flaming fore and
aft, and even as Bert looked it turned over and fell, spinning over and
over itself and vanished into the smoke of Buffalo.
Bert's mouth opened and shut, and he clutched tighter on the rail of
the bridge. For some moments--they seemed long moments--the two fleets
remained without any further change flying obliquely towards each
other, and making what came to Bert's ears as a midget uproar. Then
suddenly from either side airships began dropping out of alignment,
smitten by missiles he could neither see nor trace. The string of
Asiatic ships swung round and either charged into or over (it was
difficult to say from below) the shattered line of the Germans, who
seemed to open out to give way to them. Some sort of manoeuvring began,
but Bert could not grasp its import. The left of the battle became a
confused dance of airships. For some minutes up there the two crossing
lines of ships looked so close it seemed like a hand-to-hand scuffle
in the sky. Then they broke up into groups and duels. The descent of
German air-ships towards the lower sky increased. One of them flared
down and vanished far away in the north; two dropped with something
twisted and crippled in their movements; then a group of antagonists
came down from the zenith in an eddying conflict, two Asiatics against
one German, and were presently joined by another, and drove away
eastward all together with others 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 squadron of Asiatics came into the battle unnoted by Bert,
except that the multitude of ships above seemed presently increased.
In a little while the fight was utter confusion, drifting on the whole
to the south-west against the wind. It became more and more a series
of group encounters. Here a huge German airship flamed earthward with
a dozen flat Asiatic craft about her, crushing her every attempt to
recover. Here another hung with its screw fighting off the swordsman
from a swarm of flying-machines. Here, again, an Asiatic aflame at
either end swooped out of the battle. His attention went from incident
to incident in the vast clearness overhead; these conspicuous cases of
destruction caught and held his mind; it was only very slowly that any
sort of scheme manifested itself between those nearer, more striking
episodes.
The mass of the airships that eddied remotely above was, however,
neither destroying nor destroyed. The majority of them seemed to
be going at full speed and circling upward for position, exchanging
ineffectual shots as they did so. Very little ramming was essayed after
the first tragic downfall of rammer and rammed, and what ever attempts
at boarding were made were invisible to Bert. There seemed, however,
a steady attempt to isolate antagonists, to cut them off from their
fellows and bear them down, causing a perpetual sailing back and
interlacing of these shoaling bulks. The greater numbers of the Asiatics
and their swifter heeling movements gave them the effect of persistently
attacking the Germans. Overhead, and evidently endeavouring to keep
itself in touch with the works of Niagara, a body of German airships
drew itself together into a compact phalanx, and the Asiatics became
more and more intent upon breaking this up. He was grotesquely reminded
of fish in a fish-pond struggling for crumbs. He could see puny puffs of
smoke 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 was
followed 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 like
Valkyries swiftly through the air on the strange steeds the engineering
of Europe had begotten upon the artistic inspiration of Japan, came
a long string of Asiatic swordsman. The wings flapped jerkily, click,
clock, clitter clock, and the machines drove up; they spread and ceased,
and the apparatus came soaring through the air. So they rose and fell
and rose again. They passed so closely overhead that Bert could hear
their voices calling to one another. They swooped towards Niagara city
and landed one after another in a long line in a clear space before
the hotel. But he did not stay to watch them land. One yellow face had
craned over and looked at him, and for one enigmatical instant met his
eyes....
It was then the idea came to Bert that he was altogether too conspicuous
in the middle of the bridge, and that he took to his heels towards Goat
Island. Thence, dodging about among the trees, with perhaps an excessive
self-consciousness, he watched the rest of the struggle.
5
When Bert's sense of security was sufficiently restored for him to watch
the battle again, he perceived that a brisk little fight was in
progress between the Asiatic aeronauts and the German engineers for the
possession of Niagara city. It was the first time in the whole course of
the war that he had seen anything resembling fighting as he had studied
it in the illustrated papers of his youth. It seemed to him almost as
though things were coming right. He saw men carrying rifles and taking
cover and running briskly from point to point in a loose attacking
formation. The first batch of aeronauts had probably been under the
impression that the city was deserted. They had grounded in the open
near Prospect Park and approached the houses towards the power-works
before they were disillusioned by a sudden fire. They had scattered back
to the cover of a bank near the water--it was too far for them to reach
their machines again; they were lying and firing at the men in the
hotels and frame-houses about the power-works.
Then to their support came a second string of red flying-machines
driving up from the east. They rose up out of the haze above the houses
and came round in a long curve as if surveying the position below. The
fire of the Germans rose to a roar, and one of those soaring shapes gave
an abrupt jerk backward and fell among the houses. The others swooped
down exactly like great birds upon the roof of the power-house. They
caught upon it, and from each sprang a nimble little figure and ran
towards the parapet.
Other flapping bird-shapes came into this affair, but Bert had not seen
their coming. A staccato of shots came over to him, reminding him of
army manoeuvres, of newspaper descriptions of fights, of all that was
entirely correct in his conception of warfare. He saw quite a number of
Germans running from the outlying houses towards the power-house. Two
fell. 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 carry
the wounded men from the Zeppelin earlier in the day, suddenly ran up
the Geneva flag. The town that had seemed so quiet had evidently
been concealing a considerable number of Germans, and they were
now concentrating to hold the central power-house. He wondered what
ammunition they might have. More and more of the Asiatic flying-machines
came into the conflict. They had disposed of the unfortunate German
drachenflieger and were now aiming at the incipient aeronautic
park,--the electric gas generators and repair stations which formed
the German base. Some landed, and their aeronauts took cover and became
energetic infantry soldiers. Others hovered above the fight, their men
ever and again firing shots down at some chance exposure below. The
firing came in paroxysms; now there would be a watchful lull and now a
rapid tattoo of shots, rising to a roar. Once or twice flying machines,
as they circled warily, came right overhead, and for a time Bert gave
himself body and soul to cowering.
Ever and again a larger thunder mingled with the rattle and reminded
him of the grapple of airships far above, but the nearer fight held his
attention.
Abruptly something dropped from the zenith; something like a barrel or a
huge football.
CRASH! It smashed with an immense report. It had fallen among the
grounded Asiatic aeroplanes that lay among the turf and flower-beds near
the river. They flew in scraps and fragments, turf, trees, and gravel
leapt and fell; the aeronauts still lying along the canal bank were
thrown about like sacks, catspaws flew across the foaming water. All the
windows of the hotel hospital that had been shiningly reflecting blue
sky and airships the moment before became vast black stars. Bang!--a
second followed. Bert looked up and was filled with a sense of a number
of monstrous bodies swooping down, coming down on the whole affair like
a flight of bellying blankets, like a string of vast dish-covers. The
central tangle of the battle above was circling down as if to come
into touch with the power-house fight. He got a new effect of airships
altogether, as vast things coming down upon him, growing swiftly larger
and larger and more overwhelming, until the houses over the way seemed
small, the American rapids narrow, the bridge flimsy, the combatants
infinitesimal. As they came down they became audible as a complex of
shootings and vast creakings and groanings and beatings and throbbings
and shouts and shots. The fore-shortened black eagles at the fore-ends
of the Germans had an effect of actual combat of flying feathers.
Some of these fighting airships came within five hundred feet of the
ground. Bert could see men on the lower galleries of the Germans,
firing rifles; could see Asiatics clinging to the ropes; saw one man
in aluminium diver's gear fall flashing headlong into the waters above
Goat Island. For the first time he saw the Asiatic airships closely.
From this aspect they reminded him more than anything else of colossal
snowshoes; they had a curious patterning in black and white, in forms
that reminded him of the engine-turned cover of a watch. They had no
hanging galleries, but from little openings on the middle line peeped
out men and the muzzles of guns. So, driving in long, descending and
ascending curves, these monsters wrestled and fought. It was like clouds
fighting, like puddings trying to assassinate each other. They whirled
and circled about each other, and for a time threw Goat Island and
Niagara into a smoky twilight, through which the sunlight smote in
shafts and beams. They spread and closed and spread and grappled and
drove 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 crowd
broke away from her flare and rose about her dispersing, leaving her to
drop towards Canada and blow up as she dropped. Then with renewed uproar
the others closed again. Once from the men in Niagara city came a sound
like an ant-hill cheering. Another German burnt, and one badly deflated
by the prow of an antagonist, flopped out of action southward.
It became more and more evident that the Germans were getting the
worst of the unequal fight. More and more obviously were they being
persecuted. Less and less did they seem to fight with any object other
than escape. The Asiatics swept by them and above them, ripped their
bladders, set them alight, picked off their dimly seen men in diving
clothes, who struggled against fire and tear with fire extinguishers and
silk ribbons in the inner netting. They answered only with ineffectual
shots. Thence the battle circled back over Niagara, and then suddenly
the Germans, as if at a preconcerted signal, broke and dispersed, going
east, west, north, and south, in open and confused flight. The Asiatics,
as they realised this, rose to fly above them and after them. Only
one little knot of four Germans and perhaps a dozen Asiatics remained
fighting about the Hohenzollern and the Prince as he circled in a last
attempt to save Niagara.
Round they swooped once again over the Canadian Fall, over the waste of
waters eastward, until they were distant and small, and then round and
back, hurrying, bounding, swooping towards the one gaping spectator.
The whole struggling mass approached very swiftly, growing rapidly
larger, and coming out black and featureless against the afternoon sun
and above the blinding welter of the Upper Rapids. It grew like a storm
cloud until once more it darkened the sky. The flat Asiatic airships
kept high above the Germans and behind them, and fired unanswered
bullets into their gas-chambers and upon their flanks--the one-man
flying-machines hovered and alighted like a swarm of attacking bees.
Nearer they came, and nearer, filling the lower heaven. Two of the
Germans swooped and rose again, but the Hohenzollern had suffered too
much for that. She lifted weakly, turned sharply as if to get out of
the battle, burst into flames fore and aft, swept down to the water,
splashed into it obliquely, and rolled over and over and came down
stream rolling and smashing and writhing like a thing alive, halting and
then coming on again, with her torn and bent propeller still beating the
air. The bursting flames spluttered out again in clouds of steam. It was
a disaster gigantic in its dimensions. She lay across the rapids like
an island, like tall cliffs, tall cliffs that came rolling, smoking, and
crumpling, and collapsing, advancing with a sort of fluctuating rapidity
upon Bert. One Asiatic airship--it looked to Bert from below like three
hundred yards of pavement--whirled back and circled two or three times
over that great overthrow, and half a dozen crimson flying-machines
danced for a moment like great midges in the sunlight before they swept
on after their fellows. The rest of the fight had already gone over the
island, a wild crescendo of shots and yells and smashing uproar. It was
hidden from Bert now by the trees of the island, and forgotten by him in
the nearer spectacle of the huge advance of the defeated German airship.
Something fell with a mighty smashing and splintering of boughs unheeded
behind him.
It seemed for a time that the Hohenzollern must needs break her back
upon the Parting of the Waters, and then for a time her propeller
flopped and frothed in the river and thrust the mass of buckling,
crumpled wreckage towards the American shore. Then the sweep of the
torrent that foamed down to the American Fall caught her, and in another
minute the immense mass of deflating wreckage, with flames spurting out
in three new places, had crashed against the bridge that joined Goat
Island and Niagara city, and forced a long arm, as it were, in a heaving
tangle under the central span. Then the middle chambers blew up with a
loud report, and in another moment the bridge had given way and the main
bulk of the airship, like some grotesque cripple in rags, staggered,
flapping and waving flambeaux to the crest of the Fall and hesitated
there and vanished in a desperate suicidal leap.
Its detached fore-end remained jammed against that little island, Green
Island it used to be called, which forms the stepping-stone between the
mainland and Goat Island's patch of trees.
Bert followed this disaster from the Parting of the Waters to the bridge
head. Then, regardless of cover, regardless of the Asiatic airship
hovering like a huge house roof without walls above the Suspension
Bridge, he sprinted along towards the north and came out for the first
time upon that rocky point by Luna Island that looks sheer down upon
the American Fall. There he stood breathless amidst that eternal rush of
sound, breathless and staring.
Far below, and travelling rapidly down the gorge, whirled something like
a huge empty sack. For him it meant--what did it not mean?--the German
air-fleet, Kurt, the Prince, Europe, all things stable and familiar,
the forces that had brought him, the forces that had seemed indisputably
victorious. And it went down the rapids like an empty sack and left the
visible world to Asia, to yellow people beyond Christendom, to all that
was terrible and strange!
Remote over Canada receded the rest of that conflict and vanished beyond
the range of his vision....