THE night of the 15th of May 2037 was passed in an agony of
apprehension by nearly the whole of civilised humanity. The long
threatened and universally feared thunder-cloud of war had at last
loomed up over the serene horizon of peace in full view of the whole
world.
Although the events of the last six years had to some extent prepared
the minds of men for the impending disaster, now that the last hour of
the long peace was really about to strike there were very, very few
among the millions of non-combatants who were able to rise superior to
the universal panic.
The ocean terrorism which had paralysed the commerce of the world five
years and a half before, fearful as it had been, was, so far as the
bulk of humanity was concerned, a terror of the unseen. Ships had gone
out to sea and had vanished into the depths, leaving no trace behind
them, but the hand that struck the blow had remained invisible.
Now, however, this same terror, magnified a thousandfold, was to come
close up to the shores of lands whose inhabitants had never known what
it was for man to raise his hand against his brother. To-morrow the sun
would rise as usual, the earth would smile, the sea would dance, and
the air grow bright and warm under his beams, yet air and earth and sea
would be wholly strange to the eyes of men, for they would be invested
with terrors hitherto only pictured by the fears of panic.
The air would be charged with death. Beneath the laughing waves great
battleships would be speeding swiftly, silently, and invisibly on their
errands of destruction, and the fair face of earth would be scarred by
the harrow of battle, and seared with the fires of murderous passion.
The ocean traffic of the world had been almost wholly at a standstill
for nearly a month. Transports which could complete their voyages
before the end of the truce had done so; but since the 1st of May only
short voyages had been attempted, for it was known that escape from the
attack of a submarine battleship would be absolutely impossible for any
vessels that floated on the surface of the water.
The immediate results of this had of course been the dislocation of
trade and commerce and ever-increasing scarcity of food in the great
centres of population. Impossible, absurd even, as it still seemed to
those who had not thoroughly recognised the tremendous gravity of the
situation, the inhabitants of the magnificent cities of the old and new
worlds were actually within measurable distance, even before a blow had
been struck, of seeing the spectre of Famine cross the threshold of
their palaces.
In a few days communications by land would be as difficult and as
dangerous as those by sea, for, swift as the trains were, their speed
was far excelled by that of the slowest air-ship, which could wreck
them with a single shot. Bridges would be destroyed, stations blown
up, and lines cut in a hundred places at once, till railway travelling
would have to cease all over the world.
Thus the most splendid civilisation of all the ages stood trembling
on the verge of destruction at the moment when the sleepless eyes
of the inhabitants of Alexandria saw the first faint glow of the
dawn brightening the eastern sky. No one knew where or how the first
blow would be struck in the strange and terrible warfare for the
commencement of which the rising of that morning’s sun gave the signal.
There were scarcely any elements in common with the war of the
nineteenth century save the slaughter and destruction that it would
entail. There could be no marshalling of fleets or warships on the
sea, for to be detected by an enemy would be coming very near to being
destroyed. Every blow would have to be struck swiftly, silently, and
without warning, for only one could be struck, and to fail would be to
be lost.
So, too, in the air, as had been proved at Kerguelen and Mount Terror.
Everything would depend upon the supreme strategy which enabled the
first fatal shot to be sent home that would decide battle after battle
without hope for the vanquished to recover from their defeat.
But after all it would be on land that the terrors of the new warfare
would be most fearfully manifested. It needed but little effort of
the highly-strung imaginations of those who were waiting for the
world-tragedy to begin to picture vast armies, magnificent in their
strength and splendid in their equipments, marching to grapple with
each other on some field of Titanic strife. Suddenly and without
warning they would be smitten by an invisible foe floating far above
the clouds, or perhaps visible only as a tiny speck of light high in
the central blue.
Their battalions would be torn to pieces, their regiments decimated
and thrown into confusion, their commanders--the brains of the huge
organisms--would have no such protection as they had in the wars of
former times, for the aerial artillery would reach everywhere, and the
Commander-in-Chief in his headquarters would be as much exposed as the
private in his bivouac.
Thus the brain would be destroyed and the body reduced to impotence;
disciplined armies would become lawless and unregulated hordes in a few
days or weeks, and the organised slaughter of the battlefield would be
exchanged for the butchery and plunder of the city carried by assault.
It was little wonder, then, that the world watched the ending of its
last night of peace and the dawning of its first day of battle with
feelings such as men had not felt for five generations, if, indeed,
ever before in the history of man.
It was not a mere war of nations with which men were confronted. The
evil genius of a single woman had achieved the unheard-of feat of
dividing the human race into two hostile forces so nearly balanced
in strength that mutual destruction seemed a not improbable issue of
what might after all prove to be the death-struggle of humanity, the
collapse of civilisation and the sinking of a remnant of mankind back
to the level of barbarians whose children would wander amidst the ruins
of their forefathers’ habitations, and wonder what race of demigods had
created the wondrous fabrics whose very fragments were splendid.
As the dawn flew round the world on that momentous morning every
eye was turned towards the heavens, on every lip there was but one
question: Where will the first blow be struck? and in every heart there
was but one thought: Will it reach me or my dear ones?
The focus of all human interest was for a moment Alexandria, for it
was known that from there the main expeditionary force was to be sent
out to, if possible, effect a landing on the shores of Italy, while
other expeditions were to start from Tripoli, Tunis, and Oran to
effect landings in France and Spain. The bridge across the Straits
of Gibraltar from Point Cires to Gualdamesi was to all intents and
purposes neutral, since it would have been madness to send trains
conveying troops across it when a single shot from the British battery
at Gibraltar would have shattered the bridge to fragments.
The forces destined by the Sultan for the invasion of Europe would,
therefore, either have to be conveyed in swift transports by sea,
protected by squadrons of air-ships and flotillas of submarine
battleships, or else they would have to go by land round the Levant by
Syria, and so through Asia Minor to the shores of the Dardanelles and
the Bosphorus.
As the European shores of these two straits were known to be defended
by concealed batteries mounting guns a single shot from which would
blow the biggest transport afloat out of the water, the Sultan had
decided to make the attempt to invade Italy, France, and Spain by sea,
while the Russian forces, with their Asiatic allies, were to attack the
central nations from the east.
So far, therefore, as could be foreseen, the Mediterranean would
once more be the arena of strife, and on some part of its shores or
its waters the first blow of the war would be struck. Every possible
preparation for the attack upon Europe had been finally completed
immediately after the return of Khalid from the coronation of Olga
on the 11th, but beyond the fact that the coasts of Europe, from the
Straits of Dover to the Golden Horn, were patrolled by Federation
battleships, nothing was known of the dispositions which had been made
for the defence of Europe.
Gibraltar, Minorca, Cape Spartivento, Mount Ida in Candia and Olympus
in Cyprus formed a chain of Federation posts which, while they had been
made impregnable to all attack save long-sustained bombardment from
the air, rendered any attempt on the part of large fleets to cross the
Mediterranean an extremely hazardous venture.
These stations were connected from Gibraltar to Cyprus by telephonic
cables, buried beneath the floor of the sea to hide them from the
enemy’s cruisers, and also by patrols of battleships constantly moving
to and fro in touch with each other along the whole line, and this was
the first barrier through which the Moslem Sultan had to force his way
before he could land his armies upon the shores of Southern Europe.
This, too, formed what may be termed the first line of defence of the
Federation and of Christendom, and although neither the Sultan nor
the Tsarina was wholly aware of the fact, it had been strengthened to
such a degree that it was expected to prove unbreakable even under the
impact of the immense forces that would be brought to bear upon it.
When the sun at last rose over the hills of Syria and Sinai, and the
watchers in the streets and on the housetops of Alexandria heard the
voice of the Muezzin calling the first hour of prayer and the last
hour of the world’s peace, the bright blue waves of the Inland Sea lay
smiling and sparkling in its earliest beams, betraying not a trace
of the hidden forces which waited but for the signal that might come
either from land or sea or sky to begin the work of desolation.
The harbours of the city were thronged with shipping, great transports
lined the miles of quays whose network fronted the seaward verge of
the Moslem capital. Some of the basins swarmed with the half-submerged
hulls of scores of battleships waiting to take up their position as
convoys to the flotilla which, if the Sultan’s plans succeeded, would,
within the next twelve hours, land nearly four million troops on
European soil.
In the air, at elevations varying from five hundred to ten thousand
feet, a squadron of two hundred aerial cruisers kept watch and ward
against a surprise from the upper regions of the air. By the time the
day had fully dawned, land and sea and sky had been scanned in vain for
a sign of an enemy’s presence.
The sailing of the flotilla of transports had been fixed for six
o’clock by Alexandrian time, and already the battleships were moving
out into the open to take up their places in advance of the fleet of
transports. Fifty air-ships had ranged themselves in a long line to
seaward at an elevation of two thousand feet to protect the transports
from an aerial assault, and the transports themselves were moving
out to form in the basin behind the breakwater, whence they were to
commence their voyage.
Sultan Khalid, on board his aerial flagship _Al Borak_--named after the
winged steed which, according to the old legend, had borne the Prophet
from earth to the threshold of the Seventh Heaven--superintended in
person the last preparations for the departure of his great armament.
Flying hither and thither, now soaring and now sinking, he inspected
first the cruisers of the air and then the flotillas of the seas, and
at last, when all was ready, he took his place by one of the bow guns
of the _Al Borak_ to fire the shot that was to be the signal for the
expedition to start.
But a higher intelligence and a greater tactical ability than his had
already determined that the signal should be given in very different
fashion. Fifty miles to the south towards the Lybian desert, high in
air, fifteen thousand feet above the earth, a solitary air-ship hung
suspended in the central blue.
As the sun rose she had moved slowly forward towards the city. As she
came within sight of it, Alan Arnold standing in her conning-tower
saw through a telescope that commanded a range of a hundred miles the
disposition of the aerial fleet above Alexandria. He marked down a
group of five air-ships floating some five thousand feet above the
centre of the city, and singled them out as the first victims of the
war.
He was, of course, far out of range of gun-fire, and to have gone
within range and fired on them would have been to expose his single
ship to a concentrated hail of projectiles which would have scattered
her in dust through the sky. So he determined to open the game of death
and destruction by a stroke as dramatic as it was terrible.
He remembered how his ancestor, Richard Arnold, in the first
_Ithuriel_, had rammed the Russian war-balloons to the north of Muswell
Hill, and resolved to eclipse even that marvellous stroke of tactics.
Obeying his will like a living creature, the mighty fabric under his
control sank five thousand feet and then began to gather way on a
slanting course towards the Moslem air-ships.
The propellers whirled faster and faster, and the quadruple wings
undulated with ever-increasing velocity until the crowds in the streets
of Alexandria saw something like a swift flash of blue light stream
downward from the southern sky, and heard a long screaming roar as
though the firmament was being rent in twain above them.
Then three of the air-ships floating in line above their heads seemed
to break up and roll over. The crowds held their breath and pointed
upwards with one accord in sudden horror, as the crippled air-ships
dropped like stones towards the earth. In another moment they struck
it, and then, as though the central fires of the earth had burst
through in the heart of the great city, there came a crash and a shock
that shook the ground like an earthquake spasm.
[Illustration: THREE OF THE AIR-SHIPS SEEMED TO BREAK UP AND ROLL OVER.
_Page 259._]
A vast dazzling volume of flame shot up from amidst a wide circle of
blackened ruin, towers fell and roofs collapsed all round the focus of
the explosion, the whole atmosphere above the city was convulsed, and
the very sea itself seemed to writhe under the stress of the mighty
shock, and so, leaving death and ruin and consternation behind her,
the _Avenger_ swept out over the Mediterranean at a speed that the eye
could scarcely follow, after striking the first blow in the world-war
of the twenty-first century.
To say that this sudden and unexpected catastrophe spread panic through
the Moslem capital would be but a very inadequate description of the
_Avenger’s_ first blow in the world-war. Consternation, wild and
unbounded, blanched every cheek, and made every heart stand still as
the mighty roar of the explosion burst upon the deafened ears of the
inhabitants and then instantly died into silence, broken only by the
crash of falling ruins and the screams and groans of the wounded and
dying.
The red spectre of war in its most frightful form had suddenly appeared
to the terrified and horror-stricken vision of millions of men and
women, scarce one of whom had ever seen a deed of violence done.
Khalid, like a wise leader, did all he could to prevent the panic
spreading to the troops on board the transports by issuing peremptory
orders for the expedition to start at once. At the same time he
signalled for half a dozen air-ships to ascend as far as possible and
attempt to discover the source from which the inexplicable attack had
come, an errand destined to be entirely fruitless.
In orderly succession the hundred huge transports, each carrying from
eight to ten thousand men, left the outer basin in two long lines in
the rear of the fifty air-ships already in position.
A hundred submarine battleships took up their stations five hundred
yards in advance of the first line of transports. Fifty of these sank
to a depth of thirty feet, and shot two thousand yards ahead as soon as
the whole flotilla was in motion, while the other fifty ran along the
surface of the water with their conning-towers just showing above the
waves, ready to sink in obedience to any signal that their commanders
might receive from the air-ships, which commanded an immense range of
vision over the waters.
To all appearance the enemy was content with the one terrible blow
that had already been struck. The smooth, sunlit sea betrayed no trace
of a hostile vessel, and as far as the glasses of those on board the
air-ships could sweep the sky nothing but the blue atmosphere, flecked
here and there with white, fleecy clouds, could be seen.
But the Moslem commanders were far from being deceived by these
peaceful appearances. From Sultan Khalid, who was commanding the
expedition in person, to the engineers who worked the transports, all
knew that the invisible line of the Federation patrols had to be passed
somewhere in the depths of the sea before the shores of Italy could be
reached.
The speed of the three flotillas was limited to twenty-five miles an
hour, in order that there might be no headlong running into danger,
and the commander of each of the submerged battleships had orders to
rise to the surface the instant that his tell-tale needle denoted the
presence of an enemy, and signal the fact to the rest of the squadron.
The transports were then to stop, and were not to resume their passage
until the battleships had cleared the way for them. The first division
was to engage the enemy, while the second was to remain on the surface
ready to defend the transports in case of need.
For six hours the expedition proceeded on its way north-west by west
from Alexandria without interruption. The intention was to pass about
a hundred miles to the south of the Federation post at Candia, between
which island and the Cape Spartivento the ocean patrol would most
likely be met with.
Soon after twelve those on board the Sultan’s flagship detected
half a dozen little points of light shining amidst the waves to the
north-westward. They could be nothing else but the scout-ships of the
patrol; and although they were nearly ten miles away, a couple of
shells were discharged at them from the _Al Borak’s_ bow gun, more as a
warning to the Moslem flotilla than in the hope of doing any damage.
Whether they did or not was never known, for before the explosion of
the shells was seen in the water the points of light had vanished.
Signals were at once made from the flagship ordering the transports to
stop, and the second division of battleships to stand by to protect
them. A dozen remained on the surface of the water, running round and
round the now stationary troopships in concentric circles. The others
sank to varying depths, and scattered until the vague fluctuations of
their needles showed that they were more than a thousand yards from
each other and the transports.
As the first division had orders to keep more than two miles in advance
as soon as an enemy was discovered, there would be no danger of ramming
friend instead of foe. It ran on for seven miles after the main body
stopped. It was moving in a single line, the vessels being at an equal
distance apart, so that, with the exception of the two ships at the
extremities of the line, the attraction of the steel hulls on the
needles should be neutralised, and therefore only give indications of
vessels ahead.
At the end of the seventh mile the tell-tales ceased their wavering
motions and began to point steadily, in slightly varying directions,
ahead. The moment they did so the engines were stopped and the flotilla
rose to the surface of the water. Their commanders found themselves
out of sight of the transports, but the _Al Borak_, attended by ten
other air-ships, was floating about a thousand feet above them. From
the flagship’s mainmast-head flew the signal--“Fleet eight miles to the
rear. Enemy ahead. Sink and ram.”
The order was instantly obeyed by the whole division, and the fifty
battleships simultaneously sank out of sight to engage the invisible
enemy, while the Sultan and his companions on board the air-ships
waited in intense anxiety to see what the next few fateful minutes
would bring forth.
No human eye could see what work of death might be going on down in the
depths of the sea. Even those who took part in it would know it only by
its results, and of these only the victors would know anything. They
would reappear on the surface of the waves, but the vanquished would
never rise again.
Minute after minute passed and still the anxious watchers on the
air-ships saw nothing. The bright, sunlit waves rippled on over the
abyss in which the conflict must by this time be almost over. Five,
ten, fifteen minutes passed, and still no sign. Had Khalid been a mile
or two farther on and closer down to the surface of the sea, he would
have seen streams of air-bubbles rising swiftly here and there and
instantly breaking. But from where he was he could see nothing.
Five more minutes went by and suspense gave place to apprehension. Had
the whole of the first division simply sunk to its destruction into
some invisible trap that had been laid for it deep down in the watery
abyss? If not, how came it that not even one of the battleships had
risen to the surface to tell the tale of victory or defeat?
Khalid knew that the squadron would obey orders and hurl itself at full
speed, that is to say, at some hundred and fifty miles an hour, upon
the enemy the moment the tell-tales found their mark. In two or three
minutes--five at the outside--their rams must either have done their
work or failed to do it. If they had done it they would have risen to
the surface; if they had failed and themselves escaped destruction they
would still have risen.
Now twenty minutes had passed and not one of the fifty battleships had
reappeared. What could this mean but disaster?
And disaster it did mean, but great as it was it was as nothing
compared with the frightful catastrophe which followed close upon
it. All eyes on board the air-ships were so intently fixed upon that
portion of the sea where the squadron was expected to rise again that
no one thought for the moment of looking back towards the transports
until the dull rumbling roar of a series of explosions came rolling up
out of the distance.
Instantly every glass was turned in the direction whence the sound
came, and Khalid saw his great fleet of troopships tossing about in
the midst of a wild commotion of the waves, out of which vast masses of
white water spouted as if from the depths of the sea, and amidst these
ship after ship heeled over and sank into the white seething waters.
Uttering a cry of rage and despair, he headed the _Al Borak_ at full
speed towards the scene of the disaster. In three minutes he was
floating over it, helpless to do anything to avert or even delay the
swift destruction that was overwhelming the splendid fleet. Distracted
by impotent rage and passionate sorrow for the fate of his soldiers and
sailors, who were being slain hopelessly and by wholesale beneath his
eyes, he watched the awful submarine storm rage on, wrecking ship after
ship, and swallowing them up with all the thousands on board in the
boiling gulfs which opened ever and anon amidst the waves.
When the first panic passed, the transports which were still uninjured
scattered and headed away as fast as their engines would drive them to
the southward, where the only chance of safety seemed to lie. But there
was no escape for them from their invisible and merciless enemies.
The fate of one magnificent transport, the flagship of the fleet,
may be described as an illustration of the general disaster. She
was a vessel of fifty thousand tons measurement, and her crew and
complement of troops numbered together nearly twenty-five thousand.
She escaped the first discharge from the submarine torpedoes unharmed,
and heading southward with her triple propellers revolving at their
utmost velocity, rushed through the water at a speed of more than forty
nautical miles an hour.
She had scarcely gained a mile on her course when the glass-domed
conning-tower of a battleship appeared for an instant above the waves.
Before Khalid, not knowing whether it was friend or foe, could make up
his mind to fire on it, it disappeared again.
A few seconds later the great ship stopped and shuddered with some
mighty shock, as though she had run head-on to a sunken reef, and
heeled over to one side. Then came a dull roar, a huge column of white
foaming water rose up under her side amidships, and she broke in two
and vanished in the midst of a white space of swirling eddies.
Such scenes as this were occurring simultaneously in twenty different
parts of the naval battlefield. The foe never showed himself save for
an instant. Then came the blow that meant destruction, and the victim
vanished. There was none of the pomp and pageantry of modern naval
warfare; no splendid armaments of mighty ironclads and stately cruisers
vomiting thunder and flame and storms of shot and shell at each other,
nor were there any rolling masses of battle smoke to darken the
brightness of the sky.
The occupants of an open boat five miles away would not have known that
the most deadly sea-fight ever waged since men had first gone down to
the sea in ships was being fought out under that smiling May-day sky.
One after another the flying transports were overtaken, rammed, or
blown up and sunk by the pitiless monsters which unceasingly darted
hither and thither a few feet below the surface of the water, and in
less than two hours after the first alarm had been given the last of
the hundred transports which had sailed that morning from Alexandria
had gone down a shattered wreck into the abysses of the Inland Sea.
There was no chance of saving the drowning wretches who managed to
escape from the eddies of the sinking ships, as there would have
been in a naval battle of to-day. The air-ships could not do so
without sinking to the waves, and so making themselves marks for the
irresistible rams and torpedoes of their enemies, who themselves could
not be merciful, even if they would, shut up as they were in the steel
leviathans whose only use was destruction.
Khalid the Magnificent, with a heart well-nigh breaking with rage and
shame and sorrow, watched in passionate helplessness the destruction
of his splendid fleet and the drowning, like rats in a pond, of the
soldiers who were to have borne the banner of the Crescent over the
conquered fields of Christendom.
More than a million men had perished beneath his eyes, and he had not
been able to fire a shot to help them, although he was in command of
an aerial fleet which could have dispersed an army or wrecked a city
between sunrise and noon.
But the strangest part of the strange battle was yet to come. After
the last of the transports had disappeared, the attack ceased and the
assailants vanished. In a few minutes the sea was as calm and bright as
ever, and only a few bits of broken wooden wreckage floating here and
there betrayed the fact that anything out of the common had happened.
The remnant of the Moslem squadron rose to the surface and signalled
for instructions. Only twenty of them remained uninjured out of
the hundred that had gone into the fight. Before the signals could
be returned there was a loud hiss and a swirling noise as of some
huge body rushing at a furious speed through the water, and a great
battleship leapt up out of the nether waters, and hurled herself at
a speed of nearly two hundred miles an hour into the midst of the
floating squadron.
[Illustration: A GREAT BATTLESHIP LEAPT UP OUT OF THE NETHER WATERS.
_Page 266._]
Her gleaming ram of azurine tore its way through the sides of three
vessels in such swift succession that, almost before their fragments
had time to sink, her huge bulk vanished under the waves again. But
hardly was her work done than a second battleship charged into the
paralysed squadron, sending two of its members to the bottom and
crippling three more before she, too, vanished into the safe obscurity
of the depths.
A third was met by a storm of shells from the air-ships, which burst
round her and under her just as she came to the surface, and blew her
out of the water in fragments. Heedless of this, a fourth plunged
fiercely through the foaming area of the explosion, and had wrecked
two more Moslem vessels before a shell smashed her propeller and laid
her helpless on the water. Two of the Moslems instantly backed out and
rushed at her, tearing two great ragged holes in her side and sinking
her instantly, only to be sunk themselves in turn by a fifth charge
from below.
Scarcely had this last foe disappeared in safety than a swarm of
torpedoes, converging from all sides, encircled the remaining Moslem
battleships. Some plunged beneath the waves to escape them, but
these never reappeared. The remainder, torn and twisted and shattered
by a series of explosions that flung the water mountains high all round
them, sank like stones, and when the sea once more settled down, the
grim work of death had been completed.
The fate which had so swiftly overwhelmed the expedition that had
set out from Alexandria had almost simultaneously befallen four
other expeditions which had started at the same hour from Tripoli,
Tunis, Algiers, and Oran. The one disaster had been an almost exact
reproduction of the others.
The same order, formation, and tactics had been observed in each of the
five cases, and each of the five squadrons of transports and fleets of
submarine battleships had been overwhelmed and completely destroyed
by the same mysterious fate. Of five hundred transports and the same
number of battleships which Sultan Khalid had possessed at sunrise on
that fatal 16th of May not a single one remained by sundown, and of the
more than three million souls who had manned the five fleets not one
man survived.
Of the strength or the losses of the enemy that had wrought this
appalling and unheard-of destruction within such a brief space of time
nothing could, in the nature of the case, be known by those who had
seen only some of its effects from the decks of the air-ships which
floated almost helplessly over the waves which were engulfing their
naval consorts. The work of annihilation had for the most part been
done in the dim and silent depths of the sea, and all that they knew
was the number of those of their own comrades who had gone to battle
and never returned.
And yet to all practical intents and purposes these five stupendous
blows which had simultaneously crushed the Moslem sea-power and half
crippled the military strength of the Sultan had been struck by one
hand. In other words, the victory of the Mediterranean was due to two
inventions which had been made and perfected by Max Ernstein, who had
been transferred from Kerguelen and appointed Admiral in Command of the
whole Mediterranean forces of the Federation.
One of these was a highly improved form of an apparatus which had
just come into use on board battleships and cruisers when the War of
the Terror broke out. This was an electrical contrivance which gave
warning, more or less reliable, of the approach of torpedoes, by
translating the aqueous vibrations set up by them into sound-waves,
which increased in intensity as the hidden destroyer came nearer.
This invention had been lost sight of when all the warships of the
world were sunk in the South Atlantic after the proclamation of
the Universal Peace. Ernstein’s was therefore a new discovery, or
rediscovery, but the advantages of his position, far ahead of the
scientific skill of the nineteenth century, had enabled him to produce
a much more perfect instrument, and his apparatus, which was attached
to all the battleships of the Federation, not only gave warning of
the approach of an enemy, but indicated his direction, the number of
revolutions at which his propellers were working, and his distance at
any given moment.
This not only enabled the commander of a Federation battleship to
detect the presence of an enemy, but it enabled him to distinguish
between friend and foe. As soon as the phonetic indicator showed that
another ship was approaching he stopped his own propellers, started
them, and stopped them again.
The vibrations thus set up and interrupted would be conveyed to the
indicator of the approaching ship, if she had one, and she would at
once return the signal. If the signal was not returned it was safe
to conclude that the coming vessel was an enemy and could be rammed
accordingly.
When this invention replaced the tell-tale needle that had been in
use a year before, an alteration in tactics became necessary, and the
fighting order became more extended. A mile instead of a thousand yards
was now the limit within which the Federation battleships were not
permitted to approach each other, save under special circumstances.
Every vessel acted as an independent unit, subject only to the general
instructions.
Ernstein’s second invention was of a simpler but none the less
effective character. Knowing that the Moslem and Russian squadrons
would be forced to trust entirely to their tell-tale magnetised
needles, he had devised a plan for making these worse than useless. As
soon as the phonetic indicator told him that an enemy was coming, the
commander of each of his battleships dropped a thin rope of insulated
wire down thirty or forty feet into the water below him.
The lower end of this cable was a powerful electro-magnet, through
which a current of electricity was kept passing along the wires. The
attraction of this magnet was far stronger than that of the hull of
the vessel, and consequently the needles of the enemy were deflected
downwards, and gave a totally erroneous idea as to the depth at which
the Federation ship was floating.
Thus when the first division of the Moslem submarine squadron charged
at what its commanders thought were the hulls of their enemies, their
rams passed harmlessly underneath them, merely striking the magnet
and knocking it aside. The moment they had passed the magnet, its
attraction swung their needles back, and showed that some mysterious
mistake had been committed, but before they had time to turn and seek
the mark afresh the Federation ships were upon them, and their rams had
rent their way into their sides.
In this manner every ship of the first division had been destroyed
within three minutes after it had made its first and last charge.
Then the Federationists had risen to the surface for an instant
to reconnoitre by means of the arrangement of mirrors previously
described, and sinking again had worked their way back towards the
transports, formed in a huge circle round them, and had sent torpedo
after torpedo into their midst.
As soon as the flotilla had been thrown into confusion they had
converged until they could communicate with each other by means of
their submarine signals, and after that they had attacked the enemy
singly. Ship after ship charged into the _mêlée_, did her work, and
retired, if she escaped destruction, to give place to another.
Only twenty Federation ships had been engaged in each of the five
battles, and of these forty in all had been destroyed, a loss utterly
disproportionate to the gigantic damage that had been done to the enemy.
Khalid the Magnificent divined intuitively that the disaster
which had overwhelmed the expedition which he had commanded in
person was only a portion of a result achieved by some elaborate
and consummately-conceived scheme of defence which must have been
simultaneously put into operation against his other expeditions. What
had succeeded against his own might well have been expected to have
succeeded against them.
He at once despatched four squadrons of ten air-ships each to Tripoli
and Tunis, Algiers and Oran, with orders to collect all attainable
information, and to return to Alexandria as soon after sunset as
possible. Then he turned the prows of the remainder of his fleet
towards his capital, and gave the signal for full speed ahead.