THE BEGINNING OF THE END.
It is now time to return to Britain, to the land which the course of
events had so far appeared to single out as the battle-ground upon
which was to be fought the Armageddon of the Western World--that
conflict of the giants, the issue of which was to decide whether the
Anglo-Saxon race was still to remain in the forefront of civilisation
and progress, or whether it was to fall, crushed and broken, beneath
the assaults of enemies descending upon the motherland of the
Anglo-Saxon nations; whether the valour and personal devotion, which
for a thousand years had scarcely known a defeat by flood or field,
was still to pursue its course of victory, or whether it was to
succumb to weight of numbers and mechanical discipline, reinforced by
means of assault and destruction which so far had turned the
world-war of 1904 into a succession of colossal and unparalleled
butcheries, such as had never been known before in the history of
human strife.
When the Allied fleets, bearing the remains of the British and German
armies which had been driven out of the Netherlands, reached England,
and the news of the crowning disaster of the war in Europe was
published in detail in the newspapers, the popular mind seemed
suddenly afflicted with a paralysis of stupefaction.
Men looked back over the long series of triumphs in which British
valour and British resolution had again and again proved themselves
invulnerable to the assaults of overwhelming numbers. They thought of
the glories of the Peninsula, of the unbreakable strength of the thin
red line at Waterloo, of the magnificent madness of Balaclava, and
the invincible steadiness and discipline that had made Inkermann a
word to be remembered with pride as long as the English name endured.
Then their thoughts reverted to the immediate past, and they heard
the shock of colossal armaments, compared with which the armies of
the past appeared but pigmies in strength. They saw empires defended
by millions of soldiers crushed in a few weeks, and a wave of
conquest sweep in one unbroken roll from end to end of a continent in
less time than it would have taken Napoleon or Wellington to have
fought a single campaign. Huge fortresses, rendered, as men had
believed, impregnable by the employment of every resource known to
the most advanced military science, had been reduced to heaps of
defenceless ruins in a few hours by a bombardment, under which their
magnificent guns had lain as impotent as though they had been the
culverins of three hundred years ago.
It seemed like some hideous nightmare of the nations, in which Europe
had gone mad, revelling in superhuman bloodshed and destruction,--a
conflict in which more than earthly forces had been let loose,
accomplishing a carnage so immense that the mind could only form a
dim and imperfect conception of it. And now this red tide of
desolation had swept up to the western verge of the Continent, and
was there gathering strength and volume day by day against the hour
when it should burst and oversweep the narrow strip of water which
separated the inviolate fields of England from the blackened and
blood-stained waste that it had left behind it from the Russian
frontier to the German Ocean.
It seemed impossible, and yet it was true. The first line of defence,
the hitherto invincible fleet, magnificently as it had been managed,
and heroically as it had been fought, had failed in the supreme hour
of trial. It had failed, not because the sailors of Britain had done
their duty less valiantly than they had done in the days of Rodney
and Nelson, but simply because the conditions of naval warfare had
been entirely changed, because the personal equation had been almost
eliminated from the problem of battle, and because the new warfare of
the seas had been waged rather with machinery than with men.
In all the war not a single battle had been fought at close quarters;
there had been plenty of instances of brilliant manoeuvring, of
torpedo-boats running the gauntlet and hurling their deadly missiles
against the sides of battleships and cruisers, and of ships rammed
and sunk in a few instants by consummately-handled opponents; but the
days of boarding and cutting out, of night surprises and fire-ships,
had gone by for ever.
The irresistible artillery with which modern science had armed the
warships of all nations had made these feats impossible, and so had
placed the valour which achieved them out of court. Within the last
few weeks scarcely a day had passed but had witnessed the return of
some mighty ironclad or splendid cruiser, which had set out a miracle
of offensive and defensive strength, little better than a floating
ruin, wrecked and shattered almost beyond recognition by the awful
battle-storm through which she had passed.
The magnificent armament which had held the Atlantic route had come
back represented only by a few crippled ships almost unfit for any
further service. True, they and those which never returned had
rendered a splendid account of themselves before the enemy, but the
fact remained--they were not defeated, but they were no longer able
to perform the Titanic task which had been allotted to them.
So, too, with the Mediterranean fleet, which, so far as sea-fighting
was concerned, had achieved the most splendid triumph of the war. It
had completely destroyed the enemy opposed to it, but the victory had
been purchased at such a terrible price that, but for the squadron
which had come to its aid, it would hardly have been able to reach
home in safety.
In a word, the lesson of the struggle on the sea had been, that
modern artillery was just as effective whether fired by Englishmen,
Frenchmen, or Russians; that where a torpedo struck a warship was
crippled, no matter what the nationality or the relative valour of
her crew; and that where once the ram found its mark the ship that it
struck went down, no matter what flag she was flying.
And then, behind and beyond all that was definitely known in England
of the results of the war, there were vague rumours of calamities and
catastrophes in more distant parts of the world, which seemed to
promise nothing less than universal anarchy, and the submergence of
civilisation under some all-devouring wave of barbarism.
All regular communications with the East had been stopped for several
weeks; that India was lost, was guessed by intuition rather than
known as a certainty. Australia was as isolated from Britain as
though it had been on another planet, and now every one of the
Atlantic cables had suddenly ceased to respond to the stimulus of the
electric current. No ships came from the East, or West, or South. The
British ports were choked with fleets of useless merchantmen, to
which the markets of the world were no longer open.
Some few venturesome craft that had set out to explore the now silent
ocean had never returned, and every warship that could be made fit
for service was imperatively needed to meet the now inevitable attack
on the shores of the English Channel and the southern portions of the
North Sea. Only one messenger had arrived from the outside world
since the remains of Admiral Beresford's fleet had returned from the
Mediterranean, and she had come, not by land or sea, but through the
air.
On the 6th of October an air-ship had been seen flying at an
incredible speed across the south of England. She had reached London,
and touched the ground during the night on Hampstead Heath; the next
day she had descended again in the same place, taken a single man on
board, and then vanished into space again. What her errand had been
is well known to the reader; but outside the members of the Cabinet
Council no one in England, save the King and his Ministers, knew the
object of her mission.
For fifteen days after that event the enemy across the water made no
sign, although from the coast of Kent round about Deal and Dover
could be seen fleets of transports and war-vessels hurrying along the
French coast, and on clear days a thousand telescopes turned towards
the French shore made visible the ominous clusters of moving black
spots above the land, which betokened the presence of the terrible
machines which had wrought such havoc on the towns and fortresses of
Europe.
It was only the calm before the final outburst of the storm. The Tsar
and his allies were marshalling their hosts for the invasion, and
collecting transports and fleets of war-vessels to convoy them. For
several days strong north-westerly gales had made the sea impassable
for the war-balloons, as though to the very last the winds and waves
were conspiring to defend their ancient mistress. But this could not
last for ever.
Sooner or later the winds must sink or change, and then these
war-hawks of the air would wing their flight across the silver
streak, and Portsmouth, and Dover, and London would be as defenceless
beneath their attack as Berlin, Vienna, and Hamburg had been. And
after them would come the millions of the League, descending like a
locust swarm upon the fields of eastern England; and after that would
come the deluge.
But the old Lion of the Seas was not skulking in his lair, or
trembling at the advent of his enemies, however numerous and mighty
they might be. On sea not a day passed but some daring raid was made
on the transports passing to and fro in the narrow seas, and all the
while a running fight was kept up with cruisers and battleships that
approached too near to the still inviolate shore. So surely as they
did so the signals flashed along the coast; and if they escaped at
all from the fierce sortie that they provoked, it was with
shot-riddled sides and battered top-works, sure signs that the Lion
still had claws, and could strike home with them.
On shore, from Land's End to John o' Groats, and from Holyhead to the
Forelands, everything that could be done was being done to prepare
for the struggle with the invader. It must, however, be confessed
that, in comparison with the enormous forces of the League, the ranks
of the defenders were miserably scanty. Forty years of universal
military service on the Continent had borne their fruits.
Soldiers are not made in a few weeks or months; and where the League
had millions in the field, Britain, even counting the remnant of her
German allies, that had been brought over from Antwerp, could hardly
muster hundreds of thousands. All told, there were little more than a
million men available for the defence of the country; and should the
landing of the invaders be successfully effected, not less than six
millions of men, trained to the highest efficiency, and flushed with
a rapid succession of unparalleled victories, would be hurled against
them.
This was the legitimate outcome of the policy to which Britain had
adhered since first she had maintained a standing army, instead of
pursuing the ancient policy of making every man a soldier, which had
won the triumphs of Creçy and Agincourt. She had trusted everything
to her sea-line of defence. Now that was practically broken, and it
seemed inevitable that her second line, by reason of its miserable
inadequacy, should fail her in a trial which no one had ever dreamt
it would have to endure.
A very grave aspect was given to the situation by the fact that the
great mass of the industrial population seemed strangely indifferent
to the impending catastrophe which was hanging over the land. It
appeared to be impossible to make them believe that an invasion of
Britain was really at hand, and that the hour had come when every man
would be called upon to fight for the preservation of his own hearth
and home.
Vague threats of "eating the Russians alive" if they ever did dare to
come, were heard on every hand; but beyond this, and apart from the
regular army and the volunteers, men went about their daily
avocations very much as usual, grumbling at the ever-increasing price
of food, and here and there breaking out into bread riots wherever it
was suspected that some wealthy man was trying to corner food for his
own commercial benefit, but making no serious or combined efforts to
prepare for a general rising in case the threatened invasion became a
fact.
Such was the general state of affairs in Britain when, on the night
of the 27th of October, the north-west gales sank suddenly to a calm,
and the dawn of the 28th brought the news from Dover to London that
the war-balloons of the League had taken the air, and were crossing
the Straits.