BELEAGUERED LONDON.
A month had passed since the battle of Dover. It had been a month of
incessant fighting, of battles by day and night, of heroic defences
and dearly-bought victories, but still of constant triumphs and
irresistible progress for the ever-increasing legions of the League.
From sunrise to sunrise the roar of artillery, the rattle of
musketry, and the clash of steel had never ceased to sound to the
north and south of London as, over battlefield after battlefield, the
two hosts which had poured in constant streams through Harwich and
Dover had fought their way, literally mile by mile, towards the
capital of the modern world.
Day and night the fighting never stopped. As soon as two hostile
divisions had fought each other to a standstill, and from sheer
weariness of the flesh the battle died down in one part of the huge
arena, the flame sprang up in another, and raged on with ever renewed
fury. Outnumbered four and five to one in every engagement, and with
the terrible war-balloons raining death on them from the clouds, the
British armies had eclipsed all the triumphs of the long array of
their former victories by the magnificent devotion that they showed
in the hour of what seemed to be the death-struggle of the Empire.
The glories of Inkermann and Balaclava, of Albuera and Waterloo,
paled before the achievements of the whole-souled heroism displayed
by the British soldiery standing, as it were, with its back to the
wall, and fighting, not so much with any hope of victory, for that
was soon seen to be a physical impossibility, but with the invincible
determination not to permit the invader to advance on London save
over the dead bodies of its defenders.
Such a gallant defence had never been made before in the face of such
irresistible odds. When the soldiers of the League first set foot on
British soil the defending armies of the North and South had, with
the greatest exertions, been brought up to a fighting strength of
about twelve hundred thousand men. So stubborn had been the heroism
with which they had disputed the progress of their enemies that by
the time that the guns of the League were planted on the heights that
commanded the Metropolis, more than a million and a half of men had
gone down under the hail of British bullets and the rush of British
bayonets.
Of all the battlefields of this the bloodiest war in the history of
human strife, none had been so deeply dyed with blood as had been the
fair and fertile English gardens and meadows over which the hosts of
the League had fought their way to the confines of London. Only the
weight of overwhelming numbers, reinforced by engines of destruction
which could strike without the possibility of effective retaliation,
had made their progress possible.
Had they met their heroic foes as they had met them in the days of
the old warfare, their superiority of numbers would have availed them
but little. They would have been hurled back and driven into the sea,
and not a man of them all would have left British soil alive had it
been but a question of military attack and defence.
But this was not a war of men. It was a war of machines, and those
who wielded the most effective machinery for the destruction of life
won battle after battle as a matter of course, just as a man armed
with a repeating rifle would overcome a better man armed with a bow
and arrow.
Natas had formed an entirely accurate estimate of the policy of the
leaders of the League when he told Tremayne, in the library at
Alanmere, that they would concentrate all their efforts on the
reduction of London. The rest of the kingdom had been for the present
entirely ignored.
London was the heart of the British Empire and of the
English-speaking world, for the matter of that, and therefore it had
been determined to strike one deadly blow at the vital centre of the
whole huge organism. That paralysed, the rest must fall to pieces of
necessity. The fleet was destroyed, and every soldier that Britain
could put into the field had been mustered for the defence of London.
Therefore the fall of London meant the conquest of Britain.
After the battles of Dover and Harwich the invading forces advanced
upon London in the following order: The Army of the South had landed
at Deal, Dover, and Folkestone in three divisions, and after a series
of terrific conflicts had fought its way _viâ_ Chatham, Maidstone,
and Tunbridge to the banks of the Thames, and occupied all the
commanding positions from Shooter's Hill to Richmond. These three
forces were composed entirely of French and Italian army corps, and
numbered from first to last nearly four million men.
On the north the invading force was almost wholly Russian, and was
under the command of the Tzar in person, in whom the supreme command
of the armies of the League had by common consent been now vested. A
constant service of transports, plying day and night between Antwerp
and Harwich, had placed at his disposal a force about equal to that
of the Army of the South, although he had lost over seven hundred
thousand men before he was able to occupy the line of heights from
Hornsey to Hampstead, with flanking positions at Brondesbury and
Harlesden to the west, and at Tottenham, Stratford, and Barking to
the east.
By the 29th of November all the railways were in the hands of the
invaders. A chain of war-balloons between Barking and Shooter's Hill
closed the Thames. The forts at Tilbury had been destroyed by an
aërial bombardment. A flotilla of submarine torpedo-vessels had blown
up the defences of the estuary of the Thames and Medway, and led to
the fall of Sheerness and Chatham, and had then been docked at
Sheerness, there being no further present use for them.
The other half of the squadron, supported by a few battleships and
cruisers which had survived the battle of Dover, had proceeded to
Portsmouth, destroyed the booms and submarine defences, while a
detachment of aerostats shelled the land defences, and then in a
moment of wanton revenge had blown up the venerable hulk of the
_Victory_, which had gone down at her moorings with her flag still
flying as it had done a hundred years before at the fight of
Trafalgar. After this inglorious achievement they had been laid up in
dock to wait for their next opportunity of destruction, should it
ever occur.
London was thus cut off from all communication, not only with the
outside world, but even from the rest of England. The remnants of the
armies of defence had been gradually driven in upon the vast
wilderness of bricks and mortar which now held more than eight
millions of men, women, and children, hemmed in by long lines of
batteries and entrenched camps, from which thousands of guns hurled
their projectiles far and wide into the crowded masses of the houses,
shattering them with bursting shells, and laying the whole streets in
ruins, while overhead the war-balloons slowly circled hither and
thither, dropping their fire-shells and completing the ruin and havoc
wrought by the artillery of the siege-trains.
Under such circumstances surrender was really only a matter of time,
and that time had very nearly come. The London and North-Western
Railway, which had been the last to fall into the hands of the
invaders, had been closed for over a week, and food was running very
short. Eight millions of people massed together in a space of thirty
or forty square miles' area can only be fed and kept healthy under
the most favourable conditions. Hemmed in as London now was, from
being the best ordered great city in the world, it had degenerated
with frightful rapidity into a vast abode of plague and famine, a
mass of human suffering and misery beyond all conception or
possibility of description.
Defence there was now practically none; but still the invaders did
not leave their vantage ground on the hills, and not a soldier of the
League had so far set foot in London proper. Either the besiegers
preferred to starve the great city into surrender at discretion, and
then extort ruinous terms, or else they hesitated to plunge into that
tremendous gulf of human misery, maddened by hunger and made
desperate by despair. If they did so hesitate they were wise, for
London was too vast to be carried by assault or by any series of
assaults.
No army could have lived in its wilderness of streets swarming with
enemies, who would have fought them from house to house and street to
street. Once they had entered that mighty maze of streets and squares
both their artillery and their war-balloons would have been useless,
for they would only have buried friend and foe in common destruction.
There were plenty of ways into London, but the way out was a very
different matter.
Had a general assault been attempted, not a man would ever have got
out of London alive. The commanders of the League saw this clearly,
and so they kept their position on the heights, wasted the city with
an almost constant bombardment, and, while they drew their supplies
from the fertile lands in their rear, lay on their arms and waited
for the inevitable.
Within the besieged area martial law prevailed universally. Riots
were of daily, almost hourly, occurrence, but they were repressed
with an iron hand, and the rioters were shot down in the streets
without mercy; for, though siege and famine were bad enough, anarchy
breaking out amidst that vast sweltering mass of human beings would
have been a thousand times worse, and so the King, who, assisted by
the Prime Minister and the Cabinet Council, had assumed the control
of the whole city, had directed that order was to be maintained at
any price.
The remains of the army were quartered in the parks under canvas, and
billeted in houses throughout the various districts, in order to
support the police in repressing disorder and protecting property.
Still, in spite of all that could be done, matters were rapidly
coming to a terrible pass. In a week, at the latest, the horses of
the cavalry would be eaten. For a fortnight London had almost lived
upon horse-flesh. In the poorer quarters there was not a dog to be
seen, and a sewer rat was considered a delicacy.
Eight million mouths had made short work of even the vast supplies
that had been hurriedly poured into the city as soon as the invasion
had become a certainty, and absolute starvation was now a matter of a
few days at the outside. There were millions of money lying idle, but
very soon a five-pound note would not buy even a little loaf of
bread.
But famine was by no means the only horror that afflicted London
during those awful days and nights. All round the heights the booming
of cannon sounded incessantly. Huge shells went screaming through the
air overhead to fall and burst amidst some swarming hive of humanity,
scattering death and mutilation where they fell; and high up in the
air the fleet of aerostats perpetually circled, dropping their
fire-shells and blasting cartridges on the dense masses of houses,
until a hundred conflagrations were raging at once in different parts
of the city.
No help had come from outside. Indeed none was to be expected. There
was only one Power in the world that was now capable of coping with
the forces of the victorious League, but its overtures had been
rejected, and neither the King nor any of his advisers had now the
slightest idea as to how those who controlled it would now use it. No
one knew the real strength of the Terrorists, or the Federation which
they professed to control.
All that was known was that, if they choose, they could with their
aërial fleet sweep the war-balloons from the air in a few moments and
destroy the batteries of the besiegers; but they had made no sign
after the rejection of their President's offer to prevent the landing
of the forces of the League on condition that the British Government
accepted the Federation, and resigned its powers in favour of its
Executive.
The refusal of those terms had now cost more than a million British
lives, and an incalculable amount of human suffering and destruction
of property. Until the news of the disaster of Dover had actually
reached London, no one had really believed that it was possible for
an invading force to land on British soil and exist for twenty-four
hours. Now the impossible had been made possible, and the last
crushing blow must fall within the next few days. After that who knew
what might befall?
So far as could be seen, Britain lay helpless at the mercy of her
foes. Her allies had ceased to exist as independent Powers, and the
Russian and the Gaul were thundering at her gates as, fifteen hundred
years before, the Goth had thundered at the gates of the Eternal City
in the last days of the Roman Empire.
If the terms of the Federation could have been offered again, it is
probable that the King of England would have been the first man to
own his mistake and that of his advisers and accept them, for now the
choice lay between utter and humiliating defeat and the breaking up
of the Empire, and the recognition of the Federation. After all, the
kinship of a race was a greater fact in the supreme hour of national
disaster than the maintenance of a dynasty or the perpetuation of a
particular form of government.
It was not now a question of nation against nation, but of race
against race. The fierce flood of war had swept away all smaller
distinctions. It was necessary to rise to the altitude of the problem
of the Government, not of nations, but of the world. Was the genius
of the East or of the West to shape the future destinies of the human
race? That was the mighty problem of which the events of the next few
weeks were to work out the solution, for when the sun set on the
Field of Armageddon the fate of Humanity would be fixed for centuries
to come.