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The World Peril of 1910

by George Chetwynd Griffith · English · Gutenberg #24764 · 557,611 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The World Peril of 1910

Author: George Chetwynd Griffith


        
Release date: March 6, 2008 [eBook #24764]

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/24764

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE WORLD PERIL OF 1910 ***




Produced by Bruce Albrecht, Martin Pettit and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net






THE WORLD PERIL OF 1910

BY

GEORGE GRIFFITH

AUTHOR OF
"THE ANGEL OF THE REVOLUTION," "A CONQUEST OF FORTUNE,"
"A MAYFAIR MAGICIAN," "HIS BETTER HALF," ETC. ETC.

LONDON

F. V. WHITE & CO. LTD.

14, BEDFORD STREET, STRAND, W.C.

1907




CONTENTS


   CHAP.                                             PAGE

  PROLOGUE--A RACE FOR A WOMAN                          1

      I. A MOMENTOUS EXPERIMENT                         9

     II. NORAH'S GOOD-BYE                              17

    III. SEEN UNDER THE MOON                           24

     IV. THE SHADOW OF THE TERROR                      31

      V. A GLIMPSE OF THE DOOM                         37

     VI. THE NOTE OF WAR                               47

    VII. CAUGHT!                                       55

   VIII. FIRST BLOOD                                   63

     IX. THE "FLYING FISH" APPEARS                     72

      X. FIRST BLOWS FROM THE AIR                      79

     XI. THE TRAGEDY OF THE TWO SQUADRONS              88

    XII. HOW LONDON TOOK THE NEWS                      98

   XIII. A CRIME AND A MISTAKE                        106

    XIV. THE EVE OF BATTLE                            115

     XV. THE STRIFE OF GIANTS                         123

    XVI. HOW THE FRENCH LANDED AT PORTSMOUTH          132

   XVII. AWAY FROM THE WARPATH                        143

  XVIII. A GLIMPSE OF THE PERIL                       151

    XIX. A CHANGE OF SCENE                            160

     XX. THE NIGHT OF TERROR BEGINS--                 167

    XXI. --AND ENDS                                   176

   XXII. DISASTER                                     182

  XXIII. THE OTHER CAMPAIGN BEGINS                    189

   XXIV. TOM BOWCOCK--PITMAN                          195

    XXV. PREPARING FOR ACTION                         201

   XXVI. THE FIRST BOMBARDMENT OF LONDON              208

  XXVII. LENNARD'S ULTIMATUM                          215

 XXVIII. CONCERNING ASTRONOMY AND OYSTERS             223

   XXIX. THE LION WAKES                               231

    XXX. MR PARMENTER SAYS                            239

   XXXI. JOHN CASTELLAN'S THREAT                      247

  XXXII. A VIGIL IN THE NIGHT                         254

 XXXIII. MR PARMENTER RETURNS                         261

  XXXIV. THE "AURIOLE"                                268

   XXXV. THE "AURIOLE" HOISTS THE WHITE ENSIGN        273

  XXXVI. A PARLEY AT ALDERSHOT                        281

 XXXVII. THE VERDICT OF SCIENCE                       288

XXXVIII. WAITING FOR DOOM                             295

  XXXIX. THE LAST FIGHT                               298

  EPILOGUE--"AND ON EARTH, PEACE!"                    305




THE WORLD PERIL OF 1910




PROLOGUE

A RACE FOR A WOMAN


In Clifden, the chief coast town of Connemara, there is a house at the
end of a triangle which the two streets of the town form, the front
windows of which look straight down the beautiful harbour and bay, whose
waters stretch out beyond the islands which are scattered along the
coast and, with the many submerged reefs, make the entrance so
difficult.

In the first-floor double-windowed room of this house, furnished as a
bed-sitting room, there was a man sitting at a writing-table--not an
ordinary writing-table, but one the dimensions of which were more suited
to the needs of an architect or an engineer than to those of a writer.
In the middle of the table was a large drawing-desk, and on it was
pinned a sheet of cartridge paper, which was almost covered with
portions of designs.

In one corner there was what might be the conception of an engine
designed for a destroyer or a submarine. In another corner there was a
sketch of something that looked like a lighthouse, and over against this
the design of what might have been a lantern. The top left-hand corner
of the sheet was merely a blur of curved lines and shadings and
cross-lines, running at a hundred different angles which no one, save
the man who had drawn them, could understand the meaning of.

In the middle of the sheet there was a very carefully-outlined drawing
in hard pencil of a craft which was different from anything that had
ever sailed upon the waters or below them, or, for the matter of that,
above them.

To the right hand there was a rough, but absolutely accurate, copy of
this same craft leaving the water and flying into the air, and just
underneath this a tiny sketch of a flying fish doing the same thing.

The man sitting before the drawing-board was an Irishman. He was one of
those men with the strong, crisp hair, black brows and deep brown eyes,
straight, strong nose almost in a line with his forehead, thin, nervous
lips and pointed jaw, strong at the angles but weak at the point, which
come only from one descent.

Nearly four hundred years before, one of the ships of the great Armada
had been wrecked on Achill Island, about twenty miles from where he sat.
Half a dozen or so of the crew had been saved, and one of these was a
Spanish gentleman, captain of Arquebusiers who, drenched and bedraggled
as he was when the half-wild Irish fishermen got him out of the water,
still looked what he was, a Hidalgo of Spain. He had been nursed back to
health and strength in a miserable mud and turf-walled cottage, and,
broken in fortune--for he was one of the many gentlemen of Spain who had
risked their all on the fortunes of King Philip and the Great Armada,
and lost--he refused to go back to his own country a beaten man.

And meanwhile he had fallen in love with the daughter of his nurse, the
wife of the fisherman who had taken him more than half dead out of the
raging Atlantic surf.

No man ever knew who he was, save that he was a gentleman, a Spaniard,
and a Catholic. But when he returned to the perfection of physical and
mental health, and had married the grey-eyed, dark-browed girl, who had
seemed to him during his long hours of sickness the guardian angel who
had brought him back across the line which marks the frontier between
life and death, he developed an extraordinary talent in boat-building,
which was the real origin of the wonderful sea-worthiness of small
craft which to this day brave, almost with impunity, the terrible seas
which, after an unbroken run of almost two thousand miles, burst upon
the rock-bound, island-fenced coast of Connemara.

The man at the table was the descendant in the sixth generation of the
unknown Spanish Hidalgo, who nearly four hundred years before had said
in reply to a question as to what his name was:

"Juan de Castillano."

As the generations had passed, the name, as usual, had got modified, and
this man's name was John Castellan.

"I think that will about do for the present," he said, getting up from
the table and throwing his pencil down. "I've got it almost perfect
now;" and then as he bent down again over the table, and looked over
every line of his drawings, "Yes, it's about all there. I wonder what my
Lords of the British Admiralty would give to know what that means. Well,
God save Ireland, they shall some day!"

He unpinned the paper from the board, rolled it up, and put it into the
top drawer of an old oak cabinet, which one would hardly have expected
to find in such a room as that, and locked the drawer with a key on his
keychain. Then he took his cap from a peg on the door, and his gun from
the corner beside it, and went out.

There are three ways out of Clifden to the west, one to the southward
takes you over the old bridge, which arches the narrow rock-walled
gorge, which gathers up the waters of the river after they have had
their frolic over the rocks above. The other is a continuation of the
main street, and this, as it approaches the harbour, where you may now
see boats built on the pattern which John Castellan's ancestor had
designed, divides into two roads, one leading along the shore of the
bay, and the other, rough, stony, and ill-kept, takes you above the
coast-guard station, and leads to nowhere but the Atlantic Ocean.

Between these two roads lies in what was once a park, but which is now a
wilderness, Clifden Castle. Castle in Irish means country house, and
all over the south and west of Ireland you may find such houses as this
with doors screwed up, windows covered with planks, roofs and eaves
stripped of the lead and slates which once protected them from the
storms which rise up from the Atlantic, and burst in wind and rain, snow
and sleet over Connemara, long ago taken away to sell by the bankrupt
heirs of those who ruined themselves, mortgaged and sold every acre of
ground and every stick and stone they owned to maintain what they called
the dignity of their families at the Vice-Regal Court in Dublin.

John Castellan took the lower road, looking for duck. The old house had
been the home of his grandfather, but he had never lived in it. The ruin
had come in his father's time, before he had learned to walk. He looked
at it as he passed, and his teeth clenched and his brows came together
in a straight line.

Almost at the same moment that he left his house an Englishman came out
of the Railway Hotel. He also had a gun over his shoulder, and he took
the upper road. These two men, who were to meet for the first time that
day, were destined to decide the fate of the world between them.

As John Castellan walked past the ruined distillery, which overlooks the
beach on which the fishing boats are drawn up, he saw a couple of duck
flying seaward. He quickened his pace, and walked on until he turned the
bend of the road, at which on the right-hand side a path leads up to a
gate in the old wall, which still guards the ragged domains of Clifden
Castle. A few hundred yards away there is a little peninsula, on which
stands a house built somewhat in bungalow fashion. The curve of the
peninsula turns to the eastward, and makes a tiny bay of almost crescent
shape. In this the pair of duck settled.

John Castellan picked up a stone from the road, and threw it into the
water. As the birds rose his gun went up. His right barrel banged and
the duck fell. The drake flew landward: he fired his left barrel and
missed. Then came a bang from the upper road, and the drake dropped.
The Englishman had killed it with a wire cartridge in his choked left
barrel.

"I wonder who the devil did that!" said Castellan, as he saw the bird
fall. "It was eighty yards if it was an inch, and that's a good gun with
a good man behind it."

The Englishman left the road to pick up the bird and then went down the
steep, stony hillside towards the shore of the silver-mouthed bay in the
hope of getting another shot farther on, for the birds were now
beginning to come over; and so it came about that he and the Irishman
met within a few yards of each other, one on either side of a low spit
of sand and shingle.

"That was a fine shot you killed the drake with," said the Irishman,
looking at the bird he was carrying by the legs in his left hand.

"A good gun, and a wire cartridge, I fancy, were mainly responsible for
his death," laughed the Englishman. "See you've got the other."

"Yes, and missed yours," said the Irishman.

The other recognised the tone as that of a man to whom failure, even in
the most insignificant matter, was hateful, and he saw a quick gleam in
his eyes which he remembered afterwards under very different
circumstances.

But it so happened that the rivalry between them which was hereafter to
have such momentous consequences was to be manifested there and then in
a fashion much more serious than the hitting or missing of a brace of
wild fowl.

Out on the smooth waters of the bay, about a quarter of a mile from the
spit on which they stood, there were two boats. One was a light skiff,
in which a girl, clad in white jersey and white flannel skirt, with a
white Tam o' Shanter pinned on her head, was sculling leisurely towards
the town. From the swing of her body, the poise of her head and
shoulders, and the smoothness with which her sculls dropped in the water
and left it, it was plain that she was a perfect mistress of the art;
wherefore the two men looked at her, and admired.

The other craft was an ordinary rowing boat, manned by three lads out
for a spree. There was no one steering and the oars were going in and
out of the water with a total disregard of time. The result was that her
course was anything but a straight line. The girl's sculls made no
noise, and the youths were talking and laughing loudly.

Suddenly the boat veered sharply towards the skiff. The Englishman put
his hands to his mouth, and yelled with all the strength of his lungs.

"Look out, you idiots, keep off shore!"

But it was too late. The long, steady strokes were sending the skiff
pretty fast through the smooth water. The boat swerved again, hit the
skiff about midway between the stem and the rowlocks, and the next
moment the sculler was in the water. In the same moment two guns and two
ducks were flung to the ground, two jackets were torn off, two pairs of
shoes kicked away, and two men splashed into the water. Meanwhile the
sculler had dropped quietly out of the sinking skiff, and after a glance
at the two heads, one fair and the other dark, ploughing towards her,
turned on her side and began to swim slowly in their direction so as to
lessen the distance as much as possible.

The boys, horrified at what they had done, made such a frantic effort to
go to the rescue, that one of them caught a very bad crab; so bad,
indeed that the consequent roll of the boat sent him headlong into the
water; and so the two others, one of whom was his elder brother, perhaps
naturally left the girl to her fate, and devoted their energies to
saving their companion.

Both John Castellan and the Englishman were good swimmers, and the race
was a very close thing. Still, four hundred yards with most of your
clothes on is a task calculated to try the strongest swimmer, and,
although the student had swum almost since he could walk, his muscles
were not quite in such good form as those of the ex-athlete of
Cambridge who, six months before, had won the Thames Swimming Club
Half-mile Handicap from scratch.

Using side stroke and breast-stroke alternately they went at it almost
stroke for stroke about half a dozen yards apart, and until they were
within thirty yards or so of the third swimmer, they were practically
neck and neck, though Castellan had the advantage of what might be
called the inside track. In other words he was a little nearer to the
girl than the Englishman.

When circumstances permitted they looked at each other, but, of course,
neither of them was fool enough to waste his breath in speech. Still,
each clearly understood that the other was going to get the girl first
if he could.

So the tenth yard from the prize was reached, and then the Englishman
shook his head up an inch, filled his lungs, rolled on to his side, and
made a spurt with the reserve of strength which he had kept for the
purpose. Inch by inch he drew ahead obliquely across Castellan's course
and, less than a yard in front of him, he put his right hand under the
girl's right side.

A lovely face, beautiful even though it was splashed all over with wet
strands of dark chestnut hair, turned towards him; a pair of big blue
eyes which shone in spite of the salt water which made them blink,
looked at him; and, after a cough, a very sweet voice with just a
suspicion of Boston accent in it, said:

"Thank you so much! It was real good of you! I can swim, but I don't
think I could have got there with all these things on, and so I reckon I
owe you two gentlemen my life."

Castellan had swum round, and they took her under the arms to give her a
rest. The two boys left in the boat had managed to get an oar out to
their comrade just in time, and then haul him into the boat, which was
now about fifty yards away; so as soon as the girl had got her breath
they swam with her to the boat, and lifted her hands on to the gunwale.

"If you wouldn't mind, sir, picking up those oars," said the
Englishman, "I will get the young lady into the boat, and then we can
row back."

Castellan gave him another look which said as plainly as words: "Well, I
suppose she's your prize for the present," and swam off for the oars.
With the eager help of the boys, who were now very frightened and very
penitent, the Englishman soon had the girl in the boat; and so it came
about that an adventure which might well have deprived America of one of
her most beautiful and brilliant heiresses, resulted in nothing more
than a ducking for two men and one girl, a wet, but somehow not
altogether unpleasant walk, and a slight chill from which she had quite
recovered the next morning.

The after consequences of that race for the rescue were of course, quite
another matter.




CHAPTER I

A MOMENTOUS EXPERIMENT


On the first day of July, 1908, a scene which was destined to become
historic took place in the great Lecture Theatre in the Imperial College
at Potsdam. It was just a year and a few days after the swimming race
between John Castellan and the Englishman in Clifden Bay.

There were four people present. The doors were locked and guarded by two
sentries outside. The German Emperor, Count Herold von Steinitz,
Chancellor of the Empire, Field-Marshal Count Friedrich von Moltke,
grandson of the great Organiser of Victory, and John Castellan, were
standing round a great glass tank, twenty-five feet long, and fifteen
broad, supported on a series of trestles. The tank was filled with water
up to within about six inches of the upper edge. The depth was ten feet.
A dozen models of battleships, cruisers and torpedo craft were floating
on the surface of the water. Five feet under the surface, a grey,
fish-shaped craft with tail and fins, almost exactly resembling those of
a flying fish, was darting about, now jumping forward like a cat
pouncing on a bird, now drawing back, and then suddenly coming to a
standstill. Another moment, it sank to the bottom, and lay there as if
it had been a wreck. The next it darted up to the surface, cruised about
in swift curves, turning in and out about the models, but touching none.

Every now and then John Castellan went to a little table in the corner
of the room, on which there was a machine something like a typewriter,
and touched two or three of the keys. There was no visible connection
between them--the machine and the tank--but the little grey shape in
the water responded instantly to the touch of every key.

"That, I hope, will be enough to prove to your Majesty that as submarine
the _Flying Fish_ is quite under control. Of course the real _Flying
Fish_ will be controlled inside, not from outside."

"There is no doubt about the control," said the Kaiser. "It is
marvellous, and I think the Chancellor and the Field Marshal will agree
with me in that."

"Wonderful," said the Chancellor.

"A miracle," said the Field Marshal, "if it can only be realised."

"There is no doubt about that, gentlemen," said Castellan, going back to
the machine. "Which of the models would your Majesty like to see
destroyed first?"

The Kaiser pointed to the model of a battleship which was a very good
imitation of one of the most up-to-date British battleships.

"We will take that one first," he said.

Castellan smiled, and began to play the keys. The grey shape of the
_Flying Fish_ dropped to the bottom of the tank, rose, and seemed all at
once to become endowed with human reason, or a likeness of it, which was
so horrible that even the Kaiser and his two chiefs could hardly repress
a shudder. It rose very slowly, circled among the floating models about
two feet under the surface and then, like an animal smelling out its
prey, it made a dart at the ship which the Kaiser had indicated, and
struck it from underneath. They saw a green flash stream through the
water, and the next moment the model had crumbled to pieces and sank.

"Donner-Wetter!" exclaimed the Chancellor, forgetting in his wonder that
he was in the presence of His Majesty, "that is wonderful, horrible!"

"Can there be anything too horrible for the enemies of the Fatherland,
Herr Kanztler," said the Kaiser, looking across the tank at him, with a
glint in his eyes, which no man in Germany cares to see.

"I must ask pardon, your Majesty," replied the Chancellor. "I was
astonished, indeed, almost frightened--frightened, if your Majesty will
allow me to say so, for the sake of Humanity, if such an awful invention
as that becomes realised."

"And what is your opinion, Field Marshal?" asked the Kaiser with a
laugh.

"A most excellent invention, your Majesty, provided always that it
belongs to the Fatherland."

"Exactly," said the Kaiser. "As that very intelligent American officer,
Admiral Mahan, has told us, the sea-power is world-power, and there you
have sea-power; but that is not the limit of the capabilities of Mr
Castellan's invention, according to the specifications which I have
read, and on the strength of which I have asked him to give us this
demonstration of its powers. He calls it, as you know, the _Flying
Fish_. So far you have seen it as a fish. Now, Mr Castellan, perhaps you
will be kind enough to let us see it fly."

"With pleasure, your Majesty," replied the Irishman, "but, in case of
accident, I must ask you and the Chancellor and the Field Marshal to
stand against the wall by the door there. With your Majesty's
permission, I am now going to destroy the rest of the fleet."

"The rest of the fleet!" exclaimed the Field Marshal. "It is
impossible."

"We shall see, Feldherr!" laughed the Kaiser. "Meanwhile, suppose we
come out of the danger zone."

The three greatest men in Germany, and perhaps on the Continent of
Europe, lined up with their backs to the wall at the farther end of the
room from the tank, and the Irishman sat down to his machine. The keys
began to click rapidly, and they began to feel a tenseness in the air of
the room. After a few seconds they would not have been surprised if they
had seen a flash of lightning pass over their heads. The _Flying Fish_
had sunk to the bottom of the tank, and backed into one of the corners.
The keys of the machine clicked louder and faster. Her nose tilted
upwards to an angle of about sixty degrees. The six-bladed propeller at
her stem whirled round in the water like the flurry of a whale's fluke
in its death agony. Her side-fins inclined upwards, and, like a flash,
she leapt from the water, and began to circle round the room.

The Kaiser shut his teeth hard and watched. The Chancellor opened his
mouth as if he was going to say something, and shut it again. The Field
Marshal stroked his moustache slowly, and followed the strange shape
fluttering about the room. It circled twice round the tank, and then
crossed it. A sharp click came from the machine, something fell from the
body of the _Flying Fish_ into the tank. There was a dull sound of a
smothered explosion. For a moment the very water itself seemed aflame,
then it boiled up into a mass of seething foam. Every one of the models
was overwhelmed and engulfed at the same moment. Castellan got up from
the machine, caught the _Flying Fish_ in his hand, as it dropped towards
the water, took it to the Kaiser, and said:

"Is your Majesty convinced? It is quite harmless now."

"God's thunder, yes!" said the War Lord of Germany, taking hold of the
model. "It is almost superhuman."

"Yes," said the Chancellor, "it is damnable!"

"I," said the Field Marshal, drily, "think it's admirable, always
supposing that Mr Castellan is prepared to place this mysterious
invention at the disposal of his Majesty."

"Yes," said the Kaiser, leaning with his back against the door, "that
is, of course, the first proposition to be considered. What are your
terms, Mr Castellan?"

Castellan looked at the three men all armed. The Chancellor and the
Field Marshal wore their swords, and the Kaiser had a revolver in his
hip pocket. The Chancellor and the Field Marshal straightened up as the
Kaiser spoke, and their hands moved instinctively towards their sword
hilts. The Kaiser looked at the model of the _Flying Fish_ in his hand.
His face was, as usual, like a mask. He saw nothing, thought of nothing.
For the moment he was not a man: he was just the incarnation of an
idea.

"Field Marshal, you are a soldier," said Castellan, "and I see that your
hand has gone to your sword-hilt. Swords, of course, are the emblems of
military rank, but there is no use for them now."

"What do you mean, sir?" exclaimed the Count, clapping his right hand on
the hilt. After what he had seen he honestly believed that this Irishman
was a wizard of science who ought not to be trusted in the same room
with the Kaiser. Castellan went back to his machine and said:

"Draw your sword, sir, and see."

And then the keys began to click.

The Field Marshal's sword flashed out of the sheath. A second later the
Chancellor's did the same, and the Kaiser's right hand went back towards
his hip pocket.

Castellan got up and said:

"Your Majesty has a revolver. Be good enough, as you value your own
safety, to unload it, and throw the cartridges out of the window."

"But why?" exclaimed the Kaiser, pulling a Mauser repeating pistol out
of his hip-pocket. "Who are you, that you should give orders to me?"

"Only a man, your Majesty," replied Castellan, with a bow and a smile;
"a man who could explode every cartridge in that pistol of yours at once
before you had time to fire a shot. You have seen what has happened
already."

William the Second had seen enough. He walked to one of the windows
opening on the enclosed gardens, threw it open, dropped the pistol out,
and said:

"Now, let us have the proof of what you say."

"In a moment, your Majesty," replied Castellan, going back to his
machine, and beginning to work the keys rapidly. "I am here, an unarmed
man; let their Excellencies, the Chancellor and the Field Marshal,
attack me with their swords if they can. I am not joking. I am staking
my life on the success or failure of this experiment."

"Does your Majesty consent?" said the Field Marshal, raising his sword.

"There could be no better test," replied the Kaiser. "Mr Castellan makes
an experiment on which he stakes his life; we are making an experiment
on which we stake the welfare of the German Empire, and, perhaps, the
fate of the world. If he is willing, I am."

"And I am ready," replied Castellan, working the keys faster and faster
as he spoke, and looking at the two swords as carelessly as if they had
been a couple of walking sticks.

The sword points advanced towards him; the keys of the machine clicked
faster and faster. The atmosphere of the room became tenser and tenser;
the Kaiser leaned back against the door with his arms folded. When the
points were within three feet of Castellan's head, the steel began to
gleam with a bluish green light. The Chancellor and the Field Marshal
stopped; they saw sparkles of blue flame running along the sword blades.
Then came paralysis! the swords dropped from their hands, and they
staggered back.

"Great God, this is too much," gasped the Chancellor. "The man is
impregnable. It is too much, your Majesty. I fought through the war of
'70 and '71, but I surrender to this; this is not human."

"I beg your pardon, Excellency," said Castellan, getting up from the
machine, and picking the two swords from the floor, "it is quite human,
only a little science that the majority of humanity does not happen to
know. Your swords, gentlemen," and he presented the hilts to them.

"Bravo!" exclaimed the Kaiser, "well done! You have beaten the two best
soldiers in the German Empire, and you have done it like a gentleman.
But you are not altogether an Irishman, are you, Mr Castellan?"

"No, sir, I am a Spaniard as well. The earliest ancestor that I know
commanded the _Santiago_, wrecked on Achill Island, when the Armada came
south from the Pentland Firth. The rest of me is Irish. I need hardly
say more. That is why I am here now."

The Kaiser looked at the Chancellor and the Field Marshal, and they
looked back at him, and in a moment the situation--the crisis upon which
the fate of the world might depend--was decided. It was not a time when
men who are men talk. A few moments of silence passed; the four men
looking at each other with eyes that had the destinies of nations in the
brains behind them. Then the Kaiser took three swift strides towards
Castellan, held out his hand, and said in a voice which had an unwonted
note of respect in it:

"Sir, you have convinced me. Henceforth you are Director of the Naval
and Military operations of the German Empire, subject, of course, to the
conditions which will be arranged by myself and those who are entrusted
with the tactical and strategical developments of such plan of campaign
as I may decide to carry out on sea and land. And now, to put it
rudely--brutally, if you like, your price?"

Castellan took the Kaiser's hand in a strong, nervous grip, and said:

"I shall not state my price in money, your Majesty. I am not working for
money, but you will understand that I cannot convert what I have shown
you to-day into the fighting reality. Only a nation can do that. It will
cost ten millions of marks, at least, to--well, to so far develop this
experiment that no fleet save your Majesty's shall sail the seas, and
that no armies save yours shall without your consent march over the
battlefields of the world's Armageddon."

"Make it twenty millions, fifty millions," laughed the Kaiser, "and it
will be cheap at the price. What do you think, Herr Kantzler and
Feldherr?"

"Under the present circumstances of the other monarchies of Europe, your
Majesty," replied the Chancellor, "it would be cheap at a hundred
millions, especially with reference to a certain fleet, which appears to
be making the ocean its own country."

"Quite so," said the Field Marshal. "If what we have seen to-day can be
realised it would not be necessary to pump out the North Sea in order to
invade England."

"Or to get back again," laughed the Kaiser. "I think that is what your
grandfather said, didn't he?"

"Yes, your Majesty. He found eight ways of getting into England, but he
hadn't thought of one of getting out again."

Since the days of the Prophets no man had ever uttered more prophetic
words than Friedrich Helmuth von Moltke spoke then, all unconsciously.
But in the days to come they were fulfilled in such fashion that only
one man in all the world had ever dreamed of, and that was the man who
had beaten John Castellan by a yard in the swimming race for the rescue
of that American girl from drowning.




CHAPTER II

NORAH'S GOOD-BYE


The scene had shifted back from the royal city of Potsdam to the little
coast town in Connemara. John Castellan was sitting on a corner of his
big writing-table swinging his legs to and fro, and looking a little
uncomfortable. Leaning against the wall opposite the windows, with her
hands folded behind her back, was a girl of about nineteen, an almost
perfect incarnation of the Irish girl at her best. Tall, black-haired,
black-browed, grey-eyed, perfectly-shaped, and with that indescribable
charm of feature which neither the pen nor the camera can do justice
to--Norah Castellan was facing him, her eyes gleaming and almost black
with anger, and her whole body instinct with intense vitality.

"And so Ireland hasn't troubles enough of her own, John, that you must
bring new ones upon her, and what for? To realise a dream that was never
anything else but a dream, and to satisfy a revenge that is three
hundred years old! If that theory of yours about re-incarnation is true,
you may have been a Spaniard once, but remember that you're an Irishman
now; and you're no good Irishman if you sell yourself to these
foreigners to do a thing like that, and it's your sister that's telling
you."

"And it's your brother, Norah," he replied, his black brows meeting
almost in a straight line across his forehead, "who tells you that
Ireland is going to have her independence; that the shackles of the
Saxon shall be shaken off once and for ever, even if all Europe blazes
up with war in the doing of it. I have the power and I will use it.
Spaniard or Irishman, what does it matter? I hate England and everything
English."

"Hate England, John!" said the girl. "Are you quite sure that it isn't
an Englishman that you hate?"

"Well, and what if I do? I hate all Englishmen, and I'm the first
Irishman who has ever had the power to put his hatred into acts instead
of words--and you, an Irish girl, with six generations of Irish blood in
your veins, you, to talk to me like this. What are you thinking about,
Norah? Is that what you call patriotism?"

"Patriotism!" she echoed, unclasping her hands, and holding her right
hand out towards him. "I'm as Irish as you are, and as Spanish, too, for
the matter of that, for the same blood is in the veins of both of us.
You're a scholar and a genius, and all the rest of it, I grant you; but
haven't you learned history enough to know that Ireland never was
independent, and never could be? What brought the English here first?
Four miserable provinces that called themselves kingdoms, and all
fighting against each other, and the king of one of them stole the wife
of the king of another of them, and that's how the English came.

"I love Ireland as well as you do, John, but Ireland is not worth
setting the world swimming in blood for. You're lighting a match-box to
set the world ablaze with. It isn't Ireland only, remember. There are
Irish all over the world, millions of them, and remember how the Irish
fought in the African War. I don't mean Lynch and his traitors, but the
Dublin boys. Who were the first in and the last out--Irishmen, but they
had the sense to know that they were British first and Irish afterwards.
I tell you, you shall be shot for what you've done, and if I wasn't the
daughter of your father and mother, I'd inform against you now."

"And if you did, Norah, you would do very little good to the Saxon
cause," replied her brother, pointing with his thumb out of one of the
windows. "You see that yacht in the bay there. Everything is on board of
her. If you went out into the street now, gave me in charge of the
constabulary, to those two men in front of the hotel there, it would
make no difference. There's nothing to be proved, no, not even if my
own sister tried to swear my life and liberty away. It would only be
that the Germans and the Russians, and the Austrians, and the rest of
them would work out my ideas instead of me working them out, and it
might be that they would make a worse use of them. You've half an hour
to give me up, if you like."

And then he began to collect the papers that were scattered about the
big drawing-table, sorting them out and folding them up and then taking
other papers and plans from the drawers and packing them into a little
black dispatch box.

"But, John, John," she said, crossing the room, and putting her hand on
his shoulder. "Don't tell me that you're going to plunge the world in
war just for this. Think of what it means--the tens of thousands of
lives that will be lost, the thousands of homes that will be made
desolate, the women who will be crying for their husbands, and the
children for their fathers, the dead men buried in graves that will
never have a name on them, and the wounded, broken men coming back to
their homes that they will never be able to keep up again, not only here
and in England, but all over Europe and perhaps in America as well!
Genius you may be; but what are you that you should bring calamity like
this upon humanity?"

"I'm an Irishman, and I hate England, and that's enough," he replied
sullenly, as he went on packing his papers.

"You hate that Englishman worse than you hate England, John."

"And I wouldn't wonder if you loved that Englishman more than you loved
Ireland, Norah," he replied, with a snarl in his voice.

"And if I did," she said, with blazing eyes and flaming cheeks, "isn't
England nearer to Ireland than America?"

"Geographically, perhaps, but in sentiment--"

"Sentiment! Yes, when you have finished with this bloody business of
yours that you have begun on, go you through Ireland and England and
Europe, and ask the widows and the fatherless, and the girls who kissed
their lovers 'good-bye,' and never saw them again, what they think of
that sentiment! But it's no use arguing with you now; there's your
German yacht. You're no brother of mine. You've made me sorry that we
had the same father and mother."

As she spoke, she went to the door, opened it and, before he could
reply, slammed it behind her, and went to her room to seek and find a
woman's usual relief from extreme mental tension.

John Castellan went on packing his papers, his face grey, and his
features hard-set. He loved his beautiful sister, but he thought that he
loved his country more. When he had finished he went and knocked at her
door, and said:

"Norah, I'm going. Won't you say 'good-bye?'"

The door was swung open, and she faced him, her face wet with tears, her
eyes glistening, and her lips twitching.

"Yes, good-bye, John," she said. "Go to your German friends; but, when
all the horrors that you are going to bring upon this country through
their help come to pass, remember you have no sister left in Ireland.
You've sold yourself, and I have no brother who is a traitor. Good-bye!"

The door swung to and she locked it. John Castellan hesitated for a
moment or two, and then with a slow shake of his head he went away down
the stairs out into the street, and along to the little jetty where the
German yacht's boat was waiting to take him on board.

Norah had thrown herself on her bed in her locked room shedding the
first but not the last tear that John Castellan's decision was destined
to draw from women's eyes.

About half an hour later the encircling hills of the bay echoed the
shriek of a siren. She got up, looked out of the window, and saw the
white shape of the German yacht moving out towards the fringe of islands
which guard the outward bay.

"And there he goes!" she said in a voice that was almost choked with
sobs, "there he goes, my own brother, it may be taking the fate of the
world with him--yes, and on a German ship, too. He that knows every
island and creek and cove and harbour from Cape Wrath to Cape Clear--he
that's got all those inventions in his head, too, and the son of my own
father and mother, sold his country to the foreigner, thinking those
dirty Germans will keep their word with him.

"Not they, John, not they. The saints forgive me for thinking it, but
for Ireland's sake I hope that ship will never reach Germany. If it
does, we'll see the German Eagle floating over Dublin Castle before
you'll be able to haul up the Green Flag. Well, well, there it is; it's
done now, I suppose, and there's no help for it. God forgive you, John,
I don't think man ever will!"

As she said this the white yacht turned the southern point of the inner
bay, and disappeared to the southward. Norah bathed her face, brushed
out her hair, and coiled it up again; then she put on her hat and
jacket, and went out to do a little shopping.

It is perhaps a merciful provision of Providence that in this human life
of ours the course of the greatest events shall be interrupted by the
most trivial necessities of existence. Were it not for that the
inevitable might become the unendurable.

The plain fact was that Norah Castellan had some friends and
acquaintances coming to supper that evening. Her brother had left at a
few hours' notice from his foreign masters, as she called them, and
there would have to be some explanation of his absence, especially as a
friend of his, Arthur Lismore, the owner of the finest salmon streams
for twenty miles round, and a man who was quite hopelessly in love with
herself, was coming to brew the punch after the fashion of his
ancestors, and so, of course, it was necessary that there should be
nothing wanting.

Moreover, she was beginning to feel the want of some hard physical
exercise, and an hour or so in that lovely air of Connemara, which, as
those who know, say, is as soft as silk and as bright as champagne. So
she went out, and as she turned the corner round the head of the harbour
to the left towards the waterfall, almost the first person she met was
Arthur Lismore himself--a brown-faced, chestnut-haired, blue-eyed, young
giant of twenty-eight or so; as goodly a man as God ever put His own
seal upon.

His cap came off, his head bowed with that peculiar grace of deference
which no one has ever yet been able to copy from an Irishman, and he
said in the strong, and yet curiously mellow tone which you only hear in
the west of Ireland:

"Good afternoon, Miss Norah. I've heard that you're to be left alone for
a time, and that we won't see John to-night."

"Yes," she said, her eyes meeting his, "that is true. He went away in
that German yacht that left the bay less than an hour ago."

"A German yacht!" he echoed. "Well now, how stupid of me, I've been
trying to think all the afternoon what that flag was she carried when
she came in."

"The German Imperial Yacht Club," she said, "that was the ensign she was
flying, and John has gone to Germany in her."

"To Germany! John gone to Germany! But what for? Surely now--"

"Yes, to Germany, to help the Emperor to set the world on fire."

"You're not saying that, Miss Norah?"

"I am," she said, more gravely than he had ever heard her speak. "Mr
Lismore, it's a sick and sorry girl I am this afternoon. You were the
first Irishman on the top of Waggon Hill, and you'll understand what I
mean. If you have nothing better to do, perhaps you'll walk down to the
Fall with me, and I'll tell you."

"I could have nothing better to do, Norah, and it's yourself that knows
that as well as I do," he replied. "I only wish the road was longer.
And it's yourself that's sick and sorry, is it? If it wasn't John, I'd
like to get the reason out of any other man. That's Irish, but it's
true."

He turned, and they walked down the steeply sloping street for several
minutes in silence.




CHAPTER III

SEEN UNDER THE MOON


It was a few minutes after four bells on a grey morning in November 1909
that Lieutenant-Commander Francis Erskine, in command of his Majesty's
Fishery Cruiser, the _Cormorant_, got up on to the navigating bridge,
and, as usual, took a general squint about him, and buttoned the top
button of his oil-skin coat.

The _Cormorant_ was just a few yards inside the three-mile limit on
Flamborough Head, and, officially, she was looking for trespassers, who
either did not fly the British flag, or flew it fraudulently. There were
plenty of foreign poachers on the rich fishing grounds to the north and
east away to the Dogger, and there were also plenty of floating grog
shops from Bremen and Hamburg, and Rotterdam and Flushing, and a good
many other places, loaded up to their decks with liquor, whose mission
was not only to sell their poison at about four hundred per cent. profit
to the British fishers on the Dogger, but also to persuade them, at a
price, to smuggle more of the said poison into the British Islands to be
made into Scotch and Irish whisky, brandy, Hollands, gin, rum, and even
green and yellow Chartreuse, or any other alcoholic potion which simply
wanted the help of the chemist to transform potato and beet spirit into
anything that would taste like what it was called.

"Beast of a morning, Castellan," he said to his first officer, whom he
was relieving, "dirty sea, dirty sky, and not a thing to be seen. You
don't have worse weather than this even off Connemara, do you?"

"No," said Castellan, "and I've seen better; but look you, there's the
sky clearing to the east; yes, and there's Venus, herald of the sun:
and faith, she's bright, too, like a little moon, now isn't she? I
suppose it'll be a bit too early for Norah to be looking at her, won't
it?"

"Don't talk rot, man," replied the Lieutenant-Commander. "I hope your
sister hasn't finished her beauty sleep by this time."

The clouds parted still wider, making a great gap of blue-grey sky to
the eastward, as the westward bank drifted downward. The moon sent a
sudden flood of white light over their heads, which silvered the edges
of the clouds, and then turned the leaden waters into silver as it had
done to the grey of the cloud.

"She'd wake fast enough if she had a nightmare or a morning mare, or
something of that sort, and could see a thing like that," exclaimed
Castellan, gripping the Lieutenant-Commander by the shoulder with his
right hand, and pointing to the east with his left. "Look, man, look! By
all the Holy Powers, what is it? See there! Thanks for the blessed
moonlight that has shown it to us, for I'm thinking it doesn't mean any
good to old England or Ireland."

Erskine was an Englishman, and a naval officer at that, and therefore
his reply consisted of only a few words hardly fitted for publication.
The last words were, "What is it?"

"What is it?" said Castellan with a stamp of his feet on the bridge,
"what is it? Now wouldn't I like to know just as well as you would, and
don't you think the Lords of the British Admiralty would like to know a
lot better? But there's one thing I think I can tell you, it's one of
those new inventions that the British Admiralty never buy, and let go to
other countries, and what's more, as you've seen with your eyes, as I
have with mine, it came out of the water on the edge of that moon-lit
piece, it flew across it, it sighted us, I suppose, it found it had made
a mistake, and it went down again. Now what do you make of that?"

"Combination of submarine and airship it looks like," said Erskine,
seriously, "and if that doesn't belong to us, it's going to be fairly
dangerous. Good Lord! a thing like that might do anything with a fleet,
and whatever Power owns it may just as well have a hundred as one. Look
here, Castellan, I'm going straight into Scarborough. This is a lot more
important than the Dogger Fleet. There's the _Seagull_ at Hull. She can
relieve us, and Franklin can take this old coffee-grinder round. You and
I are going to London as soon as we can get there. Take the latitude,
longitude, and exact time, and also the evidence of the watch if any one
of them saw it."

"You think it's as serious as that?"

"Certainly. It's one of two things. Either that thing belongs to us or
it belongs to a possible enemy. The Fleet, even to a humble fishery
cruiser, means the eyes and ears of the British Empire. If that belongs
to the Admiralty, well and good; we shall get censured for leaving the
ship; that's the risk we take. If it doesn't, the Naval Board may
possibly have the civility to thank us for telling them about it; but in
either case we are going to do our duty. Send Franklin up to the bridge,
make the course for Scarborough, get the evidence of any of the watch
who saw what we have seen, and I'll go and make the report. Then you can
countersign it, and the men can make theirs. I think that's the best we
can do."

"I think so, sir," said the Lieutenant, saluting.

The Lieutenant-Commander walked from port to starboard and starboard to
port thinking pretty hard until the navigating lieutenant came to take
charge of the bridge. Of submarines he knew a good deal. He knew that
the British navy possessed the very best type of this craft which
navigated the under-waters. He had also, of course, read the aerial
experiments which had been made by inventors of what the newspapers
called airships, and which he, with his hard naval common-sense, called
gas-bags with motor engines slung under them. He knew the deadly
possibilities of the submarine; the flying gas-bag he looked upon as gas
and not much more. The real flying machine he had considered up till a
few moments ago as a dream of the future; but a combination of submarine
and flying ship such as he and Castellan, if they had not both been
drunk or dreaming, had seen a few moments ago, was quite another matter.
The possibilities of a thing like that were absolutely limitless,
limitless for good or evil, and if it did belong to a possible enemy of
Britain, there was only one conclusion to be arrived at--The Isle
Inviolate would be inviolate no more.

Lieutenant Franklin came on to the bridge and saluted; he returned the
salute, gave the orders for changing the course, and went down to his
cabin, muttering:

"Good Lord, if that's only so. Why, half a dozen things like that could
fight a fleet, then go on gaily to tackle the forts. I wonder whether my
Lords of the Naval Council will see me to-morrow, and believe me if they
do see me."

By great good luck it happened that the Commander of the North-eastern
District had come up from Hull to Scarborough for a few days' holiday.
When he saw the _Cormorant_ steam into the bay, he very naturally wanted
to know what was the matter, and so he went down to the pier-head, and
met the _Cormorant's_ cutter. As Erskine came up the steps he recognised
him and saluted.

"Good-morning, sir."

"Good-morning, Erskine. What's the matter? You're a little off your
ground, aren't you? Of course, there must be a reason for it. Anything
serious?" replied the District Commander, as he held out his hand. "Ah,
good morning, Castellan. So you've both come ashore. Well, now, what is
it?"

Erskine took a rapid glance round at the promenaders who were coming
down to have a look at the cruiser, and said in a low tone:

"Yes, sir. I am afraid it is rather serious; but it is hardly the sort
of thing one could discuss here. In fact, I was taking the
responsibility of going straight to London with Castellan, to present a
report which we have drawn up to the Board of Admiralty."

The District Commander's iron-grey eyebrows lifted for the fraction of a
minute, and he said:

"H'm. Well, Erskine, I know you're not the sort of man to do that sort
of thing without pretty good reason. Come up to the hotel, both of you,
and let us go into it."

"Thank you, sir," replied Erskine. "It is really quite fortunate that we
met you here, because I think when you've seen the report you will feel
justified in giving us formal leave instead of French leave."

"I hope so," he replied, somewhat grimly, for a rule of the Service had
been broken all to pieces, and his own sense of discipline was sorely
outraged by the knowledge that two responsible officers had left their
ship with the intention of going to London without leave.

But when he had locked the door of his sitting-room at the hotel, and
heard the amazing story which Erskine and Castellan had to tell, and had
read their report, and the evidence of the men who had also seen the
strange apparition which had leapt from the sea into the air, and then
returned to the waters, he put in a few moments of silent thinking, and
then he looked up, and said gravely:

"Well, gentlemen, I know that British naval officers and British seamen
don't see things that are not there, as the Russians did a few years ago
on the Dogger Bank. I am of course bound to believe you, and I think
they will do the same in London. You have taken a very irregular course;
but a man who is not prepared to do that at a pinch seldom does anything
else. I have seen and heard enough to convince me for the present; and
so I shall have great pleasure, in fact I shall only be doing my duty,
in giving you both leave for a week.

"I will order the _Seagull_ up from Hull, she's about ready, and I think
I can put an Acting-Commander on board the _Cormorant_ for the present.
Now, you will just have time for an early lunch with me, and catch the
1.17, which will get you to town at 5.15, and you will probably find
somebody at the Admiralty then, because I know they're working overtime.
Anyhow, if you don't find Sir John Fisher there, I should go straight to
his house, if I were you; and even if you don't see him, you'll be able
to get an early appointment for to-morrow."

"That was a pretty good slice of luck meeting the noble Crocker, wasn't
it?" said Castellan, as the train began to move out of the station,
about three hours later. They had reserved a compartment in the corridor
express, and were able to talk State secrets at their ease.

"We're inside the law now, at any rate."

"Law or no law, it was good enough to risk a court-martial for," said
Erskine, biting off the end of a cigar. "There's no doubt about the
existence of the thing, and if it doesn't belong to us, which is a fact
that only my Lords of the Naval Council can know, it simply means, as
you must see for yourself, that the invasion of England, which has been
a naval and military impossibility for the last seven hundred years or
so, will not only become possible but comparatively easy. There's
nothing upon the waters or under them that could stand against a thing
like that."

"Oh, you're right enough there," said Castellan, speaking with his soft
West of Ireland brogue. "There's no doubt of that, and it's the very
devil. A dozen of those things would play havoc with a whole fleet, and
when the fleet's gone, or even badly hurt, what's to stop our good
friends over yonder landing two or three million men just anywhere they
choose, and doing pretty well what they like afterwards? By the Saints,
that would be a horrible thing. We've nothing on land that could stand
against them, though, of course, the boys would stand till they fell
down; but fall they would."

"Yes," said Erskine, seriously. "It wouldn't exactly be a walk over for
them, but I'm afraid there couldn't be very much doubt at the end, if
the fleet once went."

"I'm afraid not," replied Castellan, "and we can only hope that our
Lords of the Council will be of the same opinion, or, better still,
that the infernal thing we saw belongs to us."

"I hope so," said Erskine, gravely. "If it doesn't--well, I wouldn't
give half-a-crown for the biggest battleship in the British Navy."




CHAPTER IV

THE SHADOW OF THE TERROR


By a curious coincidence which, as events proved, was to have some
serious consequences, almost at the same moment that Commander Erskine
began to write his report on the strange vision which he and his
Lieutenant had seen, Gilbert Lennard came out of the Observatory which
Mr Ratliffe Parmenter had built on the south of the Whernside Hills in
Yorkshire.

Mr Ratliffe Parmenter had two ambitions in life, one of which he had
fulfilled. This was to pile millions upon millions by any possible
means. As he used to say to his associates in his poorer days, "You've
got to get there somehow, so get there"--and he had "got there." It is
not necessary for the purpose of the present narrative to say how he did
it. He had done it, and that is why he bought the Hill of Whernside and
about a thousand acres around it and built an Observatory on the top
with which, to use his own words, he meant to lick Creation by seeing
further into Creation than anyone else had done, and that is just what
his great reflector had enabled his astronomer to do.

When he had locked the door Lennard looked up to the eastward where the
morning star hung flashing like a huge diamond in splendid solitude
against the brightening background of the sky. His face was the face of
a man who had seen something that he would not like to describe to any
other man. His features were hard set, and there were lines in his face
which time might have drawn twenty or thirty years later. His lips made
a straight line, and his eyes, although he had hardly slept three hours
a night for as many nights, had a look in them that was not to be
accounted for by ordinary insomnia.

His work was over for the night, and, if he chose, he could go down to
the house three-quarters of a mile away and sleep for the rest of the
day, or, at any rate, until lunch time; and yet he looked another long
look at the morning star, thrust his hands down into his trousers
pockets and turned up a side path that led through the heather, and
spent the rest of the morning walking and thinking--walking slowly, and
thinking very quickly.

When he came in to breakfast at nine the next morning, after he had had
a shave and a bath, Mr Parmenter said to him:

"Look here, young man, I'm old enough to be your father, and so you'll
excuse me putting it that way; if you're going along like this I reckon
I'll have to shut that Observatory down for the time being and take you
on a trip to the States to see how they're getting on with their
telescopes in the Alleghanies and the Rockies, and maybe down South too
in Peru, to that Harvard Observatory above Arequipa on the Misti, as a
sort of holiday. I asked you to come here to work, not to wear yourself
out. As I've told you before, we've got plenty of men in the States who
can sign their cheques for millions of dollars and can't eat a dinner,
to say nothing of a breakfast, and you're too young for that.

"What's the matter? More trouble about that new comet of yours. You've
been up all night looking at it, haven't you? Of course it's all right
that you got hold of it before anybody else, but all the same I don't
want you to be worrying yourself for nothing and get laid up before the
time comes to take the glory of the discovery."

While he was speaking the door of the breakfast-room opened and Auriole
came in. She looked with a just perceptible admiration at the man who,
as it seemed to her, was beginning to show a slight stoop in the broad
shoulders and a little falling forward of the head which she had first
seen driving through the water to her rescue in the Bay of Connemara.
Her eyelids lifted a shade as she looked at him, and she said with a
half smile:

"Good morning, Mr Lennard; I am afraid you've been sacrificing yourself
a little bit too much to science. You don't seem to have had a sleep for
the last two or three nights. You've been blinding your eyes over those
tangles of figures and equations, parallaxes and cube roots and that
sort of thing. I know something about them because I had some struggles
with them myself at Vassar."

"That's about it, Auriole," said her father. "Just what I've been
saying; and I hope our friend is not going on with this kind of business
too long. Now, really, Mr Lennard, you know you must not, and that's all
there is to it."

"Oh, no, I don't think you need be frightened of anything of that sort,"
said Lennard, who had considerably brightened up as Auriole entered the
room; "perhaps I may have been going a little too long without sleep;
but, you see, a man who has the great luck to discover a new comet is
something like one of the old navigators who discovered new islands and
continents. Of course you remember the story of Columbus. When he
thought he was going to find what is now the country which has had the
honour--"

"I know you're going to say something nice, Mr Lennard," interrupted
Auriole, "but breakfast is ready; here it comes. If you take my advice
you will have your coffee and something to eat and tell us the rest of
it while you're getting something that will do you good. What do you
think, Poppa?"

"Hard sense, Auriole, hard sense. Your mother used to talk just like
that, and I reckon you've got it from her. Well now, here's the food,
let's begin. I've got a hunger on me that I'd have wanted five dollars
to stop at the time when I couldn't buy a breakfast."

They sat down, Miss Auriole at the head of the table and her father and
Lennard facing each other, and for the next few minutes there was a
semi-silence which was very well employed in the commencement of one of
the most important functions of the human day.

When Mr Parmenter had got through his first cup of coffee, his two
poached eggs on toast, and was beginning on the fish, he looked across
the table and said:

"Well now, Mr Lennard, I guess you're feeling a bit better, as I do, and
so, maybe, you can tell us something new about comets."

"I certainly am feeling better," said Lennard with a glance at Auriole,
"but, you see, I've got into a state of mind which is not unlike the
physical state of the Red Indian who starves for a few days and then
takes his meals, I mean the arrears of meals, all at once. When I have
had a good long sleep, as I am going to have until to-night, I might--in
fact, I hope I shall be able to tell you something definite about the
question of the comet."

"What--the question?" echoed Mr Parmenter. "About the comet? I didn't
understand that there was any question. You have discovered it, haven't
you?"

"I have made a certain discovery, Mr Parmenter," said Lennard, with a
gravity which made Auriole raise her eyelids quickly, "but whether I
have found a comet so far unknown to astronomy or not, is quite another
matter. Thanks to that splendid instrument of yours, I have found a
something in a part of the heavens where no comet, not even a star, has
even been seen yet, and, speaking in all seriousness, I may say that
this discovery contradicts all calculations as to the orbits and
velocities of any known comet. That is what I have been thinking about
all night."

"What?" said Auriole, looking up again. "Really something quite
unknown?"

"Unknown except to the three people sitting at this table, unless
another miracle has happened--I mean such a one as happened in the case
of the discovery of Neptune which, as of course you know, Adams at
Cambridge and Le Verrier at Paris--"

"Yes, yes," said Auriole, "two men who didn't know each other; both
looked for something that couldn't be seen, and found it. If you've done
anything like that, Mr Lennard, I reckon Poppa will have good cause to
be proud of his reflector--"

"And of the man behind it," added her father. "A telescope's like a gun;
no use without a good man behind it. Well, if that's so, Mr Lennard,
this discovery of yours ought to shake the world up a bit."

"From what I have seen so far," replied Lennard, "I have not the
slightest doubt that it will."

"And when may I see this wonderful discovery of yours, Mr Lennard," said
Auriole, "this something which is going to be so important, this
something that no one else's eyes have seen except yours. Really, you
know, you've made me quite longing to get a sight of this stranger from
the outer wilderness of space."

"If the night is clear enough, I may hope to be able to introduce you to
the new celestial visitor about a quarter-past eleven to-night, or to be
quite accurate eleven hours, sixteen minutes and thirty-nine seconds
p.m."

"I think that's good enough, Auriole," said her father. "If the heavens
are only kind enough, we'll go up to the observatory and, as Mr Lennard
says, see something that no one else has ever seen."

"And then," laughed Auriole, "I suppose you will have achieved the
second ambition of your life. You have already piled up a bigger heap of
dollars than anybody else in the world, and by midnight you will have
seen farther into Creation than anybody else. But you will let me have
the first look, won't you?"

"Why, certainly," he replied. "As soon as Mr Lennard has got the
telescope fixed, you go first, and I reckon that won't take very long."

"No," replied Lennard, "I've worked out the position for to-night, and
it's only a matter of winding up the clockwork and setting the
telescope. And now," he continued, rising, "if you will allow me, I will
say--well, I was going to say good-night, but of course it's
good-morning--I'm going to bed."

"Will you come down to lunch, or shall I have some sent up to you?"
said Auriole.

"No, thanks. I don't think there will be any need to trouble you about
that. When I once get to sleep, I hope I shall forget all things
earthly, and heavenly too for the matter of that, until about six
o'clock, and if you will have me called then, I will be ready for
dinner."

"Certainly," replied Auriole, "and I hope you will sleep as well as you
deserve to do, after all these nights of watching."

He did sleep. He slept the sleep of a man physically and mentally tired,
in spite of the load of unspeakable anxiety which was weighing upon his
mind. For during his last night's work, he had learnt what no other man
in the world knew. He had learnt that, unless a miracle happened, or
some almost superhuman feat of ingenuity and daring was accomplished,
that day thirteen months hence would see the annihilation of every
living thing on earth, and the planet Terra converted into a dark and
lifeless orb, a wilderness drifting through space, the blackened and
desolated sepulchre of the countless millions of living beings which now
inhabited it.




CHAPTER V

A GLIMPSE OF THE DOOM


After dinner Lennard excused himself, saying that he wanted to make a
few more calculations; and then he got outside and lit his pipe, and
walked up the winding path towards the observatory.

"What am I to do?" he said between his teeth. "It's a ghastly position
for a man to be placed in. Fancy--just a poor, ordinary, human being
like myself having the power of losing or saving the world in his hands!
And then, of course, there's a woman in the question--the Eternal
Feminine--even in such a colossal problem as this!

"It's mean, and I know it; but, after all, I saved her life--though, if
I hadn't reached her first, that other chap might have got her. I love
her and he loves her; there's no doubt about that, and Papa Parmenter
wants to marry her to a coronet. There's one thing certain, Castellan
shall not have her, and I love her a lot too much to see her made My
Lady This, or the Marchioness of So-and-so, just because she's beautiful
and has millions, and the other fellow, whoever he may be, may have a
coronet that probably wants re-gilding; and yet, after all, it's only
the same old story in a rather more serious form--a woman against the
world. I suppose Papa Parmenter would show me the door to-morrow morning
if I, a poor explorer of the realm of Space, dared to tell him that I
want to marry his daughter.

"And yet how miserable and trivial all these wretched distinctions of
wealth and position look now; or would look if the world only knew and
believed what I could tell it--and that reminds me--shall I tell her, or
them? Of course, I must before long; simply because in a month or so
those American fellows will be on it, and they won't have any scruples
when it comes to a matter of scare head-lines. Yes, I think it may as
well be to-night as any other time. Still, it's a pretty awful thing for
a humble individual like myself to say, especially to a girl one happens
to be very much in love with--nothing less than the death-sentence of
Humanity. Ah, well, she's got to hear it some time and from some one,
and why shouldn't she hear it now and from me?"

When he got back to the house, there was a carriage at the door, and Mr
Parmenter was just coming down the avenue, followed by a man with a
small portmanteau in his hand.

"Sorry, Mr Lennard," he said, holding out his hand, "I've just had a
wire about a company tangle in London that I've got to go and shake out
at once, so I'll have to see what you have to show me later on. Still,
that needn't trouble anyone. It looks as if it were going to be a
splendid night for star-gazing, and I don't want Auriole disappointed,
so she can go up to the observatory with you at the proper time and see
what there is to be seen. See you later, I have only just about time to
get the connection for London."

Lennard was not altogether sorry that this accident had happened.
Naturally, the prospect of an hour or so with Auriole alone in his
temple of Science was very pleasant, and moreover, he felt that, as the
momentous tidings had to be told, he would prefer to tell them to her
first. And so it came about.

A little after half-past eleven that night Miss Auriole was looking
wonderingly into the eye-piece of the great Reflector, watching a tiny
little patch of mist, somewhat brighter towards one end than the other;
like a little wisp of white smoke rising from a very faint spark that
was apparently floating across an unfathomable sea of darkness.

She seemed to see this through black darkness, and behind it a swarm of
stars of all sizes and colours. They appeared very much more wonderful
and glorious and important than the little spray of white smoke, because
she hadn't yet the faintest conception of its true import to her and
every other human being on earth: but she was very soon to know now.

While she was watching it in breathless silence, in which the clicking
of the mechanism which kept the great telescope moving so as to exactly
counteract the motion of the machinery of the Universe, sounded like the
blows of a sledge-hammer on an anvil, Gilbert Lennard stood beside her,
wondering if he should begin to tell her, and what he should say.

At last she turned away from the eye-piece, and looked at him with
something like a scared expression in her eyes, and said:

"It's very wonderful, isn't it, that one should be able to see all that
just by looking into a little bit of a hole in a telescope? And you tell
me that all those great big bright stars around your comet are so far
away that if you look at them just with your own eyes you don't even see
them--and there they look almost as if you could put out your hand and
touch them. It's just a little bit awful, too!" she added, with a little
shiver.

"Yes," he said, speaking slowly and even more gravely that she thought
the subject warranted, "yes, it is both wonderful and, in a way, awful.
Do you know that some of those stars you have seen in there are so far
away that the light which you see them by may have left them when
Solomon was king in Jerusalem? They may be quite dead and dark now, or
reduced into fire-mist by collision with some other star. And then,
perhaps, there are others behind them again so far away that their light
has not even reached us yet, and may never do while there are human eyes
on earth to see it."

"Yes, I know," she said, smiling. "You don't forget that I have been to
college--and light travels about a hundred and eighty-six thousand miles
a second, doesn't it? But come, Mr Lennard, aren't you what they call
stretching the probabilities a little when you say that the light of
some of them will never get here, as far as we're concerned? I always
thought we had a few million years of life to look forward to before
this old world of ours gets worn out."

"There are other ends possible for this world besides wearing out, Miss
Parmenter," he answered, this time almost solemnly. "Other worlds have,
as I say, been reduced to fire-mist. Some have been shattered to tiny
fragments to make asteroids and meteorites--stars and worlds, in
comparison with which this bit of a planet of ours is nothing more than
a speck of sand, a mere atom of matter drifting over the wilderness of
immensity. In fact, such a trifle is it in the organism of the Universe,
that if some celestial body collided with it--say a comet with a
sufficiently solid nucleus--and the heat developed by the impact turned
it into a mass of blazing gas, an astronomer on Neptune, one of our own
planets, wouldn't even notice the accident, unless he happened to be
watching the earth through a powerful telescope at the time."

"And is such an accident, as you call it, possible, Mr Lennard?" she
asked, jumping womanlike, by a sort of unconscious intuition, to the
very point to which he was so clumsily trying to lead up.

"I thought you spoke rather queerly about this comet of yours at
breakfast this morning. I hope there isn't any chance of its getting on
to the same track as this terrestrial locomotive of ours. That would be
just awful, wouldn't it? Why, what's the matter? You are going to be
ill, I know. You had better get down to the house, and go to bed. It's
want of sleep, isn't it? You'll be driving yourself mad that way."

A sudden and terrible change had come over him while she was speaking.
It was only for the moment, and yet to him it was an eternity. It might,
as she said, have been the want of sleep, for insomnia plays strange
tricks sometimes with the strongest of intellects.

More probably, it might have been the horror of his secret working on
the great love that he had for this girl who was sitting there alone
with him in the silence of that dim room and in the midst of the glories
and the mysteries of the Universe.

His eyes had grown fixed and staring, and looked sightlessly at her, and
his face shone ghastly pale in the dim light of the solitary shaded
lamp. Certainly, one of those mysterious crises which are among the
unsolved secrets of psychology had come upon him like some swift access
of delirium.

He no longer saw her sitting there by the telescope, calm, gracious, and
beautiful. He saw her as, by his pitiless calculations, he must do that
day thirteen months to come--with her soft grey eyes, starting,
horror-driven from their orbits, staring blank and wide and hideous at
the overwhelming hell that would be falling down from heaven upon the
devoted earth. He saw her fresh young face withered and horror-lined and
old, and the bright-brown hair grown grey with the years that would pass
in those few final moments. He saw the sweet red lips which had tempted
him so often to wild thoughts parched and black, wide open and gasping
vainly for the breath of life in a hot, burnt-out atmosphere.

Then he saw--no, it was only a glimpse; and with that the strange
trance-vision ended. What must have come after that would in all
certainty have driven him mad there and then, before his work had even
begun; but at that moment, swiftly severing the darkness that was
falling over his soul, there came to him an idea, bright, luminous, and
lovely as an inspiration from Heaven itself, and with it came back the
calm sanity of the sternly-disciplined intellect, prepared to
contemplate, not only the destruction of the world he lived in, but even
the loss of the woman he loved--the only human being who could make the
world beautiful or even tolerable for him.

The vision was blotted out from the sight of his soul; the darkness
cleared away from his eyes, and he saw her again as she still was. It
had all passed in a few moments and yet in them he had been down into
hell--and he had come back to earth, and into her presence.

Almost by the time she had uttered her last word, he had regained
command of his voice, and he began clearly and quietly to answer the
question which was still echoing through the chambers of his brain.

"It was only a little passing faintness, thank you; and something else
which you will understand when I have done, if you have patience to hear
me to the end," he said, looking straight at her for a moment, and then
beginning to walk slowly up and down the room past her chair.

"I am going to surprise you, perhaps to frighten you, and very probably
to offend you deeply," he began again in a quiet, dry sort of tone,
which somehow impressed her against all her convictions that he didn't
much care whether or not he did any or all of these things: but there
was something else in his tone and manner which held her to her seat,
silent and attentive, although she was conscious of a distinct desire to
get up and run away.

"Your guess about the comet, or whatever it may prove to be, is quite
correct. I don't think it is a new one. From what I have seen of it so
far, I have every reason to believe that it is Gambert's comet, which
was discovered in 1826, and became visible to the naked eye in the
autumn of 1833. It then crossed the orbit of the earth one month after
the earth had passed the point of intersection. After that, some force
divided it, and in '46 and '52 it reappeared as twin comets constantly
separating. Now it would seem that the two masses have come together
again: and as they are both larger in bulk and greater in density it
would appear that, somewhere in the distant fields of Space, they have
united with some other and denser body. The result is, that what is
practically a new comet, with a much denser nucleus than any so far
seen, is approaching our system. Unless a miracle happens, or there is a
practically impossible error in my calculations, it will cross the orbit
of the earth thirteen months from to-day, at the moment that the earth
itself arrives at the point of intersection."

So far Auriole had listened to the stiff scientific phraseology with
more interest than alarm; but now she took advantage of a little pause,
and said:

"And the consequences, Mr Lennard? I mean the consequences to us as
living beings. You may as well tell me everything now that you've gone
so far."

"I am going to," he said, stopping for a moment in his walk, "and I am
going to tell you something more than that. Granted that what I have
said happens, one of two things must follow. If the nucleus of the comet
is solid enough to pass through our atmosphere without being dissipated,
it will strike the surface with so much force that both it and the earth
will probably be transformed into fiery vapour by the conversion of the
motion of the two bodies into heat. If not, its contact with the oxygen
of the earth's atmosphere will produce an aerial conflagration which, if
it does not roast alive every living thing on earth, will convert the
oxygen, by combustion, into an irrespirable and poisonous gas, and so
kill us by a slower, but no less fatal, process."

"Horrible!" she said, shivering this time. "You speak like a judge
pronouncing sentence of death on the whole human race! I suppose there
is no possibility of reprieve? Well, go on!"

"Yes," he said, "there is something else. Those are the scientific
facts, as far as they go. I am going to tell you the chances now--and
something more. There is just one chance--one possible way of averting
universal ruin from the earth, and substituting for it nothing more
serious than an unparalleled display of celestial fireworks. All that
will be necessary is perfect calculation and illimitable expenditure of
money."

"Well," she said, "can't you do the calculations, Mr Lennard, and hasn't
dad got millions enough? How could he spend them better than in saving
the human race from being burnt alive? There isn't anything else, is
there?"

"There was something else," he said, stopping in front of her again. She
had risen to her feet as she said the last words, and the two stood
facing each other in the dim light, while the mechanism of the telescope
kept on clicking away in its heedless, mechanical fashion.

"Yes, there was something else, and I may as well tell you after all;
for, even if you never see or speak to me again, it won't stop the work
being done now. I could have kept this discovery to myself till it would
have been too late to do anything: for no other telescope without my
help would even find the comet for four months to come, and even now
there is hardly a day to be lost if the work is to be done in time. And
then--well, I suppose I must have gone mad for the time being, for I
thought--you will hardly believe me, I suppose--that I could make you
the price of the world's safety.

"From that, you will see how much I have loved you, however mad I may
have been. Losing you, I would have lost the world with you. If my love
lives, I thought, the world shall live: if not, if you die, the world
shall die. But just now, when you thought I was taken ill, I had a sort
of vision, and I saw you,--yes, you, Auriole as, if my one chance fails,
you must infallibly be this night thirteen months hence. I didn't see
any of the other millions who would be choking and gasping for breath
and writhing in the torture of the universal fire--I only saw you and my
own baseness in thinking, even for a moment, that such a bargain would
be possible.

"And then," he went on, more slowly, and with a different ring in his
voice, "there are the other men."

"Which other men?" she asked, looking up at him with a flush on her
cheeks and a gleam in her eyes.

"To be quite frank, and in such a situation as this, I don't see that
anything but complete candour is of any use," he replied slowly. "I need
hardly tell you that they are John Castellan and the Marquis of
Westerham. Castellan, I know, has loved you just as I have done, from
the moment we had the good luck to pick you out of the bay at Clifden.
Lord Westerham also wants you, so do I. That, put plainly, brutally, if
you like, is the situation. Of your own feelings, of course, I do not
pretend to have the remotest idea; but I confess that when this
knowledge came to me, the first thought that crossed my mind was the
thought of you as another man's wife--and then came the vision of the
world in flames. At first I chose the world in flames. I see that I was
wrong. That is all."

She had not interrupted even by a gesture, but as she listened, a
thousand signs and trifles which alone had meant nothing to her, now
seemed to come together and make one clear and definite revelation. This
strong, reserved, silent man had all the time loved her so desperately
that he was going mad about her--so mad that, as he had said, he had
even dreamed of weighing the possession of her single, insignificant
self against the safety of the whole world, with all its innumerable
millions of people--mostly as good in their way as she was.

Well--it might be that the love of such a man was a thing worth to weigh
even against a coronet--not in her eyes, for there was no question of
that now, but in her father's. But that was a matter for future
consideration. She drew herself up a little stiffly, and said, in just
such a tone as she might have used if what he had just been saying had
had no personal interest for her--had, in fact, been about some other
girl:

"I think it's about time to be going down to the house, Mr Lennard,
isn't it? I am quite sure a night's rest won't do you any harm. No, I'm
not offended, and I don't think I'm even frightened yet. It somehow
seems too big and too awful a thing to be only frightened at--too much
like the Day of Judgment, you know. I am glad you've told me--yes,
everything--and I'm glad that what you call your madness is over. You
will be able to do your work in saving the world all the better. Only
don't tell dad anything except--well--just the scientific and necessary
part of it. You know, saving a world is a very much greater matter than
winning a woman--at least it is in one particular woman's eyes--and
I've learnt somewhere in mathematics something about the greater
including the less. And now, don't you think we had better be going down
into the house? It's getting quite late."




CHAPTER VI

THE NOTE OF WAR


The _Official Gazette_, published November the 25th, 1909, contained the
following announcement:--


     "Naval Promotions. Lieutenant-Commander Francis Erskine, of H.M.
     Fishery Cruiser _Cormorant_, to be Captain of H.M. Cruiser
     _Ithuriel_. Lieutenant Denis Castellan, also of the _Cormorant_, to
     be First Lieutenant of the _Ithuriel_."


On the evening of the same day, Mr Chamberlain, the Prime Minister, rose
amidst the tense silence of a crowded House to make another
announcement, which was not altogether unconnected with the notice in
the _Gazette_.

"Sir," he said in a low, but vibrant and penetrating voice, which many
years before had helped to make his fame as an orator, "it is my painful
duty to inform this honourable House that a state of war exists between
His Majesty and a Confederation of European countries, including
Germany, Russia, France, Spain, Holland and Belgium."

He paused for a moment, and looked round at the hundreds of faces, most
of them pale and fixed, that were turned toward the front Treasury
Bench. Since Mr Balfour, now Lord Whittinghame, and Leader of the
Conservative Party in the House of Lords, had made his memorable speech
on the 12th of October 1899, informing the House of Commons and the
world that the Ultimatum of the South African Republic had been
rejected, and that the struggle for the mastery of South Africa was
inevitable, no such momentous announcement had been made in the House of
Commons.

Mr Chamberlain referred to that bygone crisis in the following terms:

"It will be within the memory of many Members of this House that, almost
exactly ten years ago to-day, the British Empire was challenged to fight
for the supremacy of South Africa. That challenge was accepted not
because there was any desire on the part of the Government or the people
of this country to destroy the self-government of what were then the
South African Republic and the Orange Free State, but because the
Government of her late Majesty, Queen Victoria, knew that the fate of an
empire, however great, depends upon its supremacy throughout its
dominions.

"To lose one of these, however small and apparently insignificant, is to
take a stone out of an arch with the result of inevitable collapse of
the whole structure. It is not necessary for me, sir, to make any
further allusion to that struggle, save than to say that the policy of
Her Majesty's Ministers has been completely justified by the
consequences which have followed from it.

"The Transvaal and Orange River Colonies have taken their place among
the other self-governing Colonies of the Empire. They are prosperous,
contented and loyal, and they will not be the last, I think, to come to
the help of the Mother Country in such a crisis as this. But, sir, I do
not think that I should be fulfilling the duties of the responsible
position which I have the honour to occupy if I did not remind this
House, and through this House the citizens of the British Empire, that
the present crisis is infinitely more serious than that with which we
were faced in 1899. Then we were waging a war in another hemisphere, six
thousand miles away. Our unconquered, and, as I hope it will prove,
unconquerable Navy, kept the peace of the world, and policed the ocean
highways along which it was necessary for our ships to travel. It is
true that there were menaces and threats heard in many quarters, but
they never passed beyond the region of insult and calumny.

"Our possible enemies then, our actual enemies now, were in those days
willing to wound, and yet afraid to strike. To-day, they have lost their
fear in the confidence of combination. To-day the war cloud is not six
thousand miles away in the southern hemisphere; it is here, in Europe,
and a strip of water, twenty-one miles broad, separates us from the
enemy, which, even as I am speaking, may already be knocking at our
gates. Even now, the thunder of the guns may be echoing along the shores
of the English Channel.

"This, sir, is a war in which I might venture to say the most ardent
member of the Peace Society would not hesitate to engage. For it
involves the most sacred duty of humanity, the defence of our country,
and our homes.

"We remember, sir, the words which Francis Drake wrote, and which have
remained true from his day until now: 'The frontiers of an island
country are the coasts of its possible enemies.' We remember also that
when the great Napoleon had massed nearly half a million men on the
heights above Boulogne, and more than a thousand pontoons were waiting
to carry that force to the Kentish shore, there was only one old English
frigate cruising up and down the Straits of Dover.

"Sir, there is on the heights of Boulogne a monument, built to
commemorate the assembly of the Grand Army, and collectors of coins
still cherish those productions of the Paris Mint, which bear the
legend, 'Napoleon, Emperor, London, 1804.' But, sir, the statue of
Napoleon which stands on the summit of that monument faces not westward
but eastward. The Grand Army could have crossed that narrow strip of
water. It could, no doubt, have made a landing on British soil, but
Napoleon, possibly the greatest military genius the world has ever seen,
anticipated Field-Marshal von Moltke, who said that he had found eight
ways of getting into England, but he had not found one of getting out
again, unless it were possible to pump the North Sea dry, and march the
men over. In other words, sir, the British Navy was then, as now,
paramount on seas; the oceans were our territories, and the coasts of
Europe our frontiers.

"Again, sir, we must not forget that those were the days of sails, and
that these are the days of steam. What was then a matter of days is now
only a matter of hours. It is two hundred and forty-two years since the
sound of hostile guns was heard in the city of London. To-morrow morning
their thunder may awaken us.

"It has been said, sir, that Great Britain plays the game of Diplomacy
with her cards face upwards on the table. That, in a sense, is true, and
His Majesty's Government propose to play the same game now. The demands
which have been presented by the Federation of European Powers, at the
head of which stands the German Emperor--demands which, it is hardly
necessary for me to say, were instantly rejected--are these: That
Gibraltar shall be given back to Spain; that Malta shall be dismantled,
and cease to be a British naval base; that the British occupation of
Egypt and the Soudan shall cease, and that the Suez Canal and the
Trans-Continental Railway from Cairo to the Cape shall be handed over to
the control of an International Board, upon which the British Empire
will be graciously allowed one representative.

"It is further demanded that Singapore, the Gate of the East, shall be
placed under the control of the same International Board, and that the
fortifications of Hong Kong shall be demolished. That, sir, would amount
to the surrender of the British Empire, an empire which can only exist
as long as the ocean paths between its various portions are kept
inviolate.

"Those proposals, sir, in plain English are threats, and His Majesty's
Government has returned the only possible answer to them, and that
answer is war--war, let us remember, which may within a few weeks, or
even days, be brought to our own doors. Whatever our enemies may have
said of us it is still true that Britain stands for peace, security, and
prosperity. We have used the force of arms to conquer the forces of
barbarism and semi-civilisation, but the most hostile of our critics may
be safely challenged to point to any country or province upon which we
have imposed the Pax Britannica, which is not now the better for it. It
is no idle boast, sir, to say that all the world over, the rule of His
Majesty means the rule of peace and prosperity. There are only two
causes in which a nation or an empire may justly go to war. One, is to
make peace where strife was before, and the other is to defend that
which has been won, and made secure by patient toil and endeavour, no
less than by blood and suffering. It is that which the challenge of
Europe calls upon us now to defend. Our answer to the leagued nations is
this: What we have fought for and worked for and won is ours. Take it
from us if you can.

"And, sir, I believe that I can say with perfect confidence, that what
His Majesty's Government has done His Majesty's subjects will enforce to
a man, and, if necessary, countersign the declaration of war in their
own blood.

"Let us remember, too, those weighty words of warning which the Laureate
of the Empire wrote nearly twenty years ago, of this Imperial
inheritance of ours:


     "'It is not made with the mountains, it is not one with the deep,
     Men, not gods, devised it, men, not gods, must keep.
     Men not children, servants, or kinsfolk called from afar,
     But each man born in the island broke to the matter of war.

     'So ye shall bide, sure-guarded, when the restless lightnings wake,
     In the boom of the blotting war-cloud, and the pallid nations quake.
     So, at the haggard trumpets, instant your soul shall leap,
     Forthright, accoutred, accepting--alert from the walls of sleep.
     So at the threat ye shall summon--so at the need ye shall send,
     Men, not children, or servants, tempered and taught to the end.'


"Sir, it has been said that poets are prophets. The hour of the
fulfilment of that prophecy has now come, and I shall be much mistaken
in my estimate of the temper of my countrymen and fellow-subjects of His
Majesty here in Britain, and in the greater Britains over sea, if,
granted the possibility of an armed invasion of the Motherland, every
man, soldier or civilian, who is able to use a rifle, will not, if
necessary, use it in the defence of his country and his home."

The Prime Minister sat down amid absolute silence. The tremendous
possibilities which he had summed up in his brief speech seemed to have
stunned his hearers for the time being. Some members said afterwards
that they could hear their own watches ticking. Then Mr John Redmond,
the Leader of the Irish Nationalist Party, rose and said, in a slow, and
deliberate voice, which contrasted strikingly with his usual style of
oratory:

"Sir, this is not a time for what has been with a certain amount of
double-meaning described as Parliamentary speeches. Still less is it a
time for party or for racial differences. The silence in which this
House has received the speech of the Prime Minister is the most eloquent
tribute that could be paid to the solemnity of his utterances. But, sir,
I have a reason for calling attention to one omission in that speech, an
omission which may have been made purposely. The last time that a
foeman's foot trod British soil was not eight hundred years ago. It was
in December 1796 that French soldiers and sailors landed on the shores
of Bantry Bay. Sir, the Ireland of those days was discontented, and, if
you please to call it so, disloyal. There are those who say she is so
now, but, sir, whatever our domestic difficulties and quarrels may be,
and however much I and the party which I have the honour to lead may
differ from the home policy of the Right Honourable gentleman who has
made this momentous pronouncement, it shall not be said that any of
those difficulties or differences will be taken advantage of by any man
who is worth the name of Irishman.

"As the Prime Minister has told us, the thunder of the enemy's guns may
even now be echoing along our southern coasts. We have, I hope, learnt a
little wisdom on both sides of the Irish Sea during the last twenty
years, and this time, sir, I think I can promise that, while the guns
are talking, there shall be no sound of dispute on party matters in
this House as far as we are concerned. From this moment, the Irish
Nationalist Party, as such, ceases to exist, at any rate until the war's
over.

"In 1796, the French fleet carrying the invading force was scattered
over the seas by one of the worst storms that ever was known on the west
coast of Ireland. As Queen Elizabeth's medal said of the Spanish Armada,
'God blew, and they were scattered.' With God's help, sir, we will
scatter these new enemies who threaten us with invasion and conquest.
Henceforth, there must be no more Englishmen, Irishmen, Scotchmen, or
Welshmen. We are just subjects of the King, and inhabitants of the
British Islands; and the man who does not believe that, and act upon his
belief, should get out of these islands as soon as he can, for he isn't
fit to live in them.

"I remember, sir, a car-driver in Galway, who was taking an English
tourist--and he was a politician as well--around the country about that
half-ruined city. The English tourist was inquiring into the troubles of
Ireland, and he asked him what was the greatest affliction that Ireland
suffered from, and when he answered him he described just the sort of
Irishman who won't be wanted in Ireland now. He said, 'It's the absentee
landlords, your honour. This unfortunate country is absolutely swarming
with them.'"

It was an anti-climax such as only an Irishman could have achieved. The
tension which had held every nerve of every member on the stretch while
the Prime Minister was speaking was broken. The Irish members, almost to
a man, jumped to their feet, as Mr Redmond picked up his hat, waved it
round his head, and said, in a tone which rang clear and true through
the crowded Chamber:

"God save the King!"

And then for the first time in its history, the House of Commons rose
and sang the National Anthem.

There was no division that night. The Prime Minister formally put the
motion for the voting of such credit as might be necessary to meet the
expenses of the war, and when the Speaker put the question, Ay or Nay,
every member stood up bareheaded, and a deep-voiced, thunderous "Ay"
told the leagued nations of Europe that Britain had accepted their
challenge.




CHAPTER VII

CAUGHT!


The events of that memorable night formed a most emphatic contradiction
to the prophecy in Macaulay's "Armada":


     "Such night in England ne'er had been, nor e'er again shall be."


The speeches in the House of Commons and in the House of Peers were
being printed even as they were spoken; hundreds of printing-presses
were grinding out millions of copies of newspapers. Thousands of
newsboys were running along the pavements, or with great bags of new
editions slung on their shoulders tearing through the traffic on
bicycles; but all the speeches in the two Houses of Parliament, all the
reports and hurriedly-written leaders in the papers just represented to
the popular mind one word, and that word was war.

It was true that for over a hundred years no year had passed in which
the British Empire had not been engaged in a war of some kind, but they
were wars waged somewhere in the outlands of the earth. To the
stop-at-home man in the street they were rather more matters of latitude
and longitude than battle, murder, and sudden death. The South African
War, and even the terrible struggle between Russia and Japan, were
already memories drifting out of sight in the rush of the headlong
current of twentieth-century life.

But this was quite another matter; here was war--not war that was being
waged thousands of miles away in another hemisphere or on another side
of the globe--but war within twenty-one miles of English land--within
two or three hours, as it were, of every Englishman's front door.

This went home to every man who had a home, or who possessed anything
worth living for. It was not now a case of sending soldiers, militia and
yeomanry away in transports, and cheering them as they went. Not now, as
Kipling too truly had said of the fight for South Africa:


     "When your strong men cheered in their millions, while your
       striplings went to the war."


Now it was the turn of the strong men; the turn of every man who had the
strength and courage to fight in defence of all that was nearest and
dearest to him.

As yet there was no excitement. At every theatre and every music-hall in
London and the great provincial cities and towns, the performances were
stopped as soon as the news was received by telegraph. The managers read
the news from the stage, the orchestras played the first bar of the
National Anthem, the audiences rose to their feet, and all over the
British Islands millions of voices sang "God save the King," and then,
obeying some impulse, which seemed to have inspired the whole land,
burst into the triumphant psalm of "Rule Britannia."

And when the theatres and music-halls closed, men and women went on
their way home quietly discussing the tremendous tidings which had been
officially announced. There was no attempt at demonstration, there was
very little cheering. It was too serious a matter for that. The men and
women of Britain were thinking, not about what they should say, but
about what they should do. There was no time for shouting, for
to-morrow, perhaps even to-night, the guns would be talking--"The
drumming guns which have no doubts."

The House rose at half-past eleven, and at ten minutes to twelve
Lieutenant Denis Castellan, came into the smoking-room of the Keppel's
Head Hotel, Portsmouth, with a copy of the last edition of the _Southern
Evening News_ in his hand, and said to Captain Erskine:

"It's all right, my boy. It's war, and you've got the _Ithuriel_. Your
own ship, too. Designer, creator, captain; and I'm your First Luff."

"I think that's about good enough for a bottle of the best, Castellan,"
said Erskine, in the quiet tone in which the officer of the finest
Service in the world always speaks. "Touch the button, will you?"

As Denis Castellan put his finger on the button of the electric bell, a
man got up from an armchair on the opposite side of the room, and said,
as he came towards the table at which Erskine was sitting:

"You will pardon me, I hope, if I introduce myself without the usual
formalities. My name is Gilbert Lennard."

"Then, I take it, you're the man who swam that race with my brother
John, in Clifden Bay, when Miss Parmenter was thrown out of her skiff.
But he's no brother of mine now. He's sold himself to the Germans, and,"
he continued, suddenly lowering his voice almost to a whisper, "come up
to my room, we'll have the bottle there, and Mr Lennard will join us.
Yes, waiter, you can take it up to No. 24, we can't talk here," he went
on in a louder tone. "There's a German spy in the room, and by the piper
that was supposed to play before Moses, if he's here when I come back,
I'll throw him out."

Everyone in the smoking-room looked up. Castellan walked out, looking at
a fair-haired, clean-shaven little man, sitting at a table in the
right-hand corner of the room from the door. He also looked up, and
glanced vacantly about the room; then as the three went out, he took a
sip of the whisky and soda beside him, and looked back on to the paper
that he was reading.

"Who's that chap?" asked Erskine, as they went upstairs.

"I'll tell you when we're a bit more to ourselves," replied Castellan;
and when they had got into his sitting-room, and the waiter had brought
the wine, he locked the door, and said:

"That is Staff-Captain Count Karl von Eckstein, of the German Imperial
Navy, and also of His Majesty, the Kaiser's, Secret Service. He knows a
little more than we do about every dockyard and fort on the South Coast,
to say nothing of the ships. That's his district, and thanks to the most
obliging kindness of the British authorities he has made very good use
of it."

"But, surely," exclaimed Lennard, "now that there is a state of war,
such a man as that could be arrested."

"Faith," said Denis Castellan, as he filled the glasses. "Law or no law,
he will be arrested to-night if he stops here long enough for me to lay
hands upon him. Now then, what's the news, Mr Lennard? I'm told that
you've just come back from the United States, what's the opinion of
things over there?"

Such news that Lennard had was, of course, even more terrible than the
news of war and invasion, which was now thrilling through England like
an electric shock, and he kept it to himself, thinking quite rightly
that the people of England had quite enough to occupy their attention
for the immediate present, and so he replied as he raised the glass
which Denis had filled for him:

"I am afraid that I have no news except this: that from all I have heard
in the States, if it does come to death-grips, the States will be with
us. But you see, of course, that I have only just got back, and this
thing has been sprung on us so suddenly. In fact, it was only this
morning that we got an aerogram from the Lizard as we came up Channel to
say that war was almost a certainty, and advising us to get into
Southampton as soon as we could."

"Well," said Erskine, taking up his glass, "that's all right, as far as
it goes. I've always believed that it's all rot saying that blood isn't
thicker than water. It is. Of course, relations quarrel more than other
people do, but it's only over domestic matters. Let an outsider start a
row, and he very soon sees what happens, and that's what I believe our
friends on the other side of the Channel are going to find out if it
comes to extremities. Well, Mr Lennard, I am very pleased that you have
introduced yourself to us to-night. Of course, we have both known you
publicly, and therefore we have all the more pleasure in knowing you
privately."

"Thanks," replied Lennard, putting his hand into the inside pocket of
his coat and taking out an envelope. "But to be quite candid with you,
although of course I am very pleased to make your acquaintance, I did
not introduce myself to you and Mr Castellan only for personal reasons.
I have devoted some attention to the higher chemistry as well as the
higher mathematics and astronomy, and I have also had the pleasure of
going through the designs of the cruiser which you have invented, and
which you are now to command. I have been greatly interested in them,
and for that reason I think that this may interest you. I brought it
here in the hope of meeting you, as I knew that your ship was lying
here."

Erskine opened the envelope, and took out a sheet of notepaper, on which
were written just a few chemical formulae and about forty words.

Castellan, who was watching him keenly, for the first time since they
had sailed together through stress and storm under the White Ensign, saw
him start. The pupils of his eyes suddenly dilated; his eyelids and
eyebrows went up for an instant and came down again, and the rigid calm
of the British Naval Officer came back. He put the letter into his hip
pocket, buttoned it up, and said, very quietly:

"Thank you, Mr Lennard. You have done me a very great personal service,
and your country a greater one still. I shall, of course, make use of
this. I am afraid if you had sent it to the Ordnance Department you
wouldn't have heard anything about it for the next three months or more;
perhaps not till the war was over."

"And that is just why I brought it to you," laughed Lennard. "Well,
here's good luck to you and the _Ithuriel_, and all honour, and God save
the King!"

"God save the King!" repeated Erskine and Castellan, with that note of
seriousness in their tone which you can hear in the voice of no man who
has not fought, or is not going to fight; in short, to put his words
into action.

They emptied their glasses, and as they put them down on the table
again there came a knock at the door, sharp, almost imperative.

"Come in," said Erskine.

The head waiter threw the door open, and a Naval messenger walked in,
saluted, handed Erskine an official envelope, and said:

"Immediately, sir. The steam pinnace is down at the end of the Railway
Quay."

Erskine tore open the envelope and read the brief order that it
contained, and said:

"Very good. We shall be on board in ten minutes."

The messenger, who was a very useful-looking specimen of the handy man,
saluted and left the room. Castellan ran out after him, and they went
downstairs together. At the door of the hotel the messenger put two
fingers into his mouth, and gave three soft whistles, not unlike the
sounds of a boatswain's pipe. In two minutes a dozen bluejackets had
appeared from nowhere, and just as a matter of formality were asked to
have a drink at the bar. Meanwhile Denis Castellan had gone into the
smoking-room, where he found the sandy-haired, blue-eyed man still
sitting at his table in the corner, smoking his cigar, and looking over
the paper. He touched him on the shoulder and whispered, in perfectly
idiomatic German:

"I thought you were a cleverer man than that, Count. Didn't I give you a
warning? God's thunder, man. You ought to have been miles away by this
time; haven't you a motor that would take you to Southampton in an hour,
and put you on the last of the German liners that's leaving? You know it
will be a shooting or a hanging matter if you're caught here. Come on
now. My name's Castellan, and that should be good enough for you. Come
on, now, and I'll see you safe."

The name of Castellan was already well known to every German
confidential agent, though it was not known that John Castellan had a
brother who was a Lieutenant in the British Navy.

Captain Count Karl von Eckstein got up, and took his hat down from the
pegs, pulled on his gloves, and said deliberately:

"I am very much obliged to you, Mr Castellan, for your warning, which I
ought to have taken at first, but I hope there is still time. I will go
and telephone for my motor at once."

"Yes, come along and do it," said Castellan, catching him by the arm.
"You haven't much time to lose, I can tell you."

They went out of the smoking-room, turned to the left, and went into the
hall. Then Castellan snatched his hand away from Eckstein's arm, took
him by the shoulders, and pitched him forward into the middle of the
semicircle of bluejackets, who were waiting for him, saying:

"That's your man, boys. Take him down to the pinnace, and put him on
board. I'll take the consequences, and I think the owners will, too,
when they know the facts."

Von Eckstein tried to shout, but a hand about half the size of a
shoulder of mutton came down hard over his mouth and nose. Other hands,
with grips like vices, picked him off his feet, and out he went, half
stifled, along the yard, and up to the Railway Pier.

"Rather summary proceedings, weren't they, Castellan?"

Denis drew himself up, formally saluted his superior officer, and said,
with a curious mixture of fun and seriousness in his voice:

"That man's the most dangerous German spy in the South of England, sir,
and all's fair in war and the other thing. We've got him. In half an
hour he'd have been aboard a fast yacht he's got here in the harbour,
and across to Dieppe, with a portmanteau full of plans and photographs
of our forts that would be worth millions in men and money to the people
we've got to fight. I can't say it here, but you know why I know."

Captain Erskine nodded, and did his best to conceal an unofficial smile.

"That's right, Castellan," he said. "I'll take your word for it. Get
that chap on board, lads, as quick as you can. We'll follow at once."

Ship's Corporal Sandy M'Grath, the huge Scotsman, whose great fist had
stifled Count von Eckstein's attempt to cry out, touched his cap and
said: "Awa' wi' him, boys," and out they went at a run. Then Erskine
turned to Lennard, and said:

"We can do all this that you've given me on board the _Ithuriel_. It
isn't quite regular, but in consideration of this, if you like to take a
cruise, and see your own work done, I'll take the responsibility of
inviting you, only mind, there will probably be some fighting."

Even as he spoke two deep dull bangs shook the atmosphere and the
windows of the hotel shivered in their frames.

"I'll come," said Lennard. "They seem to have begun already."

"Begorra they have," said Denis Castellan, making a dash to the door.
"Come on. If that's so, there'll be blood for supper to-night, and the
sooner we're aboard the better."

The next moment the three were outside, and sprinting for the end of the
Railway Pier for all they were worth.




CHAPTER VIII

FIRST BLOOD


When they got to the end of the Railway Pier where the pinnace was lying
panting and puffing, a Flag-Lieutenant touched his cap to Erskine, took
him by the arm and led him aside. He took an envelope out of his pocket
and said, in a low tone:

"Here are your instructions, Erskine. They've jumped on us a bit more
quickly than we thought they would, but the Commander-in-Chief trusts to
you and your ship to do the needful. The position is this: one division
of the Russian, German and Dutch fleets is making a combined attack on
Hull and Newcastle. Two other divisions are going for the mouth of the
Thames, and the North Sea Squadron is going to look after them. The
French North Sea Squadron is making a rush on Dover, and will get very
considerably pounded in the process. Two French fleets from Cherbourg
and Brest are coming up Channel, and each of them has a screen of
torpedo boats and destroyers. The Southern Fleet Reserve is concentrated
here and at Portland. The Channel Fleet is outside, and we hope to get
it in their rear, so that we'll have them between the ships and the
forts. If we do, they'll have just about as hot a time of it as anybody
wants.

"As far as we've been able to learn, the French are going to try Togo's
tactics at Port Arthur, and rush Portsmouth with the small craft. You'll
find that it's your business to look after them. Sink, smash and
generally destroy. Go for everything you see. There isn't a craft of
ours within twenty miles outside. Good-bye, and good luck to you!"

"Good-bye!" said Erskine, as they shook hands, "and if we don't come
back, give my love to the Lords of the Admiralty and thank them for
giving me the chance with the _Ithuriel_. Bye-bye!"

Their hands gripped again and the captain of the _Ithuriel_ ran down the
steps like a boy going to a picnic.

The pinnace gave a little squeak from its siren and sped away down the
harbour between the two forts, in which the gunners were standing by the
new fourteen-inch wire-wound guns, whose long chases were prevented from
drooping after continuous discharge by an ingenious application of the
principle of the cantilever bridge, invented by the creator of the
_Ithuriel_. In the breech-chamber of each of them was a thousand-pound
shell, carrying a bursting charge of five hundred pounds of an explosive
which was an improvement on blasting gelatine, and the guns were capable
of throwing these to a distance of twelve miles with precision. They
were the most formidable weapons either ashore or afloat.

Just outside the harbour the pinnace swung round to the westward and in
a few minutes stopped alongside the _Ithuriel_.

As far as Lennard could see she was neither cruiser nor destroyer nor
submarine, but a sort of compound of all three. She did not appear to be
a steamer because she had no funnels. She was not exactly a submarine
because she had a signal-mast forward and carried five long,
ugly-looking guns, three ahead and two astern, of a type that he had
never seen before. Forward of the mast there was a conning-tower of oval
shape, with the lesser curves fore and aft. The breech-ends of the guns
were covered by a long hood of steel, apparently of great thickness, and
that was all.

As soon as they got on board Erskine said to Lennard:

"Come into the conning-tower with me. I believe we can make use of this
invention of yours at once. I've got a pretty well-fitted laboratory
down below and we might have a try. But you must excuse me a moment, I
will just run through this."

He opened the envelope containing his instructions, put them down on
the little desk in front of him and then read a note that was enclosed
with them.

"By Jove," he said, "they're pretty quick up at headquarters. You'll
have to excuse me a minute or two, Mr Lennard. Just stand on that side,
will you, please? Close up, we haven't too much room here. Good-bye for
the present."

In front of the desk and above the little steering-wheel there was a
mahogany board studded with two sets of ivory buttons, disposed in two
lines of six each. He touched one of these, and Lennard saw him
disappear through the floor of the conning-tower. Within a few moments
the portion of the floor upon which he had stood returned to its place,
and Lennard said to himself:

"If the rest of her works like that, she ought to be a lovely study in
engineering."

While Captain Erskine is communicating his instructions to his second in
command, and arranging the details of the coming fight, there will be
time to give a brief description of the craft on board of which Lennard
so unexpectedly found himself, and which an invention of his own was
destined to make even more formidable than it was.

To put it as briefly as possible, the _Ithuriel_ was a combination of
destroyer, cruiser, submarine and ram, and she had cost Erskine three
years of hard work to think out. She was three hundred feet long, fifty
feet broad, and thirty feet from her upper keel to her deck. This was of
course an abnormal depth for a vessel of her length, but then the
_Ithuriel_ was quite an abnormal warship. One-third of her depth
consisted of a sinking-chamber, protected by twelve-inch armour, and
this chamber could be filled in a few minutes with four thousand tons of
water. This is of course the same thing as saying she had two
waterlines. The normal cruising line gave her a freeboard of ten feet.
Above the sinking-tanks her vitals were protected by ten-inch armour. In
short, as regards armour, she was an entire reversal of the ordinary
type of warship, and she had the advantage of being impervious to
torpedo attack. Loaded torpedoes had been fired at her and had burst
like eggs against a wall, with no more effect than to make her heel over
a few degrees to the other side. Submarines had attacked her and got
their noses badly bruised in the process. It was, indeed, admitted by
the experts of the Admiralty that under water she was impregnable.

Her propelling power consisted of four sets of engines, all well below
the waterline. Three of these drove three propellers astern: the fourth
drove a suction screw which revolved just underneath the ram. This was a
mass of steel weighing fifty tons and curved upwards like the inverted
beak of an eagle. Erskine had taken this idea from the Russian
ice-breakers which had been designed by the Russian Admiral Makaroff and
built at Elswick. The screw was protected by a steel grating of which
the forward protecting girder completed the curve of the stem. Aft,
there was a similar ram, weighing thirty tons and a like protection to
the after-screws.

The driving power was derived from a combination of petrol and
pulverised smokeless coal, treated with liquid oxygen, which made
combustion practically perfect. There was no boilers or furnaces, only
combustion chambers, and this fact made the carrying of the great weight
of armour under the waterline possible. The speed of the _Ithuriel_ was
forty-five knots ahead when all four screws were driving and pulling,
and thirty knots astern when they were reversed. Her total capacity was
five thousand two hundred tons.

Behind the three forward guns was a dome-shaped conning-tower of
nine-inch steel, hardened like the rest of the armour by an improvement
on the Harvey process. Above the conning-tower were two searchlight
projectors, both capable of throwing a clear ray to a distance of four
miles and controlled from within the conning-tower.

"Well, I am afraid I have kept you waiting, Mr Lennard," said Erskine,
as the platform brought him up again into the conning-tower, in much
shorter time than was necessary to make this needful description of what
was probably the most formidable craft in the British Navy. "We're off
now. I've fitted up half a dozen shells with that diabolical invention
of yours. If we run across a battleship or a cruiser, we'll try them. I
think our friends the enemy will find them somewhat of a paralyser, and
there's nothing like beginning pretty strong."

"Nothing like hitting them hard at first, and I hope that those things
of mine will be what I think they are, and unless all my theories are
quite wrong, I fancy you'll find them all right."

"They would be the first theories of yours that have gone wrong, Mr
Lennard," replied Erskine, "but anyhow, we shall soon see. I have put
three of your shells in the forward guns. We'll try them there first,
and if they're all right we'll use the other three. I've got the after
guns loaded with my own shell, so if we come across anything big, we
shall be able to try them against each other. At present, my
instructions are to deal with the lighter craft only: destroyers and
that sort of thing, you know."

"But don't you fire on them?" said Lennard. "What would happen if they
got a torpedo under you?"

"Well," said Erskine, "as a matter of fact I don't think destroyers are
worth shooting at. Our guns are meant for bigger game. But it's no good
trying to explain things now. You'll see, pretty soon, and you'll learn
more in half an hour than I could tell you in four hours."

They were clear of the harbour by this time and running out at about ten
knots between the two old North and South Spithead forts on the top of
each of which one of the new fourteen-inch thousand-pounders had been
mounted on disappearing carriages.

"Now," he continued, "if we're going to find them anywhere, we shall
find them here, or hereabouts. My orders are to smash everything that I
can get at."

"Fairly comprehensive," said Lennard.

"Yes, Lennard, and it's an order that I'm going to fill. We may as well
quicken up a bit now. You understand, Castellan is looking after the
guns, and his sub., Mackenzie is communicating orders to my Chief
Engineer, who looks after the speed."

"And the speed?" asked Lennard.

"I'll leave you to judge that when we get to business," said Erskine,
putting his forefinger on one of the buttons on the left-hand side of
the board as he spoke.

The next moment Lennard felt the rubber-covered floor of the
conning-tower jump under his feet. All the coast lights were
extinguished but there was a half-moon and he saw the outlines of the
shore slip away faster behind them. The eastern heights of the Isle of
Wight loomed up like a cloud and dropped away astern.

"Pretty fast, that," he said.

"Only twenty-five knots," replied Erskine, as he gave the steering-wheel
a very gentle movement and swung the _Ithuriel's_ head round to the
eastward. "If these chaps are going to make a rush in the way Togo did
at Port Arthur, they've got to do it between Selsey Bill and Nettlestone
Point. If they're mad enough to try the other way between Round Tower
Point and Hurst Castle, they'll get blown out of the water in very small
pieces, so we needn't worry about them there. Our business is to keep
them out of this side. Ah, look now, there are two or three of them
there. See, ahead of the port bow. We'll tackle these gentlemen first."

Lennard looked out through the narrow semicircular window of six-inch
crystal glass running across the front of the conning-tower, which was
almost as strong as steel, and saw three little dark, moving spots on
the half-moonlit water, about two miles ahead, stealing up in line
abreast.

"Those chaps are trying to get in between the Spithead forts," said
Erskine. "They're slowed down to almost nothing, waiting for the clouds
to come over the moon, and then they'll make a dash for it. At least,
they think they will. I don't."

As he spoke he gave another turn to the steering-wheel and touched
another button. The _Ithuriel_ leapt forward again and swung about three
points to the eastward. In three minutes she was off Black Point, and
this movement brought her into a straight line with the three
destroyers. He gave the steering-wheel another half turn and her head
swung round in a short quarter circle. He put his finger on to the
bottom button on the right-hand side of the signal board and said to
Lennard:

"Hold tight now, she's going."

Lennard held tight, for he felt the floor jump harder under him this
time.

In the dim light he saw the nearest of the destroyers, as it seemed to
him, rush towards them sideways. Erskine touched another button. A
shudder ran through the fabric of the _Ithuriel_ and her bow rose above
five feet from the water. A couple of minutes later it hit the destroyer
amidships, rolled her over, broke her in two like a log of wood, amidst
a roar of crackling guns and a scream of escaping steam, went over her
and headed for the next one.

Lennard clenched his teeth and said nothing. He was thinking too hard to
say anything just then.

The second destroyer opened fire with her twelve-and six-pounders and
dropped a couple of torpedoes as the _Ithuriel_ rushed at her. The
_Ithuriel_ was now travelling at forty knots an hour. The torpedoes at
thirty. The combined speed was therefore nearly a hundred statute miles
an hour. Erskine saw the two white shapes drop into the water, their
courses converging towards him. A half turn of the wheel to port swung
the _Ithuriel_ out and just cleared them. It was a fairly narrow shave,
for one of them grated along her side, but the _Ithuriel_ had no angles.
The actual result was that one of the torpedoes deflected from its
course, hit the other one and both exploded. A mountain of foam-crowned
water rose up and the commander of the French destroyer congratulated
himself on the annihilation of at least one of the English warships, but
the next moment the grey-blue, almost invisible shape of the _Ithuriel_
leapt up out of the semi-darkness, and her long pointed ram struck
amidships, cut him down to the waterline, and almost before the two
halves of his vessel had sunk the same fate had befallen the third
destroyer.

"Well, what do you think of that?" said Erskine, as he touched a couple
more buttons and the _Ithuriel_ swung round to the eastward again.

"Well," said Lennard, slowly, "of course it's war, and those fellows
were coming in to do all the damage they could. But it is just a bit
terrible, for all that. It's just seven minutes since you rammed the
first boat: you haven't fired a shot and there are three big destroyers
and I suppose three hundred and fifty men at the bottom of the sea.
Pretty awful, you know."

"My dear sir," replied Erskine, without looking round, "all war is awful
and entirely horrible, and naval war is of course the most horrible of
all. There is no chance for the defeated: my orders do not even allow me
to pick up a man from one of those vessels. On the other hand, one must
remember that if one of those destroyers had got in, they could have let
go half a dozen torpedoes apiece among the ships of the Fleet Reserve,
and perhaps half a dozen ships and five or six thousand men might have
been at the bottom of the Solent by this time, and those torpedoes
wouldn't have had any sentiment in them. Hallo, there's another!"

A long, black shape surmounted by a signal-mast and four funnels slid up
and out of the darkness into a patch of moonlight lying on the water.
Erskine gave a quarter turn to the wheel and touched the two buttons
again. The _Ithuriel_ swung round and ran down on her prey. The two
fifteen-and the six twelve-pounder guns ahead and astern and on the
broadside of the destroyer crackled out and a hail of shells came
whistling across the water. A few of them struck the _Ithuriel_, glanced
off and exploded.

"There," said Erskine, "they've knocked some of our nice new paint off.
Now they're going to pay for it."

"Couldn't you give them a shot back?" said Lennard.

"Not worth it, my dear sir," said Erskine. "We keep our guns for bigger
game. We haven't an angle that a shell would hit. You might just as well
fire boiled peas at a hippopotamus as those little things at us. Of
course a big shell square amidships would hurt us, but then she's so
handy that I think I could stop it hitting her straight."

While he was speaking the _Ithuriel_ got up to full speed again. Lennard
shut his eyes. He felt a slight shock, and then a dull grinding. A crash
of guns and a roar of escaping steam, and when he looked out again, the
destroyer had disappeared. The next moment a blinding glare of light
streamed across the water from the direction of Selsey.

"A big cruiser, or battleship," said Erskine. "French or German. Now
we'll see what those shells of yours are made of."




CHAPTER IX

THE "FLYING FISH" APPEARS


A huge, black shape loomed up into the moonlight. As she came nearer
Lennard could see that the vessel carried a big mast forward with a
fighting-top, two funnels a little aft of it, and two other funnels a
few feet forward of the after mast.

Erskine put his glasses up to his eyes and said:

"That's the _Dupleix_, one of the improved _Desaix_ class. Steams
twenty-four knots. I suppose she's been shepherding those destroyers
that we've just finished with. I hope she hasn't seen what happened. If
she thinks that they've got in all right, we've got her. She has a heavy
fore and aft and broadside gunfire, two 6.4 guns ahead and astern and
amidships, in pairs, and as I suppose they'll be using melinite shells,
we shall get fits unless we take them unawares."

"And what does that mean?" asked Lennard.

"Show you in a minute," answered Erskine, touching three or four of the
buttons on the right-hand side as he spoke.

Another shudder ran through the frame of the _Ithuriel_ and Lennard felt
the deck sink under his feet. If he hadn't had as good a head on him as
he had, he would have said something, for the _Ithuriel_ sank until her
decks were almost awash. She jumped forward again now almost invisible,
and circled round to the south eastward. A big cloud drifted across the
moon and Erskine said:

"Thank God for that! We shall get her now."

Another quarter turn of the wheel brought the _Ithuriel's_ head at
right angles to the French cruiser's broadside. He took the transmitter
of the telephone down from the hooks and said:

"Are you there, Castellan?"

"Yes. What's that big thing ahead there?"

"It's the _Dupleix_. Ready with your forward guns. I'm going to fire
first, then ram. Stand by, centre first, then starboard and port, and
keep your eye on them. These are Mr Lennard's shells and we want to see
what they'll do. Are you ready?"

"Yes. When you like."

"Half speed, then, and tell Mackenzie to stand by and order full speed
when I give the word. We shall want it in a jump."

"Very good, sir. Is that all?"

"Yes, that's all."

Erskine put the receiver back on the hooks.

"That's it. Now we'll try your shells. If they're what I think they are,
we'll smash that fellow's top works into scrap-iron, and then we'll go
for him."

"I think I see," said Lennard, "that's why you've half submerged her."

"Yes. The _Ithuriel_ is designed to deal with both light and heavy
craft. With the light ones, as you have seen, she just walked over them.
Now, we've got something bigger to tackle, and if everything goes right
that ship will be at the bottom of the sea in five minutes."

"Horrible," replied Lennard, "but I suppose it's necessary."

"Absolutely," said Erskine, taking the receiver down from the hooks. "If
we didn't do it with them, they'd do it with us. That's war."

Lennard made no reply. He was looking hard at the now rapidly
approaching shape of the big French cruiser, and when men are thinking
hard, they don't usually say much.

The _Ithuriel_ completed her quarter-circle and dead head on to the
_Dupleix_, Erskine said, "Centre gun ready, forward--fire. Port and
starboard concentrate--fire."

There was no report--only a low, hissing sound--and then Lennard saw
three flashes of bluish-green blaze out over the French cruiser.

"Hit her! I think those shells of yours got home," said Erskine between
his clenched teeth. And then he added through the telephone, "Well
aimed, Castellan! They all got there. Load up again--three more shots
and I'm going to ram--quick now, and full speed ahead when you've
fired."

"All ready!" came back over the telephone, "I've told Mackenzie that
you'll want it."

"Good man," replied Erskine. "When I touch the button, you do the rest.
Now--are you ready?"

"Yes."

"Let her have it--then full speed. Ah," Erskine continued, turning to
Lennard, "he's shooting back."

The cruiser burst into a thunderstorm of smoke and flame and shell, but
there was nothing to shoot at. Only three feet of freeboard would have
been visible even in broad daylight. The signal mast had been
telescoped. There was nothing but the deck, the guns and the
conning-tower to be seen. The shells screamed through the air a good ten
feet over her and incidentally wrecked the Marine Hotel on Selsey Bill.

Erskine pressed the top button on the right-hand side three times. The
smokeless, nameless guns spoke again, and again the three flashes of
blue-green flame broke out on the Frenchman's decks.

"Good enough," said Erskine, taking the transmitter down from the hooks
again. "Now, Mr Lennard, just come for'ard and watch."

Lennard crept up beside him and took the glasses.

"Down guns--full speed ahead--going to ram," said Erskine, quietly, into
the telephone.

To his utter astonishment, Lennard saw the three big guns sink down
under the deck and the steel hoods move forward and cover the
emplacements. The floor of the conning-tower jumped under his feet again
and the huge shape of the French cruiser seemed to rush towards him.
There was a roar of artillery, a thunder of 6.4 guns, a crash of
bursting shells, a shudder and a shock, and the fifty-ton ram of the
_Ithuriel_ hit her forward of the conning-tower and went through the
two-inch armour belt as a knife would go through a piece of paper. The
big cruiser stopped as an animal on land does, struck by a bullet in its
vitals, or a whale when the lance is driven home. Half her officers and
men were lying about the decks asphyxiated by Lennard's shells. The
after barbette swung round, and at the same moment, or perhaps half a
minute before, Erskine touched two other buttons in rapid succession.
The _Dupleix_ lurched down on the starboard side, the two big guns went
off and hit the water. Erskine touched another button, and the
_Ithuriel_ ran back from her victim. A minute later the French cruiser
heeled over and sank.

"Good God, how did you do that?" said Lennard, looking round at him with
eyes rather more wide open than usual.

"That's the effect of the suction screw," replied Erskine. "I got the
idea from the Russian ice-breaker, the _Yermack_. The old idea was just
main strength and stupidity, charge the ice and break through if you
could. The better idea was to suck the water away from under the ice and
go over it--that's what we've done. I rammed that chap, pulled the water
away from under him, and, of course, he's gone down."

He gave the wheel a quarter-turn to starboard, took down the transmitter
and said: "Full speed again--in two minutes, three quarters and then
half."

"But surely," exclaimed Lennard, "you can do something to help those
poor fellows. Are you going to leave them all to drown?"

"I have no orders, except to sink and destroy," replied Erskine between
his teeth. "You must remember that this is a war of one country against
a continent, and of one fleet against four. Ah, there's another! A
third-class cruiser--I think I know her, she's the old _Leger_--they
must have thought they had an easy job of it if they sent her here. Low
free board, not worth shooting at. We'll go over her. No armour--what
idiots they are to put a thing like that into the fighting line!"

He took the transmitter down and said:

"Stand by there, Castellan! Get your pumps to work, and I shall want
full speed ahead--I'm going to run that old croak down--hurry up."

He put the transmitter back on the hooks and presently Lennard saw the
bows of the _Ithuriel_ rise quickly out of the water. The doomed vessel
in front of them was a long, low-lying French torpedo-catcher, with one
big funnel between two signal-masts, hopelessly out of date, and
evidently intended only to go in and take her share of the spoils.
Erskine switched off the searchlight, called for full speed ahead and
then with clenched teeth and set eyes, he sent the _Ithuriel_ flying at
her victim.

Within five minutes it was all over. The fifty-ton ram rose over the
_Leger's_ side, crushed it down into the water, ground its way through
her, cut her in half and went on.

"That ship ought to have been on the scrap-heap ten years ago," said
Erskine as he signalled for half-speed and swung the _Ithuriel_ round to
the westward.

"She's got a scrap-heap all to herself now, I suppose," said Lennard,
with a bit of a check in his voice. "I've no doubt, as you say, this
sort of thing may be necessary, but my personal opinion of it is that
it's damnable."

"Exactly my opinion too," said Erskine, "but it has to be done."

The next instant, Lennard heard a sound such as he had never heard
before. It was a smothered rumble which seemed to come out of the
depths, then there came a shock which flung him off his feet, and shot
him against the opposite wall of the conning-tower. The _Ithuriel_
heeled over to port, a huge volume of water rose on her starboard side
and burst into a torrent over her decks, then she righted.

Erskine, holding on hard to the iron table to which the signalling board
was bolted, saved himself from a fall.

"I hope you're not hurt, Mr Lennard," said he, looking round, "that was
a submarine. Let a torpedo go at us, I suppose, and didn't know they
were hitting twelve-inch armour."

"It's all right," said Lennard, picking himself up. "Only a bruise or
two; nothing broken. It seems to me that this new naval warfare of yours
is going to get a bit exciting."

"Yes," said Erskine, "I think it is. Halloa, Great Caesar! That must be
that infernal invention of Castellan's brother's; the thing he sold to
the Germans--the sweep!"

As he spoke a grey shape leapt up out of the water and began to circle
over the _Ithuriel_. He snatched the transmitter from the hooks, and
said, in quick, clear tones:

"Castellan--sink--quick, quick as you can."

The pumps of the _Ithuriel_ worked furiously the next moment. Lennard
held his breath as he saw the waves rise up over the decks.

"Full speed ahead again, and dive," said Erskine into the transmitter.
"Hold tight, Lennard."

The floor of the conning-tower took an angle of about sixty degrees, and
Lennard gripped the holdfasts, of which there were two on each wall of
the tower. He heard a rush of overwhelming waters--then came darkness.
The _Ithuriel_ rushed forward at her highest speed. Then something hit
the sea, and a quick succession of shocks sent a shudder through the
vessel.

"I thought so," said Erskine. "That's John Castellan's combined airship
and submarine right enough, and that was an aerial torpedo. If it had
hit us when we were above water, we should have been where those French
chaps are now. You're quite right, this sort of naval warfare is getting
rather exciting."




CHAPTER X

FIRST BLOWS FROM THE AIR


The _Flying Fish_, the prototype of the extraordinary craft which played
such a terrible part in the invasion of England, was a magnified
reproduction, with improvements which suggested themselves during
construction, of the model whose performances had so astonished the
Kaiser at Potsdam. She was shaped exactly like her namesake of the deep,
upon which, indeed, her inventor had modelled her. She was one hundred
and fifty feet long and twenty feet broad by twenty-five feet deep in
her widest part, which, as she was fish-shaped, was considerably forward
of her centre.

She was built of a newly-discovered compound, something like
papier-mache, as hard and rigid as steel, with only about one-tenth the
weight. Her engines were of the simplest description in spite of the
fact that they developed enormous power. They consisted merely of
cylinders into which, by an automatic mechanism, two drops of liquid
were brought every second. These liquids when joined produced a gas of
enormously expansive power, more than a hundred times that of steam,
which actuated the pistons. There were sixteen of these cylinders, and
the pistons all connected with a small engine invented by Castellan,
which he called an accelerator. By means of this device he could
regulate the speed of the propellers which drove the vessel under water
and in the air from sixty up to two thousand revolutions a minute.

The _Flying Fish_ was driven by nine propellers, three of these,
four-bladed and six feet diameter, revolved a little forward amidships
on either side under what might be called the fins. These fins collapsed
close against the sides of the vessel when under water and expanded to a
spread of twenty feet when she took the air. They worked on a pivot and
could be inclined either way from the horizontal to an angle of thirty
degrees. Midway between the end of these and the stern was a smaller
pair with one driving screw. The eighth screw was an ordinary propeller
at the stern, but the outside portion of the shaft worked on a ball and
socket joint so that it could be used for both steering and driving
purposes. It was in fact the tail of the _Flying Fish_. Steering in the
air was effected by means of a vertical fin placed right aft.

She was submerged as the _Ithuriel_ was, by pumping water into the lower
part of her hull. When these chambers were empty she floated like a
cork. The difference between swimming and flying was merely the
difference between the revolutions of the screws and the inclination of
the fins. A thousand raised her from the water: twelve hundred gave her
twenty-five or thirty miles an hour through the air: fifteen hundred
gave her fifty, and two thousand gave her eighty to a hundred, according
to the state of the atmosphere.

Her armament consisted of four torpedo tubes which swung at any angle
from the horizontal to the vertical and so were capable of use both
under water and in the air. They discharged a small,
insignificant-looking torpedo containing twenty pounds of an explosive,
discovered almost accidentally by Castellan and known only to himself,
the German Emperor, the Chancellor, and the Commander-in-Chief. It was
this which he had used in tiny quantities in the experiment at Potsdam.
Its action was so terrific that it did not rend or crack metal or stone
which it struck. It overcame the chemical forces by which the substance
was held together and reduced them to gas and powder.

And now, after this somewhat formal but necessary description of the
most destructive fighting-machine ever created we can proceed with the
story.

There were twenty _Flying Fishes_ attached to the Allied Forces, all of
them under the command of German engineers, with the exception of the
original _Flying Fish_. Two of these were attached to the three
squadrons which were attacking Hull, Newcastle and Dover: three had been
detailed for the attack on Portsmouth: two more to Plymouth, two to
Bristol and Liverpool respectively, on which combined cruiser and
torpedo attacks were to be made, and two supported by a small swift
cruiser and torpedo flotilla for an assault on Cardiff, in order if
possible to terrorise that city into submission and so obtain what may
be called the life-blood of a modern navy. The rest, in case of
accidents to any of these, were reserved for the final attack on London.

When the _Ithuriel_ disappeared and his torpedo struck a piece of
floating wreckage and exploded with a terrific shock, John Castellan,
standing in the conning-tower directing the movements of the _Flying
Fish_, naturally concluded that he had destroyed a British submarine
scout. He knew of the existence, but nothing of the real powers of the
_Ithuriel_. The only foreigner who knew that was Captain Count Karl von
Eckstein, and he was locked safely in a cabin on board her.

He had been searching the under-waters between Nettlestone Point and
Hayling Island for hours on the look-out for British submarines and
torpedo scouts, and had found nothing, therefore he was ignorant of the
destruction which the _Ithuriel_ had already wrought, and as, of course,
he had heard no firing under the water, he believed that the three
destroyers supported by the _Dupleix_ and _Leger_ had succeeded in
slipping through the entrance to Spithead.

He knew that a second flotilla of six destroyers with three swift
second-class cruisers were following in to complete the work, which by
this time should have begun, and that after them came the main French
squadron, consisting of six first-class battleships with a screen of ten
first and five second-class cruisers, the work of which would be to
maintain a blockade against any relieving force, after the submarines
and destroyers had sunk and crippled the ships of the Fleet Reserve and
cut the connections of the contact mines.

He knew also that the _See Adler_, which was _Flying Fish II._, was
waiting about the Needles to attack Hurst Castle and the forts on the
Isle of Wight side, preparatory to a rush of two battleships and three
cruisers through the narrows, while another was lurking under Hayling
Island ready to take the air and rain destruction on the forts of
Portsmouth before the fight became general.

What thoroughly surprised him, however, was the absolute silence and
inaction of the British. True, two shots had been fired, but whether
from fort or warship, and with what intent, he hadn't the remotest
notion. The hour arranged upon for the general assault was fast
approaching. The British must be aware that an attack would be made, and
yet there was not so much as a second-class torpedo boat to be seen
outside Spithead. This puzzled him, so he decided to go and investigate
for himself. He took up a speaking-tube and said to his Lieutenant,
M'Carthy--one of too many renegade Irishmen who in the terrible times
that were to come joined their country's enemies as Lynch and his
traitors had done in the Boer War:

"I don't quite make it out, M'Carthy. We'll go down and get under--it's
about time the fun began--and I haven't heard a shot fired or seen an
English ship except that submarine we smashed. My orders are for twelve
o'clock, and I'm going to obey them."

There was one more device on board the _Flying Fish_ which should be
described in order that her wonderful manoeuvering under water may be
understood. Just in front of the steering-wheel in the conning-tower was
a square glass box measuring a foot in the side, and in the centre of
this, attached to top and bottom by slender films of asbestos, was a
needle ten inches long, so hung that it could turn and dip in any
direction. The forward half of this needle was made of highly magnetised
steel, and the other of aluminium which exactly counter-balanced it. The
glass case was completely insulated and therefore the extremely
sensitive needle was unaffected by any of the steel parts used in the
construction of the vessel. But let any other vessel, save of course a
wooden ship, come within a thousand yards, the needle began to tremble
and sway, and the nearer the _Flying Fish_ approached it, the steadier
it became and the more directly it pointed towards the object. If the
vessel was on the surface, it of course pointed upward: if it was a
submarine, it pointed either level or downwards with unerring precision.
This needle was, in fact, the eyes of the _Flying Fish_ when she was
under water.

Castellan swung her head round to the north-west and dropped gently on
to the water about midway between Selsey Bill and the Isle of Wight.
Then the _Flying Fish_ folded her wings and sank to a depth of twenty
feet. Then, at a speed of ten knots, she worked her way in a zigzag
course back and forth across the narrowing waters, up the channel
towards Portsmouth.

To his surprise, the needle remained steady, showing that there was
neither submarine nor torpedo boat near. This meant, as far as he could
see, that the main approach to the greatest naval fortress in England
had been left unguarded, a fact so extraordinary as to be exceedingly
suspicious. His water-ray apparatus, a recent development of the X-rays
which enabled him to see under water for a distance of fifty yards, had
detected no contact mines, and yet Spithead ought to be enstrewn with
them, just as it ought to have been swarming with submarines and
destroyers. There must be some deep meaning to such apparently
incomprehensible neglect, but what was it?

If his brother Denis had not happened to recognise Captain Count Karl
von Eckstein and haled him so unceremoniously on board the _Ithuriel_,
and if his portmanteau full of papers had been got on board a French
warship, instead of being left for the inspection of the British
Admiralty, that reason would have been made very plain to him.

Completely mystified, and fearing that either he was going into some
trap or that some unforeseen disaster had happened, he swung round, ran
out past the forts and rose into the air again. When he had reached the
height of about a thousand feet, three rockets rose into the air and
burst into three showers of stars, one red, one white, and the other
blue. It was the Tricolour in the air, and the signal from the French
Admiral to commence the attack. Castellan's orders were to cripple or
sink the battleships of the Reserve Fleet which was moored in two
divisions in Spithead and the Solent.

The Spithead Division lay in column of line abreast between Gilkicker
Point and Ryde Pier. It consisted of the _Formidable_, _Irresistible_,
_Implacable_, _Majestic_ and _Magnificent_, and the cruisers _Hogue_,
_Sutlej_, _Ariadne_, _Argonaut_, _Diadem_ and _Hawke_. The western
Division consisted of the battleships _Prince George_, _Victoria_,
_Jupiter_, _Mars_ and _Hannibal_, and the cruisers _Amphitrite_,
_Spartiate_, _Andromeda_, _Europa_, _Niobe_, _Blenheim_ and _Blake_.

It had of course been perfectly easy for Castellan to mark the position
of the two squadrons from the air, and he knew that though they were
comparatively old vessels they were quite powerful enough, with the
assistance of the shore batteries, to hold even Admiral Durenne's
splendid fleet until the Channel Fleet, which for the time being seemed
to have vanished from the face of the waters, came up and took the
French in the rear.

In such a case, the finest fleet of France would be like a nut in a
vice, and that was the reason for the remorseless orders which had been
given to him, orders which he was prepared to carry out to the letter,
in spite of the appalling loss of life which they entailed; for, as the
_Flying Fish_ sank down into the water, he thought of that swimming race
in Clifden Bay and of the girl whose marriage with himself, willing or
unwilling, was to be one of the terms of peace when the British Navy lay
shattered round her shores, and the millions of the Leagued Nations had
trampled the land forces of Britain into submission.

Just as she touched the water a brilliant flash of pink flame leapt up
from the eastern fort on the Hillsea Lines, followed by a sharp crash
which shook the atmosphere. A thin ray of light fell from the clouds,
then came a quick succession of flashes moving in the direction of the
great fort on Portsdown, until two rose in quick succession from
Portsdown itself, and almost at the same moment another from Hurst
Castle, and yet another from the direction of Fort Victoria.

"God bless my soul, what's that?" exclaimed the Commander-in-Chief,
Admiral Sir Compton Domville, who had just completed his final
inspection of the defences of Portsmouth Harbour, and was standing on
the roof of Southsea Castle, taking a general look round before going
back to headquarters. "Here, Markham," he said, turning to the Commander
of the Fort, "just telephone up to Portsdown at once and ask them what
they're up to."

An orderly instantly dived below to the telephone room. The Fort
Commander took Sir Compton aside and said in a low voice:

"I am afraid, sir, that the forts are being attacked from the air."

"What's that?" replied Sir Compton, with a start. "Do you mean that
infernal thing that Erskine and Castellan and the watch of the
_Cormorant_ saw in the North Sea?"

"Yes, sir," was the reply. "There is no reason why the enemy should not
possess a whole fleet of these craft by this time, and naturally they
would act in concert with the attack of the French Fleet. I've heard
rumours of a terrible new explosive they've got, too, which shatters
steel into splinters and poisons everyone within a dozen yards of it. If
that's true and they're dropping it on the forts, they'll probably smash
the guns as well. For heaven's sake, sir, let me beg of you to go back
at once to headquarters! It will probably be our turn next. You will be
safe there, for they're not likely to waste their shells on Government
buildings."

"Well, I suppose I shall be of more use there," growled Sir Compton.

At this moment the orderly returned, looking rather scared. He saluted
and said:

"If you please, sir, they've tried Portsdown and all the Hillsea forts
and can't get an answer."

"Good heavens!" said the Commander-in-Chief, "that looks almost as if
you were right, Markham. Signal to Squadron A to up-anchor at once and
telephone to Squadron B to do the same. Telephone Gilkicker to turn all
searchlights on. Now I must be off and have a talk with General
Hamilton."

He ran down to his pinnace and went away full speed for the harbour, but
before he reached the pier another flash burst out from the direction of
Fort Gilkicker, followed by a terrific roar. To those standing on the
top of Southsea Castle the fort seemed turned into a volcano, spouting
flame and clouds of smoke, in the midst of which they could see for an
instant whirling shapes, most of which would probably be the remains of
the gallant defenders, hurled into eternity before they had a chance of
firing a shot at the invaders. The huge guns roared for the first and
last time in the war, and the great projectiles plunged aimlessly among
the ships of the squadron, carrying wreck and ruin along the line.

"Our turn now, I suppose," said the Fort Commander, quietly, as he
looked up and by a chance gleam of moonlight through the breaking clouds
saw a dim grey, winged shape drift across the harbour entrance.

They were the last words he ever spoke, for the next moment the roof
crumbled under his feet, and his body was scattered in fragments through
the air, and in that moment Portsmouth had ceased to be a fortified
stronghold.




CHAPTER XI

THE TRAGEDY OF THE TWO SQUADRONS


It takes a good deal to shake the nerves of British naval officer or
seaman, but those on board the ships of the Spithead Squadron would have
been something more than human if they could have viewed the appalling
happenings of the last few terrible minutes with their accustomed
coolness. They were ready to fight anything on the face of the waters or
under them, but an enemy in the air who could rain down shells, a couple
of which were sufficient to destroy the most powerful forts in the
world, and who could not be hit back, was another matter. It was a
bitter truth, but there was no denying it. The events of the last ten
years had clearly proved that a day must come when the flying machine
would be used as an engine of war, and now that day had come--and the
fighting flying machine was in the hands of the enemy.

The anchors were torn from the ground, signals were flashed from the
flagship, the _Prince George_, and within four minutes the squadron was
under way to the south-eastward. After what had happened the Admiral in
command promptly and rightly decided that to keep his ships cramped up
in the narrow waters was only to court further disaster. His place was
now the open sea, and a general fleet action offered the only means of
preventing an occupation of almost defenceless Portsmouth, and the
landing of hostile troops in the very heart of England's southern
defences.

Fifteen first-class torpedo boats and ten destroyers ran out from the
Hampshire and Isle of Wight coasts, ran through the ships, and spread
themselves out in a wide curve ahead, and at the same time twenty
submarines crept out from the harbour and set to work laying contact
mines in the appointed fields across the harbour mouth and from shore to
shore behind the Spithead forts.

But the squadron had not steamed a mile beyond the forts before a series
of frightful disasters overtook them. First, a huge column of water rose
under the stern of the _Jupiter_. The great ship stopped and shuddered
like a stricken animal, and began to settle down stern first. Instantly
the _Mars_ and _Victorious_ which were on either side of her slowed
down, their boats splashed into the water and set to work to rescue
those who managed to get clear of the sinking ship.

But even while this was being done, the _Banshee_, the _Flying Fish_
which had destroyed the forts, had taken up her position a thousand feet
above the doomed squadron. A shell dropped upon the deck of the
_Spartiate_, almost amidships. The pink flash blazed out between her two
midship funnels. They crumpled up as if they had been made of brown
paper. The six-inch armoured casemates on either side seemed to crumble
away. The four-inch steel deck gaped and split as though it had been
made of matchboard. Then the _Banshee_ dropped to within five hundred
feet and let go another shell almost in the same place. A terrific
explosion burst out in the very vitals of the stricken ship, and the
great cruiser seemed to split asunder. A vast volume of mingled smoke
and flame and steam rose up, and when it rolled away, the _Spartiate_
had almost vanished.

But that was the last act of destruction that the _Banshee_ was destined
to accomplish. That moment the moon sailed out into a patch of clear
sky. Every eye in the squadron was turned upward. There was the airship
plainly visible. Her captain instantly saw his danger and quickened up
his engines, but it was too late. He was followed by a hurricane of
shells from the three-pound quick-firers in the upper tops of the
battleships. Then came an explosion in mid-air which seemed to shake the
very firmament itself. She had fifty or sixty of the terrible shells
which had wrought so much havoc on board, and as a dozen shells pierced
her hull and burst, they too exploded with the shock. A vast blaze of
pink flame shone out.

"Talk about going to glory in a blue flame," said Seaman Gunner
Tompkins, who had aimed one of the guns in the fore-top of the
_Hannibal_, and of course, like everybody else, piously believed that
his was one of the shells that got there. "That chap's gone to t'other
place in a red'un. War's war, but I don't hold with that sort of
fighting; it doesn't give a man a chance. Torpedoes is bad enough, Gawd
knows--"

The words were hardly out of his mouth when a shock and a shudder ran
through the mighty fabric of the battleship. The water rose in a
foam-clad mountain under her starboard quarter. She heeled over to port,
and then rolled back to starboard and began to settle.

"Torpedoed, by George! What did I tell you?" gasped Gunner Tompkins. The
next moment a lurch of the ship hurled him and his mates far out into
the water.

Even as his ship went down, Captain Barclay managed to signal to the
other ships, "Don't wait--get out." And when her shattered hull rested
on the bottom, the gallant signal was still flying from the upper yard.

It was obvious that the one chance of escaping their terrible unseen foe
was to obey the signal. By this time crowds of small craft of every
description had come off from both shores to the rescue of those who had
gone down with the ships, so the Admiral did what was the most practical
thing to do under the circumstances--he dropped his own boats, each with
a crew, and ordered the _Victorious_ and _Mars_ to do the same, and then
gave the signal for full speed ahead. The great engines panted and
throbbed, and the squadron moved forward with ever-increasing speed, the
cruisers and destroyers, according to signal, running ahead of the
battleships; but before full speed was reached, the _Mars_ was struck
under the stern, stopped, shuddered, and went down with a mighty lurch.

This last misfortune convinced the Admiral that the destruction of his
battleships could not be the work of any ordinary submarine, for at the
time the _Mars_ was struck she was steaming fifteen knots and the
underwater speed of the best submarine was only twelve, saving only the
_Ithuriel_, and she did not use torpedoes. The two remaining battleships
had now reached seventeen knots, which was their best speed. The
cruisers and their consorts were already disappearing round Foreland.

There was some hope that they might escape the assaults of the
mysterious and invisible enemy now that the airship had been destroyed,
but unless the submarine had exhausted her torpedoes, or some accident
had happened to her, there was very little for the _Prince George_ and
the _Victorious_, and so it turned out. Castellan's strict orders had
been to confine his attentions to the battleships, and he obeyed his
pitiless instructions to the letter. First the _Victorious_ and then the
flagship, smitten by an unseen and irresistible bolt in their weakest
parts, succumbed to the great gaping wounds torn in the thin
under-plating, reeled once or twice to and fro like leviathans
struggling for life, and went down. And so for the time being, at least,
ended the awful work of the _Flying Fish_.

Leaving the cruisers and smaller craft to continue their dash for the
open Channel, we must now look westward.

When Vice-Admiral Codrington, who was flying his flag on the
_Irresistible_, saw the flashes along the Hillsea ridge and Portsdown
height and heard the roar of the explosions, he at once up-anchor and
got his squadron under way. Then came the appallingly swift destruction
of Hurst Castle and Fort Victoria. Like all good sailors, he was a man
of instant decision. His orders were to guard the entrance to the
Solent, and the destruction of the forts made it impossible for him to
do this inside. How that destruction had been wrought, he had of course
no idea, beyond a guess that the destroying agent must have come from
the air, since it could not have come from sea or land without provoking
a very vigorous reply from the forts. Instead of that they had simply
blown up without firing a shot.

He therefore decided to steam out through the narrow channel between
Hurst Castle and the Isle of Wight as quickly as possible.

It was a risky thing to do at night and at full speed, for the Channel
and the entrance to it was strewn with contact mines, but one of the
principal businesses of the British Navy is to take risks where
necessary, so he put his own ship at the head of the long line, and with
a mine chart in front of him went ahead at eighteen knots.

When Captain Adolph Frenkel, who was in command of the _See Adler_, saw
the column of warships twining and wriggling its way out through the
Channel, each ship handled with consummate skill and keeping its
position exactly, he could not repress an admiring "Ach!" Still it was
not his business to admire, but destroy.

He rose to a thousand feet, swung round to the north-eastward until the
whole line had passed beneath him, and then quickened up and dropped to
seven hundred feet, swung round again and crept up over the _Hogue_,
which was bringing up the rear. When he was just over her fore part, he
let go a shell, which dropped between the conning-tower and the forward
barbette.

The navigating bridge vanished; the twelve-inch armoured conning-tower
cracked like an eggshell; the barbette collapsed like the crust of a
loaf, and the big 9.2 gun lurched backwards and lay with its muzzle
staring helplessly at the clouds. The deck crumpled up as though it had
been burnt parchment, and the ammunition for the 9.2 and the forward
six-inch guns which had been placed ready for action exploded, blowing
the whole of the upper forepart of the vessel into scrap-iron.

But an even worse disaster than this was to befall the great
twelve-thousand-ton cruiser. Her steering gear was, of course,
shattered. Uncontrolled and uncontrollable, she swung swiftly round to
starboard, struck a mine, and inside three minutes she was lying on the
mud.

Almost at the moment of the first explosion, the beams of twenty
searchlights leapt up into the air, and in the midst of the broad white
glare hundreds of keen angry eyes saw a winged shape darting up into the
air, heading southward as though it would cross the Isle of Wight over
Yarmouth. Almost simultaneously, every gun from the tops of the
battleships spoke, and a storm of shells rent the air.

But Captain Frenkel had already seen his mistake. The _See Adler's_
wings were inclined at an angle of twenty degrees, her propellers were
revolving at their utmost velocity, and at a speed of nearly a hundred
miles an hour, she took the Isle of Wight in a leap. She slowed down
rapidly over Freshwater Bay. Captain Frenkel took a careful observation
of the position and course of the squadron, dropped into the water,
folded his wings and crept round the Needles with his conning-tower just
awash, and lay in wait for his prey about two miles off the Needles.

The huge black hull of the _Irresistible_ was only a couple of hundred
yards away. He instantly sank and turned on his water-ray. As the
flagship passed within forty yards he let go his first torpedo. It hit
her sternpost, smashed her rudder and propellers, and tore a great hole
in her run. The steel monster stopped, shuddered, and slid sternward
with her mighty ram high in the air into the depths of the smooth grey
sea.

There is no need to repeat the ghastly story which has already been
told--the story of the swift and pitiless destruction of these miracles
of human skill, huge in size and mighty in armament and manned by the
bravest men on land or sea, by a foe puny in size but of awful
potentiality. It was a fight, if fight it could be called, between the
visible and the invisible, and it could only have one end. Battleship
after battleship received her death-wound, and went down without being
able to fire a shot in defence, until the _Magnificent_, smitten in the
side under her boilers, blew up and sank amidst a cloud of steam and
foam, and the Western Squadron had met the fate of the Eastern.

While this tragedy was being enacted, the cruisers scattered in all
directions and headed for the open at their highest speed. It was a
bitter necessity, and it was bitterly felt by every man and boy on board
them; but the captains knew that to stop and attempt the rescue of even
some of their comrades meant losing the ships which it was their duty at
all costs to preserve, and so they took the only possible chance to
escape from this terrible unseen foe which struck out of the silence and
the darkness with such awful effect.

But despite the tremendous disaster which had befallen the Reserve
Fleet, the work of death and destruction was by no means all on one
side. When he sank the _Leger_, Erskine had done a great deal more
damage to the enemy than he knew, for she had been sent not for fighting
purposes, but as a depot ship for the _Flying Fishes_, from which they
could renew their torpedoes and the gas cylinders which furnished their
driving power. Being a light craft, she was to take up an agreed
position off Bracklesham Bay three miles to the north-west of Selsey
Bill, the loneliest and shallowest part of the coast, with all lights
out, ready to supply all that was wanted or to make any repairs that
might be necessary. Her sinking, therefore, deprived John Castellan's
craft of their base.

After the _Dupleix_ had gone down, the _Ithuriel_ rose again, and
Erskine said to Lennard:

"There must be more of them outside, they wouldn't be such fools as to
rush Portsmouth with three destroyers and a couple of cruisers. We'd
better go on and reconnoitre."

The _Ithuriel_ ran out south-eastward at twenty knots in a series of
broad curves, and she was just beginning to make the fourth of these
when six black shapes crowned with wreaths of smoke loomed up out of the
semi-darkness.

"Thought so--destroyers," said Erskine. "Yes, and look there, behind
them--cruiser supports, three of them--these are for the second rush.
Coming up pretty fast, too; they'll be there in half an hour. We shall
have something to say about that. Hold on, Lennard."

"Same tactics, I suppose," said Lennard.

"Yes," replied Erskine, taking down the receiver. "Are you there,
Castellan? All right. We've six more destroyers to get rid of. Full
speed ahead, as soon as you like--guns all ready, I suppose? Good--go
ahead."

The _Ithuriel_ was now about two miles to the westward and about a mile
in front of the line of destroyers, which just gave her room to get up
full speed. As she gathered way, Lennard saw the nose of the great ram
rise slowly out of the water. The destroyer's guns crackled, but it is
not easy to hit a low-lying object moving at fifty miles an hour, end
on, when you are yourself moving nearly twenty-five. Just the same thing
happened as before. The point of the ram passed over the destroyer's
bows, crumpled them up and crushed them down, and the _Ithuriel_ rushed
on over the sinking wreck, swerved a quarter turn, and bore down on her
next victim. It was all over in ten minutes. The _Ithuriel_ rushed
hither and thither among the destroyers like some leviathan of the deep.
A crash, a swift grinding scrape, and a mass of crumpled steel was
dropping to the bottom of the Channel.

While the attack on the destroyers was taking place, the cruisers were
only half a mile away. Their captains had found themselves in curiously
difficult positions. The destroyers were so close together, and the
movements of this strange monster which was running them down so
rapidly, that if they opened fire they were more likely to hit their own
vessels than it, but when the last had gone down, every available gun
spoke, and a hurricane of shells, large and small, ploughed up the sea
where the _Ithuriel had_ been. After the first volley, the captains
looked at their officers and the officers looked at the captains, and
said things which strained the capabilities of the French language to
the utmost. The monster had vanished.

The fact was that Erskine had foreseen that storm of shell, and the
pumps had been working hard while the ramming was going on. The result
was that the _Ithuriel_ sank almost as soon as her last victim, and in
thirty seconds there was nothing to shoot at.

"I shall ram those chaps from underneath," he said. "They've too many
guns for a shooting match."

He reduced the speed to thirty knots, rose for a moment till the
conning-tower was just above the water, took his bearings, sank, called
for full speed, and in four minutes the ram crashed into the _Alger's_
stern, carried away her sternpost and rudder, and smashed her
propellers. The _Ithuriel_ passed on as if she had hit a log of wood and
knocked it aside. A slight turn of the steering-wheel, and within four
minutes the ram was buried in the vitals of the _Suchet_. Then the
_Ithuriel_ reversed engines, the fore screw sucked the water away, and
the cruiser slid off the ram as she might have done off a rock. As she
went down, the _Ithuriel_ rose to the surface. The third cruiser, the
_Davout_, was half a mile away. She had changed her course and was
evidently making frantic efforts to get back to sea.

"Going to warn the fleet, are you, my friend?" said Erskine, between
his teeth. "Not if I know it!"

He asked for full speed again and the terror-stricken Frenchmen saw the
monster, just visible on the surface of the water, flying towards them
in the midst of a cloud of spray. A sheep might as well have tried to
escape from a tiger. Many of the crew flung themselves overboard in the
madness of despair. There was a shock and a grinding crash, and the ram
bored its way twenty feet into the unarmoured quarter. Then the
_Ithuriel's_ screws dragged her free, and the _Davout_ followed her
sisters to the bottom of the Channel.




CHAPTER XII

HOW LONDON TOOK THE NEWS


The awaking of England on the morning of the twenty-sixth of November
was like the awaking of a man from a nightmare. Everyone who slept had
gone to sleep with one word humming in his brain--war--and war at home,
that was the terrible thought which robbed so many millions of eyes of
sleep. But even those who slept did not do so for long.

At a quarter to one a sub-editor ran into the room of the chief News
Editor of the _Daily Telegraph_, without even the ceremony of a knock.

"What on earth's the matter, Johnson?" exclaimed the editor. "Seen a
ghost?"

"Worse than that, sir. Read this!" said the sub-editor, in a shaking
voice, throwing the slip down on the desk.

"My God, what's this?" said the editor, as he ran his eye along the
slip. "'Portsmouth bombarded from the air. Hillsea, Portsmouth,
Gilkicker and Southsea Castle destroyed. Practically defenceless. Fleet
Reserve Squadrons sailing.'"

The words were hardly out of his mouth before another man came running
in with a slip. "'_Jupiter_ and _Hannibal_ torpedoed by submarine.
_Spartiate_ blown up by aerial torpedo.'" Then there came a gap, as
though the men at the other end had heard of more news, then
followed--"'_Mars_, _Prince George_, _Victorious_, all torpedoed.
Cruisers escaped to sea. No news of _Ithuriel_, no torpedo attack up to
present.'"

"Oh, that's awful," gasped the editor, and then the professional
instinct reasserted itself, for he continued, handing the slip back:
"Rush out an edition straight away, Johnson. Anything, if it's only a
half-sheet--get it on the streets as quick as you can--there'll be
plenty of people about still. If anything else comes bring it up."

In less than a quarter of an hour a crowd of newsboys were fighting in
the passage for copies of the single sheet which contained the momentous
news, just as it had come over the wire. The _Daily Telegraph_ was just
five minutes ahead, but within half an hour every London paper, morning
and evening, and all the great provincial journals had rushed out their
midnight specials, and from end to end of England and Scotland, and away
to South Wales, and over the narrow seas to Dublin and Cork, the shrill
screams of the newsboys, and the hoarse, raucous howls of the newsmen
were spreading the terrible tidings over the land. What the beacon fires
were in the days of the Armada, these humble heralds of Fate were in the
twentieth century.

"War begun--Portsmouth destroyed--Fleet sunk."

The six terrible words were not quite exact, of course, but they were
near enough to the truth to sound like the voice of Fate in the ears of
the millions whose fathers and fathers' fathers back through six
generations had never had their midnight rest so rudely broken.

Lights gleamed out of darkened windows, and front doors were flung open
in street after street, as the war-cry echoed down it. Any coin that
came first to hand, from a penny to a sovereign, was eagerly offered for
the single, hurriedly-printed sheets, but the business instincts of the
newsboys rose superior to the crisis, and nothing less than a shilling
was accepted. Streams of men and boys on bicycles with great bags of
specials slung on their backs went tearing away, head down and pedals
whirling, north, south, east and west into the suburbs. Newsagents flung
their shops open, and in a few minutes were besieged by eager, anxious
crowds, fighting for the first copies. There was no more sleep for man
or woman in London that night, though the children slept on in happy
unconsciousness of what the morrow was to bring forth.

What happened in London was happening almost simultaneously all over the
kingdom. For more than a hundred years the British people had worked and
played and slept in serene security, first behind its wooden walls, and
then behind the mighty iron ramparts of its invincible Fleets, and now,
like a thunderbolt from a summer sky, came the paralysing tidings that
the first line of defence had been pierced by a single blow, and the
greatest sea stronghold of England rendered defenceless--and all this
between sunset and midnight of a November day.

Was it any wonder that men looked blankly into each other's eyes, and
asked themselves and each other how such an unheard-of catastrophe had
come about, and what was going to happen next? The first and universal
feeling was one of amazement, which amounted almost to mental paralysis,
and then came a sickening sense of insecurity. For two generations the
Fleet had been trusted implicitly, and invasion had been looked upon
merely as the fad of alarmists, and the theme of sensational
story-writers. No intelligent person really trusted the army, although
its ranks, such as they were, were filled with as gallant soldiers as
ever carried a rifle, but it had been afflicted ever since men could
remember with the bane and blight of politics and social influence. It
had never been really a serious profession, and its upper ranks had been
little better than the playground of the sons of the wealthy and
well-born.

Politician after politician on both sides had tried his hand at scheme
after scheme to improve the army. What one had done, the next had
undone, and the permanent War Office Officials had given more attention
to buttons and braids and caps than to business-like organisations of
fighting efficiency. The administration was, as it always had been, a
chaos of muddle. The higher ranks were rotten with inefficiency, and the
lower, aggravated and bewildered by change after change, had come to
look upon soldiering as a sort of game, the rules of which were being
constantly altered.

The Militia, the Yeomanry, and the Volunteers had been constantly
snubbed and worried by the authorities of Pall Mall. Private citizens,
willing to give time and money in order to learn the use of the rifle,
even if they could not join the Yeomanry or Volunteers, had been just
ignored. The War Office could see no use for a million able-bodied men
who had learned to shoot straight, besides they were only "damned
civilians," whose proper place was in their offices and shops. What
right had they with rifles? If they wanted exercise, let them go and
play golf, or cricket, or football. What had they to do with the defence
of their country and their homes?

But that million of irregular sharpshooters were badly wanted now. They
could have turned every hedgerow into a trench and cover against the foe
which would soon be marching over the fields and orchards and
hop-gardens of southern England. They would have known every yard of the
ground, and the turn of every path and road, and while the regular army
was doing its work they could have prevented many a turning movement of
the superior forces, shot down the horses of convoys and ammunition
trains, and made themselves generally objectionable to the enemy.

Now the men were there, full of fight and enthusiasm, but they had
neither ammunition nor rifles, and if they had had them, ninety per
cent. would not have known how to use them. Wherefore, those who were
responsible for the land defences of the country found themselves with
less than three hundred thousand trained and half-trained men, of all
arms, to face invading forces which would certainly not number less than
a million, every man of which had served his apprenticeship to the grim
trade of war, commanded by officers who had taken that same trade
seriously, studied it as a science, thinking it of considerably more
importance than golf or cricket or football.

It had been said that the British Nation would never tolerate
conscription, which might or might not have been true; but now, when the
next hour or so might hear the foreign drums thrumming and the foreign
bugles blaring, conscription looked a very different thing. There wasn't
a loyal man in the kingdom who didn't bitterly regret that he had not
been taken in the prime of his young manhood, and taught how to defend
the hearth and home which were his, and the wife and children which were
so dear to him.

But it was too late now. Neither soldiers nor sharpshooters are made in
a few hours or days, and within a week the first battles that had been
fought on English ground for nearly eight hundred years would have been
lost and won, and nine-tenths of the male population of England would be
looking on in helpless fury.

There had been plenty of theorists, who had said that the British
Islands needed no army of home defence, simply because if she once lost
command of the sea it would not be necessary for an enemy to invade her,
since a blockade of her ports would starve her into submission in a
month--which, thanks to the decay of agriculture and the depopulation of
the country districts, was true enough. But it was not all the truth.
Those who preached these theories left out one very important factor,
and that was human nature.

For over a century the Continental nations had envied and hated Britain,
the land-grabber; Britain who had founded nations while they had failed
to make colonies; Britain, who had made the Seven Seas her territories,
and the coasts of other lands her frontiers. Surely the leaders of the
leagued nations would have been more or less than human had they
resisted, even if their people had allowed them to do it, the
temptation of trampling these proud Islanders into the mud and mire of
their own fields and highways, and dictating terms of peace in the
ancient halls of Windsor.

These were the bitter thoughts which were rankling in the breast of
every loyal British man during the remainder of that night of horrible
suspense. Many still had reason to remember the ghastly blunders and the
muddling which had cost so many gallant lives and so many millions of
treasure during the Boer War, when it took three hundred thousand
British troops to reduce eighty thousand undrilled farmers to
submission. What if the same blundering and muddling happened now? And
it was just as likely now as then.

Men ground their teeth, and looked at their strong, useless hands, and
cursed theorist and politician alike. And meanwhile the Cabinet was
sitting, deliberating, as best it might, over the tidings of disaster.
The House of Commons, after voting full powers to the Cabinet and the
Council of Defence, had been united at last by the common and immediate
danger, and members of all parties were hurrying away to their
constituencies to do what they could to help in organising the defence
of their homeland.

There was one fact which stood out before all others, as clearly as an
electric light among a lot of candles, and, now that it was too late, no
one recognised it with more bitter conviction than those who had made it
the consistent policy of both Conservative and Liberal Governments, and
of the Executive Departments, to discourage invention outside the
charmed circle of the Services, and to drive the civilian inventor
abroad.

Again and again, designs of practical airships--not gas-bags which could
only be dragged slowly against a moderate wind, but flying machines
which conquered the wind and used it as a bird does--had been submitted
to the War Office during the last six or seven years, and had been
pooh-poohed or pigeon-holed by some sapient permanent official--and now
the penalty of stupidity and neglect had to be paid.

The complete descriptions of the tragedy that had been and was being
enacted at Portsmouth that were constantly arriving in Downing Street
left no possibility of doubt that the forts had been destroyed and the
_Spartiate_ blown up by torpedoes from the air--from which fact it was
necessary to draw the terrible inference that the enemy had possessed
themselves of the command of the air.

What was the command of the sea worth after that? What was the fighting
value of the mightiest battleship that floated when pitted against a
practically unassailable enemy, which had nothing to do but drop
torpedoes, loaded with high explosives, on her decks and down her
funnels until her very vitals were torn to pieces, her ammunition
exploded, and her crew stunned by concussion or suffocated by poisonous
gas?

It was horrible, but it was true. Inside an hour the strongest
fortifications in England had been destroyed, and ten first-class
battleships and a cruiser had been sent to the bottom of the sea, and so
at last her ancient sceptre was falling from the hand of the Sea Queen,
and her long inviolate domain was threatened by the armed legions of
those whose forefathers she had vanquished on many a stricken field by
land and sea.

"Well, gentlemen," said the Prime Minister to the other members of the
Cabinet Council, who were sitting round that historic oval table in the
Council Chamber in Downing Street, "we may as well confess that this is
a great deal more serious than we expected it to be, and that is to my
mind all the better reason why we should strain every nerve to hold
intact the splendid heritage which our fathers have left to us--"

Boom! A shudder ran through the atmosphere as he spoke the last words,
and the double windows in Downing Street shook with the vibration. The
members of the Cabinet started in their seats and looked at each other.
Was this the fulfilment of the half prophecy which the Prime Minister
had spoken so slowly and so clearly in the silent, crowded House of
Commons?

Almost at the same moment the electric bell at the outer of the double
doors rang. The doors were opened, and a messenger came in with a
telegram which he handed to the Prime Minister, and then retired. He
opened the envelope, and for nearly five minutes of intense suspense he
mentally translated the familiar cypher, and then he said, as he handed
the telegram to the Secretary for War:

"Gentlemen, I deeply regret to say that the possible prospect which I
outlined in the House to-night has become an accomplished fact. Two
hundred and forty-three years ago London heard the sound of hostile
guns. We have heard them to-night. This telegram is from Sheerness, and
it tells, I most deeply regret to say, the same story, or something like
it, as the messages from Portsmouth. A Russo-German-French fleet of
battleships, cruisers and destroyers, assisted by four airships and an
unknown number of submarines, has defeated the Southern portion of the
North Sea Squadron, and is now proceeding in two divisions, one up the
Medway towards Chatham, and the other up the Thames towards Tilbury.
Garrison Fort is now being bombarded from the sea and the air, and will
probably be in ruins within an hour."




CHAPTER XIII

A CRIME AND A MISTAKE


When the destruction of the forts and the sinking of the battleships at
Portsmouth had been accomplished, John Castellan made about the greatest
mistake in his life, a mistake which had very serious consequences for
those to whom he had sold himself and his terrible invention.

He and his brother Denis formed a very curious contrast, which is
nevertheless not uncommon in Irish families. The British army and navy
can boast no finer soldiers or sailors, and the Empire no more devoted
servants than those who claim Ireland as the land of their birth, and
Denis Castellan was one of these. As the reader may have guessed
already, he and Erskine had only been on the _Cormorant_ because it was
the policy of the Naval Council to keep two of the ablest men in the
service out of sight for a while. Denis, who had a remarkable gift of
tongues, was really one of the most skilful naval _attaches_ in service,
and what he didn't know about the naval affairs of Europe was hardly
worth learning. Erskine had been recognised by the Naval Council which,
under Sir John Fisher, had raised the British Navy to a pitch of
efficiency that was the envy of every nation in the world, except Japan,
as an engineer and inventor of quite extraordinary ability, and while
the _Ithuriel_ was building, they had given him the command of the
_Cormorant_, chiefly because there was hardly anything to do, and
therefore he had ample leisure to do his thinking.

On the other hand John Castellan was an unhappily brilliant example of
that type of Keltic intellect which is incapable of believing the
world-wide truism that the day of small states is passed. He had two
articles of political faith. One was an unshakable belief in the
possibility of Irish independence, and the other, which naturally
followed from the first, was implacable hatred of the Saxon oppressor
whose power and wealth had saved Ireland from invasion for centuries. He
was utterly unable to grasp the Imperial idea, while his brother was as
enthusiastic an Imperialist as ever sailed the seas.

Had it not been for this blind hatred, the disaster which had befallen
the Reserve Fleet would have been repeated at sea on a much vaster
scale; but he allowed his passions to overcome his judgment, and so
saved the Channel Fleet. There lay beneath him defenceless the greatest
naval port of England, with its docks and dockyards, its barracks and
arsenals, its garrisons of soldiers and sailors, and its crowds of
workmen. The temptation was too strong for him, and he yielded to it.

When the _Prince George_ had gone down he rose into the air, and ran
over the Isle of Wight, signalling to the _See Adler_. The signals were
answered, and the two airships met about two miles south-west of the
Needles, and Castellan informed Captain Frenkel of his intention to
destroy Portsmouth and Gosport. The German demurred strongly. He had no
personal hatred to satisfy, and he suggested that it would be much
better to go out to sea and discover the whereabouts of the Channel
Fleet; but Castellan was Commander-in-Chief of the Aerial Squadrons of
the Allies, and so his word was law, and within the next two hours one
of the greatest crimes in the history of civilised warfare was
committed.

The two airships circled slowly over Gosport and Portsmouth, dropping
their torpedoes wherever a worthy mark presented itself. The first one
discharged from the _Flying Fish_ fell on the deck of the old _Victory_.
The deck burst up, as though all the powder she had carried at
Trafalgar had exploded beneath it, and the next moment she broke out in
inextinguishable flames. The old _Resolution_ met the same fate from the
_See Adler_, and then the pitiless hail of destruction fell on the docks
and jetties. In a few minutes the harbour was ringed with flame.
Portsmouth Station, built almost entirely of wood, blazed up like
matchwood; then came the turn of the dockyards at Portsea, which were
soon ablaze from end to end.

Then the two airships spread their wings like destroying angels over
Portsmouth town. Half a dozen torpedoes wrecked the Town Hall and set
the ruins on fire. This was the work of the _See Adler_. The _Flying
Fish_ devoted her attention to the naval and military barracks, the
Naval College and the Gunnery School on Whale Island. As soon as these
were reduced to burning ruins, the two airships scattered their
torpedoes indiscriminately over churches, shops and houses, and in the
streets crowded by terrified mobs of soldiers, sailors and civilians.

The effect of the torpedoes in the streets was too appalling for
description. Everyone within ten or a dozen yards of the focus of the
explosion was literally blown to atoms, and for fifty yards round every
living creature dropped dead, killed either by the force of the
concussion or the poisonous gases which were liberated by the explosion.
Hundreds fell thus without the mark of a wound, and when some of their
bodies were examined afterwards, it was found that their hearts were
split open as cleanly as though they had been divided with a razor, just
as are the hearts of fishes which have been killed with dynamite.

John Castellan and his lieutenant, M'Carthy, for the time being gloried
in the work of destruction. Captain Frenkel was a soldier and a
gentleman, and he saw nothing in it save wanton killing of defenceless
people and a wicked waste of ammunition; but the terrible War Lord of
Germany had given Castellan supreme command, and to disobey meant
degradation, and possibly death, and so the _See Adler_ perforce took
her share in the tragedy.

In a couple of hours Portsmouth, Gosport and Portsea had ceased to be
towns. They were only areas of flaming ruins; but at last the ammunition
gave out, and Castellan was compelled to signal the _See Adler_ to shape
her course for Bracklesham Bay in order to replenish the magazines. They
reached the bay, and descended at the spot where the _Leger_ ought to
have been at anchor. She was not there, for the sufficient reason that
the _Ithuriel's_ ram had sent her to the bottom of the Channel.

For half an hour the _Flying Fish_ and the _See Adler_ hunted over the
narrow waters, but neither was the _Leger_ nor any other craft to be
seen between the Selsey coast and the Isle of Wight. When they came
together again in Bracklesham Bay, John Castellan's rage against the
hated Saxon had very considerably cooled. Evidently something serious
had happened, and something that he knew nothing about, and now that the
excitement of destruction had died away, he remembered more than one
thing which he ought to have thought of before.

The two rushes of the torpedo boats, supported by the swift cruisers,
had not taken place. Not a hostile vessel had entered either Spithead or
the Solent, and the British cruisers, which he had been ordered to
spare, had got away untouched. It was perfectly evident that some
disaster had befallen the expedition, and that the _Leger_ had been
involved in it. In spite of the terrible destruction that the _Flying
Fish_, the _See Adler_ and the _Banshee_ had wrought on sea and land, it
was plain that the first part of the invader's programme had been
brought to nothing by some unknown agency.

He was, of course, aware of the general plan of attack. He had destroyed
the battleships of the Fleet Reserve. While he was doing that the
destroyers should have been busy among the cruisers, and then the main
force, under Admiral Durenne, would follow, and take possession of
Southampton, Portsmouth and the Isle of Wight. A detachment of cruisers
and destroyers was then to be despatched to Littlehampton, and land a
sufficient force to seize and hold the railway at Ford and Arundel, so
that the coast line of the L.B.S.C.R., as well as the main line to
Horsham and London, should be at the command of the invaders.

Littlehampton was also particularly valuable on account of its tidal
river and harbour, which would give shelter and protection to a couple
of hundred torpedo boats and destroyers, and its wharves from which
transports could easily coal. It is hardly worth while to add that it
had been left entirely undefended. It had been proposed to mount a
couple of 9.2 guns on the old fort on the west side of the river mouth,
with half a dozen twelve-pound quick-firers at the Coast-Guard station
on the east side to repel torpedo attack, but the War Office had laughed
at the idea of an enemy getting within gunshot of the inviolate English
shore, and so one of the most vulnerable points on the south coast had
been left undefended.

What would Castellan have given now for the torpedoes which the two
ships had wasted in the wanton destruction of Portsmouth, and the murder
of its helpless citizens. The main French Fleet by this time could not
be very far off. Behind it, somewhere, was the British Channel Fleet,
the most powerful sea force that had ever ridden the subject waves, and
here he was without a torpedo on either of his ships, and no supplies
nearer than Kiel. The _Leger_ had carried two thousand torpedoes and
five hundred cylinders of the gases which supplied the motive power. She
was gone, and for all offensive purposes the _Flying Fish_ and _See
Adler_ were as harmless as a couple of balloons.

When it was too late, John Castellan remembered in the bitterness of his
soul that the torpedoes which had destroyed Portsmouth would have been
sufficient to have wrecked the Channel Fleet, and now there was nothing
for it but to leave Admiral Durenne to fight his own battle against the
most powerful fleet in the world, and to use what was left of the motive
power to get back to Kiel, and replenish their magazines.

Horrible as had been the fate which had fallen on the great arsenal of
southern England, it had not been sacrificed in vain, and very sick at
heart was John Castellan when he gave the order for the two vessels,
which a few hours ago had been such terrible engines of destruction, to
rise into the air and wing their harmless flight towards Kiel.

When the _Flying Fish_ and the _See Adler_ took the air, and shipped
their course eastward, the position of the opposing fleets was somewhat
as follows: The cruisers of the A Squadron, _Amphitrite_, _Andromeda_,
_Europa_, _Niobe_, _Blenheim_ and _Blake_, with fifteen first-class
torpedo boats and ten destroyers, had got out to sea from Spithead
unharmed. All these cruisers were good for twenty knots, the torpedo
boats for twenty-five, and the destroyers for thirty. The _Sutlej_,
_Ariadne_, _Argonaut_ and _Diadem_ had got clear away from the Solent,
with ten first-class torpedo boats and five destroyers. They met about
four miles south-east of St Catherine's Point. Commodore Hoskins of the
_Diadem_ was the senior officer in command, and so he signalled for
Captain Pennell, of the _Andromeda_, to come on board, and talk matters
over with him, but before the conversation was half-way through, a black
shape, with four funnels crowned with smoke and flame, came tearing up
from the westward, made the private signal, and ran alongside the
_Diadem_.

The news that her commander brought was this--Admiral Lord Beresford had
succeeded in eluding the notice of the French Channel Fleet, and was on
his way up the south-west with the intention of getting behind Admiral
Durenne's fleet, and crushing it between his own force to seaward and
the batteries and Reserve Fleet on the landward side. The Commander of
the destroyer was, of course, quite ignorant of the disaster which had
befallen the battleships of the Reserve Fleet and Portsmouth, and when
the captain of the cruiser told him the tidings, though he received the
news with the almost fatalistic _sang froid_ of the British naval
officer, turned a shade or two paler under the bronze of his skin.

"That is terrible news, sir," he said, "and it will probably alter the
Admiral's plans considerably. I must be off as soon as possible, and let
him know: meanwhile, of course, you will use your own judgment."

"Yes," replied the Commodore, "but I think you had better take one of
our destroyers, say the _Greyhound_, back with you. She's got her
bunkers full, and she can manage thirty-two knots in a sea like this."

At this moment the sentry knocked at the door of the Commodore's room.

"Come in," said Commodore Hoskins. The door opened, a sentry came in and
saluted, and said:

"The _Ithuriel's_ alongside, sir, and Captain Erskine will be glad to
speak to you."

"Ah!" exclaimed the Commodore, "the very thing. I wonder what that young
devil has been up to. Send him in at once, sentry."

The sentry retired, and presently Erskine entered the room, saluted, and
said:

"I've come to report, sir, I have sunk everything that tried to get in
through Spithead. First division of three destroyers, the old _Leger_,
the _Dupleix_ cruiser, six destroyers of the second division, and three
cruisers, the _Alger_, _Suchet_ and _Davout_. They're all at the
bottom."

The Commodore stared for a moment or two at the man who so quietly
described the terrific destruction that he had wrought with a single
ship, and then he said:

"Well, Erskine, we expected a good deal from that infernal craft of
yours, but this is rather more than we could have hoped for. You've done
splendidly. Now, what's your best speed?"

"Forty-five knots, sir."

"

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