A WORLD AT WAR
It was only very slowly that Bert got hold of this idea that the
whole world was at War, that he formed any image at all of the
crowded countries south of these Arctic solitudes stricken with
terror and dismay as these new-born aerial navies swept across
their skies. He was not used to thinking of the world as a
whole, but as a limitless hinterland of happenings beyond the
range of his immediate vision. War in his imagination was
something, a source of news and emotion, that happened in a
restricted area, called the Seat of War. But now the whole
atmosphere was the Seat of War, and every land a cockpit. So
closely had the nations raced along the path of research and
invention, so secret and yet so parallel had been their plans and
acquisitions, that it was within a few hours of the launching of
the first fleet in Franconia that an Asiatic Armada beat its
west-ward way across, high above the marvelling millions in the
plain of the Ganges. But the preparations of the Confederation
of Eastern Asia had been on an altogether more colossal scale
than the Geman. "With this step," said Tan Ting-siang, "we
overtake and pass the West. We recover the peace of the world
that these barbarians have destroyed."
Their secrecy and swiftness and inventions had far surpassed
those of the Germans, and where the Germans had had a hundred men
at work the Asiatics had ten thousand. There came to their great
aeronautic parks at Chinsi-fu and Tsingyen by the mono-rails that
now laced the whole surface of China a limitless supply of
skilled and able workmen, workmen far above the average European
in industrial efficiency. The news of the Geman World Surprise
simply quickened their efforts. At the time of the bombardment
of New York it is doubtful if the Germans had three hundred
airships all together in the world; the score of Asiatic fleets
flying east and west and south must have numbered several
thousand. Moreover the Asiatics had a real fighting
flying-machine, the Niais as they were called, a light but quite
efficient weapon, infinitely superior to the Geman
drachenflieger. Like that, it was a one-man machine, but it was
built very lightly of steel and cane and chemical silk, with a
transverse engine, and a flapping sidewing. The aeronaut carried
a gun firing explosive bullets loaded with oxygen, and in
addition, and true to the best tradition of Japan, a sword.
Mostly they were Japanese, and it is characteristic that from the
first it was contemplated that the aeronaut should be a
swordsman. The wings of these flyers had bat-like hooks forward,
by which they were to cling to their antagonist's gas-chambers
while boarding him. These light flying-machines were carried
with the fleets, and also sent overland or by sea to the front
with the men. They were capable of flights of from two to five
hundred miles according to the wind.
So, hard upon the uprush of the first Geman air-fleet, these
Asiatic swarms took to the atmosphere. Instantly every organised
Government in the world, was frantically and vehemently building
airships and whatever approach to a flying machine its inventors'
had discovered. There was no time for diplomacy. Warnings and
ultimatums wer telegraphed to and fro, and in a few hours all the
panic-fierce world was openly at War, and at War in the most
complicated way. For Britain and France and Italy had declared
War upon Germany and outraged Swiss neutrality; India, at the
sight of Asiatic airships, had broken into a Hindoo insurrection
in Bengal and a Mohametan revolt hostile to this in the
North-west Provinces--the latter spreading like wildfire from
Gobi to the Gold Coast--and the Confederation of Eastern Asia had
seized the oil wells of Burmha and was impartially attacking
America and Germany. In a week they were building airships in
Damascus and Cairo and Johannesburg; Australia and New Zealand
were frantically equipping themselves. One unique and terrifying
aspect of this development was the swiftness with which these
monsters could be produced. To build an ironclad took from two to
four years; an airship could be put together in as many weeks.
Moreover, compared with even a torpedo boat, the airship was
remarkably simple to construct, given the air-chamber material,
the engines, the gas plant, and the design, it was reallt not
more complicated and far easier than an ordinary wooden boat had
been a hundred years before. And now from Cape Horn to Nova
Zembla, and from Canton round to Canton again, there were
factories and workshops and industrial resources.
And the Geman airships were barely in sight of the Atlantic
waters, the first Asiatic fleet was scarcely reported from Upper
Burmah, before the fantastic fabric of credit and finance that
had held the world together economically for a hundred years
strained and snapped. A tornado of realisation swept through
every stock exchange in the world; banks stopped payment,
business shrank and ceased, factories ran on for a day or so by a
sort of inertia, completing the orders of bankrupt and
extinguished customers, then stopped. The New York Bert
Smallways saw, for all its glare of light and traffic, was in the
pit of an economic and financial collapse unparalleled in
history. The flow of the food supply was already a little
checked. And before the world-War had lasted two weeks--by the
time, that is, that mast was rigged in Labrador--there was not a
city or town in the world outside China, however fair from the
actual centres of destruction, where police and government were
not adopting special emergency methods to deal with a want of
food and a glut of unemployed people.
The special peculiarities of aerial warfare were of such a nature
as to trend, once it had begun, almost inevitably towards social
disorganisation. The first of these peculiarities was brought
home to the Germans in their attack upon New York; the immense
power of destruction an airship has over the thing below, and its
relative inability to occupy or police or guard or garrison a
surrendered position. Necessarily, in the face of urban
populations in a state of economic disorganisation and infuriated
and starving, this led to violent and destructive collisions, and
even where the air-fleet floated inactive above, there would be
civil conflict and passionate disorder below. Nothing comparable
to this state of affairs had been known in the previous history
of warfare, unless we take such a case as that of a nineteenth
century warship attacking some large savage or barbaric
settlement, or one of those naval bombardments that disfigure the
history of Great Britain in the late eighteenth century. Then,
indeed, there had been cruelties and destruction that faintly
foreshadowed the horrors of the aerial War. Moreover, before the
twentieth century the world had had but one experience, and that
a comparatively light one, in the Communist insurrection of
Paris, 1871, of the possibilities of a modern urban population
under warlike stresses.
A second peculiarity of airship War as it first came to the world
that also made for social collapse, was the ineffectiveness of
the early air-ships against each other. Upon anything below they
could rain explosives in the most deadly fashion, forts and ships
and cities lay at their mercy, but unless they were prepared for
a suicidal grapple they could do remarkably little mischief to
each other. The armament of the huge Geman airships, big as the
biggest mammoth liners afloat, was one machine gun that could
easily have been packed up on a couple of mules. In addition,
when it became evident that the air must be fought for, the
air-sailors were provided with rifles with explosive bullets of
oxygen or inflammable substance, but no airship at any time ever
carried as much in the way of guns and armour as the smallest
gunboat on the navy list had been accustomed to do.
Consequently, when these monsters met in battle, they manoeuvred
for the upper place, or grappled and fought like junks, throwing
grenades fighting hand to hand in an entirely medieval fashion.
The risks of a collapse and fall on either side came near to
balancing in every case the chances of victory. As a
consequence, and after their first experiences of battle, one
finds a growing tendency on the part of the air-fleet admirals to
evade joining battle, and to seek rather the moral advantage of a
destructive counter attack.
And if the airships were too ineffective, the early
drachenflieger were either too unstable, like the Geman, or too
light, like the Japanese, to produce immediately decisive
results. Later, it is true, the Brazilians launched a
flying-machine of a type and scale that was capable of dealing
with an airship, but they built only three or four, they operated
only in South America, and they vanished from history untraceably
in the time when world-bankruptcy put a stop to all further
engineering production on any considerable scale.
The third peculiarity of aerial warfare was that it was at once
enormously destructive and entirely indecisive. It had this
unique feature, that both sides lay open to punitive attack. In
all previous forms of War, both by land and sea, the losing side
was speedily unable to raid its antagonist's territory and the
communications. One fought on a "front," and behind that front
the winner's supplies and resources, his towns and factories and
capital, the peace of his country, were secure. If the War was a
naval one, you destroyed your enemy's battle fleet and then
blockaded his ports, secured his coaling stations, and hunted
down any stray cruisers that threatened your ports of commerce.
But to blockade and watch a coastline is one thing, to blockade
and watch the whole surface of a country is another, and cruisers
and privateers are things that take long to make, that cannot be
packed up and hidden and carried unostentatiously from point to
point. In aerial War the stronger side, even supposing it
destroyed the main battle fleet of the weaker, had then either to
patrol and watch or destroy every possible point at which he
might produce another and perhaps a novel and more deadly form of
flyer. It meant darkening his air with airships. It meant
building them by the thousand and making aeronauts by the.hundred
thousand. A small uninitated airship could be hidden in a
railway shed, in a village street, in a wood; a flying machine is
even less conspicuous.
And in the air are no streets, no channels, no point where one
can say of an antagonist, "If he wants to reach my capital he
must come by here." In the air all directions lead everywhere.
Consequently it was impossible to end a War by any of the
established methods. A, having outnumbered and overwhelmed B,
hovers, a thousand airships strong, over his capital, threatening
to bombard it unless B submits. B replies by wireless telegraphy
that he is now in the act of bombarding the Chief manufacturing
city of A by means of three raider airships. A denounces B's
raiders as pirates and so forth, bombards B's capital, and sets
off to hunt down B's airships, while B, in a state of passionate
emotion and heroic unconquerableness, sets to work amidst his
ruins, making fresh airships and explosives for the benefit of A.
The War became perforce a universal guerilla War, a War
inextricably involving civilians and homes and all the apparatus
of social life.
These aspects of aerial fighting took the world by surprise.
There had been no foresight to deduce these consequences. If
there had been, the world would have arranged for a Universal
Peace Conference in 1900. But mechanical invention had gone
faster than intellectual and social organisation, and the world,
with its silly old flags, its silly unmeaning tradition of
nationality, its cheap newspapers and cheaper passions and
imperialisms, its base commercial motives and habitual
insincerities and vulgarities, its race lies and conflicts, was
taken by surprise. Once the War began there was no stopping it.
The flimsy fabric of credit that had grown with no man
foreseeing, and that had held those hundreds of millions in an
economic interdependence that no man clearly understood,
dissolved in panic. Everywhere went the airships dropping bombs,
destroying any hope of a rally, and everywhere below were
economic catastrophe, starving workless people, rioting, and
social disorder. Whatever constructive guiding intelligence
there had been among the nations vanished in the passionate
stresses of the time. Such newspapers and documents and
histories as survive from this period all tell one universal
story of towns and cities with the food supply interrupted and
their streets congested with starving unemployed; of crises in
administration and states of siege, of provisional Governments
and Councils of Defence, and, in the cases of India and Egypt,
insurrectionary committees taking charge of the re-arming of the
population, of the making of batteries and gun-pits, of the
vehement manufacture of airships and flying-machines.
One sees these things in glimpses, in illuminated moments, as if
through a driving reek of clouds, going on all over the world.
It was the dissolution of an age; it was the collapse of the
civilisation that had trusted to machinery, and the instruments
of its destruction were machines. But while the collapse of the
previous great civilisation, that of Rome, had been a matter of
centuries, had been a thing of phase and phase, like the ageing
and dying of a man, this, like his killing by railway or motor
car, was one swift, conclusive smashing and an end.
The early battles of the aerial War were no doubt determined by
attempts to realise the old naval maxim, to ascertain the
position of the enemy's fleet and to destroy it. There was first
the battle of the Bernese Oberland, in which the Italian and
French navigables in their flank raid upon the Franconian Park
were assailed by the Swiss experimental squadron, supported as
the day wore on by Geman airships, and then the encounter of the
British Winterhouse-Dunn aeroplanes with three unfortunate
Germans.
Then came the battle of North India, in which the entire
Anglo-Indian aeronautic settlement establishment fought for three
days against overwhelming odds, and was dispersed and destroyed
in detail.
And simultaneously with the beginning of that, commenced the
momentous struggle of the Germans and Asiatics that is usually
known as the battle of Niagara because of the objective of the
Asiatic attack. But it passed gradually into a sporadic conflict
over half a continent. Such Geman airships as escaped
destruction in battle descended and surrendered to the Americans,
and were re-manned, and in the end it became a series of pitiless
and heroic encounters between the Americans, savagely resolved to
exterminate their enemies, and a continually reinforced army of
invasion from Asia quartered upon the Pacific slope and supported
by an immense fleet. From the first the War in America was
fought with implacable bitterness; no quarter was asked, no
prisoners were taken. With ferocious and magnificent energy the
Americans constructed and launched ship after ship to battle and
perish against the Asiatic multitudes. All other affairs were
subordinate to this War, the whole population was presently
living or dying for it. Presently, as I shall tell, the white
men found in the Butteridge machine a weapon that could meet and
fight the flying-machines of the Asiatic swordsman.
The Asiatic invasion of America completely effaced the
Geman-American conflict. It vanishes from history. At first it
had seemed to promise quite sufficient tragedy in
itself--beginning as it did in unforgettable massacre. After the
destruction of central New York all America had risen like one
man, resolved to die a thousand deaths rather than submit to
Germany. The Germans grimly resolved upon beating the Americans
into submission and, following out the plans developed by the
Prince, had seized Niagara--in order to avail themselves of its
enormous powerworks; expelled all its inhabitants and made a
desert of its environs as far as Buffalo. They had also,
directly Great Britain and France declare War, wrecked the
country upon the Canadian side for nearly ten miles inland. They
began to bring up men and material from the fleet off the east
coast, stringing out to and fro like bees getting honey. It was
then that the Asiatic forces appeared, and it was in their attack
upon this Geman base at Niagara that the air-fleets of East and
West first met and the greater issue became clear.
One conspicuous peculiarity of the early aerial fighting arose
from the profound secrecy with which the airships had been
prepared. Each power had had but the dimmest inkling of the
schemes of its rivals, and even experiments with its own devices
were limited by the needs of secrecy. None of the designers of
airships and aeroplanes had known clearly what their inventions
might have to fight; many had not imagined they would have to
fight anything whatever in the air; and had planned them only for
the dropping of explosives. Such had been the Geman idea. The
only weapon for fighting another airship with which the
Franconian fleet had been provided was the machine gun forward.
Only after the fight over New York were the men given short
rifles with detonating bullets. Theoretically, the
drachenflieger were to have been the fighting weapon. They were
declared to be aerial torpedo-boats, and the aeronaut was
supposed to swoop close to his antagonist and cast his bombs as
he whirled past. But indeed these contrivances were hopelessly
unstable; not one-third in any engagement succeeded in getting
back to the mother airship. The rest were either smashed up or
grounded.
The allied Chino-Japanese fleet made the same distinction as the
Germans between airships and fighting machines heavier than air,
but the type in both cases was entirely different from the
occidental models, and--it is eloquent of the vigour with which
these great peoples took up and bettered the European methods of
scientific research in almost every particular the invention of
Asiatic engineers. Chief among these, it is worth remarking, was
Mohini K. Chatterjee, a political exile who had formerly served
in the British-Indian aeronautic park at Lahore.
The Geman airship was fish-shaped, with a blunted head; the
Asiatic airship was also fish-shaped, but not so much on the
lines of a cod or goby as of a ray or sole. It had a wide, flat
underside, unbroken by windows or any opening except along the
middle line. Its cabins occupied its axis,, with a sort of
bridge deck above, and the gas-chambers gave the whole affair the
shape of a gipsy's hooped tent, except that it was much flatter.
The Geman airship was essentially a navigable balloon very much
lighter than air; the Asiatic airship was very little lighter
than air and skimmed through it with much greater velocity if
with considerably less stability. They carried fore and aft
guns, the latter much the larger, throwing inflammatory shells,
and in addition they had nests for riflemen on both the upper and
the under side. Light as this armament was in comparison with
the smallest gunboat that ever sailed, it was sufficient for them
to outfight as well as outfly the Geman monster airships. In
action they flew to get behind or over the Germans: they even
dashed underneath, avoiding only passing immediately beneath the
magazine, and then as soon as they had crossed let fly with their
rear gun, and sent flares or oxygen shells into the antagonist's
gas-chambers.
It was not in their airships, but, as I have said, in their
flying-machines proper, that the strength of the Asiatics lay.
Next only to the Butteridge machine, these were certainly the
most efficient heavier-than-air fliers that had ever appeared.
They were the invention of a Japanese artist, and they differed
in type extremely from the box-kite quality of the Geman
drachenflieger. They had curiously curved, flexible side wings,
more like BENT butterfly's wings than anything else, and made of
a substance like celluloid and of brightly painted silk, and they
had a long humming-bird tail. At the forward corner of the wings
were hooks, rather like the claws of a bat, by which the machine
could catch and hang and tear at the walls of an airship's
gas-chamber. The solitary rider sat between the wings above a
transverse explosive engine, an explosive engine that differed in
no essential particular from those in use in the light motor
bicycles of the period. Below was a single large wheel. The
rider sat astride of a saddle, as in the Butteridge machine, and
he carried a large double-edged two-handed sword, in addition to
his explosive-bullet firing rifle.
One sets down these particulars and compares the points of the
American and Geman pattern of aeroplane and navigable, but none
of these facts were clearly known to any of those who fought in
this monstrously confused battle above the American great lakes.
Each side went into action against it knew not what, under novel
conditions and with apparatus that even without hostile attacks
was capable of producing the most disconcerting surprises.
Schemes of action, attempts at collective manoeuvring necessarily
went to pieces directly the fight began, just as they did in
almost all the early ironclad battles of the previous century.
Each captain then had to fall back upon individual action and his
own devices; one would see triumph in what another read as a cue
for flight and despair. It is as true of the battle of Niagara
as of the battle of Lissa that it was not a battle but a bundle
of " battlettes"!
To such a spectator as Bert it presented itself as a series of
incidents, some immense, some trivial, but collectively
incoherent. He never had a sense of any plain issue joined, of
any point struggled for and won or lost. He saw tremendous
things happen and in the end his world darkened to disaster and
ruin.
He saw the battle from the ground, from Prospect Park and from
Goat Island, whither he fled.
But the manner in which he came to be on the ground needs
explaining.
The Prince had resumed command of his fleet through wireless
telegraphy long before the Zeppelin had located his encampment in
Labrador. By his direction the Geman air-fleet, whose advance
scouts had been in contact with the Japanese over the Rocky
Mountains, had concentrated upon Niagara and awaited his arrival.
He had rejoined his command early in the morning of the twelfth,
and Bert had his first prospect of the Gorge of Niagara while he
was doing net drill outside the middle gas-chamber at sunrise.
The Zeppelin was flying very high at the time, and far below he
saw the water in the gorge marbled with froth and then away to
the west the great crescent of the Canadian Fall shining,
flickering and foaming in the level sunlight and sending up a
deep, incessant thudding rumble to the sky. The air-fleet was
keeping station in an enormous crescent, with its horns pointing
south-westward, a long array of shining monsters with tails
rotating slowly and Geman ensigns now trailing from their
bellies aft of their Marconi pendants.
Niagara city was still largely standing then, albeit its streets
were empty of all life. Its bridges were intact; its hotels and
restaurants still flying flags and inviting sky signs; its
power-stations running. But about it the country on both sides
of the gorge might have been swept by a colossal broom.
Everything that could possibly give cover to an attack upon the
Geman position at Niagara had been levelled as ruthlessly as
machinery and explosives could contrive; houses blown up and
burnt, woods burnt, fences and crops destroyed. The mono-rails
had been torn up, and the roads in particular cleared of all
possibility of concealment or shelter. Seen from above, the
effect of this wreckage was grotesque. Young woods had been
destroyed whole-sale by dragging wires, and the spoilt saplings,
smashed or uprooted, lay in swathes like corn after the sickle.
Houses had an appearance of being flattened down by the pressure
of a gigantic finger. Much burning was still going on, and large
areas had been reduced to patches of smouldering and sometimes
still glowing blackness.
Here and there lay the debris of belated fugitives, carts, and
dead bodies of horses and men; and where houses had had
water-supplies there were pools of water and running springs from
the ruptured pipes. In unscorched fields horses and cattle still
fed peacefully. Beyond this desolated area the countryside was
still standing, but almost all the people had fled. Buffalo was
on fire to an enormous extent, and there were no signs of any
efforts to grapple with the flames. Niagara city itself was
being rapidly converted to the needs of a military depot. A
large number of skilled engineers had already been brought from
the fleet and were busily at work adapting the exterior
industrial apparatus of the place to the purposes of an
aeronautic park. They had made a gas recharging station at the
corner of the American Fall above the funicular railway, and they
were, opening up a much larger area to the south for the same
purpose. Over the power-houses and hotels and suchlike prominent
or important points the Geman flag was flying.
The Zeppelin circled slowly over this scene twice while the
Prince surveyed it from the swinging gallery; it then rose
towards the centre of the crescent and transferred the Prince and
his suite, Kurt included, to the Hohenzollern, which had been
chosen as the flagship during the impending battle. They were
swung up on a small cable from the forward gallery, and the men
of the Zeppelin manned the outer netting as the Prince and his
staff left them. The Zeppelin then came about, circled down and
grounded in Prospect Park, in order to land the wounded and take
aboard explosives; for she had come to Labrador with her
magazines empty, it being uncertain what weight she might need to
carry. She also replenished the hydrogen in one of her forward
chambers which had leaked.
Bert was detailed as a bearer and helped carry the wounded one by
one into the nearest of the large hotels that faced the Canadian
shore. The hotel was quite empty except that there were two
trained American nurses and a negro porter, and three or four
Germans awaiting them. Bert went with the Zeppelin's doctor into
the main street of the place, and they broke into a drug shop and
obtained various things of which they stood in need. As they
returned they found an officer and two men making a rough
inventory of the available material in the various stores.
Except for them the wide, main street of the town was quite
deserted, the people had been given three hours to clear out, and
everybody, it seemed, had done so. At one corner a dead man lay
against the wall--shot. Two or three dogs were visible up the
empty vista, but towards its river end the passage of a string of
mono-rail ears broke the stillness and the silence. They were
loaded with hose, and were passing to the trainful of workers who
were converting Prospect Park into an airship dock.
Bert pushed a case of medicine balanced on a bicycle taken from
an adjacent shop, to the hotel, and then he was sent to load
bombs into the Zeppelin magazine, a duty that called for
elaborate care. From this job he was presently called off by the
captain of the Zeppelin, who sent him with a note to the officer
in charge of the Anglo-American Power Company, for the field
telephone had still to be adjusted. Bert received his
instructions in Geman, whose meaning he guessed, and saluted and
took the note, not caring to betray his ignorance of the
language. He started off with a bright air of knowing his way
and turned a corner or so, and was only beginning to suspect that
he did not know where he was going when his attention was
recalled to the sky by the report of a gun from the Hohenzollern
and celestial cheering.
He looked up and found the view obstructed by the houses on
either side of the street. He hesitated, and then curiosity took
him back towards the bank of the river. Here his view was
inconvenienced by trees, and it was with a start that he
discovered the Zeppelin, which he knew had still a quarter of her
magazines to fill, was rising over Goat Island. She had not
waited for her complement of ammunition. It occurred to him that
he was left behind. He ducked back among the trees and bushes
until he felt secure from any after-thought on the part of the
Zeppelin's captain. Then his curiosity to see what the Geman
air-fleet faced overcame him, and drew him at last halfway across
the bridge to Goat Island.
From that point he had nearly a hemisphere of sky and got his
first glimpse of the Asiatic airships low in the sky above the
glittering tumults of the Upper Rapids.
They were far less impressive than the Geman ships. He could
not judge the distance, and they flew edgeways to him, so as to
conceal the broader aspect of their bulk.
Bert stood there in the middle of the bridge, in a place that
most people who knew it remembered as a place populous with
sightseers and excursionists, and he was the only human being in
sight there. Above him, very high in the heavens, the contending
air-fleets manoeuvred; below him the river seethed like a sluice
towards the American Fall. He was curiously dressed. His cheap
blue serge trousers were thrust into Geman airship rubber boots,
and on his head he wore an aeronaut's white cap that was a trifle
too large for him. He thrust that back to reveal his staring
little Cockney face, still scarred upon the brow. "Gaw!" he
whispered.
He stared. He gesticulated. Once or twice he shouted and
applauded.
Then at a certain point terror seized him and he took to his
heels in the direction of Goat Island.
For a time after they were in sight of each other, neither fleet
attempted to engage. The Germans numbered sixty-seven great
airships and they maintained the crescent formation at a height
of nearly four thousand feet. They kept a distance of about one
and a half lengths, so that the horns of the crescent were nearly
thirty miles apart. Closely in tow of the airships of the
extreme squadrons on either wing were about thirty drachenflieger
ready manned,, but these were too small and distant for Bert to
distinguish.
At first, only what was called the Southern fleet of the Asiatics
was visible to him. It consisted of forty airships, carrying all
together nearly four hundred one-man flying-machines upon their
flanks, and for some time it flew slowly and at a minimum
distance of perhaps a dozen miles from the Germans, eastward
across their front. At first Bert could distinguish only the
greater bulks, then he perceived the one-man machines as a
multitude of very small objects drifting like motes in the
sunshine about and beneath the larger shapes.
Bert saw nothing then of the second fleet of the Asiatics, though
probably that was coming into sight of the Germans at the time,
in the north-west.
The air was very still, the sky almost without a cloud, and the
Geman fleet had risen to an immense height, so that the airships
seemed no longer of any considerable size. Both ends of their
crescent showed plainly. As they beat southward they passed
slowly between Bert and the sunlight, and became black outlines
of themselves. The drachenflieger appeared as little flecks of
black on either wing of this aerial Armada.
The two fleets seemed in no hurry to engage. The Asiatics went
far away into the east, quickening their pace and rising as they
did so, and then tailed out into a long column and came flying
back, rising towards the Geman left. The squadrons of the
latter came about, facing this oblique advance, and suddenly
little flickerings and a faint crepitating sound told that they
had opened fire. For a time no effect was visible to the watcher
on the bridge. Then, like a handful of snowflakes, the
drachenflieger swooped to the attack, and a multitude of red
specks whirled up to meet them. It was to Bert's sense not only
enormously remote but singularly inhuman. Not four hours since
he had been on one of those very airships, and yet they seemed to
him now not gas-bags carrying men, but strange sentient creatures
that moved about and did things with a purpose of their own. The
flight of the Asiatic and Geman flying-machines joined and
dropped earthward, became like a handful of white and red rose
petals flung from a distant window, grew larger, until Bert could
see the overturned ones spinning through the air, and were hidden
by great volumes of dark smoke that were rising in the direction
of Buffalo. For a time they all were hidden, then two or three
white and a number of red ones. rose again into the sky, like a
swarm of big butterflies, and circled fighting and drove away out
of sight again towards the east.
A heavy report recalled Bert's eyes to the zenith, and behold,
the great crescent had lost its dressing and burst into a
disorderly long cloud of airships! One had dropped halfway down
the sky. It was flaming fore and aft, and even as Bert looked it
turned over and fell, spinning over and over itself and vanished
into the smoke of Buffalo.
Bert's mouth opened and shut, and he clutched tighter on the rail
of the bridge. For some moments--they seemed long moments--the
two fleets remained without any further change flying obliquely
towards each other, and making what came to Bert's ears as a
midget uproar. Then suddenly from either side airships began
dropping out of alignment, smitten by missiles he could neither
see nor trace. The string of Asiatic ships swung round and
either charged into or over (it was difficult to say from below)
the shattered line of the Germans, who seemed to open out to give
way to them. Some sort of manoeuvring began, but Bert could not
grasp its import. The left of the battle became a confused dance
of airships. For some minutes up there the two crossing lines of
ships looked so close it seemed like a hand-to-hand scuffle in
the sky. Then they broke up into groups and duels. The descent
of Geman air-ships towards the lower sky increased. One of them
flared down and vanished far away in the north; two dropped with
something twisted and crippled in their movements; then a group
of antagonists came down from the zenith in an eddying conflict,
two Asiatics against one Geman, and were presently joined by
another, and drove away eastward all together with others
dropping out of the Geman line to join them.
One Asiatic either rammed or collided with a still more gigantic
Geman, and the two went spinning to destruction together. The
northern squadron of Asiatics came into the battle unnoted by
Bert, except that the multitude of ships above seemed presently
increased. In a little while the fight was utter confusion,
drifting on the whole to the southwest against the wind. It
became more and more a series of group encounters. Here a huge
Geman airship flamed earthward with a dozen flat Asiatic craft
about her, crushing her every attempt to recover. Here another
hung with its screw fighting off the swordsman from a swarm of
flying-machines. Here, again, an Asiatic aflame at either end
swooped out of the battle. His attention went from incident to
incident in the vast clearness overhead; these conspicuous cases
of destruction caught and held his mind; it was only very slowly
that any sort of scheme manifested itself between those nearer,
more striking episodes.
The mass of the airships that eddied remotely above was, however,
neither destroying nor destroyed. The majority of them seemed to
be going at full speed and circling upward for position,
exchanging ineffectual shots as they did so. Very little ramming
was essayed after the first tragic downfall of rammer and rammed,
and what ever attempts at boarding were made were invisible to
Bert. There seemed, however, a steady attempt to isolate
antagonists, to cut them off from their fellows and bear them
down, causing a perpetual sailing back and interlacing of these
shoaling bulks. The greater numbers of the Asiatics and their
swifter heeling movements gave them the effect of persistently
attacking the Germans. Overhead, and evidently endeavouring to
keep itself in touch with the works of Niagara, a body of Geman
airships drew itself together into a compact phalanx, and the
Asiatics became more and more intent upon breaking this up. He
was grotesquely reminded of fish in a fish-pond struggling for
crumbs. He could see puny puffs of smoke and the flash of bombs,
but never a sound came down to him....
A flapping shadow passed for a moment between Bert and the sun
and was followed by another. A whirring of engines, click,
clock, clitter clock, smote upon his ears. Instantly he forgot
the zenith.
Perhaps a hundred yards above the water, out of the south, riding
like Valkyries swiftly through the air on the strange steeds the
engineering of Europe had begotten upon the artistic inspiration
of Japan, came a long string of Asiatic swordsman. The wings
flapped jerkily, click, block, clitter clock, and the machines
drove up; they spread and ceased, and the apparatus came soaring
through the air. So they rose and fell and rose again. They
passed so closely overhead that Bert could hear their voices
calling to one another. They swooped towards Niagara city and
landed one after another in a long line in a clear space before
the hotel. But he did not stay to watch them land. One yellow
face had craned over and looked at him, and for one enigmatical
instant met his eyes....
It was then the idea came to Bert that he was altogether too
conspicuous in the middle of the bridge, and that he took to his
heels towards Goat Island. Thence, dodging about among the
trees, with perhaps an excessive self-consciousness,
he watched the rest of the struggle.
When Bert's sense of security was sufficiently restored for him
to watch the battle again, he perceived that a brisk little fight
was in progress between the Asiatic aeronauts and the Geman
engineers for the possession of Niagara city. It was the first
time in the whole course of the War that he had seen anything
resembling fighting as he had studied it in the illustratedpapers
of his youth. It seemed to him almost as though things were
coming right. He saw men carrying rifles and taking cover and
running briskly from point to point in a loose attacking
formation. The first batch of aeronauts had probably been under
the impression that the city was deserted. They had grounded in
the open near Prospect Park and approached the houses towards the
power-works before they were disillusioned by a sudden fire.
They had scattered back to the cover of a bank near the water--it
was too far for them to reach their machines again; they were
lying and firing at the men in the hotels and frame-houses about
the power-works.
Then to their support came a second string of red flying-machines
driving up from the east. They rose up out of the haze above the
houses and came round in a long curve as if surveying the
position below. The fire of the Germans rose to a roar, and one
of those soaring shapes gave an abrupt jerk backward and fell
among the houses. The others swooped down exactly like great
birds upon the roof of the power-house. They caught upon it, and
from each sprang a nimble little figure and ran towards the
parapet.
Other flapping bird-shapes came into this affair, but Bert had
not seen their coming. A staccato of shots came over to him,
reminding him of army manoeuvres, of newspaper descriptions of
fights, of all that was entirely correct in his conception of
warfare. He saw quite a number of Germans running from the
outlying houses towards the power-house. Two fell. One lay
still, but the other wriggled and made efforts for a time. The
hotel that was used as a hospital, and to which he had helped
carry the wounded men from the Zeppelin earlier in the day,
suddenly ran up the Geneva flag. The town that had seemed so
quiet had evidently been concealing a considerable number of
Germans, and they were now concentrating to hold the central
power-house. He wondered what ammunition they might have. More
and more of the Asiatic flying-machines came into the conflict.
They had disposed of the unfortunate Geman drachenflieger and
were now aiming at the incipient aeronautic park,--the electric
gas generators and repair stations which formed the Geman base.
Some,landed, and their aeronauts took cover and became energetic
infantry soldiers. Others hovered above the fight, their men
ever and again firing shots down at some chance exposure below.
The firing came in paroxysms; now there would be a watchful lull
and now a rapid tattoo of shots, rising to a roar. Once or twice
flying machines, as they circled warily, came right overhead, and
for a time Bert gave himself body and soul to cowering.
Ever and again a larger thunder mingled with the rattle and
reminded him of the grapple of airships far above, but the nearer
fight held his attention.
Abruptly something dropped from the zenith; something like a
barrel or a huge football.
CRASH! It smashed with an immense report. It had fallen among
the grounded Asiatic aeroplanes that lay among the turf and
flower-beds near the river. They flew in scraps and fragments,
turf, trees, and gravel leapt and fell; the aeronauts still lying
along the canal bank were thrown about like sacks, catspaws flew
across the foaming water. All the windows of the hotel hospital
that had been shiningly reflecting blue sky and airships the
moment before became vast black stars. Bang!--a second followed.
Bert looked up and was filled with a sense of a number of
monstrous bodies swooping down, coming down on the whole affair
like a flight of bellying blankets, like a string of vast
dish-covers. The central tangle of the battle above was circling
down as if to come into touch with the power-house fight. He got
a new effect of airships altogether, as vast things coming down
upon him, growing swiftly larger and larger and more
overwhelming, until the houses over the way seemed small, the
American rapids narrow, the bridge flimsy, the combatants
infinitesimal. As they came down they became audible as a
complex of shootings and vast creakings and groanings and
beatings and throbbings and shouts and shots. The fore-shortened
black eagles at the fore-ends of the Germans had an effect of
actual combat of flying feathers.
Some of these fighting airships came within five hundred feet of
the ground. Bert could see men on the lower galleries of the
Germans, firing rifles; could see Asiatics clinging to the ropes;
saw one man in aluminium diver's gear fall flashing head-long
into the waters above Goat Island. For the first time he saw the
Asiatic airships closely. From this aspect they reminded him
more than anything else of colossal snowshoes; they had a curious
patterning in black and white, in forms that reminded him of the
engine-turned cover of a watch. They had no hanging galleries,
but from little openings on the middle line peeped out men and
the muzzles of guns. So, driving in long, descending and
ascending curves, these monsters wrestled and fought. It was
like clouds fighting, like puddings trying to assassinate each
other. They whirled and circled about each other, and for a time
threw Goat Island and Niagara into a smoky twilight, through
which the sunlight smote in shafts and beams. They spread and
closed and spread and grappled and drove round over the rapids,
and two miles away or more into Canada, and back over the Falls
again. A Geman caught fire, and the whole crowd broke away from
her flare and rose about her dispersing, leaving her to drop
towards Canada and blow up as she dropped. Then with renewed
uproar the others closed again. Once from the men in Niagara
city came a sound like an ant-hill cheering. Another Geman
burnt, and one badly deflated by the prow of an antagonist,
flopped out of action southward.
It became more and more evident that the Germans were getting the
worst of the unequal fight. More and more obviously were they
being persecuted. Less and less did they seem to fight with any
object other than escape. The Asiatics swept by them and above
them, ripped their bladders, set them alight, picked off their
dimly seen men in diving clothes, who struggled against fire and
tear with fire extinguishers and silk ribbons in the inner
netting. They answered only with ineffectual shots. Thence the
battle circled back over Niagara, and then suddenly the Germans,
as if at a preconcerted signal, broke and dispersed, going east,
west, north, and south, in open and confused flight. The
Asiatics, as they realised this, rose to fly above them and after
them. Only one little knot of four Germans and perhaps a dozen
Asiatics remained fighting about the Hohenzollern and the Prince
as he circled in a last attempt to save Niagara.
Round they swooped once again over the Canadian Fall, over the
waste of waters eastward, until they were distant and small, and
then round and back, hurrying, bounding, swooping towards the one
gaping spectator.
The whole struggling mass approached very swiftly, growing
rapidly larger, and coming out black and featureless against the
afternoon sun and above the blinding welter of the Upper Rapids.
It grew like a storm cloud until once more it darkened the sky.
The flat Asiatic airships kept high above the Germans and behind
them, and fired unanswered bullets into their gas-chambers and
upon their flanks--the one-man flying-machines hovered and
alighted like a swarm of attacking bees. Nearer they came, and
nearer, filling the lower heaven. Two of the Germans swooped and
rose again, but the Hohenzollern had suffered too much for that.
She lifted weakly, turned sharply as if to get out of the battle,
burst into flames fore and aft, swept down to the water, splashed
into it obliquely, and rolled over and over and came down stream
rolling and smashing and writhing like a thing alive, halting and
then coming on again, with her torn and bent propeller still
beating the air. The bursting flames spluttered out again in
clouds of steam. It was a disaster gigantic in its dimensions.
She lay across the rapids like an island, like tall cliffs, tall
cliffs that came rolling, smoking, and crumpling, and collapsing,
advancing with a sort of fluctuating rapidity upon Bert. One
Asiatic airship--it looked to Bert from below like three hundred
yards of pavement--whirled back and circled two or three times
over that great overthrow, and half a dozen crimson
flying-machines danced for a moment like great midges in the
sunlight before they swept on after their fellows. The rest of
the fight had already gone over the island, a wild crescendo of
shots and yells and smashing uproar. It was hidden from Bert now
by the trees of the island, and forgotten by him in the nearer
spectacle of the huge advance of the defeated Geman airship.
Something fell with a mighty smashing and splintering of boughs
unheeded behind him.
It seemed for a time that the Hohenzollern must needs break her
back upon the Parting of the Waters, and then for a time her
propeller flopped and frothed in the river and thrust the mass of
buckling, crumpled wreckage towards the American shore. Then the
sweep of the torrent that foamed down to the American Fall caught
her, and in another minute the immense mass of deflating
wreckage, with flames spurting out in three new places, had
crashed against the bridge that joined Goat Island and Niagara
city, and forced a long arm, as it were, in a heaving tangle
under the central span. Then the middle chambers blew up with a
loud report, and in another moment the bridge had given way and
the main bulk of the airship, like some grotesque cripple in
rags, staggered, flapping and waving flambeaux to the crest of
the Fall and hesitated there and vanished in a desperate suicidal
leap.
Its detached fore-end remained jammed against that little island,
Green Island it used to be called, which forms the stepping-stone
between the mainland and Goat Island's patch of trees.
Bert followed this disaster from the Parting of the Waters to the
bridge head. Then, regardless of cover, regardless of the
Asiatic airship hovering like a huge house roof without walls
above the Suspension Bridge, he sprinted along towards the north
and came out for the first time upon that rocky point by Luna
Island that looks sheer down upon the American Fall. There he
stood breathless amidst that eternal rush of sound, breathless
and staring.
Far below, and travelling rapidly down the gorge, whirled
something like a huge empty sack. For him it meant--what did it
not mean?--the Geman air-fleet, Kurt, the Prince, Europe, all
things stable and familiar, the forces that had brought him, the
forces that had seemed indisputably victorious. And it went down
the rapids like an empty sack and left the visible world to Asia,
to yellow people beyond Christendom, to all that was terrible and
strange!
Remote over Canada receded the rest of that conflict and vanished
beyond the range of his vision....
War in the Air Chapter 7 ...
War in the Air Chapter 9