The War in the Air

ncountered. He filled the Smallways soul with passionate dread and antipathy. For a long time Bert sat alone in Kurt's c

r the news that wireless telegraphy was bringing to the airship in th

it at last

said, "get off this locker." And he proceeded to rout out two books and a case of maps. He spread them on the folding-table, and stood regardin

it, Smallway

said Bert, broke

their Miles Standish--she's one of their biggest--has sunk with all hands. Torpedoes, I suppose. She was a bigger ship than the Karl der Grosse, b

lk, and so he delivered a lectur

W. It's a good day off us, anyhow, and they're all going south-west by south at full pelt

atic station and San Francisco. The North Atlantic squadron was the sole American force on her eastern shore, it was returning from a friendly visit to France and Spain, and was pumping oil-fuel from tenders in mid-Atlantic--for most of its ships were steamships--when the international situation became acute. It was made up of four battleships and five armoured cruisers ranking almost with battleships, not one of which was of a later date than 1913. The Americans had indeed grown so accustomed to the idea that Great Britain could be trusted to keep the peace of the Atlantic that a naval attack on the easte

ll more vital to save the canal from any attack that might prevent the return of the main fleet from the Pacific. No doubt, said Kurt, this was now making records across that ocean, "unless the Japanese have had the same idea as the Germans." It was obviously beyond human possibility that the American North Atlantic fleet could hope to meet and defeat the

of the Dornhof aeronautic park and the possibility of an attack coming upon them not only by sea, but by the air. But it is curious that so discredited were the newspapers of that per

ship and talking of guns and tonnage, of ships and their build and powers and speed, of strategic points, and bases of

r on the map. "They've been saying things like this in the p

od stuff. I bet she's got a shot or two home by now if old Schneider's up to form. Just think of it! There they are whacking away at each other, great guns going, shells exploding, magazines bursting, ironwork flying about like straw in a gale, all we've been dreaming of for years! I suppose we shall fly right away to New York--just as though it wasn't anything at al

e petty officers hushed them, it rose to a great uproar. There was a new bulletin, but what it said he did not gather except that it concerned the Barbarossa. Some of the men stared at him, and he heard the name of "Booteraidge" se

olling swing of the airship increasing. He clutched the rail tightly and felt rather giddy. They were now out of sight of land, and over blue water

ot inconvenience Bert, whose luck it was to be of that mysterious gastric disposition which constitutes a good sailor. He slept well, but in the small hours the light awok

wind. I can't make it out. We've turned away from New Yor

lking to himsel

blankets on the locker until the bugle summoned him to his morning ration. That consumed, he went out on the little gallery; but he could see nothing but eddying

and soared up suddenly in a high, clear sky, going, K

fish might rise and become visible from deep water. He stared for a moment and then ran out to the little gallery to see this wonder better. Below was cloudland and storm, a great drift of tumbled weather going hard away to the north-east, and the air about him was clear and cold an

e kept to himself whatever came until past midday. Then the bulletins c

cried. "Gott im Himmel! Der alte Barba

ging cabin, and for a ti

in fragments, and the chaps one knew--Gott!--flying about too! Scalding water squirting, fire, and the smash, smash of the guns! They smash

s?" asked Small

at with her nose broken, sagging about! There never was such a battle!--never before! Good ships and good men on both sides,--and a storm and the night and the dawn and all in the open ocean full steam ahead! N

ain, and stared at it wi

lying out of her furnaces, and the stokers and engineers scalded and dead. Men I've messed with, Sma

an't have all the luck in a battle. Poor old

maps. He infected Smallways with a sense of the immediacy of this battle that was going on just over the curve of the earth. But when Bert went down to the gallery the world was empty and still, a clear inky-blue sky above and a rippled veil of still, thin sunlit cirrus below, through which one saw a racing drift of rain-cloud, and never a glimpse of sea. Thr

a far away to the east. Smallways heard men hurrying along the passage, and was drawn out to the gallery, where he found nearly a dozen officers collected and scrutinising the helpless ruins of the battleship th

"it is like seeing an old friend with his nose

peered beneath his hands, ignored by every one, seeing the

a and the Kansas City. They discovered her proximity, dropped back until she was nearly broadside on to the former battleship, and signalled up the Theodore Roosevelt and the little Monitor. As dawn broke she had found herself hostess of a circle. The fight had not lasted five minutes before the appearance of the Hermann to the east, and immediately a

stored to him--"Gott! Da waren Albrecht--der gute

istance he remained on the gallery peering through his glasses, and

were worked to make that Barbarossa, and there were men in it--one does not meet the like of them every day. Albrecht--there was a man named Albrec

n. He could see him dimly by the window, which he had unscrewed and opened, peering down. That cold, clear, attenuated light which i

he row?"

the lieutenant.

d heavy thud of guns, one, two, a p

n, and Bert, following Kurt's pointing finger, saw dimly through the colourless veil first a red glow, then a quick red flash, and then at a little distance from it another. T

rang throug

mething in an excited tone, still

up?" cried Bert

he light passage. "You stay where you are, Smallways. You keep there

fighting vessels far below. In a moment, were they to drop like a ha

erland for which he could not account, and then he realised that the engines had slowed to an almost inaudible beat. He stuck his h

intense blue sky that still retained an occasional star. For a long time they hung, for an interminable time it seemed to him,

althy, noiseless descent. The obscurity deepened for a time, the last fading star on the horizon vanished, and he felt the cold presence of cloud. Then suddenly the glow beneath assumed distinct out

ad altered since the first contact of the fleets. By this time the American admiral, O'Connor, was fully informed of the existence of the airships, and he was no longer vitally concerned for Panama, since the submarine flotilla was reported arrived there from Key West, and the Delaware and Abraham Lincoln, two powerful and entirely modern ships, were already at Rio Grande, on the Pacific side of the canal. His manoeuvre was, however, delayed by a boiler explosion on board the Susquehanna, and dawn found this ship

Bert, however, the names of all these ships were unknown, and for a considerable time indeed, misled by the direction in which the combatants were moving, he imagined the Germans to be Americans and the Americans Germans. He saw what appeared to him to be a column of six battleships pursuing three others who were supported by a newcomer, until the fact that the Bremen and Weimar were firing into the Susquehanna upset his calculations. Then for a time he was hopelessly at a loss. The noise of the guns, too, confused him, they no longer seemed to boom; they went whack, whack, whack, whack, and each faint flash made his heart jump in anticipation of the instant impact. He saw these ironclads, too, not in profile, as he was accustomed to see ironclads in pictures, but in plan and curiously foreshortened. For the mos

speed of that ship. From that ship she must have been intermittently visible through the drifting clouds. The rest of the German fleet remained above the c

st have been to a battled-strained sailor suddenly glancing upward to discover that huge long silent shape overhead, vaster than any battleship, and trailing now from its hinder quarter a big German flag. Pre

med American fleet while the Prince by wireless telegraphy directed the movements of her consorts. Meanwhile the Vogel-stern and Preussen, each with half a dozen drachenflieger in tow, went full speed ahead and then dropped through the clouds, perhaps

fly to pieces as it hit the waves. He saw little men on the deck of the Theodore Roosevelt below, men foreshortened in plan into mere heads and feet, running out preparing to shoot at the others. Then the foremost flying-machine was rushing between Bert and the American's deck, and then bang! came the thunder of its bomb flung neatly at the forward barbette, and a thin little crackling of rifle shots in reply. Whack, whack, whack, went the quick-firing guns of the Americans' battery, and smash came an answering sh

rowing, pitiless light a number of minute, convulsively active animalcula scorched and struggling in the Theodore Roosevelt's foaming wake. What were they? Not men--surely not men? Those drowning, mangled little creatures tore with their clutching fingers at Bert's soul. "Oh, Gord!" he cried, "Oh, Gord!"

d more now to the east, blew up and vanished abruptly in a boiling, steaming welter. For a moment nothing was to be seen but tumbled water, and--then

nd apparently uninjured, and three or four were still in the air and coming round now in a wide circle to return to their mother airships. The American ironclads were no longer in column formation; the Theodore Roosevelt, badly damaged, had turned to the southeast, and th

a trivial sound like the noise of an ill-greased, ill-hung door th

irradiated the world. It came like a sudden smile in a scene of hate and terror. The cloud veil had vanished as if by m

the line, with her forward guns disabled, in a heap of wreckage, and the Monitor was in some grave trouble. These two had ceased fire altogether, and so had the Bremen and Weimar, all four ships lying within shot of each other in an involuntary truce and with their respective flags still displayed. Only

le faster than the ship below, pelted her thinly protected decks with bombs until they became sheets of detonating flame. So the airships passed one after the other along the American column as it sought to keep up its fight with the Furst Bismarck, the Hermann, and the Germanicus, and each airship added to the destruction and confusion its predecessor had

but were there four? Bert now could see only three of those floating, blackened, and smoking rafts of ruin against the sun. But the Bremen had two boats out; the Theodore Roosevelt was also dropping boats to where the drift of minute objects struggled, rising and falling on the big, broad Atlantic waves.... The Vaterland was no longer f

tle thing far away, an incident before the breakfast. It dwindled to a string of dark shapes and one smoking yellow flare that pr

in schools, in types, in series, each larger and heavier and more deadly than its predecessors. Each in its turn was hailed as the last birth of time, most in their turn were sold for old iron. Only about five per cent of them ever fought in a battle. Some foundered, some went ashore, and broke up, several rammed one another by accident and sank. The lives of countless men were spent in their service, the splendid genius, and patience of thousands of eng

asket-work made an end of them alt

all this fierce torrent of sensation one impression rose and became cardinal--the impression of the men of the Theodore Roosevelt who had struggled in the water after the explos

group of air sailors looking at something that was hidden from him in a recess. One of them was in the light diver's costume Bert had already seen in the gas chamber turret, and he was moved to walk along and look at this person more clos

land or, indeed, imagined himself under fire. He could not understa

ening to the man with the helmet, who made explanations and pointed to the round bullet hole in the floor and the smash in the panel of the passage upon which the still vicious missile had spent the residue of its energy. All the

he direction of the little gallery and something spok

lower, more respec

less natural. Down the passage appeared a group of figures,

saw the thing in the recess,

id he in

talking over his shoulder to V

lowed the gesture of Kurt's hand. He glared at the crump

esture towards the boy's bod

d on, finishing his sentence to Von Winterfeld

ordly figure of Prince Karl Albert gesturing aside the dead body of the Vaterland sailor. Hitherto he had rather liked the idea of war as being a jolly, s

he distinctive gentleness of the period. It was quite peculiar to the crowded townsmen of that time, and different altogether from the normal experience of any preceding age, that they never saw anything killed, never encountered, save through the mitig

r the airships. The man's defence was that he had grown so used to the notices and had been so preoccupied with his work that he hadn't applied them to himself; he pleaded, in his defence, what is indeed in military affairs another serious crime, inadvertency. He was tried by his captain, and the sentence confirmed by wireless tele

lambered up the outer netting to the upper sides. The officers appeared upon the machine-gun platforms. Bert thought it an altogether stupendous sight, looking down, as he was, upon the entire fleet. Far off below two steamers on the rippled blue water, one British and the other flying the American flag,

hiding matches or contemplating any kindred disobedience. Bert saw the man standing, a living, reluctant man, no doubt scared and rebellious enou

have died and swung edifyingly, but instead a more terrible thing happened; his head came right off, and

before him, and a sympathetic grunt c

ner, glared for some seconds, then turn

physically sick with the horror of this trifling incident. He found it far more drea

curled up on his locker, and looking very white and miserab

ck?" he

N

g. There's a good breeze coming up unde

id not

ith his maps. Then he fell thinking darkly. He roused himself pre

thi

eateningly. "Wh

saw that dead chap in the passage. I seen too much smashing and killing lately. That's the matt

it," said Kurt

y. I'm gettin' giddy. I didn't mind a bit being up in that balloon at first, but all this lo

to get off

for the killing, we've got to be blooded; that's all. We're tame, civilised men. And we've got to get blooded. I suppose there's not a dozen men on the ship who've really

body's getting a bit

mpled up in the corner, apparently heedle

to go and 'ang that chap f

TE right. Here were the orders, plain as the nose on your

that bit in a 'urry,"

ican aeroplanes are like?" he said. "Something like our drachenflieger.... We shall know by this time to-morr

ng ahead, and speculating about the things that might happen on the morrow. Clouds veiled the sea again, and the long straggling wedge of air-s