CHAPTER XXXIX
THE LAST FIGHT
It so happened that on the first night the German Emperor saw the cometwithout the aid of a telescope he was attacked by one of those fits ofhysteria which, according to ancient legend, are the hereditary curse ofthe House of Brandenburg. He had made possible that which had beenimpossible for over a thousand years--he had invaded England in force,and he had established himself and his Allies in all the greatestfortress-camps of south-eastern England. After all, the story of thecomet might be a freak of the scientific imagination; there might besome undetected error in the calculations. One great mistake had beenmade already, either by the comet or its discoverer--why not another?
"No," he said to himself, as he stood in front of the headquarters atAldershot looking up at the comet, "we've heard about you before, myfriend. Astronomers and other people have prophesied a dozen times thatyou or something like you were going to bring about the end of theworld, but somehow it never came off; whereas it is pretty certain thatthe capture of London will come off if it is only properly managed. Atanyrate, I am inclined to back my chances of taking London against yoursof destroying it."
And so he made his decision. He sent a telegram to Dover ordering anaerogram to be sent to John Castellan, whose address was now, of course,anywhere in the air or sea; the message was to be repeated from all theContinental stations until he was found. It contained the firstcapitulation that the War Lord of Germany had ever made. He accepted theterms of his Admiral of the Air and asked him to bring his fleet thefollowing day to assist in a general assault on London--London oncetaken, John Castellan could have the free hand that he had asked for.
In twelve hours a reply came back from the Jotunheim in Norway.Meanwhile, the Kaiser, as Generalissimo of the Allied Forces,telegraphed orders to all the commanders of army corps in England toprepare for a final assault on the positions commanding London withintwenty-four hours. At the same time he sent telegraphic orders to allthe centres of mobilisation in Europe, ordering the advance of allpossible reinforcements with the least delay. It was his will that fourmillion men should march on London that week, and, in spite of theprotests of the Emperor of Austria and the Tsar, his will was obeyed.
So the truce was broken and the millions advanced, as it were over thebrink of Eternity, towards London. But the reinforcements never came.Every transport that steamed out of Bremen, Hamburg, Kiel, Antwerp,Brest or Calais, vanished into the waters; for now the whole squadron oftwelve _Ithuriels_ had been launched and had got to work, and theBritish fleets from the Mediterranean, the China Seas and the NorthAtlantic, had once more asserted Britain's supremacy on the seas. Inaddition to these, ten first-class battleships, twelve first and fifteensecond-class cruisers and fifty destroyers had been turned out by theHome yards, and so the British Islands were once more ringed with anunbreakable wall of steel. One invasion had been accomplished, but nowno other was possible. The French Government absolutely refused to sendany more men. The Italian armies had crossed the Alps at three points,and every soldier left in France was wanted to defend her own fortressesand cities from the attack of the invader.
But, despite all this, the War Lord held to his purpose; and that nightthe last battle ever fought between civilised nations began, and whenthe sun rose on the sixteenth of April, its rays lit up what wasprobably the most awful scene of carnage that human eyes had ever lookedupon. The battle-line of the invaders had extended from Sheerness toReading in a sort of irregular semicircle, and it was estimatedafterwards that not less than a million and a half of killed and woundedmen, fifty thousand horses and hundreds of disabled batteries of lightand heavy artillery strewed the long line of defeat and conquest.
The British aerial fleet of twenty ships had made victory for thedefenders a practical certainty. As Admiral Hingeston had told the Tsar,they could both out-fly and out-shoot the _Flying Fishes_. This they didand more. The moment that a battery got into position half a dozensearchlights were concentrated on it. Then came a hail of shells, and aseries of explosions which smashed the guns to fragments and killedevery living thing within a radius of a hundred yards. Infantry andcavalry shared the same fate the moment that any formation was made foran attack on the British positions; the storm of fire was made ten-foldmore terrible by the unceasing bombardment from the air; and thebrilliant glow of the searchlights thrown down from a height of athousand feet or so along the lines of the attacking forces made thework of the defenders comparatively easy, for the man in a fight who cansee and is not seen is worth several who are seen and yet fight in thedark.
But the assailants were exposed to an even more deadly danger thanartillery or rifle fire. The catastrophe which had overwhelmed theBritish Fleet in Dover Harbour was repeated with ten-fold effect; butthis time the tables were turned. The British aerial fleet hunted the_Flying Fishes_ as hawks hunt partridges, and whenever one of them wasfound over a hostile position a shell from the silent, flameless gunshit her, and down she went to explode like a volcano amongst masses ofcavalry, infantry and artillery, and of this utter panic was the onlynatural result.
Eleven out of the twelve _Flying Fishes_ were thus accounted for. Whathad become of the twelfth no one knew. It might have been partiallycrippled and fallen far away from the great battlefield; or it mighthave turned tail and escaped, and in this case it was a practicalcertainty, at least in Lennard's mind, that it was John Castellan's ownvessel and that he, seeing that the battle was lost, had taken her awayto some unknown spot in order to fulfil the threat contained in hisletter, and for this reason five of the British airships were at oncedespatched to mount guard over the great cannon at Bolton.
The defeat of the Allies both by land and sea, though accomplished atthe eleventh hour of the world's threatened fate, had been so completeand crushing, and the death-total had reached such a ghastly figure,that Austria, Russia and France flatly refused to continue the Alliance.After all the tremendous sacrifice that had been made in men, money andmaterial they had not even reached London. From their outposts on theSurrey hills they could see the vast city, silent and apparentlysleeping under its canopy of hazy clouds, but that was all. It was stillas distant from them as the poles; and so the Allies looked upon it andthen upon their dead, and admitted, by their silence if not by theirwords, that Britain the Unconquered was unconquerable still.
The German Emperor's fit had passed. Even he was appalled when upon thatmemorable morning he received the joint note of his three Allies andlearnt the awful cost of that one night's fighting.
Just as he was countersigning the Note of Capitulation in theheadquarters at Aldershot, the _Auriole_ swung round from the northwardand descended on to the turf flying the flag of truce. He saw itthrough the window, got up, put his right hand on the butt of therevolver in his hip-pocket, thought hard for one fateful moment, thentook it away and went out.
At the gate he met Lord Kitchener; they exchanged salutes and shookhands, and the Kaiser said:
"Well, my lord, what are the terms?"
K. of K. laughed, simply because he couldn't help it. The absolute hardbusiness of the question went straight to the heart of the best businessman in the British Army.
"I am not here to make or accept terms, your Majesty," he said. "I amonly the bearer of a message, and here it is."
Then he handed the Kaiser an envelope bearing the Royal Arms.
"I am instructed to take your reply back as soon as possible," hecontinued. Then he saluted again and walked away towards the _Auriole_.
The Kaiser opened the envelope and read--an invitation to lunch from hisuncle, Edward of England, and a request to bring his august colleagueswith him to talk matters over. There was no hint of battle, victory ordefeat. It was a quite commonplace letter, but all the same it was oneof those triumphs of diplomacy which only the first diplomatist inEurope knew how to achieve. Then he too laughed as he folded up theletter and went to Lord Kitchener and said:
"This is only an invitation to lunch, and you have told me
you are nothere to propose or take terms. That, of course, was official, butpersonally--"
K. of K. stiffened up, and a harder glint came into his eyes.
"I can say nothing personally, your Majesty, except to ask you toremember my reply to Cronje."
The Kaiser remembered that reply of three words, "Surrender, or fight,"and he knew that he could not fight, save under a penalty of utterdestruction. He went back into his room, brought back the joint notewhich he had just received, and gave it to Lord Kitchener, just as itwas, without even putting it into an envelope, saying:
"That is our answer. We are beaten, and those who lose must pay."
Lord Kitchener looked over the note and said, in a somewhat dry tone:
"This, your Majesty, I read as absolute surrender."
"It is," said William the Second, his hand instinctively going to thehilt of his sword. Lord Kitchener shook his head, and said very quietlyand pleasantly:
"No, your Majesty, not that. But," he said, looking up at the four flagswhich were still flying above the headquarters, "I should be obliged ifyou would give orders to haul those down and hoist the Jack instead."
There was no help for it, and no one knew better than the Kaiser thestrength there was behind those quietly-spoken words. The awful lessonof the night before had taught him that this beautiful cruiser of theair which lay within a few yards of him could in a few moments rise intothe air and scatter indiscriminate death and destruction around her, andso the flags came down, the old Jack once more went up, and Aldershotwas English ground again.
Wherefore, not to enter into unnecessary details, the _Auriole_, insteadof making the place a wilderness as Lord Kitchener had quite determinedto do, became an aerial pleasure yacht. Orderlies were sent to theRussian, Austrian and French headquarters, and an hour later the chiefsof the Allies were sitting in the deck saloon of the airship, flying atabout sixty miles an hour towards London.
The lunch at Buckingham Palace was an entirely friendly affair. KingEdward had intended it to be a sort of international shake-hands allround. The King of Italy was present, as the _Columbia_ had beendespatched early in the morning to bring him from Rome, and had pickedup the French President on the way back at Paris. The King gave thefirst and only toast, and that was:
"Your Majesties and Monsieur le President, in the name of Humanity, Iask you to drink to Peace."
They drank, and so ended the last war that was ever fought on Britishsoil.
The World Peril of 1910 Page 40