CHAPTER XXXIV.
THE PATH OF CONQUEST.
This narrative does not in any sense pretend to be a detailed historyof the war, but only of such phases of it as more immediately concernthe working out of those deep-laid and marvellously-contrived plansdesigned by their author to culminate in nothing less than thecollapse of the existing fabric of Society, and the upheaval of thewhole basis of civilisation.
It will therefore be impossible to follow the troops of the Allianceand the League through the different campaigns which were beingsimultaneously carried out in different parts of Europe. The mostthat can be done will be to present an outline of the leading eventswhich, operating throughout a period of nearly three months, preparedthe way for the final catastrophe in which the tremendous issues ofthe world-war were summed up.
The fall of Berlin was the first decisive blow that had been struckduring the war. Under it the federation of kingdoms and states whichhad formed the German Empire fell asunder almost instantly, and thewhole fabric collapsed like a broken bubble. The shock was feltthroughout the length and breadth of Europe, and it was immediatelyseen that nothing but a miracle could save the whole of CentralEurope from falling into the hands of the League.
Its immediate results were the surrender of Magdeburg, Brunswick,Hanover, and Bremen. Hamburg, strongly garrisoned by British andGerman troops, supported by a powerful squadron in the Elbe, anddefended by immense fortifications on the landward side, alonereturned a flat defiance to the summons of the Tsar. The road to thewestward, therefore, lay entirely open to his victorious troops. Asfor Hamburg, it was left for the present under the observation of acorps of reconnaissance to be dealt with when its time came.
When Berlin fell the position of affairs in Europe may be brieflydescribed as follows:--The French army had taken the field nearlyfive millions strong, and this immense force had been divided into anArmy of the North and an Army of the East. The former, consisting ofabout two millions of men, had been devoted to the attack on theBritish and German forces holding an almost impregnable positionbehind the chain of huge fortresses known at present as the BelgianQuadrilateral.
This Army of the North, doubtless acting in accordance with thepreconceived schemes of operations arranged by the leaders of theLeague, had so far contented itself with a series of harassingattacks upon different points of the Allied position, and had made noforward movement in force. The Army of the East, numbering nearlythree million men, and divided into fifteen army corps, had crossedthe German frontier immediately on the outbreak of the war, and atthe same moment that the Russian Armies of the North and South hadcrossed the eastern Austro-German frontier, and the Italian army hadforced the passes of the Tyrol.
The whole of the French fleet of war-balloons had been attached tothe Army of the East with the intention, which had been realisedbeyond the most sanguine expectations, of overrunning and subjugatingCentral Europe in the shortest possible space of time. It had sweptlike a destroying tempest through the Rhine Provinces, leavingnothing in its track but the ruins of towns and fortresses, and widewastes of devastated fields and vineyards.
Before the walls of Munich it had effected a junction with theItalian army, consisting of ten army corps, numbering two millionmen. The ancient capital of Bavaria fell in three days under theassault of the aerial fleet and the overwhelming numbers of theattacking force. Then the Franco-Italian armies advanced down thevalley of the Danube and invested Vienna, which, in spite of theheroic efforts of what had been left of the Austrian army after thedisastrous conflicts on the Eastern frontier, was stormed and sackedafter three days and nights of almost continuous fighting, and themost appalling scenes of bloodshed and destruction, four days afterthe surrender of the German Emperor to the Tsar had announced thecollapse of what had once been the Triple Alliance.
From Vienna the Franco-Italian armies continued their way down thevalley of the Danube, and at Budapest was joined by the northerndivision of the Russian Army of the South, and from there the mightyflood of destruction rolled south-eastward until it overflowed theBalkan peninsula, sweeping everything before it as it went, until itjoined the force investing Constantinople.
The Turkish army, which had retreated before it, had concentratedupon Gallipoli, where, in conjunction with the allied British andTurkish Squadrons holding the Dardanelles, it prepared to advance tothe relief of Constantinople.
The final attack upon the Turkish capital had been purposely delayeduntil the arrival of the French war-balloons, and as soon as theseappeared upon the scene the work of destruction instantlyrecommenced. After four days of bombardment by sea and land, and fromthe air, and a rapid series of what can only be described aswholesale butcheries, the ancient capital of the Sultan shared thefate of Berlin and Vienna, and after four centuries and a half theTurkish dominion in Europe died in its first stronghold.
Meanwhile one of the wings of the Franco-Italian army had made adescent upon Gallipoli, and after forty-eight hours' incessantfighting had compelled the remnant of the Turkish army, which it thuscut off from Constantinople, to take refuge on the Turkish andBritish men-of-war under the protection of the guns of the fleet. Inview of the overwhelming numbers of the enemy, and the terribleeffectiveness of the war-balloons, it was decided that any attempt toretake Constantinople, or even to continue to hold the Dardanelles,could only result in further disaster.
The forts of the Dardanelles were therefore evacuated and blown up,and the British and Turkish fleet, with the remains of the Turkisharmy on board, steamed southward to Alexandria to join forces withthe British Squadron that was holding the northern approaches to theSuez Canal. There the Turkish troops were landed, and the Alliedfleets prepared for the naval battle which the release of the RussianBlack Sea Squadron, through the opening of the Dardanelles, wasconsidered to have rendered inevitable.
Five days later was fought a second battle of the Nile, a battlecompared with which the former conflict, momentous as it had been,would have seemed but child's play. On the one side AdmiralBeresford, in command of the Mediterranean Squadron, had collectedevery available ship and torpedo-boat to do battle for the defence ofthe all-important Suez Canal, and opposed to him was an immensearmament formed by the junction of the Russian Black Sea Squadronwith the Franco-Italian fleet, or rather those portions of it whichhad survived the attacks, or eluded the vigilance of the BritishAdmiral.
The battle, fought almost on the ancient battle-ground of Nelson andCollingwood, was incomparably the greatest sea-fight in the historyof war.
The fleet under Admiral Beresford's command consisted of fifty-fivebattleships of the first and second class, forty-six armoured andseventy-two unarmoured cruisers, fifty-four gunboats, and two hundredand seventy torpedo-boats; while the Franco-Italian Allied fleetsmustered between them forty-six battleships, seventy-five armouredand sixty-three unarmoured cruisers, forty gunboats, and two hundredand fifty torpedo-boats.
The battle began soon after sundown on the 24th of August, and ragedcontinuously for over sixty hours. The whole issue of the fight wasthe question of the command of the Mediterranean, and the Britishline of communication with India and the East _via_ the Suez Canal.
The prize was well worthy of the tremendous struggle that the twocontending forces waged for it; and from the two Admirals in commandto the boys employed on the most insignificant duties about theships, every one of the combatants seemed equally impressed with themagnitude of the momentous issues at stake.
To the League, victory meant a deadly blow inflicted upon the onlyenemy now seriously to be reckoned with. It meant the severing of theBritish Empire into two portions, and the cutting of the oneremaining channel of supply upon which the heart of the Empire nowdepended for its nutrition. To destroy Admiral Beresford's fleetwould be to achieve as great a triumph on the sea as the armies ofthe League had achieved on land by the taking of Berlin, Vienna, andConstantinople. On the other hand, the defeat of the Franco-Italianfleets meant complete command of the Mediterranean, and the
abilityto destroy in detail all the important sea-board fortresses andarsenals of the League that were situated on its shores.
It meant the keeping open of the Suez Canal, the maintenance ofcommunication with India and Australia by the shortest route, and,what was by no means the least important consideration, thevindication of British prestige in Egypt, the Soudan, and India. Itwas with these enormous gains and losses before their eyes that thetwo forces engaged and fought as perhaps men had never fought witheach other in the world before. Everything that science andexperience could suggest was done by the leaders of both sides. Humanlife was counted as nothing in the balance, and deeds of the mostreckless heroism were performed in countless instances as the mightystruggle progressed.
With such inflexible determination was the battle waged on eitherside, and so appalling was the destruction accomplished by theweapons brought into play, that by sunrise on the morning of the27th, more than half the opposing fleets had been destroyed, and ofthe remainder the majority were so crippled that a continuance of thefight had become a matter of physical impossibility.
What advantage remained appeared to be on the side of the remains ofthe Franco-Italian fleet; but this was speedily negatived an hourafter sunrise by the appearance of a fresh British Squadron,consisting of the five battleships, fifteen cruisers, and a largeflotilla of gunboats and torpedo-boats which had passed through theCanal during the night from Aden and Suakim, and appeared on thescene just in time to turn the tide of battle decisively in favour ofthe British Admiral.
As soon as this new force got into action it went to work withterrible effectiveness, and in three hours there was not a singlevessel that was still flying the French or Italian flag. The victoryhad, it is true, been bought at a tremendous price, but it wascomplete and decisive, and at the moment that the last of the shipsof the League struck her flag, Admiral Beresford stood in the sameglorious position as Sir George Rodney had done a hundred andtwenty-two years before, when he saved the British Empire in theever-memorable victory of the 12th of April 1782.
The triumph in the Mediterranean was, however, only a set-off to adisaster which had occurred more than five weeks previously in theAtlantic. The Russian fleet, which had broken the blockade of theSound, with the assistance of the _Lucifer_, had, after coaling atAberdeen, made its way into the Atlantic, and there, in conjunctionwith the Franco-Italian fleets operating along the Atlantic steamerroute, had, after a series of desperate engagements, succeeded inbreaking up the line of British communication with America andCanada.
This result had been achieved mainly in consequence of the contrastbetween the necessary methods of attack and defence. On the one hand,Britain had been compelled to maintain an extended line of oceandefence more than three thousand miles in length, and her ships hadfurther been hampered by the absolute necessity of attending, first,to the protection of the Atlantic liners, and, secondly, to wardingoff isolated attacks which were directed upon different parts of theline by squadrons which could not be attacked in turn withoutbreaking the line of convoy which it was all-essential to preserveintact.
For two or three weeks there had been a series of running fights; butat length the ocean chain had broken under the perpetual strain, anda repulse inflicted on the Irish Squadron by a superior force ofFrench, Italian, and Spanish warships had settled the question of thecommand of the Atlantic in favour of the League. The immediate resultof this was that food supplies from the West practically stopped.
Now and then a fleet Atlantic greyhound ran the blockade and broughther priceless cargo into a British port; but as the weeks went bythese occurrences became fewer and further between, till the timenews was received in London of the investment of the fortresses ofthe Quadrilateral by the innumerable hosts of the League, broughttogether by the junction of the French and Russian Armies of theNorth and the conquerors of Vienna and Constantinople, who hadreturned on their tracks after garrisoning their conquests in theEast.
Food in Britain, already at war prices, now began to rise stillfurther, and soon touched famine prices. Wheat, which in the lastdecade of the nineteenth century had averaged about L9 a ton, rose toover L31 a ton, its price two years before the Battle of Waterloo.Other imported food-stuffs, of course, rose in proportion with thestaple commodity, and the people of Britain saw, at first dimly, thenmore and more clearly, the real issue that had been involved in thedepopulation of the rural districts to swell the populations of thetowns, and the consequent lapse of enormous areas of land either intopasturage or unused wilderness.
In other words, Britain began to see approaching her doors an enemybefore whose assault all human strength is impotent and all valourunavailing. Like Imperial Rome, she had depended for her food supplyupon external sources, and now these sources were one by one beingcut off.
The loss of the command of the Atlantic, the breaking of the Balticblockade, and the consequent closing of all the continental portssave Hamburg, Amsterdam, Rotterdam, and Antwerp, had left herentirely dependent upon her own miserably insufficient internalresources and the Mediterranean route to India and the East.
More than this, too, only Hamburg, Antwerp, and the fortresses of theQuadrilateral now stood between her and actual invasion,--thatsupreme calamity which, until the raid upon Aberdeen, had been forcenturies believed to be impossible.
Once let the League triumph in the Netherlands, as it had done inCentral and South-Eastern Europe, and its legions would descend likean avalanche upon the shores of England, and the Lion of the Seaswould find himself driven to bay in the stronghold which he had heldinviolate for nearly a thousand years.
The Angel of the Revolution: A Tale of the Coming Terror Page 35