le
swimmy in the head at first. As 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
seen bloodshed. Nice, quiet, law-abiding Germans they've been so far....
Here they are--in for it. They're a bit squeamy now, but you wait till
they've got their hands in."

He reflected. "Everybody's getting a bit strung up," he said.

He turned again to his maps. Bert sat crumpled up in the corner,
apparently heedless of him. For some time both kept silence.

"What did the Prince want to go and 'ang that chap for?" asked Bert,
suddenly.

"That was all right," said Kurt, "that was all right. QUITE right. Here
were the orders, plain as the nose on your face, and here was that fool
going about with matches--"

"Gaw! I shan't forget that bit in a 'urry," said Bert irrelevantly.

Kurt did not answer him. He was measuring their distance from New York
and speculating. "Wonder what the American aeroplanes are like?" he
said. "Something like our drachenflieger.... We shall know by this time
to-morrow.... I wonder what we shall know? I wonder. Suppose, after all,
they put up a fight.... Rum sort of fight!"

He whistled softly and mused. Presently he fretted out of the cabin, and
later Bert found him in the twilight upon the swinging platform, staring
ahead, and speculating about the things that might happen on the morrow.
Clouds veiled the sea again, and the long straggling wedge of air-ships
rising and falling as they flew seemed like a flock of strange new
births in a Chaos that had neither earth nor water but only mist and
sky.

CHAPTER VI. HOW WAR CAME TO NEW YORK

1

The City of New York was in the year of the German attack the largest,
richest, in many respects the most splendid, and in some, the wickedest
city the world had ever seen. She was the supreme type of the City of
the Scientific Commercial Age; she displayed its greatness, its power,
its ruthless anarchic enterprise, and its social disorganisation most
strikingly and completely. She had long ousted London from her pride of
place as the modern Babylon, she was the centre of the world's finance,
the world's trade, and the world's pleasure; and men likened her to
the apocalyptic cities of the ancient prophets. She sat drinking up the
wealth of a continent as Rome once drank the wealth of the Mediterranean
and Babylon the wealth of the east. In h