blinding flames squirted out in all directions from the point of
impact, and the little man who had jumped became, for an instant, a
flash of fire and vanished--vanished absolutely. The people running out
into the road took preposterous clumsy leaps, then flopped down and lay
still, with their torn clothes smouldering into flame. Then pieces of
the archway began to drop, and the lower masonry of the building to fall
in with the rumbling sound of coals being shot into a cellar. A faint
screaming reached Bert, and then a crowd of people ran out into the
street, one man limping and gesticulating awkwardly. He halted, and went
back towards the building. A falling mass of brick-work hit him and sent
him sprawling to lie still and crumpled where he fell. Dust and black
smoke came pouring into the street, and were presently shot with red
flame....

In this manner the massacre of New York began. She was the first of the
great cities of the Scientific Age to suffer by the enormous powers
and grotesque limitations of aerial warfare. She was wrecked as in the
previous century endless barbaric cities had been bombarded, because she
was at once too strong to be occupied and too undisciplined and proud to
surrender in order to escape destruction. Given the circumstances, the
thing had to be done. It was impossible for the Prince to desist, and
own himself defeated, and it was impossible to subdue the city except
by largely destroying it. The catastrophe was the logical outcome of
the situation, created by the application of science to warfare. It
was unavoidable that great cities should be destroyed. In spite of his
intense exasperation with his dilemma, the Prince sought to be moderate
even in massacre. He tried to give a memorable lesson with the minimum
waste of life and the minimum expenditure of explosives. For that night
he proposed only the wrecking of Broadway. He directed the air-fleet to
move in column over the route of this thoroughfare, dropping bombs, the
Vaterland leading. And so our Bert Smallways became a participant in one
of the most cold-blooded slaughters in the world's history, in which
men who were neither excited nor, except for the remotest chance of
a bullet, in any danger, poured death and destruction upon homes and
crowds below.

He clung to the frame of the porthole as the airship tossed and swayed,
and stared down through the light rain that now drove before the wind,
into the twilight streets, watching