people running out of the houses,
watching buildings collapse and fires begin. As the airships sailed
along they smashed up the city as a child will shatter its cities of
brick and card. Below, they left ruins and blazing conflagrations and
heaped and scattered dead; men, women, and children mixed together as
though they had been no more than Moors, or Zulus, or Chinese. Lower
New York was soon a furnace of crimson flames, from which there was no
escape. Cars, railways, ferries, all had ceased, and never a light lit
the way of the distracted fugitives in that dusky confusion but the
light of burning. He had glimpses of what it must mean to be down
there--glimpses. And it came to him suddenly as an incredible discovery,
that such disasters were not only possible now in this strange,
gigantic, foreign New York, but also in London--in Bun Hill! that the
little island in the silver seas was at the end of its immunity, that
nowhere in the world any more was there a place left where a Smallways
might lift his head proudly and vote for war and a spirited foreign
policy, and go secure from such horrible things.

CHAPTER VII. THE "VATERLAND" IS DISABLED

1

And then above the flames of Manhattan Island came a battle, the first
battle in the air. The Americans had realised the price their waiting
game must cost, and struck with all the strength they had, if haply they
might still save New York from this mad Prince of Blood and Iron, and
from fire and death.

They came down upon the Germans on the wings of a great gale in
the twilight, amidst thunder and rain. They came from the yards of
Washington and Philadelphia, full tilt in two squadrons, and but for one
sentinel airship hard by Trenton, the surprise would have been complete.

The Germans, sick and weary with destruction, and half empty of
ammunition, were facing up into the weather when the news of this onset
reached them. New York they had left behind to the south-eastward, a
darkened city with one hideous red scar of flames. All the airships
rolled and staggered, bursts of hailstorm bore them down and forced
them to fight their way up again; the air had become bitterly cold. The
Prince was on the point of issuing orders to drop earthward and trail
copper lightning chains when the news of the aeroplane attack came to
him. He faced his fleet in line abreast south, had the drachenflieger
manned and held ready to cast loose, and ordered a general ascent into
the free