ut an
ant-hill kicked to pieces by a fool!

"Think of it, Smallways: there's war everywhere! They're smashing up
their civilisation before they have made it. The sort of thing the
English did at Alexandria, the Japanese at Port Arthur, the French at
Casablanca, is going on everywhere. Everywhere! Down in South America
even they are fighting among themselves! No place is safe--no place is
at peace. There is no place where a woman and her daughter can hide and
be at peace. The war comes through the air, bombs drop in the night.
Quiet people go out in the morning, and see air-fleets passing
overhead--dripping death--dripping death!"

CHAPTER VIII. A WORLD AT WAR

1

It was only very slowly that Bert got hold of this idea that the
whole world was at war, that he formed any image at all of the crowded
countries south of these Arctic solitudes stricken with terror and
dismay as these new-born aerial navies swept across their skies. He
was not used to thinking of the world as a whole, but as a limitless
hinterland of happenings beyond the range of his immediate vision. War
in his imagination was something, a source of news and emotion, that
happened in a restricted area, called the Seat of War. But now the whole
atmosphere was the Seat of War, and every land a cockpit. So closely had
the nations raced along the path of research and invention, so secret
and yet so parallel had been their plans and acquisitions, that it was
within a few hours of the launching of the first fleet in Franconia
that an Asiatic Armada beat its west-ward way across, high above the
marvelling millions in the plain of the Ganges. But the preparations
of the Confederation of Eastern Asia had been on an altogether more
colossal scale than the German. "With this step," said Tan Ting-siang,
"we overtake and pass the West. We recover the peace of the world that
these barbarians have destroyed."

Their secrecy and swiftness and inventions had far surpassed those of
the Germans, and where the Germans had had a hundred men at work the
Asiatics had ten thousand. There came to their great aeronautic parks
at Chinsi-fu and Tsingyen by the mono-rails that now laced the whole
surface of China a limitless supply of skilled and able workmen, workmen
far above the average European in industrial efficiency. The news of the
German World Surprise simply quickened their efforts. At the time of the
bombardment of New York it is doubtful if the Germans had three hu