oreshadowed the
horrors of the aerial war. Moreover, before the twentieth century the
world had had but one experience, and that a comparatively light one,
in the Communist insurrection of Paris, 1871, of the possibilities of a
modern urban population under warlike stresses.

A second peculiarity of airship war as it first came to the world that
also made for social collapse, was the ineffectiveness of the early
air-ships against each other. Upon anything below they could rain
explosives in the most deadly fashion, forts and ships and cities lay at
their mercy, but unless they were prepared for a suicidal grapple they
could do remarkably little mischief to each other. The armament of the
huge German airships, big as the biggest mammoth liners afloat, was one
machine gun that could easily have been packed up on a couple of mules.
In addition, when it became evident that the air must be fought for, the
air-sailors were provided with rifles with explosive bullets of oxygen
or inflammable substance, but no airship at any time ever carried as
much in the way of guns and armour as the smallest gunboat on the navy
list had been accustomed to do. Consequently, when these monsters met in
battle, they manoeuvred for the upper place, or grappled and fought like
junks, throwing grenades fighting hand to hand in an entirely medieval
fashion. The risks of a collapse and fall on either side came near to
balancing in every case the chances of victory. As a consequence, and
after their first experiences of battle, one finds a growing tendency on
the part of the air-fleet admirals to evade joining battle, and to seek
rather the moral advantage of a destructive counter attack.

And if the airships were too ineffective, the early drachenflieger were
either too unstable, like the German, or too light, like the Japanese,
to produce immediately decisive results. Later, it is true, the
Brazilians launched a flying-machine of a type and scale that was
capable of dealing with an airship, but they built only three or four,
they operated only in South America, and they vanished from history
untraceably in the time when world-bankruptcy put a stop to all further
engineering production on any considerable scale.

The third peculiarity of aerial warfare was that it was at once
enormously destructive and entirely indecisive. It had this unique
feature, that both sides lay open to punitive attack. In all previous
forms of war, both by land and sea, t