ready raiding London and
Paris when the advance fleets from the Asiatic air-parks, the first
intimation of a new factor in the conflict, were reported from Burmah
and Armenia.

Already the whole financial fabric of the world was staggering when
that occurred. With the destruction of the American fleet in the North
Atlantic, and the smashing conflict that ended the naval existence of
Germany in the North Sea, with the burning and wrecking of billions of
pounds' worth of property in the four cardinal cities of the world, the
fact of the hopeless costliness of war came home for the first time,
came, like a blow in the face, to the consciousness of mankind. Credit
went down in a wild whirl of selling. Everywhere appeared a phenomenon
that had already in a mild degree manifested itself in preceding periods
of panic; a desire to SECURE AND HOARD GOLD before prices reached
bottom. But now it spread like wild-fire, it became universal. Above was
visible conflict and destruction; below something was happening far more
deadly and incurable to the flimsy fabric of finance and commercialism
in which men had so blindly put their trust. As the airships fought
above, the visible gold supply of the world vanished below. An epidemic
of private cornering and universal distrust swept the world. In a few
weeks, money, except for depreciated paper, vanished into vaults, into
holes, into the walls of houses, into ten million hiding-places. Money
vanished, and at its disappearance trade and industry came to an end.
The economic world staggered and fell dead. It was like the stroke
of some disease it was like the water vanishing out of the blood of
a living creature; it was a sudden, universal coagulation of
intercourse....

And as the credit system, that had been the living fortress of the
scientific civilisation, reeled and fell upon the millions it had
held together in economic relationship, as these people, perplexed and
helpless, faced this marvel of credit utterly destroyed, the airships
of Asia, countless and relentless, poured across the heavens, swooped
eastward to America and westward to Europe. The page of history
becomes a long crescendo of battle. The main body of the British-Indian
air-fleet perished upon a pyre of blazing antagonists in Burmah; the
Germans were scattered in the great battle of the Carpathians; the vast
peninsula of India burst into insurrection and civil war from end to
end, and from Gobi to Morocco rose the s