from which flying-machine raids
could be made. For a time they had everything their own way in this, and
then, as this story has told, the lost secret of the Butteridge machine
came to light, and the conflict became equalized and less conclusive
than ever. For these small flying-machines, ineffectual for any large
expedition or conclusive attack, were horribly convenient for guerilla
warfare, rapidly and cheaply made, easily used, easily hidden. The
design of them was hastily copied and printed in Pinkerville and
scattered broadcast over the United States and copies were sent to
Europe, and there reproduced. Every man, every town, every parish that
could, was exhorted to make and use them. In a little while they were
being constructed not only by governments and local authorities, but by
robber bands, by insurgent committees, by every type of private person.
The peculiar social destructiveness of the Butteridge machine lay in
its complete simplicity. It was nearly as simple as a motor-bicycle. The
broad outlines of the earlier stages of the war disappeared under its
influence, the spacious antagonism of nations and empires and races
vanished in a seething mass of detailed conflict. The world passed at a
stride from a unity and simplicity broader than that of the Roman Empire
at its best, to as social fragmentation as complete as the robber-baron
period of the Middle Ages. But this time, for a long descent down
gradual slopes of disintegration, comes a fall like a fall over a cliff.
Everywhere were men and women perceiving this and struggling desperately
to keep as it were a hold upon the edge of the cliff.

A fourth phase follows. Through the struggle against Chaos, in the wake
of the Famine, came now another old enemy of humanity--the Pestilence,
the Purple Death. But the war does not pause. The flags still fly.
Fresh air-fleets rise, new forms of airship, and beneath their swooping
struggles the world darkens--scarcely heeded by history.

It is not within the design of this book to tell what further story, to
tell how the War in the Air kept on through the sheer inability of
any authorities to meet and agree and end it, until every organised
government in the world was as shattered and broken as a heap of china
beaten with a stick. With every week of those terrible years history
becomes more detailed and confused, more crowded and uncertain. Not
without great and heroic resistance was civilisation borne down. Out
of