r fancy when the tides stirred
it from its mooring--carrying it away, away through deeps or shallows
as the currents swerved.

CHAPTER XX

The pale parody on that sacred date which once had symbolised the
birth of Christ had come and gone; the ghastly year was nearing its
own death--the bloodiest year, for all its final triumph, that the
world had ever witnessed--_l'annee horrible_!

Nor was the end yet, of all this death and dying: for the Crimson
Tide, washing through Russia, eastward, seethed and eddied among the
wrecks of empires, lapping Poland's bones, splashing over the charred
threshold of the huns, creeping into the Balkans, crawling toward
Greece and Italy, menacing Scandinavia, and arousing the stern
watchers along the French frontier--the ultimate eastward barrier of
human liberty.

And unless, despite the fools who demur, that barrier be based upon
the Rhine, that barrier will fall one day.

Even in England, where the captive navies of the anti-Christ now
sulked at anchor under England's consecrated guns, some talked glibly
of rule by Soviet. All Ireland bristled now, baring its teeth at
government; vast armies, disbanding, were becoming dully restless; and
armed men, disarming, began to wonder what now might be their destiny
and what the destiny of the world they fought for.

And everywhere, among all peoples, swarmed the stealthy agents of the
Red Apocalypse, whispering discontent, hinting treasons, stirring the
unhappy to sullen anger, inciting the simple-minded to insanity, the
ignorant to revolution. For four years it had been a battle between
Light and Night; and now there threatened to be joined in battle the
uttermost forces of Evolution and Chaos--the spiritual Armageddon at
last, where Life and Light and Order must fight a final fight with
Degeneracy, Darkness and Death.

And always, everywhere, that hell-born Crimson Tide seemed to be
rising. All newspapers were full of it, sounding the universal alarm.
And Civilisation merely stared at the scarlet flood--gawked stupidly
and unstirring--while the far clamour of massacre throughout Russia
grew suddenly to a crashing discord in Berlin, shaking the whole world
with brazen dissonance.

Like the first ominous puff before the tempest, the deadly breath of
the Black Death--called "influenza," but known of old among the
verminous myriads of the East--swept over the earth from East to West.
Millions died; millions were yet to perish of