THE night of the 15th of May 2037 was passed in an agony of apprehension by nearly the whole of civilised humanity. The long threatened and universally feared thunder-cloud of war had at last loomed up over the serene horizon of peace in full view of the whole world.

Although the events of the last six years had to some extent prepared the minds of men for the impending disaster, now that the last hour of the long peace was really about to strike there were very, very few among the millions of non-combatants who were able to rise superior to the universal panic.

The ocean terrorism which had paralysed the commerce of the world five years and a half before, fearful as it had been, was, so far as the bulk of humanity was concerned, a terror of the unseen. Ships had gone out to sea and had vanished into the depths, leaving no trace behind them, but the hand that struck the blow had remained invisible.

Now, however, this same terror, magnified a thousandfold, was to come close up to the shores of lands whose inhabitants had never known what it was for man to raise his hand against his brother. To-morrow the sun would rise as usual, the earth would smile, the sea would dance, and the air grow bright and warm under his beams, yet air and earth and sea would be wholly strange to the eyes of men, for they would be invested with terrors hitherto only pictured by the fears of panic.

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The air would be charged with death. Beneath the laughing waves great battleships would be speeding swiftly, silently, and invisibly on their errands of destruction, and the fair face of earth would be scarred by the harrow of battle, and seared with the fires of murderous passion.

The ocean traffic of the world had been almost wholly at a standstill for nearly a month. Transports which could complete their voyages before the end of the truce had done so; but since the 1st of May only short voyages had been attempted, for it was known that escape from the attack of a submarine battleship would be absolutely impossible for any vessels that floated on the surface of the water.

The immediate results of this had of course been the dislocation of trade and commerce and ever-increasing scarcity of food in the great centres of population. Impossible, absurd even, as it still seemed to those who had not thoroughly recognised the tremendous gravity of the situation, the inhabitants of the magnificent cities of the old and new worlds were actually within measurable distance, even before a blow had been struck, of seeing the spectre of Famine cross the threshold of their palaces.

In a few days communications by land would be as difficult and as dangerous as those by sea, for, swift as the trains were, their speed was far excelled by that of the slowest air-ship, which could wreck them with a single shot. Bridges would be destroyed, stations blown up, and lines cut in a hundred places at once, till railway travelling would have to cease all over the world.

Thus the most splendid civilisation of all the ages stood trembling on the verge of destruction at the moment when the sleepless eyes of the inhabitants of Alexandria saw the first faint glow of the dawn brightening the eastern sky. No one knew where or how the first blow would be struck in the strange and terrible warfare for the commencement of which the rising of that morning’s sun gave the signal.

There were scarcely any elements in common with the war of the nineteenth century save the slaughter and destruction[255] that it would entail. There could be no marshalling of fleets or warships on the sea, for to be detected by an enemy would be coming very near to being destroyed. Every blow would have to be struck swiftly, silently, and without warning, for only one could be struck, and to fail would be to be lost.

So, too, in the air, as had been proved at Kerguelen and Mount Terror. Everything would depend upon the supreme strategy which enabled the first fatal shot to be sent home that would decide battle after battle without hope for the vanquished to recover from their defeat.

But after all it would be on land that the terrors of the new warfare would be most fearfully manifested. It needed but little effort of the highly-strung imaginations of those who were waiting for the world-tragedy to begin to picture vast armies, magnificent in their strength and splendid in their equipments, marching to grapple with each other on some field of Titanic strife. Suddenly and without warning they would be smitten by an invisible foe floating far above the clouds, or perhaps visible only as a tiny speck of light high in the central blue.

Their battalions would be torn to pieces, their regiments decimated and thrown into confusion, their commanders—the brains of the huge organisms—would have no such protection as they had in the wars of former times, for the aerial artillery would reach everywhere, and the Commander-in-Chief in his headquarters would be as much exposed as the private in his bivouac.

Thus the brain would be destroyed and the body reduced to impotence; disciplined armies would become lawless and unregulated hordes in a few days or weeks, and the organised slaughter of the battlefield would be exchanged for the butchery and plunder of the city carried by assault.

It was little wonder, then, that the world watched the ending of its last night of peace and the dawning of its first day of battle with feelings such as men had not felt for five generations, if, indeed, ever before in the history of man.

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It was not a mere war of nations with which men were confronted. The evil genius of a single woman had achieved the unheard-of feat of dividing the human race into two hostile forces so nearly balanced in strength that mutual destruction seemed a not improbable issue of what might after all prove to be the death-struggle of humanity, the collapse of civilisation and the sinking of a remnant of mankind back to the level of barbarians whose children would wander amidst the ruins of their forefathers’ habitations, and wonder what race of demigods had created the wondrous fabrics whose very fragments were splendid.

As the dawn flew round the world on that momentous morning every eye was turned towards the heavens, on every lip there was but one question: Where will the first blow be struck? and in every heart there was but one thought: Will it reach me or my dear ones?

The focus of all human interest was for a moment Alexandria, for it was known that from there the main expeditionary force was to be sent out to, if possible, effect a landing on the shores of Italy, while other expeditions were to start from Tripoli, Tunis, and Oran to effect landings in France and Spain. The bridge across the Straits of Gibraltar from Point Cires to Gualdamesi was to all intents and purposes neutral, since it would have been madness to send trains conveying troops across it when a single shot from the British battery at Gibraltar would have shattered the bridge to fragments.

The forces destined by the Sultan for the invasion of Europe would, therefore, either have to be conveyed in swift transports by sea, protected by squadrons of air-ships and flotillas of submarine battleships, or else they would have to go by land round the Levant by Syria, and so through Asia Minor to the shores of the Dardanelles and the Bosphorus.

As the European shores of these two straits were known to be defended by concealed batteries mounting guns a single shot from which would blow the biggest transport afloat out of the water, the Sultan had decided to make the attempt to[257] invade Italy, France, and Spain by sea, while the Russian forces, with their Asiatic allies, were to attack the central nations from the east.

So far, therefore, as could be foreseen, the Mediterranean would once more be the arena of strife, and on some part of its shores or its waters the first blow of the war would be struck. Every possible preparation for the attack upon Europe had been finally completed immediately after the return of Khalid from the coronation of Olga on the 11th, but beyond the fact that the coasts of Europe, from the Straits of Dover to the Golden Horn, were patrolled by Federation battleships, nothing was known of the dispositions which had been made for the defence of Europe.

Gibraltar, Minorca, Cape Spartivento, Mount Ida in Candia and Olympus in Cyprus formed a chain of Federation posts which, while they had been made impregnable to all attack save long-sustained bombardment from the air, rendered any attempt on the part of large fleets to cross the Mediterranean an extremely hazardous venture.

These stations were connected from Gibraltar to Cyprus by telephonic cables, buried beneath the floor of the sea to hide them from the enemy’s cruisers, and also by patrols of battleships constantly moving to and fro in touch with each other along the whole line, and this was the first barrier through which the Moslem Sultan had to force his way before he could land his armies upon the shores of Southern Europe.

This, too, formed what may be termed the first line of defence of the Federation and of Christendom, and although neither the Sultan nor the Tsarina was wholly aware of the fact, it had been strengthened to such a degree that it was expected to prove unbreakable even under the impact of the immense forces that would be brought to bear upon it.

When the sun at last rose over the hills of Syria and Sinai, and the watchers in the streets and on the housetops of Alexandria heard the voice of the Muezzin calling the first hour of prayer and the last hour of the world’s peace, the bright blue waves of the Inland Sea lay smiling and sparkling[258] in its earliest beams, betraying not a trace of the hidden forces which waited but for the signal that might come either from land or sea or sky to begin the work of desolation.

The harbours of the city were thronged with shipping, great transports lined the miles of quays whose network fronted the seaward verge of the Moslem capital. Some of the basins swarmed with the half-submerged hulls of scores of battleships waiting to take up their position as convoys to the flotilla which, if the Sultan’s plans succeeded, would, within the next twelve hours, land nearly four million troops on European soil.

In the air, at elevations varying from five hundred to ten thousand feet, a squadron of two hundred aerial cruisers kept watch and ward against a surprise from the upper regions of the air. By the time the day had fully dawned, land and sea and sky had been scanned in vain for a sign of an enemy’s presence.

The sailing of the flotilla of transports had been fixed for six o’clock by Alexandrian time, and already the battleships were moving out into the open to take up their places in advance of the fleet of transports. Fifty air-ships had ranged themselves in a long line to seaward at an elevation of two thousand feet to protect the transports from an aerial assault, and the transports themselves were moving out to form in the basin behind the breakwater, whence they were to commence their voyage.

Sultan Khalid, on board his aerial flagship Al Borak—named after the winged steed which, according to the old legend, had borne the Prophet from earth to the threshold of the Seventh Heaven—superintended in person the last preparations for the departure of his great armament. Flying hither and thither, now soaring and now sinking, he inspected first the cruisers of the air and then the flotillas of the seas, and at last, when all was ready, he took his place by one of the bow guns of the Al Borak to fire the shot that was to be the signal for the expedition to start.

But a higher intelligence and a greater tactical ability than his had already determined that the signal should be given[259] in very different fashion. Fifty miles to the south towards the Lybian desert, high in air, fifteen thousand feet above the earth, a solitary air-ship hung suspended in the central blue.

As the sun rose she had moved slowly forward towards the city. As she came within sight of it, Alan Arnold standing in her conning-tower saw through a telescope that commanded a range of a hundred miles the disposition of the aerial fleet above Alexandria. He marked down a group of five air-ships floating some five thousand feet above the centre of the city, and singled them out as the first victims of the war.

He was, of course, far out of range of gun-fire, and to have gone within range and fired on them would have been to expose his single ship to a concentrated hail of projectiles which would have scattered her in dust through the sky. So he determined to open the game of death and destruction by a stroke as dramatic as it was terrible.

He remembered how his ancestor, Richard Arnold, in the first Ithuriel, had rammed the Russian war-balloons to the north of Muswell Hill, and resolved to eclipse even that marvellous stroke of tactics. Obeying his will like a living creature, the mighty fabric under his control sank five thousand feet and then began to gather way on a slanting course towards the Moslem air-ships.

The propellers whirled faster and faster, and the quadruple wings undulated with ever-increasing velocity until the crowds in the streets of Alexandria saw something like a swift flash of blue light stream downward from the southern sky, and heard a long screaming roar as though the firmament was being rent in twain above them.

Then three of the air-ships floating in line above their heads seemed to break up and roll over. The crowds held their breath and pointed upwards with one accord in sudden horror, as the crippled air-ships dropped like stones towards the earth. In another moment they struck it, and then, as though the central fires of the earth had burst through in the heart of the great city, there came a crash and a shock that shook the ground like an earthquake spasm.

Three of the Air-Ships seemed to break up and roll over. Page 259.

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A vast dazzling volume of flame shot up from amidst a wide circle of blackened ruin, towers fell and roofs collapsed all round the focus of the explosion, the whole atmosphere above the city was convulsed, and the very sea itself seemed to writhe under the stress of the mighty shock, and so, leaving death and ruin and consternation behind her, the Avenger swept out over the Mediterranean at a speed that the eye could scarcely follow, after striking the first blow in the world-war of the twenty-first century.

To say that this sudden and unexpected catastrophe spread panic through the Moslem capital would be but a very inadequate description of the Avenger’s first blow in the world-war. Consternation, wild and unbounded, blanched every cheek, and made every heart stand still as the mighty roar of the explosion burst upon the deafened ears of the inhabitants and then instantly died into silence, broken only by the crash of falling ruins and the screams and groans of the wounded and dying.

The red spectre of war in its most frightful form had suddenly appeared to the terrified and horror-stricken vision of millions of men and women, scarce one of whom had ever seen a deed of violence done.

Khalid, like a wise leader, did all he could to prevent the panic spreading to the troops on board the transports by issuing peremptory orders for the expedition to start at once. At the same time he signalled for half a dozen air-ships to ascend as far as possible and attempt to discover the source from which the inexplicable attack had come, an errand destined to be entirely fruitless.

In orderly succession the hundred huge transports, each carrying from eight to ten thousand men, left the outer basin in two long lines in the rear of the fifty air-ships already in position.

A hundred submarine battleships took up their stations five hundred yards in advance of the first line of transports. Fifty of these sank to a depth of thirty feet, and shot two thousand yards ahead as soon as the whole flotilla was in motion, while the other fifty ran along the surface of the[261] water with their conning-towers just showing above the waves, ready to sink in obedience to any signal that their commanders might receive from the air-ships, which commanded an immense range of vision over the waters.

To all appearance the enemy was content with the one terrible blow that had already been struck. The smooth, sunlit sea betrayed no trace of a hostile vessel, and as far as the glasses of those on board the air-ships could sweep the sky nothing but the blue atmosphere, flecked here and there with white, fleecy clouds, could be seen.

But the Moslem commanders were far from being deceived by these peaceful appearances. From Sultan Khalid, who was commanding the expedition in person, to the engineers who worked the transports, all knew that the invisible line of the Federation patrols had to be passed somewhere in the depths of the sea before the shores of Italy could be reached.

The speed of the three flotillas was limited to twenty-five miles an hour, in order that there might be no headlong running into danger, and the commander of each of the submerged battleships had orders to rise to the surface the instant that his tell-tale needle denoted the presence of an enemy, and signal the fact to the rest of the squadron. The transports were then to stop, and were not to resume their passage until the battleships had cleared the way for them. The first division was to engage the enemy, while the second was to remain on the surface ready to defend the transports in case of need.

For six hours the expedition proceeded on its way north-west by west from Alexandria without interruption. The intention was to pass about a hundred miles to the south of the Federation post at Candia, between which island and the Cape Spartivento the ocean patrol would most likely be met with.

Soon after twelve those on board the Sultan’s flagship detected half a dozen little points of light shining amidst the waves to the nort............