ds. Englishmen turned in disgust from the slow, complex,
civilised methods of their national politics to this uncompromising,
forceful figure. Frenchmen believed in him. Poems were written to him in
American.

He made the war.

Quite equally with the rest of the world, the general German population
was taken by surprise by the swift vigour of the Imperial government.
A considerable literature of military forecasts, beginning as early as
1906 with Rudolf Martin, the author not merely of a brilliant book of
anticipations, but of a proverb, "The future of Germany lies in the
air," had, however, partially prepared the German imagination for some
such enterprise.

2

Of all these world-forces and gigantic designs Bert Smallways knew
nothing until he found himself in the very focus of it all and gaped
down amazed on the spectacle of that giant herd of air-ships. Each one
seemed as long as the Strand, and as big about as Trafalgar Square. Some
must have been a third of a mile in length. He had never before seen
anything so vast and disciplined as this tremendous park. For the first
time in his life he really had an intimation of the extraordinary and
quite important things of which a contemporary may go in ignorance. He
had always clung to the illusion that Germans were fat, absurd men, who
smoked china pipes, and were addicted to knowledge and horseflesh and
sauerkraut and indigestible things generally.

His bird's-eye view was quite transitory. He ducked at the first shot;
and directly his balloon began to drop, his mind ran confusedly upon how
he might explain himself, and whether he should pretend to be Butteridge
or not. "O Lord!" he groaned, in an agony of indecision. Then his eye
caught his sandals, and he felt a spasm of self-disgust. "They'll think
I'm a bloomin' idiot," he said, and then it was he rose up desperately
and threw over the sand-bag and provoked the second and third shots.

It flashed into his head, as he cowered in the bottom of the car, that
he might avoid all sorts of disagreeable and complicated explanations by
pretending to be mad.

That was his last idea before the airships seemed to rush up about him
as if to look at him, and his car hit the ground and bounded and pitched
him out on his head....

He awoke to find himself famous, and to hear a voice crying,
"Booteraidge! Ja! Jai Herr Booteraidge! Selbst!"

He was lying on a little patch of grass beside one of the main avenues
of the aero