destruction and confusion
its predecessor had made. The American gunfire ceased, except for a few
heroic shots, but they still steamed on, obstinately unsubdued, bloody,
battered, and wrathfully resistant, spitting bullets at the airships
and unmercifully pounded by the German ironclads. But now Bert had but
intermittent glimpses of them between the nearer bulks of the airships
that assailed them....

It struck Bert suddenly that the whole battle was receding and growing
small and less thunderously noisy. The Vaterland was rising in the air,
steadily and silently, until the impact of the guns no longer smote
upon the heart but came to the ear dulled by distance, until the four
silenced ships to the eastward were little distant things: but were
there four? Bert now could see only three of those floating, blackened,
and smoking rafts of ruin against the sun. But the Bremen had two boats
out; the Theodore Roosevelt was also dropping boats to where the drift
of minute objects struggled, rising and falling on the big, broad
Atlantic waves.... The Vaterland was no longer following the fight. The
whole of that hurrying tumult drove away to the south-eastward, growing
smaller and less audible as it passed. One of the airships lay on
the water burning, a remote monstrous fount of flames, and far in the
south-west appeared first one and then three other German ironclads
hurrying in support of their consorts....

5

Steadily the Vaterland soared, and the air-fleet soared with her and
came round to head for New York, and the battle became a little thing
far away, an incident before the breakfast. It dwindled to a string of
dark shapes and one smoking yellow flare that presently became a mere
indistinct smear upon the vast horizon and the bright new day, that was
at last altogether lost to sight...

So it was that Bert Smallways saw the first fight of the airship and the
last fight of those strangest things in the whole history of war:
the ironclad battleships, which began their career with the floating
batteries of the Emperor Napoleon III in the Crimean war and lasted,
with an enormous expenditure of human energy and resources, for seventy
years. In that space of time the world produced over twelve thousand
five hundred of these strange monsters, in schools, in types, in series,
each larger and heavier and more deadly than its predecessors. Each in
its turn was hailed as the last birth of time, most in their turn were
sold f