or old iron. Only about five per cent of them ever fought in a
battle. Some foundered, some went ashore, and broke up, several rammed
one another by accident and sank. The lives of countless men were spent
in their service, the splendid genius, and patience of thousands of
engineers and inventors, wealth and material beyond estimating; to their
account we must put, stunted and starved lives on land, millions of
children sent to toil unduly, innumerable opportunities of fine living
undeveloped and lost. Money had to be found for them at any cost--that
was the law of a nation's existence during that strange time. Surely
they were the weirdest, most destructive and wasteful megatheria in the
whole history of mechanical invention.

And then cheap things of gas and basket-work made an end of them
altogether, smiting out of the sky!...

Never before had Bert Smallways seen pure destruction, never had he
realised the mischief and waste of war. His startled mind rose to the
conception; this also is in life. Out of all this fierce torrent of
sensation one impression rose and became cardinal--the impression of the
men of the Theodore Roosevelt who had struggled in the water after the
explosion of the first bomb. "Gaw!" he said at the memory; "it might
'ave been me and Grubb!... I suppose you kick about and get the water in
your mouf. I don't suppose it lasts long."

He became anxious to see how Kurt was affected by these things. Also he
perceived he was hungry. He hesitated towards the door of the cabin and
peeped out into the passage. Down forward, near the gangway to the men's
mess, stood a little group of air sailors looking at something that
was hidden from him in a recess. One of them was in the light diver's
costume Bert had already seen in the gas chamber turret, and he was
moved to walk along and look at this person more closely and examine the
helmet he carried under his arm. But he forgot about the helmet when he
got to the recess, because there he found lying on the floor the dead
body of the boy who had been killed by a bullet from the Theodore
Roosevelt.

Bert had not observed that any bullets at all had reached the Vaterland
or, indeed, imagined himself under fire. He could not understand for a
time what had killed the lad, and no one explained to him.

The boy lay just as he had fallen and died, with his jacket torn and
scorched, his shoulder-blade smashed and burst away from his body and
all the left side of