; one would see triumph
in what another read as a cue for flight and despair. It is as true of
the Battle of Niagara as of the Battle of Lissa that it was not a battle
but a bundle of "battlettes"!

To such a spectator as Bert it presented itself as a series of
incidents, some immense, some trivial, but collectively incoherent. He
never had a sense of any plain issue joined, of any point struggled
for and won or lost. He saw tremendous things happen and in the end his
world darkened to disaster and ruin.

He saw the battle from the ground, from Prospect Park and from Goat
Island, whither he fled.

But the manner in which he came to be on the ground needs explaining.

The Prince had resumed command of his fleet through wireless telegraphy
long before the Zeppelin had located his encampment in Labrador. By his
direction the German air-fleet, whose advance scouts had been in contact
with the Japanese over the Rocky Mountains, had concentrated upon
Niagara and awaited his arrival. He had rejoined his command early in
the morning of the twelfth, and Bert had his first prospect of the Gorge
of Niagara while he was doing net drill outside the middle gas-chamber
at sunrise. The Zeppelin was flying very high at the time, and far below
he saw the water in the gorge marbled with froth and then away to the
west the great crescent of the Canadian Fall shining, flickering and
foaming in the level sunlight and sending up a deep, incessant thudding
rumble to the sky. The air-fleet was keeping station in an enormous
crescent, with its horns pointing south-westward, a long array of
shining monsters with tails rotating slowly and German ensigns now
trailing from their bellies aft of their Marconi pendants.

Niagara city was still largely standing then, albeit its streets were
empty of all life. Its bridges were intact; its hotels and restaurants
still flying flags and inviting sky signs; its power-stations running.
But about it the country on both sides of the gorge might have been
swept by a colossal broom. Everything that could possibly give cover
to an attack upon the German position at Niagara had been levelled as
ruthlessly as machinery and explosives could contrive; houses blown up
and burnt, woods burnt, fences and crops destroyed. The mono-rails had
been torn up, and the roads in particular cleared of all possibility of
concealment or shelter. Seen from above, the effect of this wreckage was
grotesque. Young woods had been de