plunging, oversetting, soaring to the zenith and dropping to the ground,
they came to assail or defend the myriads below.

Secretly the Central European power had gathered his flying machines
together, and now he threw them as a giant might fling a handful of ten
thousand knives over the low country. And amidst that swarming flight
were five that drove headlong for the sea walls of Holland, carrying
atomic bombs. From north and west and south, the allied aeroplanes rose
in response and swept down upon this sudden attack. So it was that war
in the air began. Men rode upon the whirlwind that night and slew and
fell like archangels. The sky rained heroes upon the astonished earth.
Surely the last fights of mankind were the best. What was the heavy
pounding of your Homeric swordsmen, what was the creaking charge of
chariots, beside this swift rush, this crash, this giddy triumph, this
headlong swoop to death?

And then athwart this whirling rush of aerial duels that swooped and
locked and dropped in the void between the lamp-lights and the stars,
came a great wind and a crash louder than thunder, and first one and
then a score of lengthening fiery serpents plunged hungrily down upon
the Dutchmen's dykes and struck between land and sea and flared up again
in enormous columns of glare and crimsoned smoke and steam.

And out of the darkness leapt the little land, with its spires and
trees, aghast with terror, still and distinct, and the sea, tumbled with
anger, red-foaming like a sea of blood....

Over the populous country below went a strange multitudinous crying and
a flurry of alarm bells... .

The surviving aeroplanes turned about and fled out of the sky, like
things that suddenly know themselves to be wicked....

Through a dozen thunderously flaming gaps that no water might quench,
the waves came roaring in upon the land....

Section 8

'We had cursed our luck,' says Barnet, 'that we could not get to our
quarters at Alkmaar that night. There, we were told, were provisions,
tobacco, and everything for which we craved. But the main canal from
Zaandam and Amsterdam was hopelessly jammed with craft, and we were glad
of a chance opening that enabled us to get out of the main column and
lie up in a kind of little harbour very much neglected and weedgrown
before a deserted house. We broke into this and found some herrings in
a barrel, a heap of cheeses, and stone bottles of gin in the cellar;
and with this I cheered my