rible tidings over the land. What the beacon fires
were in the days of the Armada, these humble heralds of Fate were in the
twentieth century.

"War begun--Portsmouth destroyed--Fleet sunk."

The six terrible words were not quite exact, of course, but they were
near enough to the truth to sound like the voice of Fate in the ears of
the millions whose fathers and fathers' fathers back through six
generations had never had their midnight rest so rudely broken.

Lights gleamed out of darkened windows, and front doors were flung open
in street after street, as the war-cry echoed down it. Any coin that
came first to hand, from a penny to a sovereign, was eagerly offered for
the single, hurriedly-printed sheets, but the business instincts of the
newsboys rose superior to the crisis, and nothing less than a shilling
was accepted. Streams of men and boys on bicycles with great bags of
specials slung on their backs went tearing away, head down and pedals
whirling, north, south, east and west into the suburbs. Newsagents flung
their shops open, and in a few minutes were besieged by eager, anxious
crowds, fighting for the first copies. There was no more sleep for man
or woman in London that night, though the children slept on in happy
unconsciousness of what the morrow was to bring forth.

What happened in London was happening almost simultaneously all over the
kingdom. For more than a hundred years the British people had worked and
played and slept in serene security, first behind its wooden walls, and
then behind the mighty iron ramparts of its invincible Fleets, and now,
like a thunderbolt from a summer sky, came the paralysing tidings that
the first line of defence had been pierced by a single blow, and the
greatest sea stronghold of England rendered defenceless--and all this
between sunset and midnight of a November day.

Was it any wonder that men looked blankly into each other's eyes, and
asked themselves and each other how such an unheard-of catastrophe had
come about, and what was going to happen next? The first and universal
feeling was one of amazement, which amounted almost to mental paralysis,
and then came a sickening sense of insecurity. For two generations the
Fleet had been trusted implicitly, and invasion had been looked upon
merely as the fad of alarmists, and the theme of sensational
story-writers. No intelligent person really trusted the army, although
its ranks, such as they were, were filled with as gall