but also in no small
degree to the hopeless unpreparedness of the British home armies to meet
an invasion, which both military and naval experts had simply refused to
believe possible.

The seizure of the line from Dover to Chatham had been accomplished in a
single night. A dozen airships patrolled the air ahead of the advancing
German forces, which of course far outnumbered the weak and
hastily-collected British forces which could be brought against them,
and which, attacked at once by land and from the air, never really had a
chance.

It was the most perfectly conducted invasion ever planned. The
construction trains which went in advance on both lines carried sections
of metals of English gauge, already fastened to sleepers, and ready to
lay down. Every little bridge and culvert had been known and was
provided for. Not a bolt nor a fishplate had been forgotten, and
moreover John Castellan's operations from the air had reduced the
destruction to a minimum, and the consequence was that twelve hours
after the Kaiser had landed at Dover he found himself in his
headquarters at Canterbury, whence the British garrison had been forced
to retire after heavy fighting along the lines of wooded hills behind
Maidstone.

It was the old, old story, the story of every war that England had gone
into and "muddled through" somehow; but with two differences. Her
soldiers had never had to fight an enemy in the skies before, and--there
was no time now to straighten out the muddle, even if every able-bodied
man in the United Kingdom had been trained soldiers, as the invaders
were.

But there was another element in the situation. Incredible as it might
seem to those ignorant of the tremendous forces brought into play, the
home fleets of Europe had been destroyed, practically to a ship, within
three days and nights. The narrow seas were deserted. On the morning of
the seventeenth, four transports attempting to cross from Hamburg to
Ramsgate, carrying a force of men, horses and light artillery, which was
intended to operate as a flying column along the northern shores of
Kent, had been rammed and sent to the bottom within fifteen minutes half
way between land and land, and not a man nor an animal had escaped.

There was no news from the expeditions which had been sent against Hull
and Newcastle--all the cables had been cut, save the transatlantic
lines, the cutting of which the United States had already declared they
would consider as a