tions until he was found. It contained the first
capitulation that the War Lord of Germany had ever made. He accepted the
terms of his Admiral of the Air and asked him to bring his fleet the
following day to assist in a general assault on London--London once
taken, John Castellan could have the free hand that he had asked for.

In twelve hours a reply came back from the Jotunheim in Norway.
Meanwhile, the Kaiser, as Generalissimo of the Allied Forces,
telegraphed orders to all the commanders of army corps in England to
prepare for a final assault on the positions commanding London within
twenty-four hours. At the same time he sent telegraphic orders to all
the centres of mobilisation in Europe, ordering the advance of all
possible reinforcements with the least delay. It was his will that four
million men should march on London that week, and, in spite of the
protests of the Emperor of Austria and the Tsar, his will was obeyed.

So the truce was broken and the millions advanced, as it were over the
brink of Eternity, towards London. But the reinforcements never came.
Every transport that steamed out of Bremen, Hamburg, Kiel, Antwerp,
Brest or Calais, vanished into the waters; for now the whole squadron of
twelve _Ithuriels_ had been launched and had got to work, and the
British fleets from the Mediterranean, the China Seas and the North
Atlantic, had once more asserted Britain's supremacy on the seas. In
addition to these, ten first-class battleships, twelve first and fifteen
second-class cruisers and fifty destroyers had been turned out by the
Home yards, and so the British Islands were once more ringed with an
unbreakable wall of steel. One invasion had been accomplished, but now
no other was possible. The French Government absolutely refused to send
any more men. The Italian armies had crossed the Alps at three points,
and every soldier left in France was wanted to defend her own fortresses
and cities from the attack of the invader.

But, despite all this, the War Lord held to his purpose; and that night
the last battle ever fought between civilised nations began, and when
the sun rose on the sixteenth of April, its rays lit up what was
probably the most awful scene of carnage that human eyes had ever looked
upon. The battle-line of the invaders had extended from Sheerness to
Reading in a sort of irregular semicircle, and it was estimated
afterwards that not less than a million and a half of killed and wounded
men,