fifty thousand horses and hundreds of disabled batteries of light
and heavy artillery strewed the long line of defeat and conquest.

The British aerial fleet of twenty ships had made victory for the
defenders a practical certainty. As Admiral Hingeston had told the Tsar,
they could both out-fly and out-shoot the _Flying Fishes_. This they did
and more. The moment that a battery got into position half a dozen
searchlights were concentrated on it. Then came a hail of shells, and a
series of explosions which smashed the guns to fragments and killed
every living thing within a radius of a hundred yards. Infantry and
cavalry shared the same fate the moment that any formation was made for
an attack on the British positions; the storm of fire was made ten-fold
more terrible by the unceasing bombardment from the air; and the
brilliant glow of the searchlights thrown down from a height of a
thousand feet or so along the lines of the attacking forces made the
work of the defenders comparatively easy, for the man in a fight who can
see and is not seen is worth several who are seen and yet fight in the
dark.

But the assailants were exposed to an even more deadly danger than
artillery or rifle fire. The catastrophe which had overwhelmed the
British Fleet in Dover Harbour was repeated with ten-fold effect; but
this time the tables were turned. The British aerial fleet hunted the
_Flying Fishes_ as hawks hunt partridges, and whenever one of them was
found over a hostile position a shell from the silent, flameless guns
hit her, and down she went to explode like a volcano amongst masses of
cavalry, infantry and artillery, and of this utter panic was the only
natural result.

Eleven out of the twelve _Flying Fishes_ were thus accounted for. What
had become of the twelfth no one knew. It might have been partially
crippled and fallen far away from the great battlefield; or it might
have turned tail and escaped, and in this case it was a practical
certainty, at least in Lennard's mind, that it was John Castellan's own
vessel and that he, seeing that the battle was lost, had taken her away
to some unknown spot in order to fulfil the threat contained in his
letter, and for this reason five of the British airships were at once
despatched to mount guard over the great cannon at Bolton.

The defeat of the Allies both by land and sea, though accomplished at
the eleventh hour of the world's threatened fate, had been so complete
and crushing,