which had
up to that time succeeded in maintaining their neutrality. Belgium,
Holland, Denmark, Switzerland, Poland, Austria Hungary, Lombardy, and
Servia, had been devastated. Five million adult male human beings had
been exterminated by the machines of war, by disease, and by famine. Ten
million had been crippled or invalided. Fifteen million women and
children had been rendered widows or orphans. Industry there was none.
No crops were harvested or sown. The ocean was devoid of sails.
Throughout European Christendom women had taken the place of men as
field hands, labourers, mechanics, merchants, and manufacturers. The
amalgamated debt of the involved nations, amounting to more than
$100,000,000,000, had bankrupted the world. Yet the starving armies
continued to slaughter one another.

Siberia was a vast charnel-house of Tartars, Chinese, and Russians.
Northern Africa was a holocaust. Within sixty miles of Paris lay an army
of two million Germans, while three million Russians had invested
Berlin. In Belgium an English army of eight hundred and fifty thousand
men faced an equal force of Prussians and Austrians, neither daring to
take the offensive.

The inventive genius of mankind, stimulated by the exigencies of war,
had produced a multitude of death-dealing mechanisms, most of which had
in turn been rendered ineffective by some counter-invention of another
nation. Three of these products of the human brain, however, remained
unneutralized and in large part accounted for the impasse at which the
hostile armies found themselves. One of these had revolutionized warfare
in the field, and the other two had destroyed those two most important
factors of the preliminary campaign--the aeroplane and the submarine.
The German dirigibles had all been annihilated within the first ten
months of the war in their great cross-channel raid by Pathe contact
bombs trailed at the ends of wires by high-flying French planes. This,
of course, had from the beginning been confidently predicted by the
French War Department. But by November, 1915, both the allied and the
German aerial fleets had been wiped from the clouds by Federston's
vortex guns, which by projecting a whirling ring of air to a height of
over five thousand feet crumpled the craft in mid-sky like so many
butterflies in a simoon.

The second of these momentous inventions was Captain Barlow's device for
destroying the periscopes of submarines, thus rendering them blind and