and splintered by the
iron hail of artillery, and of towns and villages, reduced to heaps
of ruins, still smouldering with the fires that had destroyed them.

No more eloquent object-lesson in the horrors of what is called
civilised warfare could well have been found than the scene which was
visible from the decks of the air-ships. The promised fruits of a
whole year of patient industry had been withered in a few hours under
the storm-blast of war; homes which but a few days before had
sheltered stalwart, well-fed peasants and citizens, were now mere
heaps of blackened brick and stone and smoking thatches.

Streets which had been the thoroughfares of peaceful industrious
folk, who had no quarrel with the Powers of the earth, or with any of
their kind, were now strewn with corpses and encumbered with ruins,
and the few survivors, more miserable than those who had died, were
crawling, haggard and starving, amidst the wrecks of their vanished
prosperity, seeking for some scanty morsels of food to prolong life
if only for a few more days of misery and nights of sleepless
anxiety.

As the sun rose and shed its midsummer splendour, as if in sublime
mockery, over the scene of suffering and desolation, hideous features
of the landscape were brought into stronger and more horrifying
relief; the scorched and trampled fields were seen to be strewn with
unburied corpses of men and horses, and ploughed up with cannon shot
and torn into great irregular gashes by shells that had buried
themselves in the earth and then exploded.

It was evident that some frightful tragedy must have taken place in
this region not many hours before the air-ships had arrived upon the
scene. And this, in fact, had been the case. Barely three days
previously the advance guard of the Russian army of the North had
been met and stubbornly but unsuccessfully opposed by the remnants of
the German army of the East, which, driven back from the frontier,
was retreating in good order to join the main force which had
concentrated about Berlin, under the command of the Emperor, there to
fight out the supreme struggle, on the issue of which depended the
existence of that German Empire which fifty years before had been so
triumphantly built up by the master-geniuses of the last generation.

After a flight of a little over two hours the flotilla came in sight
of the Russian army lying between Cuestrin on the right and
Frankfort-on-Spree on the left. The distance be