and ammunition were seized, and six large cruisers
were taking in coal all night. The banks were also entered, and
the specie taken possession of, as indemnity for the town. At
eight o'clock the cruisers and battleships steamed out of the
river without doing further damage. The squadron from the Tay was
compelled to retire by the overwhelming force that the Russians
brought to bear upon it after Aberdeen surrendered.

Half an hour ago the Russian fleet was lost sight of proceeding
at full speed to the north-eastward. Our loss has been terribly
heavy. The fort and batteries have been destroyed, all the ships
have been sunk or disabled, and of the whole defending force
scarcely three hundred men remain. Captain Marchmont went down on
the _Ascalon_ with his flag flying, and fighting to the last
moment.

While the excitement caused by the news of the raid upon Aberdeen was
at its height, that is to say, on the morning of the 2nd of July,
intelligence was received in London of a tremendous disaster to the
Anglo-Teutonic Alliance. It was nothing less, in short, than the fall
of Berlin, the collapse of the German Empire, and the surrender of
the Kaiser and the Crown Prince to the Tsar. After nearly sixty hours
of almost continuous fighting, during which the fortifications had
been wrecked by the war-balloons, the German ammunition-trains burnt
and blown up by the fire-shells rained from the air, and the heroic
defenders of the city disorganised by the aerial bombardment of
melinite shells and cyanogen poison-bombs, and crushed by an
overwhelming force of not less than four million assailants. So fell
like a house of cards the stately fabric built up by the genius of
Bismarck and Moltke; and so, after bearing his part gallantly in the
death-struggle of his empire, had the grandson of the conqueror of
Sedan yielded up his sword to the victorious Autocrat of the Russias.

The terrible news fell upon London like the premonitory echo of an
approaching storm. The path of the triumphant Muscovites was now
completely open to the forts of the Belgian Quadrilateral, under the
walls of which they would form a junction, which nothing could now
prevent, with the beleaguering forces of France. Would the Belgian
strongholds be able to resist any more effectually than the
fortifications of Berlin had done the assaults of the terrible
war-balloons of the Tsar?

CHAPTER XXXIV.

TH