the
great mass of the industrial population seemed strangely indifferent
to the impending catastrophe which was hanging over the land. It
appeared to be impossible to make them believe that an invasion of
Britain was really at hand, and that the hour had come when every man
would be called upon to fight for the preservation of his own hearth
and home.

Vague threats of "eating the Russians alive" if they ever did dare to
come, were heard on every hand; but beyond this, and apart from the
regular army and the volunteers, men went about their daily
avocations very much as usual, grumbling at the ever-increasing price
of food, and here and there breaking out into bread riots wherever it
was suspected that some wealthy man was trying to corner food for his
own commercial benefit, but making no serious or combined efforts to
prepare for a general rising in case the threatened invasion became a
fact.

Such was the general state of affairs in Britain when, on the night
of the 27th of October, the north-west gales sank suddenly to a calm,
and the dawn of the 28th brought the news from Dover to London that
the war-balloons of the League had taken the air, and were crossing
the Straits.

CHAPTER XXXIX.

THE BATTLE OF DOVER.

Until the war of 1904, it had been an undisputed axiom in naval
warfare that a territorial attack upon an enemy's coast by a fleet
was foredoomed to failure unless that enemy's fleet had been either
crippled beyond effective action, or securely blockaded in distant
ports. As an axiom secondary to this, it was also held that it would
be impossible for an invading force, although convoyed by a powerful
fleet, to make good its footing upon any portion of a hostile coast
defended by forts mounting heavy long-range guns.

These principles have held good throughout the history of naval
warfare from the time when Sir Walter Raleigh first laid them down in
the early portion of his _History of the World_, written after the
destruction of the Spanish Armada.

But now two elements had been introduced which altered the conditions
of naval warfare even more radically than one of them had changed
those of military warfare. Had it not been for this the attack upon
the shores of England made by the commanders of the League would
probably either have been a failure, or it would have stopped at a
demonstration of force, as did that of the great Napoleon in 1803.

The portion of the Kentish coast selected fo