r the attack was that
stretching from Folkestone to Deal, and it would perhaps have been
difficult to find in the whole world any portion of sea-coast more
strongly defended than this was on the morning of October 28, 1904;
and yet, as the event proved, the fortresses which lined it were as
useless and impotent for defence as the old Martello towers of a
hundred and fifty years before would have been.

As the war-balloons rose into the air from the heights above
Boulogne, good telescopes at Dover enabled their possessors to count
no less than seventy-five of them. Fifty of these were quite newly
constructed, and were of a much improved type, as they had been built
in view of the practical experience gained by the first fleet.

This aerial fleet divided into three squadrons; one, numbering
twenty-five, steered south-westward in the direction of Folkestone,
twelve shaped their course towards Deal, and the remaining
thirty-eight steered directly across the Straits to Dover. As they
approached the English coast they continually rose, until by the time
they had reached the land, aided by the light south-easterly breeze
which was then blowing, they floated at a height of more than five
thousand feet.

All this while not a warship or a transport had put to sea. The whole
fleet of the League lay along the coast of France between Calais and
Dieppe, under the protection of shore batteries so powerful that it
would have been madness for the British fleet to have assumed the
offensive with regard to them. With the exception of two squadrons
reserved for a possible attack upon Portsmouth and Harwich, all that
remained from the disasters and costly victories of the war of the
once mighty British naval armament was massed together for the
defence of that portion of the coast which would evidently have to
bear the brunt of the attack of the League.

Ranged along the coast from Folkestone to Deal was an armament
consisting of forty-five battleships of the first, second, and third
classes, supported by fifteen coast-defence ironclads, seventy
armoured and thirty-two unarmoured cruisers, forty gunboats, and a
hundred and fifty torpedo-boats.

Such was the still magnificent fleet that patrolled the waters of the
narrow sea,--a fleet as impotent for the time being as a flotilla of
Thames steamboats would have been in face of the tactics employed
against it by the League. Had the enemy's fleet but come out into the
open, as it would h