ging to Britain, nor yet any prospect
of her possessing one. The effects described here as produced by
these terrible machines are little, if at all, exaggerated. Granted
ten years of progress, and they will be reproduced to a
certainty.--AUTHOR.]

[Illustration: "The _Centurion_, the last of the British battleships,
was struck by one of the submarine torpedoes."

_See page 300._]

CHAPTER XL.

BELEAGUERED LONDON.

A month had passed since the battle of Dover. It had been a month of
incessant fighting, of battles by day and night, of heroic defences
and dearly-bought victories, but still of constant triumphs and
irresistible progress for the ever-increasing legions of the League.
From sunrise to sunrise the roar of artillery, the rattle of
musketry, and the clash of steel had never ceased to sound to the
north and south of London as, over battlefield after battlefield, the
two hosts which had poured in constant streams through Harwich and
Dover had fought their way, literally mile by mile, towards the
capital of the modern world.

Day and night the fighting never stopped. As soon as two hostile
divisions had fought each other to a standstill, and from sheer
weariness of the flesh the battle died down in one part of the huge
arena, the flame sprang up in another, and raged on with ever renewed
fury. Outnumbered four and five to one in every engagement, and with
the terrible war-balloons raining death on them from the clouds, the
British armies had eclipsed all the triumphs of the long array of
their former victories by the magnificent devotion that they showed
in the hour of what seemed to be the death-struggle of the Empire.

The glories of Inkermann and Balaclava, of Albuera and Waterloo,
paled before the achievements of the whole-souled heroism displayed
by the British soldiery standing, as it were, with its back to the
wall, and fighting, not so much with any hope of victory, for that
was soon seen to be a physical impossibility, but with the invincible
determination not to permit the invader to advance on London save
over the dead bodies of its defenders.

Such a gallant defence had never been made before in the face of such
irresistible odds. When the soldiers of the League first set foot on
British soil the defending armies of the North and South had, with
the greatest exertions, been brought up to a fighting strength of
about twelve hundred thousand men. So stubborn had been the heroism
with w