hich they had disputed the progress of their enemies that by
the time that the guns of the League were planted on the heights that
commanded the Metropolis, more than a million and a half of men had
gone down under the hail of British bullets and the rush of British
bayonets.

Of all the battlefields of this the bloodiest war in the history of
human strife, none had been so deeply dyed with blood as had been the
fair and fertile English gardens and meadows over which the hosts of
the League had fought their way to the confines of London. Only the
weight of overwhelming numbers, reinforced by engines of destruction
which could strike without the possibility of effective retaliation,
had made their progress possible.

Had they met their heroic foes as they had met them in the days of
the old warfare, their superiority of numbers would have availed them
but little. They would have been hurled back and driven into the sea,
and not a man of them all would have left British soil alive had it
been but a question of military attack and defence.

But this was not a war of men. It was a war of machines, and those
who wielded the most effective machinery for the destruction of life
won battle after battle as a matter of course, just as a man armed
with a repeating rifle would overcome a better man armed with a bow
and arrow.

Natas had formed an entirely accurate estimate of the policy of the
leaders of the League when he told Tremayne, in the library at
Alanmere, that they would concentrate all their efforts on the
reduction of London. The rest of the kingdom had been for the present
entirely ignored.

London was the heart of the British Empire and of the
English-speaking world, for the matter of that, and therefore it had
been determined to strike one deadly blow at the vital centre of the
whole huge organism. That paralysed, the rest must fall to pieces of
necessity. The fleet was destroyed, and every soldier that Britain
could put into the field had been mustered for the defence of London.
Therefore the fall of London meant the conquest of Britain.

After the battles of Dover and Harwich the invading forces advanced
upon London in the following order: The Army of the South had landed
at Deal, Dover, and Folkestone in three divisions, and after a series
of terrific conflicts had fought its way _via_ Chatham, Maidstone,
and Tunbridge to the banks of the Thames, and occupied all the
commanding positions from Shooter's Hil