l to Richmond. These three
forces were composed entirely of French and Italian army corps, and
numbered from first to last nearly four million men.

On the north the invading force was almost wholly Russian, and was
under the command of the Tzar in person, in whom the supreme command
of the armies of the League had by common consent been now vested. A
constant service of transports, plying day and night between Antwerp
and Harwich, had placed at his disposal a force about equal to that
of the Army of the South, although he had lost over seven hundred
thousand men before he was able to occupy the line of heights from
Hornsey to Hampstead, with flanking positions at Brondesbury and
Harlesden to the west, and at Tottenham, Stratford, and Barking to
the east.

By the 29th of November all the railways were in the hands of the
invaders. A chain of war-balloons between Barking and Shooter's Hill
closed the Thames. The forts at Tilbury had been destroyed by an
aerial bombardment. A flotilla of submarine torpedo-vessels had blown
up the defences of the estuary of the Thames and Medway, and led to
the fall of Sheerness and Chatham, and had then been docked at
Sheerness, there being no further present use for them.

The other half of the squadron, supported by a few battleships and
cruisers which had survived the battle of Dover, had proceeded to
Portsmouth, destroyed the booms and submarine defences, while a
detachment of aerostats shelled the land defences, and then in a
moment of wanton revenge had blown up the venerable hulk of the
_Victory_, which had gone down at her moorings with her flag still
flying as it had done a hundred years before at the fight of
Trafalgar. After this inglorious achievement they had been laid up in
dock to wait for their next opportunity of destruction, should it
ever occur.

London was thus cut off from all communication, not only with the
outside world, but even from the rest of England. The remnants of the
armies of defence had been gradually driven in upon the vast
wilderness of bricks and mortar which now held more than eight
millions of men, women, and children, hemmed in by long lines of
batteries and entrenched camps, from which thousands of guns hurled
their projectiles far and wide into the crowded masses of the houses,
shattering them with bursting shells, and laying the whole streets in
ruins, while overhead the war-balloons slowly circled hither and
thither, dropping their fire-sh