ells and completing the ruin and havoc
wrought by the artillery of the siege-trains.

Under such circumstances surrender was really only a matter of time,
and that time had very nearly come. The London and North-Western
Railway, which had been the last to fall into the hands of the
invaders, had been closed for over a week, and food was running very
short. Eight millions of people massed together in a space of thirty
or forty square miles' area can only be fed and kept healthy under
the most favourable conditions. Hemmed in as London now was, from
being the best ordered great city in the world, it had degenerated
with frightful rapidity into a vast abode of plague and famine, a
mass of human suffering and misery beyond all conception or
possibility of description.

Defence there was now practically none; but still the invaders did
not leave their vantage ground on the hills, and not a soldier of the
League had so far set foot in London proper. Either the besiegers
preferred to starve the great city into surrender at discretion, and
then extort ruinous terms, or else they hesitated to plunge into that
tremendous gulf of human misery, maddened by hunger and made
desperate by despair. If they did so hesitate they were wise, for
London was too vast to be carried by assault or by any series of
assaults.

No army could have lived in its wilderness of streets swarming with
enemies, who would have fought them from house to house and street to
street. Once they had entered that mighty maze of streets and squares
both their artillery and their war-balloons would have been useless,
for they would only have buried friend and foe in common destruction.
There were plenty of ways into London, but the way out was a very
different matter.

Had a general assault been attempted, not a man would ever have got
out of London alive. The commanders of the League saw this clearly,
and so they kept their position on the heights, wasted the city with
an almost constant bombardment, and, while they drew their supplies
from the fertile lands in their rear, lay on their arms and waited
for the inevitable.

Within the besieged area martial law prevailed universally. Riots
were of daily, almost hourly, occurrence, but they were repressed
with an iron hand, and the rioters were shot down in the streets
without mercy; for, though siege and famine were bad enough, anarchy
breaking out amidst that vast sweltering mass of human beings would
have be