Away in the far northern wilderness the giant engines purred on remorselessly, continually drawing away more and more of the vital earth-spirit from Europe and Asia. In Great Britain and North America nothing had happened, except a succession of abnormally violent thunderstorms, and certain other minor electrical disturbances which were only detected by instruments at the observatories; but all cables had ceased to work, and the only sea communication possible was by means of wooden sailing ships, for every steamer, whether warship, liner, or tramp, broke down when she got about fifteen miles from the English or American coasts. What was happening in the Southern Hemisphere no one knew till long afterwards.
Throughout Europe and Asia a most extraordinary condition of things was coming to pass. What had happened at Kiel happened also at all the great fortresses along the German frontier which were invested by the French and Russians. Guns of all calibres on both sides burst, killing those who used them, but doing no damage to the enemy. Quick-firing guns jammed or burst and became useless. If a man tried to fire a rifle, the breech-lock blew out and killed or maimed him, until French and Germans, Russians, Austrians, and Italians alike refused to fire a shot, and even on the rare occasions when bodies of men got near enough to each other for a cavalry or bayonet charge, lance-points, sabres, and bayonets cracked and splintered like so many icicles.
By the tenth day every officer and man in Europe had recognised that if the war was to go on at all it would have to be fought out with fists and feet. All modern weapons of warfare had suddenly become useless. Moreover, communication had become so difficult, that the feeding of the vast armies in the field was rapidly approaching impossibility, and the helpless, hostile battalions were beginning to starve in sight of each other. Locomotives broke down or blew up, bridges collapsed under the weight of the trains, and now horses and men had become afflicted with a deadly languor which made severe exertion an impossibility.
From the war lords of the nations to the raw conscripts and the camp-followers it was the same. Neither mind nor body would do its work. The soul of the world was leaving it—drawn out by those remorseless engines into the vast receivers of the Storage Works—and men were beginning to find that without it they could neither think nor work any more than they could fight.
There was not a cable or a telegraph line in Europe or Asia that could be operated, not a stationary or locomotive engine that would work without breaking down or blowing up. Electric lighting and traction had for two or three days been things of the past. Throughout two continents industries and commerce, like war, were at a standstill; a sort of creeping paralysis had spread from the Straits of Dover to the Sea of Japan.
There were no exceptions, from the rulers of the highest civilisations down to the sampan men of Canton and the fur-clad Samoyeds of the northern wilderness. Great fleets and squadrons were either drifting about the ocean or lying helpless on rock or sand or mud-bank, like the silenced forts full of guns and ammunition and yet unable to fire a single shot either in attack or defence.
On the morning of the eleventh day the French President, who had been drawn along the useless railway from Paris to Calais by relays of horses harnessed to a light truck running on wheels of papier-maché, embarked for Dover on board a fishing-lugger. Twelve hours before the German Emperor had sailed from Cuxhaven, which he had reached by rail with infinite difficulty, and after a dozen breakdowns, for Harwich in a fast wood-built schooner-yacht.
During the last four or five days there had been very little communication between the Continent and England. All English steamers, including warships, had been forbidden to pass the three-mile limit. By a happy accident the Channel Fleet and the Home Defence Squadron had anchored in British waters after the manœuvres just before Miss Chrysie pulled that fatal lever. The Mediterranean Fleet was at Malta, powerless to move an engine or fire a gun. Communication across the narrow seas was still possible by wooden sailing craft, and it was the news which these had brought from England that had induced the Kaiser and the President to go and see the miracle for themselves.
The moment that they set foot on English soil, which they did almost about the same time, the growing lassitude of the last few days vanished.
"These are truly the Fortunate Isles just now," exclaimed the Kaiser, as he drew his first breath of the cool English air. "A few moments and I am a man again. Then that circular which we all laughed at so was true!" he went on, to himself. "Yes, everything seems going on as usual. They seem to be caring as little about the state of Europe as they did about the African war. Why, there's a train running as easily as though the railways of Europe were not strewn with wrecks."