The Angel of the Revolution: A Tale of the Coming Terror

by George Chetwynd Griffith

  CHAPTER XIX.

  THE EVE OF BATTLE.

  It will now be necessary to go back about six weeks from the day thatthe _Ithuriel_ started on her northward voyage, and to lay before thereader a brief outline of the events which had transpired in Europesubsequently to the date of Tremayne's letter to Arnold.

  On the evening of that day he went down to the House of Lords, tomake his speech in favour of the Italian Loan. He had previouslyspoken some half dozen times since he had taken his seat, and, youngas he was, had always commanded a respectful hearing by his soundcommon sense and his intimate knowledge of foreign policy, but noneof his brother peers had been prepared for the magnificent speechthat he had made on this momentous night.

  He had never given his allegiance to any of the political parties ofthe day, but he was one of the foremost advocates of what was thenknown as the Imperial policy, and which had grown up out of what isknown in the present day as Imperial Federation. To this hesubordinated everything else, and held as his highest, and indeedalmost his only political ideal, the consolidation of Britain and hercolonies into an empire commercially and politically intact and apartfrom the rest of the world, self-governing in all its parts asregards local affairs, but governed as a whole by a representativeImperial Parliament, sitting in London, and composed of delegatesfrom all portions of the empire.

  This ideal--which, it is scarcely necessary to say, was stillconsidered as "beyond the range of practical politics"--formed thekeynote of such a speech as had never before been heard in theBritish House of Lords. He commenced by giving a rapid but minutesurvey of foreign policy, which astounded the most experienced of hishearers. Not only was it absolutely accurate as far as they couldfollow it, but it displayed an intimate knowledge of involutions ofpolicy at which British diplomacy had only guessed.

  More than this, members of the Government and the Privy Council saw,to their amazement, that the speaker knew the inmost secrets of theirown policy even better than they did themselves. How he had becomepossessed of them was a mystery, and all that they could do was tosit and listen in silent wonder.

  He drew a graphic word-picture of the nations of the earth standingfull-armed on the threshold of such a war as the world had never seenbefore,--a veritable Armageddon, which would shake the fabric ofsociety to its foundations, even if it did not dissolve it finally inthe blood of countless battlefields.

  He estimated with marvellous accuracy the exact amount of force whicheach combatant would be able to put on to the field, and summed upthe appalling mass of potential destruction that was ready to burstupon the world at a moment's notice. He showed the position of Italy,and proved to demonstration that if the loan were not immediatelygranted, it would be necessary either for Britain to seize her fleet,as she did that of Denmark a century before--an act which theItalians would themselves resist at all hazards--or else to financeher through the war, as she had financed Germany during theNapoleonic struggle.

  To grant the loan would be to save the Italian fleet and army for theTriple Alliance; to refuse it would be to detach Italy from theAlliance, and to drive her into the arms of their foes, for not onlycould she not stand alone amidst the shock of the contending Powers,but without an immediate supply of ready money she would not be ableto keep the sea for a month.

  Thus, he said in conclusion, the fate of Europe, and perhaps of theworld, lay for the time being in their Lordships' hands. The DoubleAlliance was already numerically stronger than the Triple, and,moreover, they had at their command a new means of destruction, forthe dreadful effectiveness of which he could vouch from personalexperience.

  The trials of the Russian war-balloons had been secret, it was true,but he had nevertheless witnessed them, no matter how, and he knewwhat they could accomplish. It was true that there were in existenceeven more formidable engines than these, but they belonged to nonation, and were in the hands of those whose hands were against everyman's, and whose designs were still wrapped in the deepest mystery.

  He therefore besought his hearers not to trust too implicitly to thathitherto unconquerable valour and resource which had so far renderedBritain impregnable to her enemies. These were not the days ofpersonal valour. They were the days of warfare by machinery, ofwholesale destruction by means which men had never before been calledupon to face, and which annihilated from a distance before merevalour had time to strike its blow.

  If ever the Fates were on the side of the biggest battalions, theywere now, and, so far as human foresight could predict the issue ofthe colossal struggle, the greatest and the most perfectly equippedarmaments would infallibly insure the ultimate victory, quite apartfrom considerations of personal heroism and devotion.

  No such speech had been heard in either House since Edmund Burke hadfulminated against the miserable policy which severed America fromBritain, and split the Anglo-Saxon race in two; but now, as then,personal feeling and class prejudice proved too strong for eloquenceand logic.

  Italy was the most intensely Radical State in Europe, and she wasbankrupt to boot; and, added to this, there was a very strong partyin the Upper House which believed that Britain needed no such ally,that with Germany and Austria at her side she could fight the world,in spite of the Tsar's new-fangled balloons, which would probablyprove failures in actual war as similar inventions had done before,and even if her allies succumbed, had she not stood alone before, andcould she not do it again if necessary?

  She would fulfil her engagement with the Triple Alliance, and declarewar the moment that one of the Powers was attacked, but she would notpour British gold in millions into the bottomless gulf of Italianbankruptcy.

  Such were the main points in the speech of the Duke of Argyle, whofollowed Lord Alanmere, and spoke just before the division. When thefigures were announced, it was found that the Loan Guarantee Bill hadbeen negatived by a majority of seven votes.

  The excitement in London that night was tremendous. The two Houses ofParliament had come into direct collision on a question which thePremier had plainly stated to be of vital importance, and a deadlockseemed inevitable. The evening papers brought out special editionsgiving Tremayne's speech _verbatim_, and the next morning the wholepress of the country was talking of nothing else.

  The "leading journals," according to their party bias, discussed itpro and con, and rent each other in a furious war of words, theprelude to the sterner struggle that was to come.

  Unhappily the parties in Parliament were very evenly balanced, and avery strong section of the Radical Opposition was, as it always hadbeen, bitterly opposed to the arrangement with the Triple Alliance,which every one suspected and no one admitted until Tremayneastounded the Lords by reciting its conditions in the course of hisspeech.

  It was the avowed object of this section of the Opposition to standout of the war at any price till the last minute, and not to fight atall if it could possibly be avoided. The immediate consequence wasthat, when the Government on the following day asked for an urgencyvote of ten millions for the mobilisation of the Volunteers and theNaval Reserve, the Opposition, led by Mr. John Morley, mustered toits last man, and defeated the motion by a majority of eleven.

  The next day a Cabinet Council was held, and in the afternoon Mr.Balfour rose in a densely-crowded House, and, after a dignifiedallusion to the adverse vote of the previous day, told the House thatin view of the grave crisis which was now inevitable in Europeanaffairs, a crisis in which the fate, not only of Britain, but of thewhole Western world, would probably be involved, the Ministry felt itimpossible to remain in office without the hearty and unequivocalsupport of both Houses--a support which the two adverse votes inLords and Commons had made it hopeless to look for as those Houseswere at present constituted.

  He had therefore to inform the House that, after consultation withhis colleagues, he had decided to place the resignations of theMinistry in the hands of his Majesty,[1] and appeal to the country onthe plain issue of Intervention or Non-intervention. Under thecircumstances, there was nothing else t
o be done. The deplorablecrisis which immediately followed was the logical consequence of theinherently vicious system of party government.

  While the fate of the world was practically trembling in the balance,Europe, armed to the teeth in readiness for the Titanic struggle thata few weeks would now see shaking the world, was amused by thespectacle of what was really the most powerful nation on earth losingits head amidst the excitement of a general election, and fritteringaway on the petty issues of party strife the energies that shouldhave been devoted with single-hearted unanimity to preparation forthe conflict whose issue would involve its very existence.

  For a month the nations held their hand, why, no one exactly knew,except, perhaps, two men who were now in daily consultation in acountry house in Yorkshire. It may have been that the finalpreparations were not yet complete, or that the combatants weretaking a brief breathing-space before entering the arena, or thatEurope was waiting to see the decision of Britain at theballot-boxes, or possibly the French fleet of war-balloons was notquite ready to take the air,--any of these reasons might have beensufficient to explain the strange calm before the storm; butmeanwhile the British nation was busy listening to the conflictingeloquence of partisan orators from a thousand platforms throughoutthe land, and trying to make up its mind whether it should return aConservative or a Radical Ministry to power.

  In the end, Mr. Balfour came back with a solid hundred majoritybehind him, and at once set to work to, if possible, make up for losttime. The moment of Fate had, however, gone by for ever. During theprecious days that had been fooled away in party strife, French goldand Russian diplomacy had done their work.

  The day after the Conservative Ministry returned to power, Francedeclared war, and Russia, who had been nominally at war with Britainfor over a month, suddenly took the offensive, and poured her Asiatictroops into the passes of the Hindu Kush. Two days later, thedefection of Italy from the Triple Alliance told Europe howaccurately Tremayne had gauged the situation in his now historicspeech, and how the month of strange quietude had been spent by thecontrollers of the Double Alliance.

  The spell was broken at last. After forty years of peace, Europeplunged into the abyss of war; and from one end of the Continent tothe other nothing was heard but the tramp of vast armies as theymarshalled themselves along the threatened frontiers, andconcentrated at the points of attack and defence.

  On all the lines of ocean traffic, steamers were hurrying homeward orto neutral ports, in the hope of reaching a place of safety beforehostilities actually broke out. Great liners were racing across theAtlantic either to Britain or America with their precious freights,while those flying the French flag on the westward voyage prepared torun the gauntlet of the British cruisers as best they might.

  All along the routes to India and the East the same thing washappening, and not a day passed but saw desperate races between fleetocean greyhounds and hostile cruisers, which, as a rule, terminatedin favour of the former, thanks to the superiority of privateenterprise over Government contract-work in turning out ships andengines.

  In Britain the excitement was indescribable. The result of thegeneral election had cast the final die in favour of immediate war inconcert with the Triple Alliance. The defection of Italy hadthoroughly awakened the popular mind to the extreme gravity of thesituation, and the declaration of war by France had raised the bloodof the nation to fever heat. The magic of battle had instantlyquelled all party differences so far as the bulk of the people wasconcerned, and no one talked of anything but the war and itsimmediate issues. Men forgot that they belonged to parties, and onlyremembered that they were citizens of the same nation.

  [Footnote 1: At the period in which the action of the narrative takesplace, her Majesty Queen Victoria had abdicated in favour of thepresent Prince of Wales, and was living in comparative retirement atBalmoral, retaining Osborne as an alternative residence.]