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

by George Chetwynd Griffith

  CHAPTER XXXIX.

  THE BATTLE OF DOVER.

  Until the war of 1904, it had been an undisputed axiom in navalwarfare that a territorial attack upon an enemy's coast by a fleetwas foredoomed to failure unless that enemy's fleet had been eithercrippled beyond effective action, or securely blockaded in distantports. As an axiom secondary to this, it was also held that it wouldbe impossible for an invading force, although convoyed by a powerfulfleet, to make good its footing upon any portion of a hostile coastdefended by forts mounting heavy long-range guns.

  These principles have held good throughout the history of navalwarfare from the time when Sir Walter Raleigh first laid them down inthe early portion of his _History of the World_, written after thedestruction of the Spanish Armada.

  But now two elements had been introduced which altered the conditionsof naval warfare even more radically than one of them had changedthose of military warfare. Had it not been for this the attack uponthe shores of England made by the commanders of the League wouldprobably either have been a failure, or it would have stopped at ademonstration of force, as did that of the great Napoleon in 1803.

  The portion of the Kentish coast selected for the attack was thatstretching from Folkestone to Deal, and it would perhaps have beendifficult to find in the whole world any portion of sea-coast morestrongly defended than this was on the morning of October 28, 1904;and yet, as the event proved, the fortresses which lined it were asuseless and impotent for defence as the old Martello towers of ahundred and fifty years before would have been.

  As the war-balloons rose into the air from the heights aboveBoulogne, good telescopes at Dover enabled their possessors to countno less than seventy-five of them. Fifty of these were quite newlyconstructed, and were of a much improved type, as they had been builtin view of the practical experience gained by the first fleet.

  This aerial fleet divided into three squadrons; one, numberingtwenty-five, steered south-westward in the direction of Folkestone,twelve shaped their course towards Deal, and the remainingthirty-eight steered directly across the Straits to Dover. As theyapproached the English coast they continually rose, until by the timethey had reached the land, aided by the light south-easterly breezewhich was then blowing, they floated at a height of more than fivethousand feet.

  All this while not a warship or a transport had put to sea. The wholefleet of the League lay along the coast of France between Calais andDieppe, under the protection of shore batteries so powerful that itwould have been madness for the British fleet to have assumed theoffensive with regard to them. With the exception of two squadronsreserved for a possible attack upon Portsmouth and Harwich, all thatremained from the disasters and costly victories of the war of theonce mighty British naval armament was massed together for thedefence of that portion of the coast which would evidently have tobear the brunt of the attack of the League.

  Ranged along the coast from Folkestone to Deal was an armamentconsisting of forty-five battleships of the first, second, and thirdclasses, supported by fifteen coast-defence ironclads, seventyarmoured and thirty-two unarmoured cruisers, forty gunboats, and ahundred and fifty torpedo-boats.

  Such was the still magnificent fleet that patrolled the waters of thenarrow sea,--a fleet as impotent for the time being as a flotilla ofThames steamboats would have been in face of the tactics employedagainst it by the League. Had the enemy's fleet but come out into theopen, as it would have been compelled to do under the old conditionsof warfare, to fight its way across the narrow strip of water, thereis little doubt but that the issue of the day would have been verydifferent, and that what had been left of it would have been drivenback, shattered and defeated, to the shelter of the French shorebatteries.

  But, in accordance with the invariable tactics of the League, thefirst and most deadly assault was delivered from the air. Thewar-balloons stationed themselves above the fortifications on land,totally ignoring the presence of the fleet, and a few minutes afterten o'clock began to rain their deadly hail of explosives down uponthem. Fifteen were placed over Dover Castle, and five over the forton the Admiralty Pier, while the rest were distributed over the townand the forts on the hills above it. In an hour everything was in astate of the most horrible confusion. The town was on fire in ahundred places from the effects of the fire-shells. The Castle hillseemed as if it had been suddenly turned into a volcano; jets ofbright flame kept leaping up from its summit and sides, followed bythunderous explosions and masses of earth and masonry hurled into theair, mingled with guns and fragments of human bodies.

  The end of the Admiralty Pier, with its huge blocks of stone wrenchedasunder and pulverised by incessant explosions of dynamite andemmensite, collapsed and subsided into the sea, carrying fort, guns,and magazine with it; and all along the height of the Shakespearecliff the earthworks had been blown up and scattered into dust, and ahuge portion of the cliff itself had been blasted out and hurled downon to the beach.

  Meanwhile the victims of this terrible assault had, in the nature ofthe case, been able to do nothing but keep up a vertical fire, in thehope of piercing the gas envelopes of the balloons, and so bringingthem to the earth. For more than an hour this fusilade produced noeffect; but at length the concentrated fire of several Maxim andNordenfelt guns, projecting a hail of missiles into the sky, broughtabout a result which was even more disastrous to the town than it wasto its assailants.

  Four of the aerostats came within the zone swept by the bullets.Riddled through and through, their gas-holders collapsed, and theircars plunged downwards from a height of more than 5000 feet. A fewseconds later four frightful explosions burst forth in differentparts of the town, for the four cargoes exploded simultaneously asthey struck the earth.

  The emmensite and dynamite tore whole streets of houses to fragments,and hurled them far and wide into the air, to fall back again onother parts of the town, and at the same time the fire-shellsignited, and set the ruins blazing like so many furnaces. No moreshots were fired into the air after that.

  There was nothing for it but for British valour to bow to theinevitable, and evacuate the town and what remained of itsfortifications; and so with sad and heavy hearts the remnant of thebrave defenders turned their faces inland, leaving Dover to its fate.Meanwhile exactly the same havoc had been wrought upon Folkestone andDeal. Hour after hour the merciless work continued, until by threeo'clock in the afternoon there was not a gun left upon the wholerange of coast that was capable of firing a shot.

  All this time the ammunition tenders of the aerial fleet had beenwinging their way to and fro across the Strait constantly renewingthe shells of the war-balloons.

  As soon as it began to grow dusk the naval battle commenced.Numerically speaking the attacking force was somewhat inferior tothat of the defenders, but now the second element, which socompletely altered the tactics of sea fighting, was for the firsttime in the war brought into play.

  As the battleships of the League steamed out to engage the opponents,who were thirsting to avenge the destruction that had been wroughtupon the land, a small flotilla of twenty-five insignificant-lookinglittle craft, with neither masts nor funnels, and looking more likehalf-submerged elongated turtles than anything else, followed in towclose under their quarters. Hardly had the furious cannonade brokenout into thunder and flame along the two opposing lines, than thesestrange craft sank gently and silently beneath the waves. They weresubmarine vessels belonging to the French navy, an improved type ofthe _Zede_ class, which had been in existence for more than tenyears.[1]

  These vessels were capable of sinking to a depth of twenty feet, andremaining for four hours without returning to the surface. They werepropelled by twin screws worked by electricity at a speed of twentyknots, and were provided with an electric searchlight, which enabledthem to find the hulls of hostile ships in the dark.

  Each carried three torpedoes, which could be launched from a tubeforward so as to strike the hull of the doomed ship from beneath. Assoon as the torpedo was discharged the submarine boat
spun round onher heel and headed away at full speed in an opposite direction outof the area of the explosion.

  The effects of such terrible and, indeed, irresistible engines ofnaval warfare were soon made manifest upon the ships of the Britishfleet. In the heat of the battle, with every gun in action, andraining a hail of shot and shell upon her adversary, a greatbattleship would receive an unseen blow, struck in the dark upon hermost vulnerable part, a huge column of water would rise up from underher side, and a few minutes later the splendid fabric would heel overand go down like a floating volcano, to be quenched by the waves thatclosed over her.

  But as if it were not enough that the defending fleet should beattacked from the surface of the water and the depths of the sea, thewar-balloons, winging their way out from the scene of ruin that theyhad wrought on shore, soon began to take their part in the work ofdeath and destruction.

  Each of them was provided with a mirror set a little in front of thebow of the car, at an angle which could be varied according to theelevation. A little forward of the centre of the car was a tube fixedon a level with the centre of the mirror. The ship selected fordestruction was brought under the car, and the speed of the balloonwas regulated so that the ship was relatively stationary to it.

  As soon as the glare from one of the funnels could be seen throughthe tube reflected in the centre of the mirror, a trap was sprung inthe floor of the car, and a shell charged with dynamite, which, itwill be remembered, explodes vertically downwards, was released, and,where the calculations were accurately made, passed down the funneland exploded in the interior of the vessel, bursting her boilers andreducing her to a helpless wreck at a single stroke.

  Every time this horribly ingenious contrivance was successfullybrought into play a battleship or a cruiser was either sunk orreduced to impotence. In order to make their aim the surer, theaerostats descended to within three hundred yards of their prey, andwhere the missile failed to pass through the funnel it invariablystruck the deck close to it, tearing up the armour sheathing, andwrecking the funnel itself so completely that the steaming-power ofthe vessel was very seriously reduced.

  All night long the battle raged incessantly along a semicircle sometwelve miles long, the centre of which was Dover. Crowds of anxiouswatchers on the shore watched the continuous flashes of the gunsthrough the darkness, varied ever and anon by some tremendousexplosion which told the fate of a warship that had fired her lastshot.

  All night long the incessant thunder of the battle rolled to and froalong the echoing coast, and when morning broke the light dawned upona scene of desolation and destruction on sea and shore such as hadnever been witnessed before in the history of warfare. On land werethe smoking ruins of houses, still smouldering in the remains of thefires which had consumed them; forts which twenty-four hours beforehad grinned defiance at the enemy were shapeless heaps of earth andstone, and armour-plating torn into great jagged fragments; and onsea were a few half-crippled wrecks, the remains of the Britishfleet, with their flags still flying, and such guns as were notdisabled firing their last rounds at the victorious foe.

  To the eastward of these about half the fleet of the League, in butlittle better condition, was advancing in now overwhelming force uponthem, and behind these again a swarm of troopships and transportswere heading out from the French shore. About an hour after dawn the_Centurion_, the last of the British battleships, was struck by oneof the submarine torpedoes, broke in two, and went down with her flagflying and her guns blazing away to the last moment. So ended thebattle of Dover, the most disastrous sea-fight in the history of theworld, and the death-struggle of the Mistress of the Seas.

  The last news of the tremendous tragedy reached the nowpanic-stricken capital half an hour before the receipt of similartidings from Harwich, announcing the destruction of the defendingfleet and forts, and the capture of the town by exactly the samemeans as those employed against Dover. Nothing now lay between Londonand the invading forces but the utterly inadequate army and the linesof fortifications, which could not be expected to offer any moreeffective resistance to the assault of the war-balloons than hadthose of the three towns on the Kentish coast.

  [Footnote 1: _The Naval Annual_ for 1893 mentions two types ofsubmarine boats, the _Zede_ and the _Goubet_, both belonging to theFrench navy, which had then been tried with success. The same workmentions no such vessels belonging to Britain, nor yet any prospectof her possessing one. The effects described here as produced bythese terrible machines are little, if at all, exaggerated. Grantedten years of progress, and they will be reproduced to acertainty.--AUTHOR.]

  "The _Centurion_, the last of the British battleships,was struck by one of the submarine torpedoes."

  _See page 300._]