American.

He made the war.

Quite equally with the rest of the world, the general German
population was taken by surprise by the swift vigour of the
Imperial government. A considerable literature of military
forecasts, beginning as early as 1906 with Rudolf Martin, the
author not merely of a brilliant book of anticipations, but of a
proverb, "The future of Germany lies in the air," had, however,
partially prepared the German imagination for some such
enterprise.

2

Of all these world-forces and gigantic designs Bert Smallways
knew nothing until he found himself in the very focus of it all
and gaped down amazed on the spectacle of that giant herd of air-
ships. Each one seemed as long as the Strand, and as big about
as Trafalgar Square. Some must have been a third of a mile in
length. He had never before seen anything so vast and
disciplined as this tremendous park. For the first time in his
life he really had an intimation of the extraordinary and quite
important things of which a contemporary may go in ignorance. He
had always clung to the illusion that Germans were fat, absurd
men, who smoked china pipes, and were addicted to knowledge and
horseflesh and sauerkraut and indigestible things generally.

His bird's-eye view was quite transitory. He ducked at the first
shot; and directly his balloon began to drop, his mind ran