fire escape--and ran right athwart the great forward air-chamber
to the little look-out gallery with a telephone, that gallery
that bore the light pom-pom of German steel and its locker of
shells. This gallery was all of aluminium magnesium alloy, the
tight front of the air-ship swelled cliff-like above and below,
and the black eagle sprawled overwhelmingly gigantic, its
extremities all hidden by the bulge of the gas-bag. And far
down, under the soaring eagles, was England, four thousand feet
below perhaps, and looking very small and defenceless indeed in
the morning sunlight.

The realisation that there was England gave Bert sudden and
unexpected qualms of patriotic compunction. He was struck by a
quite novel idea. After all, he might have torn up those plans
and thrown them away. These people could not have done so very
much to him. And even if they did, ought not an Englishman to
die for his country? It was an idea that had hitherto been
rather smothered up by the cares of a competitive civilisation.
He became violently depressed. He ought, he perceived, to have
seen it in that light before. Why hadn't he seen it in that
light before?

Indeed, wasn't he a sort of traitor?... He wondered how the
aerial fleet must look from down there. Tremendous, no doubt,
and dwarfing all the buildings.

He was passing between Manchester and Liverpool, Kurt told him; a
gleaming band across the prospect was the Ship Canal, and a
weltering ditch of shipping far away ahead, the Mersey estuary.
Bert was a Southerner; he had never been north of the Midland