and sad who is out of breath—and when she stumbled I ran with my hand beneath her arm. We ran down past a couple of men, who turned back staring in astonishment at my behaviour—they must have recognised my face. And half-way down the slope came a tumult in the air—clang-clank, clang-clank—and we stopped, and presently over the hill-crest those war things came flying one behind the other.'
The man seemed hesitating on the verge of a description.
'What were they like?' I asked.
'They had never fought,' he said. 'They were just like our ironclads are nowadays; they had never fought. No one knew what they might do, with excited men inside them; few even cared to speculate. They were great driving things shaped like spear-heads without a shaft, with a propeller in the place of the shaft?
'Steel?'
'Not steel.'
'Aluminium?'
'No, no, nothing of that sort. An alloy that was very common—as common as brass, for example. It was called—let me see' He squeezed his forehead with the fingers of one hand. 'I am forgetting everything,' he said.
'And they carried guns?'
'Little guns, firing high explosive shells. They fired the guns backwards, out of the base of the leaf, so to speak, and rammed with the beak. That was the theory, you know, but they had never been fought. No one could tell exactly what was going to happen. And meanwhile I suppose it was very fine to go whirling through the air like a flight of young swallows, swift and easy. I guess the captains tried not to think too clearly what the real thing would be like. And these flying war machines, you know, were only one sort of
