The Raid of Dover: A Romance of the Reign of Woman, A.D. 1940Ford, Douglas Morey
Science
The Raid of Dover: A Romance of the Reign of Woman, A.D. 1940
Ford, Douglas Morey
Imaginary wars and battles -- Fiction; Socialism -- Fiction; Women -- Suffrage -- Great Britain -- Fiction
Many of the Marines who had escaped the hand grenades had had limbs
clean amputated by the knife-like fragments of the high explosives ere
the rush was made. In some instances the upper halves of bodies lay
on the hill without marks of injury, the lower limbs having wholly
disappeared. Yet terribly and suddenly as death had come to these
devoted men, far more awful was the fate of those whom shell and bomb
had shattered without absolutely killing. These slowly dying fragments
of humanity lay moaning in their tortured state, praying as they had
never prayed before for that last agony which should release them from
sufferings that no tongue could utter and no imagination even picture.
Already the havoc wrought in human flesh had been accompanied with
inconceivable disaster in all directions. Fort Burgoyne, its guns
silenced by the more modern ordnance, was little better than a heap
of ruins--ruins piled high above the dead and dying gunners. The more
exposed batteries on the Western Heights had been dismantled long
before the inhabitants of Dover climbed the hill and gazed across
the valley. When, after the repulse of the British attack, the fury
of fight was abated for a brief period, and the smoke of battle
temporarily rolled away, the appearance of Dover Castle itself filled
the spectators with amazement and dismay. So great was the destruction
and the transformation that it was difficult to believe that what they
now looked upon had any association with the great towers and massive
walls which had been familiar objects to them all their lives. The
Norman keep, with walls more than 20 feet thick, had been so battered
as to present the appearance of a jagged range of rock. Peveril's
Tower had disappeared. The Cotton Gate, rising as it did to a height
of 90 feet and 460 feet above sea-level, by some miracle had escaped
all damage; but the Constable's Tower was reduced to half its former
height. The upper half, it was conjectured, lay crumbling in the moat
below.
What had happened to the Duke of York's School, which the boys had
evacuated overnight, or to the batteries that had been placed in
Northfall Meadows and on the Golf Links, could only be a matter
of surmise. The Pharos and St. Mary's Church so far seemed to be
untouched, possibly because the gunners in Fort Warden had not deemed
it worth while to waste their fire on either.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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