Air warfare -- Fiction; Science fiction; War stories
felt strangely dead and heavy after the buoyant airship.
6
So it came about that that great and powerful Prince Karl Albert was
for a time thrust out of the stupendous conflict he chiefly had been
instrumental in provoking. The chances of battle and the weather
conspired to maroon him in Labrador, and there he raged for six long
days, while war and wonder swept the world. Nation rose against
nation and air-fleet grappled air-fleet, cities blazed and men died in
multitudes; but in Labrador one might have dreamt that, except for a
little noise of hammering, the world was at peace.
There the encampment lay; from a distance the cabins, covered over with
the silk of the balloon part, looked like a gipsy's tent on a rather
exceptional scale, and all the available hands were busy in building
out of the steel of the framework a mast from which the Vaterland's
electricians might hang the long conductors of the apparatus for
wireless telegraphy that was to link the Prince to the world again.
There were times when it seemed they would never rig that mast. From
the outset the party suffered hardship. They were not too abundantly
provisioned, and they were put on short rations, and for all the thick
garments they had, they were but ill-equipped against the piercing wind
and inhospitable violence of this wilderness. The first night was spent
in darkness and without fires. The engines that had supplied power were
smashed and dropped far away to the south, and there was never a
match among the company. It had been death to carry matches. All the
explosives had been thrown out of the magazine, and it was only towards
morning that the bird-faced man whose cabin Bert had taken in the
beginning confessed to a brace of duelling pistols and cartridges, with
which a fire could be started. Afterwards the lockers of the machine gun
were found to contain a supply of unused ammunition.
The night was a distressing one and seemed almost interminable. Hardly
any one slept. There were seven wounded men aboard, and Von Winterfeld's
head had been injured, and he was shivering and in delirium, struggling
with his attendant and shouting strange things about the burning of New
York. The men crept together in the mess-room in the darkling, wrapped
in what they could find and drank cocoa from the fireless heaters and
listened to his cries. In the morning the Prince made them a speech
about Destiny, and the God of his Fathers and the pleasure and glory
of giving one's life for his dynasty, and a number of similar
considerations that might otherwise have been neglected in that bleak
wilderness. The men cheered without enthusiasm, and far away a wolf
howled.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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