Turtle Reader

“I’d never ’ave got better if it ’adn’t been for your aunt.
‘Tom,’ she says to me, ‘you got to get well,’ and I ’ad to. Then
she sickened. She sickened but there ain’t much dyin’ about your
aunt. ‘Lor!’ she says, ’as if I’d leave you to go muddlin’ along
alone!’ That’s what she […]

“But ’ow did the people get killed?” asked Teddy presently.

“There was the War. The War was the beginning of it. The War
banged and flummocked about, but it didn’t really kill many
people. But it upset things. They came and set fire to London
and burnt and sank all the ships there used to […]

He paused.

“Yes,” said the little boy breathlessly. “Go on. What then?”

“A sound of carts and ’orses there was, and a sound of cabs and
omnibuses, and then a lot of whistling, shrill whistles, whistles
that froze ’is marrer. And directly the whistles began things
begun to show, people in the streets ’urrying, people in the
’ouses […]

The little boy regarded the rusty evidences acrosss the narrow
muddy ditch of cow-droppings that had once been a High Street.
He was clearly disposed to be sceptical, and yet there the ruins
were! He grappled with ideas beyond the strength of his
imagination.

“What did they go for?” he asked, “all of ’em?”

“They ’ad to. Everything was […]

Their employment of sacking and such-like coarse material for
work-a-day clothing, and their habit of tying it on with string
and of thrusting wadding and straw inside it for warmth, gave
these people an odd, “packed” appearance, and as it was a
week-day when Tom took his little nephew for the hen-seeking
excursion, so it was they were attired.

“So you’ve […]

The Epilogue

It happened that one bright summer’s morning exactly thirty years
after the launching of the first German air-fleet, an old man
took a small boy to look for a missing hen through the ruins of
Bun Hill and out towards the splintered pinnacles of the Crystal
Palace. He was not a very old man; he was, as […]

“Oh! Bertie, boy!” she cried. “You’ve come–you’ve come!” and
put out her arms and staggered. “I told ’im. He said he’d kill
me if I didn’t marry him.”

But Edna was not married, and when presently Bert could get talk
from her, she explained the task before him. That little patch
of lonely agricultural country had […]

As Bert travelled from parish to parish, and from district to
district, avoiding as far as possible those festering centres of
violence and despair, the larger towns, he found the condition
of affairs varying widely. In one parish he would find the large
house burnt, the vicarage wrecked, evidently in violent conflict
for some suspected and perhaps imaginary store […]

It is not within the design of this book to tell what further
story, to tell how the War in the Air kept on through the sheer
inability of any authorities to meet and agree and end it, until
every organised government in the world was as shattered and
broken as a heap of china beaten with a stick. […]

This story has already told of the swift rush upon New York of
the first German air-fleet and of the wild, inevitable orgy of
inconclusive destruction that ensued. Behind it a second
air-fleet was already swelling at its gasometers when England and
France and Spain and Italy showed their hands. None of these
countries had prepared for aeronautic […]