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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

“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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]