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Updated: June 12, 2025
The whole of the French fleet of war-balloons had been attached to the Army of the East with the intention, which had been realised beyond the most sanguine expectations, of overrunning and subjugating Central Europe in the shortest possible space of time.
"If he neglects this warning with which I now entrust you, I will bring a force against him before which he shall be as helpless as the armies of the Alliance have so far been before him and his war-balloons; and, more than this, tell him that if I conquer I will not spare. I will hold him and his advisers strictly to account for all that may happen after that moment.
He at once despatched a war-balloon to the French and Italian headquarters with a note containing the terrible news from Harwich, and requesting Generals le Gallifet and Cosensz to lose no time in communicating with the eastern and southern ports, and in throwing out corps of observation supported by war-balloons.
"Fleet of war-balloons coming up from the south'ard, sir. You can just see 'em, sir, coming on in line under that long bank of cloud." The captain of the Ithuriel took the night-glasses, and looked eagerly in the direction pointed out by his keen-eyed coxswain.
Petersburg, and I have now come to make terms, if possible, for the restoration of the air-ship. Those terms are as follows An hour before daybreak this morning I captured nine of your war-balloons, after destroying three others which attempted to escape.
And you ask me to believe this, and to give up that priceless air-ship on such grounds as these a story that would hardly deceive a child? You captured nine of the Tsar's war-balloons this morning, had an interview with his Majesty, got this letter from him at Cüstrin more than five hundred miles away, and bring it here, and it is barely two in the afternoon!
But as if it were not enough that the defending fleet should be attacked from the surface of the water and the depths of the sea, the war-balloons, winging their way out from the scene of ruin that they had wrought on shore, soon began to take their part in the work of death and destruction.
Almost before the words were out of his mouth one of the guns was ready. A moment later the messenger of destruction was speeding on its way, and they saw it explode fairly in the midst of the squadron. The second followed before the glare of the first explosion had passed, and this was the last shot fired in the aërial warfare between the air-ships and the war-balloons.
From first to last of the war the slaughter had averaged more than a million of fighting men a month, and fully five millions of non-combatants, men, women, and children, had fallen victims to famine and disease, or had been killed during the wholesale destruction of fortified towns by the war-balloons of the League. At the lowest calculation the invasion of England had cost four million lives.
On the conclusion of the war the aërial fleet was increased to twenty-five vessels exclusive of the flagship. The number of war-balloons was raised to fifty, and three millions of Federation soldiers were held ready for active service until the conclusion of the war in the East between the Moslems and Buddhists.
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