awful fire from quick-firing guns which none could withstand. The streets, with their barricades swept away, were strewn with mutilated corpses. Hundreds upon hundreds had attempted to make a last stand, rallied by the Union Jack they waved above, but a shell exploding in their midst had sent them to instant eternity.
Many a gallant deed was done that day by patriotic Londoners in defence of their homes and loved ones—many a deed that should have earned the V.C.—but in nearly all cases the patriot who had stood up and faced the foe had gone to straight and certain death.
Till seven o'clock the dull roar of the guns in the north continued, and people across the Thames knew that London was still being destroyed, nay pulverised. Then with one accord came a silence—the first silence since the hot noon.
Von Kronhelm's field telegraph at Jack Straw's Castle had ticked the order to cease firing.
All the barricades had been broken.
London lay burning—at the mercy of the German eagle.
And as the darkness fell the German Commander-in-Chief looked again through his glasses, and saw the red flames leaping up in dozens of places, where whole blocks of shops and buildings, public institutions, whole streets in some cases, were being consumed.
London—the proud capital of the world, the "home" of the Englishman—was at last ground beneath the iron heel of Germany!
And all, alas! due to one cause alone—the careless insular apathy of the Englishman himself!
