Section 6

One single monarch held out against the general acquiescence in the new rule, and that was that strange survival of mediaevalism, the ’Slavic Fox,’ the King of the Balkans.  He debated and delayed his submissions.  He showed an extraordinary combination of cunning and temerity in his evasion of the repeated summonses from Brissago.  He affected ill-health and a great preoccupation with his new official mistress, for his semi-barbaric court was arranged on the best romantic models.  His tactics were ably seconded by Doctor Pestovitch, his chief minister.  Failing to establish his claims to complete independence, King Ferdinand Charles annoyed the conference by a proposal to be treated as a protected state.  Finally he professed an unconvincing submission, and put a mass of obstacles in the way of the transfer of his national officials to the new government.  In these things he was enthusiastically supported by his subjects, still for the most part an illiterate peasantry, passionately if confusedly patriotic, and so far with no practical knowledge of the effect of atomic bombs.  More particularly he retained control of all the Balkan aeroplanes.

For once the extreme naivete of Leblanc seems to have been mitigated by duplicity.  He went on with the general pacification of the world as if the Balkan submission was made in absolute good faith, and he announced the disbandment of the force of aeroplanes that hitherto guarded the council at Brissago upon the approaching fifteenth of July.  But instead he doubled the number upon duty on that eventful day, and made various arrangements for their disposition.  He consulted certain experts, and when he took King Egbert into his confidence there was something in his neat and explicit foresight that brought back to that ex-monarch’s mind his half-forgotten fantasy of Leblanc as a fisherman under a green umbrella.

About five o’clock in the morning of the seventeenth of July one of the outer sentinels of the Brissago fleet, which was soaring unobtrusively over the lower end of the lake of Garda, sighted and hailed a strange aeroplane that was flying westward, and, failing to get a satisfactory reply, set its wireless apparatus talking and gave chase.  A swarm of consorts appeared very promptly over the westward mountains, and before the unknown aeroplane had sighted Como, it had a dozen eager attendants closing in upon it.  Its driver seems to have hesitated, dropped down among the mountains, and then turned southward in flight, only to find an intercepting biplane sweeping across his bows.  He then went round into the eye of the rising sun, and passed within a hundred yards of his original pursuer.