“It had been decided that all the vessels should rush in, scattered, upon the island, opening fire at three miles, and continuing to the edge of the reef, there to retain loose formation and engage.  Palgrave Island repeatedly warned us, by wireless, in the international code, to keep outside the ten-mile limit; but no heed was paid to the warnings.

“The North Dakota did not take part in the movement of the morning of May 1.  This was due to a slight accident of the preceding night that temporarily disabled her steering-gear.  The morning of May 1 broke clear and calm.  There was a slight breeze from the south-west that quickly died away.  The North Dakota lay twelve miles off the island.  At the signal the squadrons charged in upon the island, from all sides, at full speed.  Our wireless receiver continued to tick off warnings from the island.  The ten-mile limit was passed, and nothing happened.  I watched through my glasses.  At five miles nothing happened; at four miles nothing happened; at three miles, the New York, in the lead on our side of the island, opened fire.  She fired only one shot.  Then she blew up.  The rest of the vessels never fired a shot.  They began to blow up, everywhere, before our eyes.  Several swerved about and started back, but they failed to escape.  The destroyer, Dart XXX, nearly made the ten-mile limit when she blew up.  She was the last survivor.  No harm came to the North Dakota, and that night, the steering-gear being repaired, I gave orders to sail for San Francisco.”

To say that the United States was stunned is but to expose the inadequacy of language.  The whole world was stunned.  It confronted that blight of the human brain, the unprecedented.  Human endeavour was a jest, a monstrous futility, when a lunatic on a lonely island, who owned a yacht and an exposed village, could destroy five of the proudest fleets of Christendom.  And how had he done it?  Nobody knew.  The scientists lay down in the dust of the common road and wailed and gibbered.  They did not know.  Military experts committed suicide by scores.  The mighty fabric of warfare they had fashioned was a gossamer veil rent asunder by a miserable lunatic.  It was too much for their sanity.  Mere human reason could not withstand the shock.  As the savage is crushed by the sleight-of-hand of the witch doctor, so was the world crushed by the magic of Goliah.  How did he do it?  It was the awful face of the Unknown upon which the world gazed and by which it was frightened out of the memory of its proudest achievements.

But all the world was not stunned.  There was the invariable exception—­the Island Empire of Japan.  Drunken with the wine of success deep-quaffed, without superstition and without faith in aught but its own ascendant star, laughing at the wreckage of science and mad with pride of race, it went forth upon the way of war.  America’s fleets had been destroyed.  From the battlements of heaven the multitudinous ancestral shades of Japan leaned down.  The opportunity, God-given, had come.  The Mikado was in truth a brother to the gods.