The War in the Air by H. G. Wells, is part of the HackerNoon Books Series. Read this book online for free on HackerNoon!

It did not occur to either Tom or Bert Smallways that this remarkable aerial performance of Mr. Butteridge was likely to affect either of their lives.

“This here Progress,” said Mr. Tom Smallways, “it keeps on.”

There flowed through Bert's brain a squittering succession of thinly violent ideas about German competition.

Oh to be alone in a balloon at a height of fourteen or fifteen thousand feet.

“Fighting! The American North Atlantic squadron and pretty nearly the whole of our fleet."

And then above the flames of Manhattan Island came a battle, the first battle in the air.

“we overtake and pass the West. We recover the peace of the world that these barbarians have destroyed.”

Was it better to risk a fall over land or over water—such water?

With that apparition began a new phase of Goat Island in Bert's experience.

And now the whole fabric of civilisation was bending and giving, and dropping to pieces and melting in the furnace of the war.

One bright summer's morning exactly 30 years after the launch of the first German air-fleet, an old man took a small boy to look for a missing