The catastrophe that overwhelmed the inhabitants of this planet in the year ——, might have been foretold a hundred years earlier, from the increasing subtlety and skill with which the nations had devoted all the resources of science to multiplying the means of destruction. At the same time, for many generations, they had all been declaring that, in certain contingencies, they would "fight to the last man". The sincerity and seriousness of these declarations could not be doubted; nor could one suppose that all the nations of the earth would speak so emphatically of what they would do in a purely imaginary case. It was not bluff. They meant what they said; and, at last, they were confronted by the very case about which they had been talking: they must either prove their words and save their faces, or eat their words and save everyone else.