"Victory had been snatched from the very jaws of defeat."
This line comes after the peons on the plantation of Leiningen have begun their deadly
march. Refusing to leave his plantation to the ants's ravaging, Leiningen devises
strategies of defense. When Leiningen took over this "model farm and plantation," he
says, he prepared it for anything and everything. So, his water-filled ditches are one
of the defenses that Leiningen employs against the onslaught of millions of ants. He
opens the dam, which fills these ditches, making "an imposing girdle of water completely
around the plantation. This twelve-foot water ditch seems to afford all the security
necessary as the people and creatures remain on the other
side.
As a further security, Leiningen has an inner ditch
built that is smaller than the other. This ditch extends around the perimeter of all
the buildings. Into this concrete ditch, filled with concrete, Leiningen has inflow
pipes from three great gasoline tanks. If by some miracle the ants pass over the other
ditch, the gasoline wall will prevent them.
Thousands of
millions "of voracious jaws bearing down" upon the men appears, but they are deterred by
their "failure to find a way over the ditch." However, they begin to climb and march
over the dead bodies of other ants, and Leningen must think fast. Fortunately, the ants
did not assalt simultaneously along the entire length of the ditch, or the outlook for
the defenders "would have been black indeed." But, Leiningen puts the gasoline into
action. Responding, the ants come along a widening line. But, as the ants climb onto
the men's arms, Leiningen shouts to them to douse their arms in the gasoline. As the
water rises that moves more swiftly "carrying away more and more of it on the hastening
current.
As the water washes the ants away, Stephenson
writes, Victory had been snatched from the very jaws of defeat." But, the ants use
leaves to pass across the water as on rafts.
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