According to historian of Germany Sir Richard Evans, the paper built up "mass alarm" by dressing its London newspaper vendors as Prussian soldiers complete with pickelhaube helmet and placards showing maps of where the 'troops' would be next day.

[1] The rewrite of the story, featuring towns and villages with large readership of the Daily Mail,[2] greatly increased the newspaper's circulation and made a small fortune for Le Queux; it was translated into twenty-seven languages, and over one million copies of the book edition were sold.

They advance inland, cutting all telegraph lines and despoiling farmland as they go, and the British struggle to mount a proper defence, fighting a battle at Royston.

A junior Member of Parliament declares that "Britain is not defeated" and organises a resistance movement, the "League of Defenders," despite harsh reprisals by the Germans and a severe lack of arms.

Le Queux himself stated that one of his aims was to "bring home to the British public vividly and forcibly what really would occur were an enemy suddenly to appear in our midst".