The Invasion of America

In January, 1915, Mr. G. T. Viskniskki, manager of The Wheeler Syndicate, asked me: “Assuming that an enemy landed an army on the American coast, what could we actually do with our actual present resources used to their fullest possible extent?”

This story was written as the answer.

I hesitated a long time before I did it. I feared and fear still the dangers to which the possession of military power drives Nations, and which are particularly great in the case of a Republic. The obvious danger that a Nation like ours if powerfully armed may be too easily impelled to war, is great enough. But still more grave is the danger of a deep and fatal change in our National spirit, our ideals and our attitudes toward the world outside of our own borders.

Therefore when I did write the story I did it with no unworthy design, and not for the sake of taking advantage of the popular interest in the subject.

The story was written without any idea of suggesting that any Nation or group of Nations may mean to attack us. It was written with no desire to “scare” the people of the United States into giving thought to the army and navy. I should hold it a sad reflection on our country to assume that it must be aroused by terror or hatred into setting its house in order.

I beg my readers to accept the story in this spirit. There are eight words, uttered by one of the greatest of simple men. They are: “With malice toward none, with charity toward all.” Let that spirit dominate whatever this Nation may do for military Preparedness, and there will be no danger that the Preparedness shall become Bellicosity and curse the land.

As to the story itself, I need say only that I have tried scrupulously to avoid twisting any fact to prove a point; and I have cited no fact, even the most unimportant, without verifying it by reference to the original source. The description of the method of attack by the invading foreign armies is not based on any of the conflicting tales that have come to us from the European scene of war. In fact, the present war has been almost ignored. The foreign army statistics and other facts are based on undoubtedly authoritative official and semi-official publications issued during times of peace, on a study of the great peace maneuvers, and on information possessed by our own military experts.

Similarly, in treating of our own army and its situation I abstained wholly from using any of the tempting material that has been made so freely available since the beginning of the agitation for military preparedness, and have used, instead, the simple and surely unbiassed facts presented to Congress in responsible official reports before the European War centered American interest on our own condition.

The book will demonstrate for itself that the “story element” is not made to depend on invented battles or imagined catastrophes. Facing the fact that war is an iron game, wherein the moves are predicated inexorably on the possession of the material in men and appliances, the fiction takes no liberties save in trying to present a living picture of what such a war, falling on an army so unprepared, will be in such a country as ours.

The technical soundness of the book is left by me to the verdict of technical experts. The story was planned, drafted, written and rewritten with the benefit of unusually authoritative assistance and under technical coöperation rarely granted to books of this nature. My thanks are due to men who gave freely of their knowledge, professional ability and time without even asking that credit should be given to them in return.

The Author.

Let us be safe rather than sorry! Every scene so graphically described by the writer of this book will find its duplicate in the mind of the reader who has kept himself informed of the occurrences in the European fields of war.

In war the law of Nations, conserving the laws of humanity, is superseded by the law of necessity which is invoked and interpreted as to life and property by the belligerent concerned, to excuse every act committed.

Four years of costly and exhausting Civil War found us able to mass on the Mexican border a magnificently trained and virile army to execute our mandate of withdrawal (under the Monroe Doctrine) of a so-called Ruler by Divine Right and his government sustained by foreign arms. From that task the Civil War armies of both sides, trained to look with contempt upon obstacles hitherto regarded as insurmountable, turned and accomplished the construction of trans-Continental railroads that would not otherwise have been built for another generation, thus inaugurating an era of unparalleled national development.

The war in Europe, once ended, will likewise find such virile armies with warships and transport service comparatively unimpaired and aggregating, as to the latter, millions of net tons.

The teaching of history shows that so long as human nature remains unchanged, war cannot be eliminated as a factor in human affairs. Meanwhile, and doubtless for centuries to follow, war is inevitable as a recurrent consequence of the ceaseless operation of an inexorable law of progress toward world unity under that ultimate governmental form that shall approach nearest to the laws of humanity and righteousness.

As our own experience in the Spanish-American war abundantly proves, intervening oceans lost to our command by reason of the insufficient strength of our navy, offer no obstacles to the landing on our shore of a first armed enemy relay sufficient to secure a gateway through which others would rapidly follow. To this we should be able to oppose only an available mobile force—at present little more than double the police force which is deemed somewhat inadequate to preserve order and protect life and property in the City of New York.

This book thus simply stages here in New England, the heart of our industrial efficiency for war or peace, scenes the counterpart of those occurring abroad from day to day, against the actual happening of which in our own land there now intervenes a wholly inadequate navy and but the skeleton of an army, as in the days of the late Thomas Nast.[1]

John A. Johnston,
Brigadier General U. S. Army (Resigned);
President Army League of the U. S.

Washington, D. C. November 1, 1915.

	PAGE
“It Was Not Because They Knew How to Fight; It Was Because They Meant to Stay There Till They Died”	Frontispiece
“Days Before, the American Fleet Had Steamed Out of Long Island Sound”	facing 14
“There Were Ships Moving Toward the Long Island Coast as if to Threaten New York”	28
“There in Connecticut Lay the Army ... Miles of Tents Separated by Geometrically Straight Rows of Company Streets”	33
“Up Mounted a Hydro-Aeroplane”	46
“The Dragons of Twelve-Inch Mortars that Squatted in Hidden Pits”	48
“Destroyers Moved Straight for the Harbor in a Long Line”	60
“He Steered His Craft, Awash, from Behind Fisher’s Island, at Dawn”	83
“For Miles Beyond that the Enemy’s Patrols Had Occupied Points ...”	92
“They Flew over the Tall Municipal Building of New York”	100
“The Efficient, Prepared, Resourceful Invader Was Landing His Army, Not Only Without Losing a Man, but Without Getting a Man’s Feet Wet”	109
“The Forward Turret of a Battleship Turned and Spoke with a Great Voice”	129
“The People Had Gone out to Tear Up the Railroad Tracks Leading into the Town”	152
“Entirely Raw Volunteers, Who Had Everything to Learn”	160
“There Had Been Firing from Mill-Buildings, Which Had Been Destroyed for Punishment”	183
“The Quick Searchlights Caught the Ships”	208
“A Landing Was Attempted in Greater Force, with the Assistance of a Destroyer Division Lying Close to the Beach”	213
“The Country-Club Had Been Turned into a Brigade Headquarters”	243
“The Army of Madmen Went Forward to the Connecticut River to Hold the Western Bank”	260
“The Only Activity that Remained in Full Progress Was the Activity of the Bulletin-Boards”	291
“The Big Guns Behind Them Made No Despicable Sentinels”	331

MAPS
The Landing of the Enemy Forces	123
Boston Harbor	201
The Attack on the New York Defences	300

“Washington, D. C., March 20.—The President, as Commander-in-Chief of the Army and Navy, has ordered a grand joint maneuver of the fleet, the regular army and the Organized Militia (National Guard) of Divisions 5, 6, 7, and 8, comprising New England, New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia and West Virginia.”

No comment from official circles accompanied this dispatch when it was printed in the newspapers. None was needed. Ever since the Great Coalition had been formed, America had faced the probability of war.

In the White House there was a conference of the Cabinet, attended by the Chief of Staff of the United States Army and the Admiral who was President of the General Board of the Navy.

“The regular troops are moving,” reported the Chief of Staff. “Every last man of ’em is on the way east.” He laughed grimly. “I take no credit for it. The trains of the country can do it without changing a schedule. Do you know, gentlemen, that even the smaller roads often handle an excursion crowd as big as this whole army of ours?”[2]

The Secretary of War shrugged his shoulders. “Despite all the talk of recent years, despite all our official reports, I doubt if the people realize it.”

“Make them!” said the President. “Drive it home to them, before war is brought to our coasts.” He turned to the two chiefs of staff. “Give the newspapers a statement about the ‘maneuvers’ that will give the public the cold truth.”

“The fleet,” said the Admiral to the newspaper correspondents an hour later, “is assumed to be an enemy fleet too powerful for opposition. It will attempt to land at least 100,000 fighting forces somewhere on the Atlantic Coast. It is conceded that an actual enemy planning invasion would not come with less than that number. It is conceded also that a sufficiently powerful fleet can transport that number, and more, safely across the ocean. The Navy, further, concedes the landing.”[3]

What Our Harbor Defenses Cannot Prevent

“But our coast defenses, Admiral!” spoke the correspondent of a Boston newspaper. “We’ve been told that those affairs with their monster 12-inch rifled steel cannon and their 12-inch mortar batteries, and mines and things, are as powerful as any in the world, and can stand off any fleet!”

“They are not coast defenses, sir,” answered the Chief of Staff. “They are harbor defenses. They can stop warships from entering our great harbors. They cannot prevent an enemy from landing on the coast out of their range. And on the Atlantic Coast of the United States there are hundreds of miles of utterly undefended beach where any number of men can land as easily as if they were trippers landing for a picnic. All those miles of shore, and all the country behind them, lie as open to invasion,” he held out his hand, “as this.”

“Then what’s the use of them?”

“They furnish a protected harbor within which our own navy could take refuge if defeated or scattered,” said the Admiral. “They make our protected cities absolutely secure against a purely naval attack. No navy could readily pass the defenses, and probably none would venture so close as even to bombard them seriously. Certainly no fleet could bombard the cities behind them.

“Therefore,” he continued, “if an enemy wishes to bring war to us, he must land an army of invasion. Our harbor defenses force him to do that; but—having forced him to bring the army, their function ceases. They cannot prevent him from landing it. We have to do that with OUR army.”

“And could you stop him, or is that a military secret?” asked one of the party. He did it tentatively. He had been a war correspondent with foreign armies, and he did not expect a reply.

31,000 Men—Our Actual Mobile Army

“My dear boy,” answered the Chief of Staff promptly, “there probably isn’t a General Staff in the world that doesn’t know all about us, to the last shoe on the last army mule. We’ve got 88,000 men in the regular army, officers and privates.[4] Of these, you may count out 19,000. They are non-combatants—cooks, hospital staffs, teamsters, armorers, blacksmiths, and all the other odds and ends that an army must have, but can’t use for fighting. Now, cut out another 21,000 men. Those are fighting men, but they’re not here. They’re in Panama, Hawaii, the Philippines, China and Alaska—and we wish that we had about three times as many there, especially in Panama. How much does that leave? Forty-eight thousand? Very well. That’s what we’ve got here at home. But you’ll please count out another 17,000. They’re in the Coast Artillery, and have to man the harbor defenses of which we’ve been talking. Now you’ve got our mobile army—the actual force that we can put into the field and move around. Thirty-one thousand men.”

“A pretty straight tip,” agreed the Washington correspondents when they left the War Department. And as a straight tip they passed it on to their readers. So the Nation read the next morning how their army was being made ready. They read how four companies of one infantry regiment were gathered from Fort Lawton in Washington and another four companies from Fort Missoula in Montana. They read how still four other companies of the same regiment were at Madison Barracks in New York State.[5]

Their fifth Cavalry regiment, they learned, was being assembled like a picture puzzle by sending to Fort Myer, Virginia, for four troops of it, to Fort Sheridan, Illinois, for four more troops and a machine-gun platoon, and to Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, for the remaining four troops needed to form a full regiment.

There was field artillery whose component units were scattered, guns, horses and men, from the Vermont line to the Rio Grande. There were signal troops in Alaska, Texas, the Philippines and Panama.

This was no such mobilization as that giant mobilization in Europe when a continent had stood still for days and nights while the soldiers moved to their appointed places. So far scattered was the American army, so small were its units, that only a few civilians here and there could have noticed that troops were being moved at all.

More than one un-military citizen, looking over his newspaper that morning, cursed the politics that had maintained the absurd, worthless, wasteful army posts, and cursed himself for having paid no heed in the years when thoughtful men had called on him and his fellows to demand a change.

More than one citizen, when he left his house to go to his accustomed work, looked up at the sky and wondered, with a sinking heart, how soon it would seem black with war.

A Dreadnaught For Every Effective American Ship

It was a peaceful, soft sky, with baby clouds sleeping on its bland, blue arch. It radiated a tranquil warmth of coming spring; and under it the Atlantic Ocean lay equally peaceful, equally soft, equally tranquil.

Yet even as the people of America were taking up the day’s work, under that soft, tranquil sea a message was darting through the encrusted cables that swept away all peace.

Before noon, from sea to sea and from lakes to gulf, from the valley of the Hudson to the sierras of the Rockies, from Jupiter Inlet to the Philippines, ran the silent alarm of the telegraph that the Great Coalition had declared War!

Forty-eight hours later the combined battle-fleet of the four Nations put to sea with its army transports, bound for the American coast.[6]

The United States learned of its departure before its rear-guard had well cleared the land. The news did not come from American spies. It came from the Coalition itself.

War, the Chameleon, as Clausewitz called it, was presenting a new aspect of its unexpected phases. Not a cable had been cut following the declaration of war; and now the submarine cables and the wireless began to bring official news from the enemy—news addressed not to the American government, but to the American people.

It was news that told of an invulnerable fleet carrying more than a thousand rifled cannon of the largest caliber ever borne by ships in all the world. It told of enough battleships alone (and named them) to match the Republic’s fleet with a dreadnaught for every effective American ship of any kind.[7]

“Clever!” said the Secretary of State to the President. “It is Terrorism.”

“Don’t you think that you’d better reconsider your idea of letting this go through?” asked the Secretary of War. “It’s pretty dangerous stuff.”

“It’s the Nation’s War,” answered the President. “Will it demoralize our people to know the truth, even under the guise of terrorism? Do you know in whose hands I’m going to leave that question?”

“I can’t guess,” said the Secretary.

“In the hands of the newspapers,” replied the President.

The newspapers did not require to be told that the purpose of this novel news service from the enemy was Terrorism.

They answered Terrorism by Printing The News.

The Battle That Was Decided Years Before

Then the sea-coast cities began to call to Washington. By telegraph and telephone they demanded protection. It was a chorus from Maine to Georgia. Into the White House thronged the Congressmen.

“Defend us! Defend our people! Defend our towns!” said they.[8]

“We cannot do it!” said the Chief of Staff. “No wit of man can guess at what point of many hundred miles the enemy will strike. He may land on the New Jersey coast to take Philadelphia. He may land on Long Island to march at New York. He may strike at Boston. He may land between Boston and New York, on the Rhode Island or Massachusetts coasts, and keep us guessing whether he’ll turn west to New York or east to Boston. He may even strike for both at once, from there.”

“Then why not put men into each place to protect it?” demanded a Congressman. “Are these great cities to be left wide open?”

“You know how many regulars we’ve got. Do you know how many effective men we’ve pulled together by calling out those eastern divisions of organized militia? Their enrolled strength is 50,000 men. Their actual active strength as shown by attendance figures has been only about 30 per cent. of that; but we were lucky.[9] This danger has brought out all, probably, that were able to come. Still, there are less than 30,000 men; and not quite half of those have had good field training. We need them. We need them so badly that we’re putting them all in the first line. But it’s a little bit like—well, it’s murder.”

“Then you mean to say—!” The Congressman was aghast.

“I mean to say,” answered the Chief of Staff, with a set face, “that the army is going to take what it has, and do its best. But it’s going to do it in its own way. No enemy will dream of landing an invading army unless it is decisively, over-poweringly superior to our own. Now, Congressman, the only way for an inferior army to accomplish anything is to refuse battle until the chances are as favorable as they can be made. The inferior force must retire before a superior. It must force the invader to follow till he is weakened by steadily lengthening lines of communications. His difficulties of food-and ammunition-transport grow. He becomes involved in strange terrain. Last but not least, he gets more and more deeply into a land filled with a hostile population. But if we must defend a specific place at all hazards, then we must stand and give battle—well, it will be only one battle.”

“You mean—?”

“I mean that such a battle is decided already. It was decided years ago—when the country refused to prepare.”

“Good God, man!” The Congressman wiped his forehead with a trembling, fat hand. “I can’t go back and tell my people that.”

“You’d better not,” said the General, grimly.

No Men to Defend the Harbor Works

The unhappy man, and other unhappy men like him, went back to their constituencies knowing that now no campaign oratory would serve. Soften the news they must, and would; but they were the bearers of ill tidings, and they knew what comes to these.

The stricken cities heard. From all the great coast with its piled gold and silver, there arose a cry. Men shook their fists and cursed the machinery of politics that had worked through the blind years to hinder, to deceive and to waste. The Pork Barrel ceased all at once to be the great American joke.

“Throw men into our harbor defenses!” cried the cities of the coast. “Hold them! Hold them!”

“We have seventeen thousand trained regulars and 5,000 militia more or less experienced to handle these complex giants,” answered the Army, implacably. “There are 1,184 guns and mortars to handle. It leaves no men to defend the works. To throw the mobile army or any part of it into the defenses for mere protection is only to lock them up. The mobile army must defend the defenses from outside. If it cannot do it, they fall.”[10]

“Where is the mobile army?” cried the cities. “Send it here!” clamored each city.

There was no reply. Somewhere behind the Atlantic Coast lay the mobile army, silent.

The cities stared to sea. They listened for sounds from the sea. That serving ocean that had made them rich and great, had become suddenly terrible, a secret place where there brooded wrath. Every day great multitudes, stirred by helpless, vague impulse, moved toward the waterfronts and gazed down the harbors. Every rumble of blasts or heavy vehicle, every sudden great noise, startled the cities into a quick: “Listen! Cannons!”

The News the Fleet Sent Back

“Where is the fleet?” The question ran from Maine to Florida, till it, too, became one great clamor, storming at the White House. Again there was no answer.

Days before, the American fleet had steamed out of the eastern end of Long Island Sound. The tall, gray dreadnaughts and armored cruisers, each with its circling, savage brood of destroyers; light cruisers, torpedo boats,

sea-going submarines, hospital ships, auxiliaries and colliers, one by one they had passed into the open sea and vanished.

But though no man knew where it was, from its unknown place it spoke by wireless to Washington, and through Washington to the Nation.

From “somewhere between the Virginia Capes and the northern end of the Bahama Islands” where it lay, it had sent out its feelers across the sea toward the on-coming foe—swift gray feelers whose tall skeleton fire-control tops were white with watching sailors. And so, presently, between the enemy and the American coast there lay a line of relays to catch the news and pass it on to the Nation and its fleet.

More than a hundred miles of sea, said the news, were covered by the advancing fleet. It was a hundred miles of steel forts; and outside of them, dashing back and forth in ceaseless patrol, were the lighter and faster craft, consisting of destroyers and small, swift cruisers.

The scout cruiser Birmingham had spied ships inside even the inner line. But they were not transports. They were still warships. The troop transports were so far within all the protective cordons that the American scouts, lying far along the horizon, could not even sight their masts.

The enemy fleet scarcely made an attempt to attack the spying vessels. It seemed almost that the enormous mass was too insolently sure of its power to trouble about the scouts.

So, with watching cruisers and destroyers hanging to its sides day and night, the invaders’ armada moved westward as steady as a lifeless, wicked machine. Never varying their distances or relative positions, never falling out of line, never altering their speed of 14 knots, the dreadnaughts and battle-cruisers guarded their precious transports, trusting to their outer cordon to keep off all attacks. And the outer cordon held true.

It did not move slowly, majestically, like the armored line. Incessantly it swept back and forth, and in and out, patrolling the sea to a distance so far from the battle-ships that the American scouts rarely could approach nearer than to sight, from their own tops, the tops of the dreadnaughts.

The Message From the Kearsarge

As the enemy covered the sea, so he filled the air. Constantly, all day long, floating and drifting with the soft white clouds far beyond the farthest extent of the cordon, his aeroplanes surveyed the water-world. And all day long, and all night long, the ships’ wireless tore the air.

The American wireless, too, played forth its electric waves of air night and day. From daring scouts to relay-ships, and from relay-ships to hidden fleet and to waiting Nation, went the story out of the far sea. The American millions knew the progress of the coming enemy as if the fleet were an army moving along a populous highway of the land.

The Nation watched the implacable, remorseless advance breathlessly, apprehensively; but behind its apprehension there was hope. “Surely, surely,” men said to each other, “our splendid sailors will get at them!”

Accustomed by its history to expect thrilling deeds of dash and enterprise that should wrest success out of disaster, the United States waited for The Deed.

It came. Out of the far Atlantic came the story. It came from the battle-ship Kearsarge and went to the Chester, it was passed on by the Chester and picked up by the Tacoma, and the Tacoma tossed it into the air and sent it to the coast.

“Engaged,” said the Kearsarge, “have—sunk,” and then there came a break in the message. “Destroyer—light—cruiser—” spoke the wireless again, and stopped. “Armored—cruiser,” spoke the wireless again in half an hour. “Port—beam—disabled—withdrawing—pre-dreadnaught—abaft—starboard—beam—firing—14,000—yards—dreadnaught—port beam—” Again there came an abrupt check to the wireless.

To the men on the fleet “somewhere off the Virginia Capes,” and to the men in newspaper offices from ocean to ocean, it was as if they were witnessing the fight. Indeed, the presses had some of it printed and on the streets before the battle-ship’s story was done.

“Dreadnaught—” started the wireless again. “17,000—yards—am struck—after—gun—upper—turret—am struck—forward—gun—lower—turret—dismounted—am struck—after—gun—lower—turret—”

The air fell silent. It was the last word from the Kearsarge.

The Inevitable Order to an Inferior Fleet

“As a man,” said the Admiral that night to the correspondents who pressed him for an interview, “I am glad that the Kearsarge did it. As Admiral, I can only say that her destruction, old though she was, is a heavy loss to us that would not be balanced even if, besides the ships she sank, she had sunk both the dreadnaughts. We have ordered the fleet to keep itself intact.”

“Does that mean that there are to be no raids?”

“It cannot be done,” answered the Admiral. “With sufficient machinery, heroism can do great deeds to-day, as ever. Without the machinery, it can only go down, singing.[11] The enemy transports are within an inmost line of great ships. At the margin of their zone of fire is another armored line of dreadnaughts. And the outer cordon is at the margin of that zone of fire. Thus one of our raiding ships would have to break through at least thirty miles, every inch of it under fire from half a dozen ships. It cannot be done. This enemy fleet could be broken only by brute force. To attack in force with our inferior fleet would mean simply that we should smash ourselves against him as unavailingly as if we smashed ourselves full speed ahead against a rocky coast.”

“But surely at night our ships can dash in!” insisted the public, reluctant to give up romantic hopes. “Wait—and some night you will see!”

Then there came a wireless relayed from the Conyngham, biggest and swiftest of the American destroyer divisions. She had circled the whole enemy fleet, flying around it through days and nights at the full speed of her thirty knots. Her message told why there could be no raids at night.

There was no night. All the sea, ran the Conyngham’s tale, was lit like a flaming city. The outer cordon played its search-lights far toward each horizon. It played other lights inward, toward its own battle-ships. And the line of battle-ships in turn, kept mighty searchlights, bow and stern, steadily on their transports.

Each transport had its guard, whose bright surveillance never shifted, never wavered, from dusk to dawn. These sentinel dreadnaughts never turned a search-light to sweep the surrounding sea. They held their transports steadily in the white glare.

There was not an inch of ocean within their lines that was not ablaze. A fragment of driftwood could not have floated into that vivid sea without being detected by a hundred eyes.

The Invader Off the Coast

Now the news came fast and faster, as the fleet, and its hovering spies, came nearer.

The Alabama, sister-ship to the Kearsarge, by haphazard fortune got between two enemy scouts and the main fleet, and accomplished by sudden attack what she never could have accomplished by speed. She sank them within twenty minutes, and returned without injury. It was 13-inch guns against 8-inch, and the story was as it always is. The inferior enemy ships went down like pasteboard, under the fire of the turret guns on the American vessel.

On the same day, almost at the same hour, the scout cruiser Birmingham, at the other end of the enemy line, sent report that the destroyer Bainbridge, tiniest of the division, had driven her two 18-inch torpedoes home and sunk an armored cruiser that had fallen out of line to repair some unknown injury to its machinery. The Bainbridge did not tell its own story. The little boat and her men were blasted into nothing within ten minutes by a battle-cruiser that had turned to protect her mate.

These disasters, that might have been appalling to a lesser sea-power, left the great navy of the Coalition unshaken. Steadily, imperturbably, it kept on its way.

So there came the day when coasters and small craft sped wildly into the shelter of Boston and New York Harbors, into Long Island Sound and into the Delaware and Chesapeake Bays. They had seen the enemy.

Next morning, in a gray, transparent, peaceful April dawn, watchers on the coast, gazing across the empty, flat Atlantic, to the immense half-circle of the horizon, saw innumerable tiny objects just sticking up above the rim of the sea. Through the glass they seemed to be little perches of skeleton iron built in the deep ocean.

Set at beautifully precise distances apart, they dotted the sharply outlined edge of water and sky, north and south, far beyond vision.

Innocent and quiet they appeared, as they stood there, growing slowly, very slowly, up out of the far sea.

And the roaring presses, spouting forth extra editions east, west, north and south, told the United States of America:

INVADER APPEARS OFF AMERICAN COAST

Never, even in after years, was it determined whence the news of the enemy ships came first. Almost as easily might a land invaded by locusts have decided what eye first saw the coming cloud, or at what precise spot.

“Warship on horizon. Standing in. Slowly.” It came from the keeper of Peaked Hill Bar Life-Saving Station at the far end of Cape Cod’s sweeping sand-arm. From the crest of the Navesink Highlands, standing steep out of the Atlantic at New York’s harbor entrance, men saw ships. On the high place their eyes commanded a view eighteen miles out to sea. At that extreme distance were the tops of fighting craft, lying safely outside of the zone of fire from the big guns in Sandy Hook’s harbor-defenses.

From his lantern 163 feet high the lighthouse keeper of Barnegat on the New Jersey coast, forty miles south of the Navesink, saw tops above his horizon. “Ships standing off here,” came the word from Cape Ann, north of Boston.

Philadelphia heard from Absecon Light and cried to Washington that the enemy was preparing to land on its coast. Boston cried to Washington for ships and men. New York telegraphed and telegraphed again and sent delegations on a special train.

Washington faced the clamor, the appeals half-beseeching and half-furious, with a great stern aspect, new in a Republic wherein the rulers are the servants who must heed public demands. This coming invasion was unprovoked. The Administration needed no party behind it now; for it knew that this was to be a fight for life, and that only the sword could decide. And it had given the sword to the army and navy without conditions.

“It is the least we can do,” the President had said. “Long ago they warned the Nation. The Nation would not give them the tools they needed. Now that there is nothing left except to do their best, they shall be left to do it in their own way.”

So the word went abroad among the politicians: “The army and navy have the bit in their teeth.” And the politicians, once so powerful, went helplessly to the Departments, to ask what they might tell their people.

“Tell them,” said the Admiral, “that there is nothing to say—yet. Here! We are sending out a bulletin.” He passed it over.

The Sea Strategy an Invader Would Employ

“The enemy fleet,” said the bulletin, “has expanded its line enormously to threaten many far separated points simultaneously, and thus mask its actual design for landing. Our ships and air scouts, and the army air scouts, are trying to penetrate the screen of cruisers, destroyers and enemy air-craft to find the real fleet with the convoys.”

“But is this not a chance for the navy to attack the scattered enemy ships?” asked one.

“Opportunities may occur,” answered the Admiral. “But the business of our fleet is to keep itself in battle formation.”[12]

The sea-coast cities read the bulletin and held their breath. Through their streets thundered their traffic, as in peace. But the exchanges were closed—had closed half an hour after opening, in panic. Even in that short time, a thousand fortunes had been destroyed: and men passing outside had heard from within a vast noise of cries and shrieks as of animals.

The banks were closing. The streets leading to the railroad stations from the financial centers were clogged by slowly moving but madly crowding automobiles and cabs and trucks. Everything on wheels had been pressed into service. On one open truck, guarded by half a dozen men who showed automatic pistols ostentatiously, were bags of gold. The United States sub-Treasuries were being emptied. Men tore at securities in their safe-deposit vaults and stuffed them into valises, and ran. The treasure of the cities was being sent inland.

In front of the newspaper offices stood the citizens. They stood so closely crowded that there was no passage through those parts of the towns. Their throngs were so great that from their outskirts only those could read the announcements who were armed with field glasses. These fortunate ones told the news as it appeared: and it was repeated to the crowds in the side-streets, who packed the roads from house-edge to edge.

All these great crowds were utterly silent. There was no sound from them, except for the voices of those who passed the news on. A man looking from a high window in a newspaper office suddenly stepped back, with a choking in his throat. “It is—it is,” he said, and choked again, “as if they were waiting for the end of the world.”

A Strategical Shelling of the Coast

Incessantly the bulletins spoke. Lighthouses, coast-guards, patrols, harbor defenses, ships, air-scouts wirelessed their reports to Washington, and Washington flung it swiftly through the land.

Nantucket had seen ships. There were ships moving toward the Long Island coast as if to threaten New York. Atlantic City on the southern New Jersey coast, and Rockport in New England sent out warning.

It was a still, warm morning, heavy with the soft, humid air that early spring lays on the cities of the sea. There was no breeze, except for a languorous breathing from the distant

ocean, that stole up the harbors and scarcely moved the air. Suddenly that brooding, heavy air was shaken. One! Two! Three!

Afterward, when men compared the time, they knew that it was heard at the same instant at New York and Boston, and all the stretches of coast between them and beyond. Even in that moment of fear, there were thousands who instinctively looked at their watches and timed it. It was exactly half-past ten when the first shot sounded. Very regularly, almost somnolently, came the far-off shocks through the air. There were half-minute intervals between them, quite exact.

The last boom was heard at eleven. Long before that the bulletins had begun to tell that ships were shelling the coast. Duxbury Beach near Boston was being shelled. Long Branch and Asbury Park were bombarded. Amagansett on Long Island was in flames.

“It has stopped,” said the bulletins, then, “The ships have ceased firing.”

Then there came news from the harbor defenses. Two ships, said Plum Island at the east end of Long Island Sound, had engaged the defenses at long range without effect. A ship had come in east of Coney Island, just outside of the zone of fire from Sandy Hook, reported Fort Hamilton, and dropped shells into Brooklyn’s suburbs.

Now the crowds were silent no longer. Long years afterward, old men told how on that still April morning they were in quiet places on the outskirts of the great cities, and heard from there a great, strange sound as of a vast æolian harp. It was the noise of multitudes, risen.

They stormed their City Halls, roaring for soldiers. They tried to rush their armories, demanding weapons. To Washington flashed the dreaded news of Mobs. “Troops must be sent at once,” said the cities.

The old Chief of Staff, with “the bit in his teeth,” dropped the dispatches on the floor. “Let ’em handle their own mobs,” said he.

Not Enough Men to Guard Even the Water Supply of New York and Boston

“Handle your own mobs!” he said again, to The Boss from New York, who appeared with a flaming face.

But The Boss had the bit in his teeth, too. Those dispatches, and long distance telephone messages from close lieutenants, had filled him with a dread that was bigger than the new-born dread of the old soldier. “I’ve broken bigger men than you!” he roared. “A thousand times bigger! Once and for the last time, are you going to send the army to protect us?”

“Once, and for the last time,” said the General, quietly, “no!”

The Boss looked at him. His eyes glared. Then, all at once, he saw that in the General’s face that gave him a big, new, overwhelming knowledge. He saw that the new word “NO” had been born in Washington; and that he and his henceforth would have to admit that it meant “NO.”

It hit him like a club. Something came from his throat that was not a sob, yet strangely like one. “Then what—then—are we going to everlasting smash?”

“Listen,” said the General, gravely calm as in the beginning. He laid his hand on the politician’s shoulder. “We have swept together the stuff that you and your kind gave us in these past years. Up there,” he pointed north, “in Connecticut, our officers have been fighting to make an army of it—of battalions that have no regiments, of divisions that are not divisions, of riflemen who never learned to shoot and of cavalry that never learned to maneuver. But even if all that mess were not a mess—if all these young men were fit to fight in the battle line this moment, there are not enough of them to guard even the water-supply of New York and Boston.”[13]

“Then you won’t put any men into the city?”

“To defend a city from within is an act of desperation, no matter how big one’s army is,” said the General. “The place to defend a city is as far away from it as you can meet the enemy.”

“But the newspapers say that you haven’t men enough to stop him.” The Boss had dismissed all attempt to bluster. “Isn’t there a chance?”

“Not if he comes in the force we expect—and he will be sure to come so.” The General did not endeavor to soften his statement. He spoke sharp and short, “And remember—the cities are not the United States. Our business is to keep the army in the field for the Union, not for New York or Boston or even Washington.

There is a price to be paid—and perhaps the cities must pay it.”

“And you’ll pay the price, too,” muttered the Chief of Staff, looking northward toward New England from his window after the politician had gone. “You’re paying it now, with sweat and nerves; and you’ll pay it in lives.”

A Militia That Cannot Shoot

There, in Connecticut, lay the army, looking formidable enough. Radiating in beautiful precision from a central point, were miles of tents separated by geometrically straight rows of company streets. Over all the great space, afoot and horseback, in companies and troops, in squadrons and battalions, moved spruce, agile figures in the trim efficient campaign dress of the American soldier. Glossy, bright flags floated everywhere. The sweet bugles sang.

It would have seemed a very harmonious, solidly welded whole, that army, to any layman who could have had a bird’s eye view of its business-like assembly, its great parks of artillery, its full corrals of mounts, its endless rows of tents and equipage and its enormous trains of transport vehicles and ambulances.

But at one end of that great, orderly, formidable camp were hordes of organized militia firing at targets. With the enemy on the coast, these men were still being broken in to shoot—not to become sharp-shooters, but to qualify merely as second-class marksmen that they might at least learn enough about the use of their rifles to be not entirely useless in battle. Ever since the militia of the coast States had come in, small-arms experts of the army had been clutching greedily at every bit of daylight, to teach 14,000 men how to shoot—14,000 men of an armed force that was offered by the States to be the country’s first line of defense.[14]

Into that camp had marched a month before, with flags flying, bands gallantly playing, weapons gleaming, one whole State’s militia organization of which only 700 men had fired regularly in practice during the whole preceding year. Only 525 of even that small number had qualified as shots, and more than a thousand were carried as utterly unqualified. Of that entire State force, only one man had passed through the regular army qualification course with the rifle, and only twelve had qualified at long range practice.[15]

“Brave?” said the hapless General of Brigade who had them under his hands. “Brave? If we gave ’em the order, they would charge an army with their bare hands, sir—and they might as well.”

He fluttered a sheet of paper in his hard, hairy fist. The sheet showed 25,353 organized militia enrolled as “trained men armed with the rifle.” Of these 15,927 men had qualified sufficiently to be fit for firing in battle. There were a thousand men in that command whose records showed that they had not fired their rifles a single time in a year: and the General had reason to believe that many of these never had used weapons except as instruments of parade.[16]

State Artillerymen That Have Never Qualified as Gunners.

A mile away, in the artillery encampment, a field artillery battery of regulars from Fort Sill swept their guns at top speed through passages so tight that it seemed impossible for the flying wheels to clear them. Sharply they wheeled and came to position, just as a militia battery arrived.

The militia guns were hauled by horses that their State had hastily hired or bought. The brutes had hauled trucks in a city; and in trying to wheel, one of them straddled the gun. In a moment the gun-team was around and over the guns in a confusion of chains and leather.

“Do you stable your mounts on top of your guns in the milish?” shouted a regular, gleefully. But he and his fellows helped good-naturedly enough.

“We never had horses till now,” growled one of the militiamen, who was stooping to tug at a trace-chain. It made his face fiery red. “State wouldn’t give us any, and we didn’t have stables, anyway, in our armory. So we couldn’t break in any mounts.”

“Nor you couldn’t break yourselves in, chum, I guess,” spoke another regular. “How the devil did you get gunnery practice? Haul your little gun out by hand to the firing ground?”

The militiamen fumbled at the trace again. “Didn’t fire it,” he said, without looking up.

“All right, milish!” shouted the regular. “Shake! You’re game, all right, you boys! Willing, by gum, to face the Hell that you’re going to get, and not a gunner in your battery. Fine leather-headed citizens you must have, back home.”

“They didn’t think much of artillery at home,” grinned the militiaman. “Thought that infantry was all they needed. They sort of thought we just had a little toy to play with.”

“You ain’t going to be lonely, milish,” grunted the regular, sauntering off. “Tie a necktie around your horses and then go over yonder. You’ll find three other batteries from three other States that never had no horses, never had no mounted drills, and never qualified as gunners.”[17]

Cavalry Without Horses and Undrilled

A grizzled Colonel of Cavalry rode by. Under his shaggy eye-brows he shot a glance at the helpless battery, and swore. He dated back to Indian times, and they said of him in the army that he knew nothing except cavalry tactics and horses. But he knew them; and he was breaking his old heart over the militia cavalry that had come under his command.

Some he had that were good enough to win his full praise; but none of these was full as to quota of men. The Colonel of the best of the regiments was riding at his side. It was an organized force of rich men, each of whom had brought his own mount, trained as carefully as any cavalry horse, and perfectly equipped. “Fine, sir, fine!” said the old Indian fighter. “But oh! Wait till you see what arrived last week. They can ride! Yes, sir, they can ride. Heaven knows how they learned it, for they didn’t ever have a mount except what they hired in livery stables. A rich State, too, and one that did its infantry damned well, damned well, sir. It was supposed to be a regiment of cavalry that we were to get. Do you know what arrived? Two squadrons! And, sir, they came afoot. They served a State that evidently prefers horseless cavalry.”[18]

He chewed his cigar and threw it away. “Look over there!” he continued. “See those chaps? They were among the first to come to us. Yes, sir. The entire cavalry force of that State came out—the entire force, you understand. D’you want to know how many there were? Three troops,—three—troops—confound me, sir. Not a whole squadron. But as these three troops were in three different parts of the State they hadn’t even been drilled to move together in their little three troops as one body. We’re just getting ’em so that they can ride in squadron without smashing into some other troop and crumpling the whole outfit to Hades.”[19]

State Troops Without Medical Supplies, Shoes, Overcoats

Even while the old cavalry leader was swearing, a delegation of civilians, sent to visit the camp officially, was gathered at headquarters. The visitors were haggard and worried: but, with the ever-ready optimism of the extraordinary American race, the most worried one of them all said: “A splendid army. Looks fit to fight for its life. We are sure that you will give a good account of yourselves, General, against any force.”

“Against any force,” echoed another.

The Major-General did not reply. He gazed over the spick and span tents, the spick and span men, the spick and span guns, far and on, and on, over an encampment that stretched out of sight behind distant wooded heights.

In the immediate line of his vision lay the sanitary camp. There, beside his own regulars, lay sanitary troops of the State militia that had come into camp without ambulance companies, without field hospitals, without medical supplies. He thought of one regiment (a regiment on paper, seven companies in reality) that had appeared without even its service outfit of shoes and overcoats. Two whole State divisions, had they gone into action on their own strength, would have had no ambulances at all to carry off their wounded. One division, formed from a State that had done better than most with its militia, arrived for war with two field hospitals short and lacking seven full ambulance companies. Even the richest State of the sea-board groups had left its organized force short, both a field hospital and an ambulance company. Not one of all the militia forces from all the States had ambulances enough.[20]

The soldier looked up at the sky. “Lord! Lord!” he muttered, not impiously. “An extravagant land. As extravagant with its lives as with everything else.”

The One Thing in Which Our Army Would Be Perfect

There was only one thing in which that army was preëminent and perfect. It was in the matter of transport. Even that had been made only since war was declared; but it had been made swiftly, thoroughly, because it demanded only an efficient, swift gathering of vast resources.

Within an hour of the declaration, the army had swept the coast States from New Jersey to Maine clear of everything serviceable that had wheels. Piled on miles of sidings beside the magnificent railroad system lay the rolling stock of a dozen great commercial States. Like mammoth trains along the sides of all the highways, north, south, east and west from the camp, were the requisitioned automobiles and trucks.

This army was going to be able not only to fight on its stomach, as Napoleon said, but it was going to be able to fight on flying feet, too.

So great were its resources in motive power, that although there were motor vehicles making a double line miles long on each of half a dozen roads leading from the camp, there still were thousands of swift cars free to patrol the American coast from the end of Maine to the Virginia Capes.

The army might not be able to withstand a blow; but it could dodge.

It could know, too, in time to dodge. Its own trained intelligence department was supplemented by ten thousand and more untrained observers and watchers, who tried to make up for their lack of technical skill by keen intelligence, alertness, adventurous daring and—unlimited private means.

Queer enough were their reports, often incomprehensible, frequently absurd to the point of tragedy. In a measure, they made a confused trouble for army headquarters; yet on the whole they were invaluable in that time, when the United States was so wofully short of scouts.

The First American to See the Enemy’s Troop Ships

The volunteer scouts spied out the air as they did the roads.

It was a volunteer who soared out in his bi-plane from New Bedford in Massachusetts that morning, when the newspapers announced the approach of the hostile fleet. He had learned to loop the loop for fun, fun being the great object of his gay though strenuous existence.

Fortunate it was, indeed, that rich men had taken up aviation as a sport: for the enemy had come with aeroplanes counted not by scores, but by hundreds. And to oppose them, the American army and navy combined had exactly 23![21]

Now it had happened that the few military airmen, attempting their scouting flights from the south and the west, had encountered unfortunate cloudless conditions, which quite prevented them from evading the far superior forces of hostile airmen. They had, therefore, been beaten back, continually, before they could pierce the screen.

The volunteer, however, sweeping across the mouth of Buzzards Bay and out between the islands of No Man’s Land and Martha’s Vineyard, dipped into one of those drifting, isolated fogs that are born in the waters of Nantucket Shoals. Before a slow, lazy wind, the thick vapors went steaming and trailing out to sea, and he went with them. Occasionally he rose above the bank and looked out, like a man lifting himself from a trench. He had done this about a dozen times, and he was getting into the thin, seaward end of the fog-belt, when he saw ships.

Instantly he went up, up, up. It was a racing one-man biplane. He thanked Heaven for its speed: for even as he was looking down on the ships, little things detached themselves from the decks and arose. They were specks at first, but in a moment they had grown. He watched them grow out of a corner of his eye, but with all his vision, all his concentrated attention, he looked at the fleet.

There, surrounded by war vessels, he saw a long line of immense two-funneled, three funneled and four-funneled steamships; and he knew that he was the first American to see the troop transports of the enemy.

The News the Airman Brought

He was turning in a sharp circle to flee even while he counted them. He was darting toward the coast, even while he still looked sidewise down at them to finish his count. Then, rolling and swooping as he put on the fullest speed of his racing engine, he fled, with five navy planes behind him, coming on the wings of their explosive storm.

He wondered if they were firing at him. All that he knew was that his world just then was only one blur of whistling, strangling, smiting air and deafening roar. He struck a hole in the air and pitched sharply. He swept over the fog bank. It could not help him now. He dared not sink low enough to hide in it. Shining brightly in the bright air, he volleyed straight on as if he were going to dash into the blue wall of sky ahead.

He won. He never knew how far the enemy planes had pursued, or whether they had come near him or not. He knew only that suddenly there was a yellow band of sandy land deep, deep under him, that the next instant trees and hills swept past like little color-prints, and that he came to earth.

Then he reached for a flask. And then he looked to wonder where he had landed. And then he heard the roar of a motor on one side of him, and the roar of a motor on the other. “Hands up!” shouted a man in khaki, leaning from the side of a swaying, drunkenly rolling car. He put up his hands, laughing hysterically.

Fifteen minutes later the telephone bells rang in the forts on Fisher’s Island, Plum Island, in the Narragansett Harbor defenses, and in the headquarters of the field army. It told them that the enemy transports were thirty miles south of Nantucket Island, standing in for Block Island Sound or Long Island.

Unleashing the Submarines

Up from Fisher’s Island under the Connecticut shore mounted an army hydro-aeroplane. It rose 2,000 feet, and circled there,

with such graceful, steady wheelings that despite its constant speed, it seemed to be soaring in lazy spirals like a sleepy gull. Under the two fliers in the machine lay the eastern entrance of Long Island Sound—the watergate to New York, with half-open jaws whose fangs were the guns of Fisher’s Island on the north and Plum Island on the south. Utterly harmless and innocuous seemed those two jaws, for not even the keenest eye could make out from above anything more savage than grassy mounds and daintily graded slopes of earth. Not even the sharpest glass could see within those pretty models in relief the dragons of 12-inch mortars that squatted in hidden pits sixteen in a group, or the sleek, graceful rifled cannon whose secret machinery could swing their thirty-five tons upward in an instant and as instantly withdraw them after they had spat out their half ton of shot.

Between the guarding jaws there was deep water—deep and beautifully green. One of the airmen spoke to the other, who was looking out to sea through his glasses. “There they go,” he said, nodding to indicate the water below.

Both looked. They looked into fifty feet of ocean, but their height made it but as a thick pane of dim green glass.

They saw things moving, deep down. They were sleek and gray, like small whales. But they had snouts longer and sharper than any whale that ever swam. Three of them there were, moving out to sea through the entrance, steadily, at about ten knots an hour.

The Wait for the Enemy to Strike

An hour passed. The men in the hydro-aeroplane descended, and their reliefs went up. They circled for an hour. Sometimes they drifted out to sea till the land was lost behind them.

The forts and the army headquarters caught a wireless from the air. The enemy fleet was approaching Block Island, said the message. The hydro-aeroplane was rushing homeward while it spattered its news into the air, for it was a slow machine, and swifter ones were over the fleet. The enemy had formed in columns, ejaculated the fleeing machines, with destroyers and light cruisers in advance, and the transports, gripped on all sides by armored ships,

were coming on in echelon formation, eight cable lengths, or 4,800 feet, apart.

Simultaneously, almost, all the coast places from Barnegat to the end of New York Harbor’s farthest flung domain signaled and telephoned and wired that the menacing ships had disappeared. To Washington and the waiting American fleet passed the message from sea-scouts that all the enemy screen was withdrawing slowly toward the east—a mighty screen, lying along a hundred miles out to sea, and steadily closing in on its nucleus, to protect its flanks and rear against surprise from the ocean ways.

They were moving fast now—much faster than fourteen knots. There was no feint now. They were sweeping straight at the land. But where would they strike? Would they land at Long Island to march their army to New York, or would they strike at Rhode Island or the southern coast of Massachusetts?

Boston was sure that they would come at Massachusetts. New York roared with the news that its own Long Island coast was the enemy’s object. But though the cities were shaken with panic, there were no mobs now. Noise and fear and medley of advice and demand and anger there were, but no mobs. The cities had handled their mobs with long cordons of silent, stout, unimaginative police and with firemen who brought out clanging engines and hose. It was the best answer to hysteria; for these sudden-born mobs had been born only of hysteria. They became all the more orderly, after it had had its vent. And the real mob, the silent, brooding, dangerous under-world, had not begun to stir.

It would not, now. Before noon there were men in all the armories—militia fragments and volunteers. They were incapable of fighting soldiers; but the mobs were as helpless against them as they, in turn, were helpless against trained armies.

All That Our Submarines Could Accomplish

On a dreadnaught in the van of the convoying fleet, stood the Admiral of the armada. He was speaking with the ship’s Captain, as they paced up and down the bridge. Everywhere enormously long polished black cannon thrust their supple bodies out of turrets. Like the peering heads of serpents, the guns of the secondary batteries looked out from bow to stern. Everywhere stood officers and men at quarters. Without a moment’s pause signals ran up and down, wimpling out their gaudy messages, and everlastingly the wireless sounded its stuttering staccato. Yet there was a placid, strangely peaceful quiet over the whole gray, tall, bristling machine. Except for its appearance, it might have been a pleasure yacht.

“It’s a lovely shore,” the Admiral was saying. “Some beautiful estates and charming people. I was delightfully entertained within five miles of where we shall land. It seems a rough return for hospitality. But one does for one’s country what one would not do—hello!”

The dreadnaught’s circling destroyers were coming at the ship headlong. The Captain leaped to the rail. Before he got there, the ship’s port battery crashed. A signalman pointed at the water fifty yards off. Something like a staring, hooded eye had looked from the sea for a moment.

It was the last thing the signalman saw on earth. The dreadnaught shuddered. While its guns were still firing, it lifted with a jerk as a man would lift if caught by an upward swing under the jaw. A great, queerly muffled explosion shook it. For perhaps a minute it tore along under the impetus of its own speed, but it did not move smoothly. It jolted, like a cart going over a rough road. Then it began to topple. Over and over it leaned, slowly, fast, faster. There was not an outcry. Short calls of command there were from officers, but not a sound from the men.

It was very still now. The wireless had ceased, the engines were shut off, and there was only the roar of steam.

The dreadnaught’s crew was clinging, like men clinging to a steep cliff, holding fast to everything that would give foot-hold or hand-grip on the inclined deck. A signal climbed along the toppling mast. Then, with a thunder of breaking metal, with fire-hose, ammunition cases, instruments, ship’s furniture all volleying into the sea, the ship fell full on her side and went down.

A Maneuver to Escape Undersea Attack

In a hissing, breaking sea that instantly was gray with ashes and multi-colored with oil, swam eight hundred men. None came near them. The dreadnaught’s last signal had been the order to keep off: and the big fleet was weaving in and out at top speed, in a maneuver long since perfected, to escape other attacks from the invisible things.

Far astern raved the guns again. This time the alert destroyers had not missed their aim. A periscope disappeared. Presently, slowly, little spreading disks of oil swam on the surface, and united, and more floated upward and spread.

Not for a moment had the fleet fallen into disorder. Even while the destroyers were picking up what survivors they could find, another dreadnaught hoisted its commander’s flag as Admiral, in place of the one who lay under the bright green water. A speed cone went up: and warships and convoy steamed full speed ahead.

Half an hour later the periscopes of two submarines, outdistanced, bobbed up far behind the fleet. Their gray shapes arose, streaming. The manholes opened and heads came out, blinking into the sunlight and drawing in great breaths of fresh air. They followed the ships toward the coast.

One of them hoisted a wireless apparatus, and began to call. It was a weak call, that had to be repeated again and again. Then Montauk Point heard, over a temporary apparatus, and received, and began to send on to New York; and the bulletins told that submarine M-9 had sunk the Admiral’s flag-ship, that submarine G-3 had sunk a destroyer, and that submarine O-1 had been lost.

“Victory! Victory! VICTORY!” ran the news. They knew that it was not victory, those great, anxious crowds that stopped all traffic that day in all the continent of North America. But for a while they were thrilled, and they cheered, and forgot the slow, implacable grip of irresistible power that was closing in on their eastern sea-coast, not to be stayed, not even to be halted.

The Bombardment of the Coast

The day passed, and the dusk came in. A pleasant evening it was, warm enough to tempt people to stay out-of-doors. Even in the trembling sea-cities there was all the wonted life of such a season. The rich had fled; but the others remained. There was nothing else for them to do. A few months before, had any of them been asked what they would do in case of an invasion, they would have painted a picture of the millions fleeing from their cities with what possessions they could lug. Thus it had been in Europe, as they had read. Thus it would be in America.

But it was not so. There they were, watching and waiting, and clinging to the only hold they knew. And in this soft dusk, there they loitered in their countless miles of streets, and talked, and argued, and prophesied, just as they had done always. And everywhere in the miles fronted by little houses and tenements and tall apartments the children were ushering in the spring by playing ring-around-rosy. Everywhere their thin, clear young voices made the old accustomed music of the towns.

EXTRA! EXTRA!

In the soft dusk, on the Rhode Island and Massachusetts coast there was falling red Hell and ruin.

Out of the tranquil, empty sea it had come. Out there, far out, in the pearl and gray, there had been flashes. There had been roars and whistles and bellows in the high, still air, coming, coming! And the shells had plunged down, everywhere, unending. Streams of iron, streams of fire, streams of screaming, bursting things: things that struck the land and spun into it like beasts biting, and burst, blasting away forests and houses and men in crimson whirlwind: things that plunged into towns and ricocheted, and pulled down walls and towers: things that darted at power plants and darkened the world: and things that burst into towns with fierce fire and set the world a-light.

It was not news that came through the spring night. To the men at the receiving ends of wires it was as if there were coming to them one wild din of terror. Here were telephone messages that broke off in the middle and were never to be resumed on this earth. Here were telegraph dispatches that stopped suddenly and left the wire dead, its far end dangling where a shell had torn down the poles. From hill tops far inland came raving words of burning towns glaring red in the country below. From somewhere unknown, from somebody unknown, came one word over a telephone that instantly went out of commission. It was: “God.”

In the cabin of the new flag-ship sat the new Admiral. The ship was shaking with the explosions from its secondary batteries, but the cabin was orderly and sedate. A shaded light was shining on a chart.

“Another hour of this,” said the Admiral, “and I think the coast will be nicely cleared for the landing.” He selected a cigar from its box, and lit it carefully.

The first American soil on which the invader set foot was not on the mainland. It was a steep-edged, wind-blown bit of New England territory that swims like a ship far out on the Atlantic in the great misty ocean gate between painted Gay Head on Martha’s Vineyard and the brown-handed lighthouse of Montauk Point, Long Island.

Unimportant to the world, but famous in American history and legend is this Block Island or Manisees, as the Indians called it, meaning the Isle of God. Here, ever since American liberty was born, there have clung generations of sea-faring, storm-fighting New England men, proud to call themselves Rhode Islanders, though the State to which they belong is so far away that they can only just see its coast.

Block Island’s men and women stood on Mehegan Bluff and Beacon Hill and Clay Head, watching their sky fill with fighting tops and enemy flags, and their sea oppressed by enemy craft. Among those who stood there that day were descendants of men who had fought at sea in every American war. Some were there who could boast that their ancestors had crept into Long Island Sound in little sloops, and even in rowing boats, to harry tall King’s ships.[22]

Strong-hearted, like their forefathers, were these men. They looked out on their beset horizon and doubled their sun-burned hands into fists, longing to get among the foe with ship to ship, gun to gun, and the battle-flag of America shining.

This was no tame population, to be terrified like a driven herd. Smacksmen were these, accustomed to looking unafraid into the black snarl of storm. Swordfishermen were here who went daily, without a second thought, to fight the lithe spearsman of the sea in his own element.

The First Invader

A cruiser rushed at their island. Heavy with turreted guns and broadside batteries, tall with laced iron mast-towers and wide funnels and ponderous cranes, swarthy-gray over all like a Vulcan’s smithy, the enormous thing stopped half a mile out with the guns of the secondary batteries pointing at the land. From under her quarter, around bow and stern, swept destroyers with cocked funnels spitting smoke and with ready, alert men at the lean little guns.

They moved straight for the little harbor, in a long line. On the bridge of the foremost, an officer waved a hand at the crowd of fishermen on the shore, pointed to his guns, and, with a backward motion, to the cruiser.

“Aye! We take the hint, damn ye!” growled an old man. “He means,” he turned to the rest, “that we’d better not make a fuss! Drop that!” He turned sharply to a younger man, who had just joined the group. He had a shot-gun, half concealed under his coat.

“Are we going to take it laying down?” demanded the armed man.

The old man pushed him backward with both hands. “You fool! That thing out there could blow us off the island, men, women and

children, as if we was dead maple-leaves afore a southeastern gale!”

The destroyers had stopped. The crews swung their guns toward the shore.

From the cruiser dropped six ships’ boats, full of blue-jackets. They swung past the destroyers, beached, and formed in a line. There was a click of breech-bolts shot home—so quick that it was as but one sound.

A Lieutenant advanced his men with the swinging navy trot. He pointed to men in the little throng, selecting six of the older ones. “We take the island,” he said in precise English. “Fall in! We hold you responsible for the good order of the rest of your people. There must be no attempt at resistance.”

While he spoke, another detachment of the landing party had been busy among the huddle of boats in the harbor. Some were being made up into a tow. Others were being scuttled at their moorings. A third detachment was knocking holes into the smaller craft hauled up on shore.[23]

The First American to Fall

Three sailors were just driving boat-hooks through the bottom of an up-turned cat-boat, when a tall young fisherman leaped at them with an oaken tiller-handle, and struck one down.

The other two closed on him, but let go again almost instantly at the sound of a sharp order. They tore themselves away and jumped aside.

There was another order, in the same sharp voice. Instantly, while the fisherman still stood, staring, with his weapon in the motion of striking, a blast of fire spat at him from six carbines. His head went up, exposing his broad brown throat. He thrust his hands before him, all the fingers out-spread. With his eyes wide open, he tottered and pitched face down.

Another order, and the sailors wheeled, covering the islanders.

“Dan!” screamed a girl in the crowd. “Hush! Don’t look!” An older woman caught her around the neck and pressed the girl’s face to her breast.

“He brought it on himself!” said the Lieutenant to the fishermen. “Take warning! That is war!” He turned, and walked to the beach.

The dead man lay where he had fallen. The bluejackets, lowering their carbines, came to rest beyond him, facing the Block Islanders impassively.

None of these had said a word. Save for the outcry of the girl and the woman’s “Hush!” there had been utter silence, as if the discharge of the weapons had swept away speech. Slowly clenching and unclenching their hands, the big, weather-beaten, strong men stared at the corpse that lay huddled so awkwardly before them.

One of the women touched a white-haired, white-bearded islander on the arm. “Won’t they let us have him!” She turned her eyes toward the dead man. “It don’t seem hardly right—to let him lay there.”

The old man looked at her as if waking from a trance. He passed his rough hand over his brow. With his slow, wide fisherman’s stride, he stepped forward. The sailors instantly brought their weapons up.

The old man pointed dumbly to the corpse. In reply, a sailor indicated the Lieutenant with a gesture.

The fisherman walked to the Lieutenant. “I wanted to ask you—” he began, but a signalman interrupted him, pointing at his head. The Block Islander looked at him, bewildered. Impatiently, the sailor pointed again, and the islander understood.

Hesitatingly, reluctantly, he took off his hat. Crushing its brim with the grip of helpless anger, he faced the officer.

“I wanted to know—sir—if mebbe we couldn’t—” he indicated the corpse.

“Yes!” answered the officer, shortly. “You can have him!” With a change in his voice, he added: “I am sorry. Very sorry. Yes! You may take him away.”

Block Island as a Naval Base For the Enemy

So fell brave Block Island. It had greeted the sunrise with the stars and stripes hauled defiantly in the face of the invader. The setting sun shone on the flag of the enemy. Its wireless was being operated by uniformed men. Its telephone and telegraph communications with the mainland were torn out. Its little harbors were being used by destroyers and small craft as if they had been foreign naval bases forever.

So, too, had fallen the islands of Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard with their stouthearted, passionately American population. They had yielded, not to ignoble fear, but to the irresistible mechanics of war.

The people of Block Island, watching destroyers steaming slowly toward the New England coast with strings of their fishing boats in tow, noted a curious thing. Every boat was laden with fish-nets. The enemy had gathered every seine, every pound-net. He had lifted long fyke-nets from the sea, and had dragged the enormous hauling-seines from their drying-reels.

Block Island wondered what a fighting navy meant to do with fish-nets. Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard wondered, too; for they, also, had been stripped of their gear.

Following the long tows with their heaped brown freight, six cruisers moved toward the coast, each guarded by destroyers whose men watched the sea for a periscope, or for the whitened, broken water that would indicate the presence of a submarine.[24]

They moved fast, until they were within three miles of land. Then they opened fire.

Steaming rapidly up and down, ship behind ship, they loosed all their broad-side batteries, starboard and port in turn, simultaneously. So fierce was the blast that the water shook. All the surface of the sea between the ships and the land quivered. Fantastic vibration-ripples shot all around, like cracks on a shattered steel plate.

The blast killed the wind, and made an infernal little gale of its own around each ship, that spun in hot ascending columns. Surface-swimming fish were struck dead and floated in schools on the water, miles away. Even the bottom-haunting creatures felt the shock and scurried into the sand and mud.[25]

This was only the blast from the lips of the guns. It was only pressure. It was only the released energy that drove conical steel masses forward. They sped with a violence that would leave the swiftest locomotive behind in the wink of an eye. Like locomotives smashing into an obstacle, the projectiles hit the land.

That impact alone was annihilation. Having struck, the projectiles exploded.

The chart under the shaded light in the Admiral’s cabin had a semi-circle marked on it—a semi-circle that made a great segment into the land. As if it were in the electric arc, the country in that zone of fire melted. Houses vanished into stone-dust and plaster-dust even as the screaming thing that had done it struck houses a mile beyond and threw them on each other. Streets became pits with sloping sides that burned. Trees rocked, roaring as in a gale, and were tossed high, and fell, and twisted in flame. The land shriveled.

A Vast Confusion of Facts and Rumors

As the shells fell on New England’s coast, so the news fell on the United States. It sped as a vast confusion of facts and rumors, bewildered tales of terror, inventions born of crazed brains, dispatches that told only half a story, and messages that told none at all and yet, in their very incoherence, told more than intelligible words could have done.

The newspapers were tested that night, and the steady, intangible discipline of the great organization held true. Never a linotype in all the cities had to wait for its copy. The word went to the presses to “let her go.” Extras followed extras.

But the news sped ahead of the extras. It sped, and spread, and grew, and became monstrous.

The enemy had forced the harbor defenses of Boston! So ran the rushing rumor in New York and Philadelphia. Long before trains could carry papers there, people in far-off country districts heard it.

The State House was in ruins! Portsmouth and Boston Navy Yards had fallen!

New York, ran the stories through Boston and all New England, was invested at both approaches! Fort Totten had been blown up! The enemy ships had the range of the city, and already the sky-scrapers were toppling into Broadway!

The government was fleeing from Washington! An army had landed on the Delaware coast!

Even those who had the newspapers before them, and knew that none of these things was true, were shaken when the tales that had sped ahead, came back like the back-wash of a wild sea. Many hundreds that night ran with the newspapers in their hands and helped to spread, and make more fantastic, the fantastic falsehoods that had been born miles away.

But the newspaper organization worked steadily. Bit by bit the medley took tangible form. From the watchful, self-controlled chain of light-house and life-saving stations, revenue marine and other coast guard services; from the steady, unimaginative army and navy; from the alert, unshaken harbor-defenses, bit by bit the story of the night began to come in orderly sequence.

The Sea Vitals of the Commercial United States

The enemy fleet was biting into the sea-vitals of the commercial United States, the southern coast of New England between Cape Cod and Long Island Sound whose possession is the key to the manufacturing and industrial life of the East.

Battle-ships lying off the mouth of Buzzards Bay were dropping shells into the harbor and into the shores. One ship had ventured close into the land, approaching within the zone of fire from Fort Rodman, and had dropped shells near New Bedford. Hidden by intervening hills, it had escaped return fire, and was now lying just out of range, dropping an occasional 15-inch projectile toward the defenses.[26]

Other ships were firing into Narragansett Bay. They, too, were firing at immensely long range, to avoid return fire from the defenses.

Montauk Point’s wireless transmitted a dispatch that three vessels were standing in there and lowering boats. Then the apparatus fell silent.

Point Judith’s wireless had ceased speaking soon after dusk. Its last dispatch was that shells were falling near it. An hour later its operators reported from Narrangansett Pier that the tower had been destroyed.

Watch Hill and Westerly, on Rhode Island’s southwestern border, said a message from near-by Stonington, were burning, and were being wrecked by heavy shells. Fort Wright telegraphed that this was fire from two battle-ships standing just outside of range from the fort’s mortars and rifles, and throwing shells from 15-inch guns.[27]

But these great guns were being used only at intervals. Though their bite could rend towns, they destroyed themselves as they wreaked destruction. The acid-fumes from their monster powder-charges ate out their scientifically rifled cores. They had to be spared.

The real attack came from the heavy cruisers, standing close in and working 4, 5, and 8-inch guns. For every shot that the battle-ships’ mammoths fired, the cruisers fired a hundred. It was not a bombardment. It was a driving flail of whirling, smashing, exploding metal that whipped the coast between Watch Hill and Point Judith.

To the ear it was din, vast, insane. In reality, it was an operation of war, conducted as precisely and methodically as if it were a quiet laboratory experiment. The wireless controlled every shot from every gun on every ship. From the small things on slim tripods to the wide-mouthed heavy calibers spitting from hooded turrets, not one spoke without orders.

Sweeping the Floor Clean for the Enemy Army

To the trained artillerists, listening in the Narragansett and Long Island Sound defenses, it was plain as English words. That crash, as if a steel side had been blown out of a ship, was the four-inch broadside, all loosed at once. Now it would be fifteen seconds, and another crash, farther east, would tell of the next ship’s 4-inch discharge. And the heavier, fuller, air-shaking roar that came in between was from 5-inch guns, while the broken, slower, coughing bellow, that overwhelmed all the rest and echoed from every echo-making prominence inland, was the voice of an 8-inch rifle, speaking once every five minutes.

Now the flocks of shells went high to reach far to their farthest range into the land. Now they went low to sweep through the cover near shore. Sometimes the steel things drove, as if in sudden uncontrollable fury, at one given spot. Again, they spread out into a dreadful cone that danced along a five-mile stretch like a dancing whirl-wind.

The fire slackened, and died away, and fell silent, and burst out again as if a horde of devils had only held their breaths to scream anew. Up and down it moved, now in, now out, although long ago the shells had whirled away everything that could be destroyed. There was nothing living in there now. The very beasts of the woods, the birds in their nests, were dead.

To the survivors who had escaped from the first red blast, the thing seemed only a deed of insane wickedness. What had they done, they asked each other with sobbing breaths, to bring a steel navy at them? What could a great, powerful enemy gain by this murder of peaceful, unarmed country folk? What danger could there lie to him, they gasped as they fled through the dark, or lay face down to the earth and gripped at grass, in tiny houses and gardens and little sea-shore hamlets?

It was wicked murder. “Wicked murder!” said the wires, telling their tale to their fellow-citizens far away.

The men who were working the ships’ guns were from little villages, from pretty sea-shore hamlets like these themselves. They were not thinking of the habitations which were being blasted away. It was an operation of war. This was the chosen time, and this the chosen place, for the landing of the army that waited in the gloom of the sea for them to make the shore safe for it.

With their brooms of steel and fire, they simply were sweeping clear the floor on which that army was to set its foot.

Far in shore of the flame-torn cruisers, safe from any land-fire under the parabolas of the naval projectiles as if they were under a bombproof arch, certain little vessels had toiled up and down from the beginning. Slowly, for they dragged between them long wire cables that hung down to the sea-bottom, they moved back and forth along the beach, fishing.

The fish they were trying to catch were spherical and conical steel fish that bore little protuberances on their tops like the sprouting horns of a yearling kid.

A touch as soft as the touch of a lover’s hand could drive those little horns inward, to awaken a slumbering little devil of fulminate of mercury, whose sleep is so light that a mere tap will break it. And the fulminate’s explosion would detonate three hundred pounds of gun-cotton.

The submarine mine says to the big ships: “I am Death!” And they cannot answer it.

Guns That Were Being Made Too Late

But there is an answer to the mine. It is the mine-sweeper that drags for them. The men on these mine-sweepers dedicate themselves to the tomb. Some must inevitably perish. They will find a mine with their keels instead of their groping drags; or they will grapple one too close; or their wire cable will clutch two mines and swing them together, so that the little horns touch—

But, if the mine-sweepers are permitted to work on, the mines may kill, and kill, and kill, yet in the end they will be gathered in.

There is an absolute answer to the mine-sweepers. It is to hammer them with rapid fire from the shore. These little vessels, dragging laboriously, present targets that scarcely move. No artillerist can miss them.

But again there is an answer to the mine-protecting guns. It is long-range fire from the ships that lie safely outside of the mine-fields.

There is only one answer to that. It is for defenders on land to plant huge guns far inland that can reach the ships and beat them back that they dare not come close enough to reach the lesser shore artillery nearer the sea.

This formula of shore-defense is a formula so simple that a mathematician, given the conditions, can work it out with simple arithmetic though he never had seen a cannon in his life.

Guns, guns, and again guns—and an army to protect them! This was the only possible reply to the fleet that was pounding the coast. The United States had not enough sufficiently powerful mobile coast guns and siege guns. It had not enough artillerists to fight what guns there were. And it had not enough ammunition to provide them with food.[28]

In Bethlehem, Pennsylvania; up the Hudson, in smoky Watervliet; in Hartford and Bridgeport and New Haven, and a dozen other towns, with machinery hastily assembled, and workmen hastily learning, they were trying, now, to make projectiles enough, and guns enough. They were trying to make enough powder, down in Delaware and New Jersey.

In the encampment of the United States army at that moment trains were delivering guns—guns made in record time, magnificent testimony to American efficiency under stress. But the guns were coming in one by one—to meet an enemy who was beating at the gates and could not be stopped except with hundreds.

The Enemy on the Mainland!

Even then the flag-ship off the coast was sputtering a code into the night. It was a long code, but its meaning was short. It meant: “Now!”

The mine-sweepers hauled their gear and came out. Fourteen had gone in. Those that came out were nine.

Before they had well begun to move, the beach was white with ships’ boats, and nine hundred bluejackets and marines set foot on the mainland of the United States.[29]

With sharpened knives in their sheaths, and loaded carbines, and bandoleers filled with cartridges, and entrenching tools and provisions, each man of that first force presented the highest attainable unit-efficiency for war.

The boats were scarcely off the beach, to return to the ships, before eight hundred of these units were trotting through the up-land, throwing out advance parties, and making hasty trenches from which, in a moment, there looked the greyhound muzzles of machine-guns.

On the shore, the strand-party was sinking sand-anchors and rigging derricks. Others were setting together the five and one-half foot sections of jointed hollow masts for the wireless. When the boats beached again, with more men, two 40-foot masts reached into the night, and hand-power generators were making the antennæ pulse with their mysterious life.

Launches came in now, dragging wide, flat-bottom pontoons and swinging them on to shore and speeding back for more. Men snatched at them, and held them in the surf, and ran their mooring up the beach, while others carried out kedges and boat-anchors from all sides to make them lie steady in the groundswell.

The beach shone white as day, all at once. The destroyers had steamed in, and were giving their men aid with their search-lights.

In swung more pontoons. Broadside to broadside, kedged and anchored out, they were moored out into the sea, at half a dozen parts of the beach. Laid far enough apart that they should not touch, however hard the swell might strive to grind them together, they formed floating piers, reaching beyond the farthest outer line of surf. From pontoon to pontoon ran gang-planks, lashed fast.

Three hours had passed. Three times the ships’ boats had made the trip between warships and shore—thirty naval service cutters, each carrying thirty men. Twenty-seven hundred sailors, marines and soldiers were holding the Rhode Island coast.[30]

From the trenches of the advance party a wireless spoke to the cruiser bearing the senior officer. “Motor scouts reported in front, on road, three thousand yards in. Will fire rocket indicating direction.”

The rocket burst. For a minute it made all that part of the black country stand out as under lightning. “Crash!” said the ship. Over the bluejackets swept the shells, and burst.

“Crash!” said another ship.

“Apparently effective,” said the wireless again. “Shall send patrols forward.” And again it spoke, in half an hour: “Enemy driven back. Our patrols hold road. Barb wire entanglements completed. Scouts in. Report land clear, except for enemy cavalry in force inland out of range.”

The Transports

“Now!” said the cruiser’s wireless, speaking once more into the sea.

Silent, formless, black, four vast ships, long and twice as tall as the cruisers, came slowly in among them.

These were the transports, sealed that not a thread of light should shine from them to betray them to the thing that all the fleet dreaded more than anything else—the under-water lance of a submarine’s torpedo.

Under water the submarine is always blind, even when the brightest light of the noon-day sun shines vertically into the ocean. It can see only with its periscope eye above the surface.

At night the periscope cannot see. Then the submarine ceases to be useful as a submarine. It can act still; but only on the surface, like any other torpedo boat.

Two score destroyers, each of thirty knots, each armed with from four to ten 3-inch guns and rapid-firers, circled around the transports. Twice as swift as the surface-speed of the swiftest submarine, armed overwhelmingly, they could defy surface attack.[31]

They hemmed the darkened troop-ships round with a great circle of search-lights, all thrown outward, that served the double purpose of illuminating the ocean for miles, and of blinding any who tried to approach. No human eye looking into that glare could have seen the transports, even if the night had not shrouded them.

Still, these liners with their tens of thousands of men, were too precious to be protected only by this bright vigilance. From each transport there projected long steel booms, eleven to a side. These held out a half-ton net of steel grommets. Stretched fore and aft as taut as steam-capstans could haul it, this shirt of

chain-mail hung far down into the sea to catch any torpedo that might come driving at the keel.

There was more protection than that. It would be day soon, and then the submarines would be blind no longer. All around the area chosen for the transports to lie in, the fishing boats taken from the sea-islands were being towed by destroyers, to drop their nets. Their wooden buoys formed odd geometrical outlines on the sea.

These thin things of meshed twine, made only to hold little, inoffensive fish, were suspended like submarine fences, north and south and east and west of the field of operations.

That such trivial things should be of any avail against under-water craft with death in their heads, might well have seemed absurd to a landsman. They did not seem absurd to the Lieutenant who commanded United States submarine M-9, when he steered his craft, awash, out from behind Fisher’s Island Sound at dawn, and looked eastward through his glasses.[32]

Ten miles away lay the transports, quite motionless, beautifully assembled as a target for him. At that distance their masts and funnels seemed huddled. He had a vivid picture in his mind, for an instant. It was a picture of fat, slow sheep crowding together with a wolf among them.

Woven Twine Versus Submarine M-9

But between them and his wolf lay the net buoys, dotting all the surface, in and out as if they had been laid by some laboring artist to make a maze.

The sea-wolf went slowly nearer. With its tanks full of water, it lay so far submerged that the sea washed the coaming around the manhole hatch. The Lieutenant was like a man wading breast-high in the ocean. It would be hard to see him from any distance.

He studied the traceries of buoys. There were spaces between them, that betokened gaps in the fences. One might find a gap and go through.

But to find a gap, the submarine must raise her periscope above water, and look around. But at each gap, sweeping incessantly to and fro, like galloping cavalry, were destroyers.[33]

Could one dive and go through blind? The Lieutenant knew the limitations of his terrible little animal. Its kiss could draw a twenty thousand ton ship into the abyss, but the woven twine would laugh at it.

Its nose could cut through them like the threads that they were. But the torn ends would catch conning tower and masts and periscope tubes. Even if it tore away from them, the whirl of the propellor remained to renew the danger, sucking the trailing cords to itself and in one instant switching them around and around the spinning shaft.

With the propellor blocked, the submarine must rise; for only with its propellor thrusting and its horizontal fins set to hold it down, can the submarine stay under. It submerges, not by sinking but by diving with main strength.

Another rather vivid picture flashed into the Lieutenant’s mind. It was not a picture, this time, of a wolf among sheep. It was a picture of a sudden enormous commotion among those quiet net-buoys, as of something struggling down below; and then of a violent surge as the tangled nets were dragged to and fro by a helpless submarine, held fast by the tail.[34]

A breeze arose with the rising sun, and the water roughened. The submarine stopped. It could not meet rough water while it was awash. Although its buoyancy when it was sealed was such that its propellor had to thrust full speed to make it dive, yet with its hatches open two hundred gallons of water, far less than is contained in a single big wave, would send it down like a tin can.[35]

The Commander held on as long as he could, watching the whitening water in the east, and watching the transports.

He saw that at a thousand yards’ distance around them (just what he would have chosen as neat torpedo range), there lay a little fleet of gun-boats, all thrusting out booms with steel nets, that made them look oddly as if they were hooped and wide-skirted. Disposed in an oval, they guarded the transports with a second wall of steel wire.

And overhead, soaring in spirals, never flying far away, and always returning, were three naval planes. The Commander of the M-9 knew that they were waiting and watching for just one thing—the “shadow” of a submerged submarine.[36]

This enemy, plainly, was taking no chances. The fleet had power and time. It bent them to one object—to land its men safely. It would not engage the harbor defenses, and so open itself to the risks of plunging fire and torpedo attack. It would not blockade harbors, and so make itself a chosen mark for such terrors as M-9.

The Three Harbor Gates to New York and Boston

Very scientifically, very thoughtfully, had the enemy staked out the vital spot at which he had decided to strike. Here, facing each to each almost like the salients of a fortification, lay three harbor gates to the northeastern United States—Buzzards Bay, gashing deeply into Massachusetts: Narragansett Bay, almost cutting Rhode Island in two: and the eastern entrance to Long Island Sound and the cities of Connecticut.[37]

Open any one of these gates, and it opened the way at one blow to both New York and Boston.

These three sea-salients were greatly armed for defense. In each harbor lay batteries of 12-inch all-steel rifled cannon. Hidden under facings of earth, steel and concrete, they sat on disappearing carriages and pneumatic gun-lifts that would swing them up as if they weighed ounces instead of tons, and instantly plunge them back again into cover after firing.

Deep under earth embankments, squatting in concrete-lined graves, 12-inch mortars, sixteen to a group, stared upward at the patches of sky over their heads, which was all that their men would see while they were firing, however bitter the fight might be.

A single shot from one of the long, graceful rifles might sink a ship, if it were well placed. A single salvo from the mortars, the sixteen firing together, assuredly would. And they could do it. Aimed by mathematics, they were sure to strike the spot.[38]

A score of serving devices in the defenses were slaves to the steel champions. Searchlights in armor waited like men-at-arms to point with a long white finger at their prey. Mine fields and emplacements and cable conduits were there to force the ships to steer where the guns could strike them most surely. Masked by trees and mounds, concealed by every device against betrayal, were range-finders and fire-control stations.

Here sat experts who had studied the most occult questions of arithmetic, geometry, surveying, navigation, and cartography for one purpose—to direct those long guns true. They were provided with exquisite instruments for calculating angles and distances to an inch, though the point to be ascertained were ten nautical miles and more away.

Before them lay charts of the sea-area that they were guarding. Let a ship come within the limit of their apparatus, and in the time required to speak into a telephone the gun-pits miles away down the defense-line would crack with the explosion of tons of smokeless powder.

They were nearly perfect, those works—as engineering works. They were fully armed with the engines to make them malignant to the ultimate fatal degree. The ten-mile area of sea that lay so bright and dimpled that morning might well have been black as the Wings of Death; for a few little motions of the waiting men under the pretty grassy mounds would unfold those pinions.

The Joint in America’s Armor

But under the iron visages was weakness. In none of the defenses on this morning when the time had come for their test, were there more than one-half the number of men required to hold them.[39]

They could fight the guns, so long as the action remained a ship-to-fort action; but if the enemy attacked at the rear, from the land, they were not in sufficient force to meet him and throw him back. Attacked from the land, the men of the defenses would have to retire to the inner keep and fight from shelter with rapid-fire guns. And when the defenses thus began to defend themselves, their hour would have struck.[40]

Still, for the time they were deadly. The enemy fleet paid them the supreme tribute of scrupulous respect. Not a vessel ventured after dawn into the deadly circle of their reach. To make sure that no vessel should expose itself by accident, the mine-layers of the enemy fleet were even then moving well outside of the zone of extreme fire, and laying immense steel buoys, painted a vivid scarlet.

These scarlet buoys outlined an area of safety that was shaped somewhat like a pentagon with its apex at Block Island and its base on the Rhode Island coast between Watch Hill and Point Judith.

It was a base marking out five miles of beach that was safe both from the fire of the Long Island Sound defenses and from the shots of the Narragansett defenses.

Here day-light revealed a land occupied in orderly, quiet, perfect military manner. Inland, as far as the naval guns could protect them, lay the men of the advance landing party behind their machine-gun positions. For miles beyond that, east and west, their patrols had cut telegraph and telephone wires, and occupied points that commanded roads by which attacking forces might approach.

On the beach, where the blocks and tackle and hoisting derricks had been rigged in the night, gun-floats were being brought to the beach with cannon and caissons. Under the pull of centrifugal blocks these were hoisted out and dropped in shore on railway tracks that led over the sand to firm ground.

There motor trucks and traction engines, all brought to land during the night, took them and hurried them to positions ready for fight, or to park them ready for moving when the advance should begin.

Destroying the Railroad of Southern New England

From vantage points inland, from hills on Fisher’s Island, from such venturesome spies as M-9, went the news to Washington, and so through the land. The crowds in the cities, dense even at that early hour of the morning, read on the bulletin boards:

“Enemy effected a landing during the night on Rhode Island between Narragansett Bay and Long Island Sound. Transports are now close in preparing to put troops ashore. Scouts report four liners aggregating one hundred thousand tons. Army officials estimate that at the usual allowance of two men per ton this means fifty thousand men. More transports waiting under Block Island.”

“Now is the time to strike ’em!” It was not one man in one crowd who said it. In every city where there were crowds there arose these speakers—the excitable, passionate orators who are born of every great crisis and who, in such moments, find willing listeners.

“Now is the time to strike ’em, before they can bring more men ashore! They should have been attacked in the night! What kind of Generals have we got, to let ’em land, instead of throwing ’em back into the sea as fast as they came? Where is our army? Keeping itself safe?”

The army, with ten thousand civilian workers impressed as they were needed, was destroying the railroad of southern New England. It was tearing up the shore line of the New York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad from New Haven to New London and from New London to Providence. It was throwing the rails on flat cars to be whirled away westward and northward. Concrete and stone embankments, steel bridges, and tunnels were sent skyward through the night with dynamite.

All the connecting system from New Haven north to Hartford and from New London north to Worcester was being destroyed. Locomotives and rolling stock that could not be removed were being sent down grades to crash into wreckage, or blown up or set afire. A curious intoxication of destruction was on the population that night. Prosperous, dignified citizens came out with axes or with oil and fire, and helped in the ruin.

In fire and dirt and amid shattering roars of explosion and rumbling of falling trestles they worked on hundreds of miles of iron highway, desperately, frantically, shouting aloud, willing to tear their soft hands and to risk limb and even life, rather than to wait inactive, and listen for news, and dread what was to happen.

They were tearing up their civilization; and they did it with a savage delight, that nothing might be left to the foe.

The American Army’s Lack of “Eyes”

In the Army Headquarters, where a single short order had set loose all this saturnalia of destruction, the Commanding General and his staff were busied with something that was of more immediate importance to them. Desperately they were thrusting out for information, and always they were baffled by superior numbers, superior resources.

They had pushed cavalry toward the coast, and it had been driven back by artillery and long-range fire from the ships, whose aim was controlled by aeroplane signals from the sky and wireless from the shore. They had pushed out motor scouts, and the artillery had found them. Always, at every approach, during the night or since daylight, the ships’ fire had swept the roads.

Now, scarcely an hour after sunrise, the army aeroplanes had come back, after only haphazard scouting. They had not been able to fly over the invaded coast. Wherever they tried it, they reported, they were met by enemy planes in superior numbers.

One United States air-man had been driven by four enemy planes into Narragansett Bay where he had been picked up by boats from the Newport Torpedo Station. Two others, borne down by three enemy machines faster than they, and fired at by anti-air-craft guns from an in-lying ship, had barely managed to escape behind the defenses of Fort Wright in the Sound.

The others had been pressed back, inexorably, by the screen of naval planes that swarmed over the coast.[41]

The enemy planes came from the sea. To the marveling eyes in the American defenses, it seemed as if the ocean were spewing them forth. One after another rose from the Atlantic under Block Island.

Three strange vessels lay there. They had funnels set extremely far aft, like certain types of clumsy tramp-ships, but they were big as passenger liners and their lines showed all the efficiency of the naval architect. The great sweep of their decks forward was as bare as the deck of a racing schooner yacht.

A structure on short trestles like a skid-way rose from this deck at the bow, projecting slightly.

It was there that the aeroplanes were being spewed. These were mother-ships.

Torpedo-netted, guarded by destroyers, guarded even by a small semi-rigid dirigible that hovered a thousand feet high over-head, they were sending out spies to search the land.

Twenty-Five Aeroplanes Against a Swarm

The two United States fliers, standing by their machines in Fort Wright, looked at the ascending swarm. “No wonder!” said one. “You know how many one of those Nations had at last accounts? Twelve hundred!”[42]

“And we’ve got thirteen in the Army and twelve in the Navy!” His companion laughed. “And Servia had sixty, before the Great War!”

They said no more, but watched in silence. That ascending, continually growing line of flying things was like something that was writing into the sky the word: “Resources!”

Suddenly the American air-men noticed that these new machines were not flying to the coast near them. They were turning off, in regular order. One turned west, to fly over Long Island. The next one turned east, toward Buzzards Bay. They alternated thus till the entire division had separated, and disappeared.

One of the scouts slapped his thigh. “I believe,” said he, “that they are going to show themselves to Boston and New York!”

That was at nine o’clock in the morning. At noon the crowds in the two cities were startled by a distant roar that grew, almost before they had first heard it, into a thundering that shook the air. They stared upward and beheld the first squadron of armed flying machines that America ever had seen.

Armored, with the bright colors of the enemy on their under-bodies, the aeroplanes from the enemy fleet flew low. What few anti-aircraft guns the United States possessed were with the army. Around the peaceful American cities were no encircling fortifications, no batteries, no military works that might conceal marksmen. The air-men knew that there was nothing to fear.

They skimmed close to the State House on Boston’s Beacon Hill. They flew over the tall municipal building of New York and dipped toward the City Hall. They appeared over Providence and Fall River, over Brockton, over Bridgeport and New Haven. They passed over every one of the factory-cities of New Jersey that crowd to be near New York’s harbor.

Where they appeared it was as if they bore some instant charm to turn the world to stone.

All the city noises stopped, dead. All motion stopped. Wheels stopped turning and feet stopped moving and every white face was turned upward. For that long moment of dumb fear, men saw nothing except the wide-winged bodies. They heard nothing except the yelping and droning of the hundred-horse-power motors over them.

Then they fled. Motor-men and drivers bent low, and yelled, and sent their vehicles ahead blindly. The crowds rushed every door-way. They fought for the protection of narrow cornices as if they were bomb-proofs. They squeezed themselves close to the sides of buildings, and clung to smooth iron and granite, and stared upward, waiting for bombs.

Instead of bombs, they saw things raining down gently, lightly—little weighted pennants that circled downward in lovely spirals and dropped on the streets with scarcely a sound.

Into every crowded street, into every open square of half a hundred cities that day, the hostile air-men dropped these pennants.

They were printed. They bore proclamations addressed to the people of America.

THE ENEMY’S PROCLAMATION

Recovering from their shock of fear, the first impulse of the Americans who read these proclamations was one of rage. Their cities had grown proud in unchallenged greatness. These pennants, slowly raining from their sky, were infuriating insults.

Had the invader appeared in that moment, the people would have torn up the paving blocks to fight him.

In the State House in Boston there were said the words that uttered the emotion of all the cities along the Atlantic coast. In that old, rebellious town, where American liberty had been nurtured in the very presence of an armed foe, there were gathered many eminent citizens, with the officials, the Mayor and the Governor of their State.

One of these officials had a pennant in his hands. “What can we do?” he asked. “If we had all the militia of the State here, we would have less than 6,000 men. If the foe arrives, and lays his guns on the town—gentlemen, they will be guns that fire high explosives and incendiary shells. We have nothing to fight with. If the army cannot check him before he arrives, we must—to save our people’s lives, we must surrender peaceably!”[43]

He turned to a man who bore a family name identified with Boston’s history from the time of its settlement. His ancestors had stood in Faneuil Hall with James Otis when he dedicated it to the cause of liberty.

“Let Us Destroy It!”

He took the proclamation, held it for a moment while he looked around the circle, and then crumpled it suddenly, angrily, in his fist. Throwing it to the floor, he set his foot on it.

“I say,” he cried with flashing eyes, “let him destroy it! Better still, let us destroy it! When the enemy approaches, let us send our Boston town up in flame and fragments! Let us leave him not so much as a rivet to pick up for loot!”

There were many men there, of many minds. They had many interests to guard, and many responsibilities to bear. But for a moment he carried them with him. They waved their hands and shouted assent.

It was only for a moment. “If all thought like you!” said one, an old, grave man. “But we have 700,000 people, and they are not soldiers or philosophers. They’re human men. It is laid on us to protect them, at whatever price to our National pride. If humiliation is the price that we must pay for our past carelessness, why, gentlemen, we must pay it, bitter though it is.”

So it was in New York, in Philadelphia, in a score of cities between and around them. Everywhere was the first outburst of fury and unrecking heroism, and then the sober second thought born not of cowardice but of cold logic. This north-eastern Atlantic seaboard with its chain of twelve million city dwellers, was no Holland to drown itself under its own sea in order to destroy its foe. These cities were no Moscows, to devour themselves in fire that the enemy might perish with them. This was the United States of America, and this was the Twentieth Century—and the men, no less brave, no less patriotic, faced the conditions of their place and time.

They faced it from Portland, Maine, to the Capes of Virginia. If the army could not stop the invader, they must fall.

They formed committees of safety. They wrestled with their top-heavy municipal machineries to make them answer the sharp need. Under the stress, all the defects of their political rule stood out uncompromisingly, not to be denied. Their over-staffed departments were lost in the ingenious mazes of their own contriving. There was only one answer to the inextricable, blind confusion. It was martial law.

Volunteers Who Could Not Even Be Shod

But here, too, there was inefficiency—inefficiency that had been cultivated and tended, like a plant, by politics through the heedless years. In the armories there were no reserve supplies of weapons or ammunition for the volunteers who came to offer their services. Although the United States government had given the States enough money annually for many years back to equip them to full war-strength; and although the militia nowhere had maintained even one-half of that strength, there were no reserves of blankets, of uniforms, of tents, of cots. Doctors who offered their services found that there was no place for them, because there were no ambulances, no field hospitals, no surgical instruments, no anæsthetics and no medicines. There had not been enough for the troops that took the field, though every company had less men than even its insufficient peace strength demanded.[44]

The volunteers could not even be shod. Those who were accepted had to drill in their worthless street shoes, that never could survive the test of rough roads and mud and water.

Politics! Politics! It stared the appalled citizens in the face wherever they turned, as it had stared them in the face for a generation—but now they had to look and see! It was politics that had left their State militias to blunder along, each by itself, without agreement or settled plan. It was politics that now had sent their plucky, intelligent, capable young men into the field insufficiently equipped, trained or organized. It was politics that now left their cities bare, to be made a sport of.

At the recruiting depots of the regular army it was politics again that over-bore the recruiting officers with eager, courageous applicants whom they could not use. What they needed now was men who were ready NOW—not men who needed six months’ training. These applicants, offering themselves by thousands, were city-born and city-bred. They were men who never in all their lives had slept except under a roof; who never had lain in rain and storm; who had been saved by their city from doing a dozen simple things that men of the open do for themselves without a second thought.

Not one in a thousand of these volunteers ever had built a fire of sticks, or pitched a tent or even washed dishes. Not one of five thousand ever had held a gun in his hands. There were thousands there, and thousands again, who did not even know what it was to be in the dark—for they had slept all their lives in the electrically lighted city.

Needed—Not Men But Reserves!

It was not men that the regular army needed. It was reserves! And never a Congress of all the Congresses that had talked and voted and appropriated had voted a practical system of army reserves![45]

Of all the men who had been trained by previous army experience, the War Department could not call on one unless he chose to volunteer. If those men—invaluable to the country at this moment—offered themselves, they offered themselves one by one, here and there and everywhere, scattered through a land of three and a quarter million square miles. Enlisted thus, they were futile individuals lost in hordes

of raw recruits. Could they have been called together by their government, they would have formed perfect regiments, ready for instant, efficient, priceless service.

While the United States, civilian and military, was working hopelessly to make up in desperate hours for long years of waste, the efficient, prepared, resourceful invader was landing his army, not only without losing a man, but without getting a man’s feet wet. So perfect were the dispositions of this expedition that the commander had been able to order, “Our troops must land perfectly dry,” and the order was carried out.[46]

Every transport had three broad gangways to a side. Never for a moment were these gangways bare of equipped men, moving file after file into the enormous flat-bottomed landing barges. Never for a moment was the sea without long tows of them, each bearing two hundred men to shore with their rifles between their knees, ready.[47]

Preparedness Versus Unpreparedness

In the camp of the United States Army at that moment men were breaking green horses for cavalry and artillery purposes. On the coast, the enemy’s four-decked horse transports were sending trained mounts into broad floats with derricks and slings, lowering away with head and tail lines to prevent struggling, with nose lines to bridles to prevent them from turning in the air, with men standing by below to put little bags of salt into each horse’s mouth to quiet it as soon as it touched the floats.[48]

Nothing had been forgotten, nothing left to be improvised. The horse-floats had hinged sterns. Backed into the beach, these hinged boards dropped down and formed gang-planks. Sailors threw collision mats on them to prevent slipping. It required less than a minute to lower a horse from the ships to the floats. In less than half a minute each horse was unloaded from them and set ashore. To empty each float of its cargo of twenty horses, and to have each craft off the beach and under tow again for another load, was a matter of less than forty minutes.

Almost as swiftly, at another end of the beach, guns were being landed from the same type of floats, shoal and wide-beamed, that could be run well up on shore and could withstand the pounding of the surf. They brought four light field pieces with their limbers to a load, or two heavy field artillery pieces. They were landing field howitzers of calibers that the United States Army did not possess. This artillery has been coming ashore for hours. It had begun to come before dawn. Still there was more arriving.

Yet the beach never was occupied for a moment. The guns were rushed inland, the men were rushed inland, the horses were rushed inland. Twelve hours after the first landing party had prepared the way, Rhode Island was occupied by 30,000 foot, 3,000 cavalry and 50 batteries of artillery—almost two full divisions that lay in a great belligerent front snarling with guns—a perfect, complex, often-assembled, often-tested machine.[49]

This was the time for the American army to strike, before the enemy could increase his forces and move forward to attack.

But the American army was a complex machine that never had been assembled before, or tested before. The Regular Army never had been together with the Organized Militia, and the Organized Militias of the various States never had seen each other. “An uncoördinated army of allies,” its Commander had called it, “with all the inherent weakness of allies, emphasized by the unusual number of allies.”[50]

The Uncoördinated and Unorganized American Army

It was an army of which neither the regulars nor the militia had been organized into divisions at the time when it should have been done, the only time when it could have been done—in the long days of peace. Until it was so organized, it was an army only in numbers. For operation against a prepared, organized enemy it was not an army but merely a multitude of units, whose trained and perfect ones would inevitably be sacrificed to the errors and weaknesses of the imperfect ones.[51]

The division is the true Weapon of War. It alone contains in vitally correct proportion the various troops that must sustain each other when cannons and explosives begin that arbitration from which there is no appeal on earth. It is the division, and the division alone, that possesses all the limbs and organs—the signal corps and cavalry that are the eyes and ears: the infantry and engineers and sanitary corps that are the body and feet: and the artillery that is the smiting fists.[52]

In the City Hall Park in New York, a speaker, lifted above the crowd that watched the newspaper bulletins, was cursing the army amid savage cheers. He cursed its Generals and its men because they did not fight. He cursed the Government.

The crowd listened, and forgot that again and again they had been warned that this would be if war should ever come.

With the blind wrath of helpless men they could reason only that at this moment when everything should be done, nothing was being done. They shouted approval when the frantic orator screamed: “Tell Washington to order ’em to fight. Fight! Fight! That’s what they’re for!”

The crowds could perceive only that they had an army that did not strike a blow. They could not know that the American commanders were fighting a better fight just then by fighting to organize, than if they fought with guns. They could not know that to these officers, grown gray in the service of their country, this fight was more heart-breaking than it would have been to fight in the hot blast of shells.

Regiments of Infantry Without a Single Cannon to Protect Them

To organize an army in the face of the foe is like organizing a fire department when the streets of a city are already in flames. This is what the Chiefs of the Army were trying to do—had been doing, day and night, desperately, ever since the troops had come together. And in Washington, in the archives of Congress, there were lying sheaves of reports, gathering dust, that had demanded nothing except the chance to do it in time.

Here were regiments of militia so “organized” by their States that if they were permitted to go into battle as they were, 170 companies of infantry would face the enemy without a single cannon to protect them. Of all the eastern militia cavalry in that camp, only one regiment had a machine gun company.[53]

Even the regular army was efficient only in those things that could be maintained and perfected by the steady, personal efforts of officers and men. In everything that depended on legislation it was lacking. Instead of 150 men to a company of infantry some had only 65. Its troops of cavalry were not full. It had no siege artillery corps. It was a skeleton army which, according to optimists, was to be clothed with substance when war arrived. Now war had come; and to clothe that skeleton with untrained men would have meant that for every 65 skilled soldiers there would be 85 utterly useless ones in each company.

Shortage of men was not the only curse that was laid on the army by the policy of neglect. In the enemy headquarters, two or at the most three orders were sent to department chiefs for every movement. In the American headquarters, the staff had to deal with units. Every problem had to be handled in detail by men who should have been free to direct one great, comprehensive movement. Every order issued by the Commanding General demanded intolerable duplication.

American Commanders Who Had Never Commanded

The General had under him commanders of brigade who had commanded posts that contained only fragments of regiments. Their brigades, never assembled in any one place, not only did not approximate to war conditions, but had to be disrupted and divided and re-formed before the General could dare to offer them in battle. Hardly a brigade commander had under him troops that he had known and trained and handled himself.[54]

With exception of those who had been on the Mexican border, when a part of the small army had been mobilized in a body for the first time, these men had tried to prepare themselves with the best that Congress would give them—battalions and companies and single batteries instead of assembled armies, because the politicians would not let the army come together.

The 49 army posts of the United States, long a subject of derision among all except those who fattened on them, might well have been symbolized now in that camp by forty-nine skeletons—a skeleton army waiting to lead the other skeleton army to death.[55]

To none was this better known than to the enemy. The invaders’ commander, standing idly with his hands in his pockets, was able to say confidently: “They’ll not bother us seriously. The only thing they’ll do, the only thing they can do, is to retreat when we begin to threaten them.”

He held in his grip the sea, the land and the air. In shore lay ships ready to sweep part of his front with protective fire. On land his advance forces had seized roads and railroads, his engineers were repairing what had been destroyed, and his cavalry was guarding all approaches. His air-men, overwhelmingly numerous, spied on the American army almost with impunity, and parried with sure aerial thrusts all American attempts to spy on their own lines.

The aerial guard, steel-breasted, with the wings of speed and talons of fire, could be broken only by equal numbers, equally terrible. Individual daring, individual skill, were nothing against this armored brood. Five times American fliers rose to try it; and five times they were grappled in mid-air and torn with shot, and dropped to the earth far below. “No more!” said the General in command.

He sat with his chin in his hand, studying the dispatches that were laid before him. They were piled high, though twenty operators and half a dozen aides struggled to eliminate from the torrential confusion the news that might be deemed most reliable.[56]

The “Fog of War”

There were messages from Washington, messages from coast defenses, messages from patrols and outposts, from scouts and from company commanders. There were wild reports of enemy invasion from places so far inland that it was palpable that they could not be true. There were reports from places so nearby that they might mean imminent danger.

Excited officials of towns and cities sent long, involved dispatches or hung for long minutes to telephones to recount interminable tales.

One hundred thousand men had landed, according to spies who had made their way into Fort Greble in the Narragansett defenses. It was two hundred thousand, telephoned Providence, transmitting messages from the coast. The army’s own scouts and spies and patrols, groping in insufficient numbers and finding a wall of cavalry and foot and machine gun detachments opposed to them everywhere, sent in estimates that varied all the way from twenty-five thousand to eighty thousand.

These American advance detachments were striking the enemy outposts east and west. Near Watch Hill three American motor cycle companies with machine guns ambushed and cut up two troops of cavalry. American cavalry drove back a battalion of engineers who had begun work on the railroad at Kingston. At Niantic two American motor patrols ran into the fire of a concealed field gun and were destroyed.

From Fort Michie on Gull Island came the news, brought by a Montauk Point fisherman who had managed to make his way across the Sound in a small boat, that men had landed on that end of Long Island. They had destroyed all communication immediately and had seized the railroad leading to New York; but it was impossible to guess how great this force was.[57]

Only one certain fact was developed from all the news. It was that the transports were unloading troops still.

The Enemy Moves

Suddenly, almost simultaneously, the American patrols were driven back all along the line. On a front that extended quickly, irresistibly, clear across Washington County, Rhode Island, from east to west, the invader army expanded. It seized Watch Hill. Kingston was occupied in force. Wickford Junction was occupied. Narragansett Pier was flooded, all at once, with men and guns.

With the swiftness of a blow from a fighter’s fist, the invader had struck and won the entire railroad system of the New York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad in Rhode Island, and commanded the way to Providence.

The foe had filled his divisions. Forty thousand men were ready for battle on American soil, with ten thousand in reserve on the coast.

Now the wind turned south-east. Point Judith, Rhode Island’s cape that coast-wise mariners call The Fog-Hole, began to brew one of its April fogs, gray and blind and wet.

Its first effect was kind to the Americans. The enemy air-craft, seeing the vapory bank growing from the sea, fled toward their lines. From all directions they came in, like gulls fleeing before a storm. They could not dare to remain in strange territory. All their fine maps, all their ingenious instruments, would be impotent against it. They came in, and alighted behind their army.

Freed from them, and masked by the fog, the American scouts went forward again and groped once more along the foe’s front. In an

hour field telephones and telegraphs and aerial told the American commander enough to assure him that the enemy’s force in men was at least nearly equal to his own. He knew, too, that the invader had brought up preponderating artillery. Every road, every piece of negotiable country was held by guns.

The American army held tight. In its front, between it and the foe, there was not a rail-line, not a bridge. All had been destroyed. Behind it lay a perfect railroad system, with long trains and giant locomotives under steam, and all the gathered motor vehicles, ready to speed along perfect roads.

So far the fog was kind to the defenders. But the invader, too, was quick to seize its favor.

The Fishermen Who Caught More Than Lobsters

Long before, half a dozen men, dressed like fishermen, had made their way out of Narragansett Harbor in a small sloop, and had reported at the enemy headquarters. For a month or more past they had been fishing for lobsters; but they had caught more than lobsters. Their catch lay on the table in the Commander’s tent, in the form of charts with soundings and range lines and distances. They were maps of the mine fields.

As soon as the fog began, these men went aboard a mine-sweeper. It steamed eastward, followed by the others. The sweepers had more than the cables and grapples that make a mine-sweeper’s outfit. Set in rows on the after-deck of each vessel were bulging mines, filled with 300 pounds of trinitrotol.[58]

The fog became so thick that it was hard to say if it were daylight still, or night. Night could only make it more black. It could not increase the obscurity.

In the coast defenses of Long Island Sound and Narragansett Bay every man was straining eyes and ears and nerves. Every gun company was at its weapon. Every gun was loaded. Tall projectiles stood ready with the chains and grapples of the hoists prepared. Men stood waiting in the powder magazines under the batteries.

Nothing to see or hear at Fort Wright on Fisher’s Island. Nothing at Fort Michie on Gull Island. Nothing at Fort Terry on Plum Island. On all the shrouded, swift tide-ways that led into Long Island Sound there was nothing.

There was nothing in front of the Narragansett defenses that eyes could see or ears could hear. Nothing—and then, far out, it was as if a sea-monster had arisen in dying torment, and lashed, and spouted and screamed. Before the riven column of water could fall, there came muffled, thundering explosion under water—one, two, three!

The defenses split the fog with fire. Their mine-protecting batteries had been trained over the fields long since. There was no need for aim. Instantly they swept the hidden sea with shells that would clear twenty acres of water.

Again there was silence and blindness—the unearthly silence of the Atlantic sea-fog. It lay for half an hour, as if there were no such thing as war in the world.

Then once more came the roar and the crash, followed by its submarine echoes. Once more the land-guns raved, firing blind.

Fighting Mines with Mines

The enemy was counter-mining. Instead of sweeping, his vessels were dropping mines of their own in the fields, and then, backing off to avoid the fire from the batteries if they could, they exploded them by electric contact, to blow up the American mines with the shock.

Not all the mine-sweepers escaped mines or guns. But there were vessels to spare, and lives to spare. All night the counter-mining went on, and all night the American guns fired into the vapor and the darkness.

The sun arose invisibly. But it climbed, and when it had lifted all its disk above the rim of sea, it showed through the mist as a pale illumination. It was “burning off” the fog.

“It will be clear enough in an hour,” said the executive officer of a battleship under Block Island. The vessel’s wireless began to speak.

On one of the mother-ships men brought out and assembled an armored biplane. Its two fliers stowed range-finding apparatus, aerial telegraph, aneroids and charts in it. There were signal flags and light, brightly silvered balls. Men brought receptacles that contained bombs and adjusted them carefully in place. The fliers waited, watching the fog.

It lessened. It tore away in rifts. All around, the ships became visible.

Seven battle-ships swung around and put on speed and rushed in echelon toward the coast. They steered straight for the mouth of Narragansett Bay, turned just outside of the zone of fire of its defenses, slowed down and steamed across the mouth.

The bi-plane’s engine burst into life. The machine lifted and followed them. It flew high over them and into the bay, climbing.

“They’re over it!” said an officer on a ship, looking at the machine through his glasses.

Locating the Forts For the Enemy Ships

Far inside of the bay, so high in air that it was little more than a shining speck, the aeroplane was describing a series of regular, equal circles. All at once, as if it had been painted in the air with a mammoth brush, a jet-black descending streak stood out against the sky, and lengthened steadily toward the earth.

The azimuth and other range-finding instruments at both ends of the battle-ships caught

the angles and ascertained the range to the black smear that still hung in the air, like grease. The aviator had dropped a smoke-bomb to indicate the fort below.

The forward turret of a battleship turned, its hooded rifle lifted its muzzle to an angle of fifteen degrees, and spoke with a great voice.

Eleven miles away a ton of steel rushed from the sky, crashed into the water of the bay roaring, ricochetted, struck again half a mile beyond, and again and again. Four times it rebounded, like a pebble, before it disappeared at last; and each time it filled the air with its clamor, like a suffering thing.[59]

The ships’ wireless caught a signal from the aeroplane. The shot had fallen short. The battleship steamed on, and another one in line opened up the mouth of the harbor and fired.

From the aeroplane fell a silver ball. It glittered in the brightening sun, splendid. “Hit!” went the message to the turret; and the crew there embraced and cheered.

It had hit the outer earth-works of the defenses. It had plunged down with a shock that stunned men in mortar pits and gun-emplacements far away—small wonder, for this thing falling from the sky had struck a blow equal to that of New York’s obelisk plunging into Broadway from the top of Trinity Church steeple.[60]

“No Effect!”

“No effect!” reported the watchers in the coast defense to the commandant. Though the impact had shaken the works and the very earth: though the blast from the explosion of its charge had twisted three-inch iron bars within the works, and bent the steel doors of casemates, it had done no harm to the defenses. So well had they been built by the engineers that the rending explosion left a crater for only a moment. The earth rippled down and closed it. The steel and concrete facing underneath held true.[61]

The enemy had the range. Ship after ship passed the entrance, delivered its single shot, proceeded and returned to follow in the circling line. These were the most modern dreadnaughts, firing from 16-inch guns. Their shells tore the earth embankments away in tons and flung dirt high in air and sent it down to bury everything in its way under mounds. But all their fire and all their havoc was in vain, unless they could hit a gun. And the guns were protected by steel armor and concrete and earth piled on earth.

To hit a gun was to attempt to hit a bull’s eye only a few feet square at a range of eleven miles, farther than men can see.

Still the bombardment went on, undeterred. More aeroplanes soared over the defenses now, far out of reach from shots, and circled and signaled. The fire grew. The ships were not hesitating now to wear out the rifling of their guns. They meant to give the defenders no rest.

They were trying for a prize that was worth all the guns in their turrets. They knew that inside of the works there could not be more than a few thousand men, if that much. They knew that all the Coast Artillery forces of the United States combined numbered only 170 companies and that these 170 companies had 27 harbor defense systems to guard. Even if the United States had stripped its other defenses to the utmost, there could not be a sufficient force in these that were now being attacked.[62]

Only Enough Ammunition to Last Two Hours

So they poured fire on fire and shot on shot. It was a one-sided duel, for their great guns outranged the 12-inch guns of the defenses. The men in there fired only occasionally, when their observers and range-finders and plotters perceived an opportunity. There was another reason for their slow fire, besides the inability to reach. Those perfect defenses, those perfect products of engineering science, those results of millions on millions of expenditure, contained only enough ammunition for two hours of firing![63]

They waited till the enemy ships should try to force the passage and come within range, that they might make those two hours two hours of unspeakable destruction that should glorify their death with the fiery splendor of bursting ships.

The enemy did not try to force the passage. While they saved their ammunition, these defenses were fearful gladiators to approach. None could come within reach of their steel hands and live.

But the gladiators were gladiators fearful only in front. Steel-gauntleted, armored with steel breast-plates and shin-plates, mightily visored—so they faced the sea. In the back they were naked.

Fire, and noise, and bursting charges, and explosions that made hot gales within the works and whirled men like dried leaves! An hour passed. Still from the sea there came the coughing bellow, that made the air tremble and rolled inland like summer thunder among hills. Still there fell the screaming steel from the sky. Another hour! And still it came.

The sun was over-head. Suddenly, into the naked back of the defenses poured fire and steel that hammered and beat and tore through them. Under it, through flame and smoke and flying dirt appeared shining rows of bayonets. With a yelp 10,000 men poured in.[64]

And through the United States, smiting it into the dumbness of despair, went the news that the great Narragansett defenses had fallen, and that the enemy fleet was entering the harbor.

America had lost Narragansett Bay, with all its defenses, great guns and government stations, in less than two weeks after the declaration of war!

The generation that faced this disaster had faced many catastrophes which had seemed great disasters. It had seen States razed by cyclones. It had seen giant floods. It had seen magnificent cities thrown down by a shaking earth. Unterrified, it had flung money and men to the stricken places to make them whole. Destroyed cities rose in beauty almost before the dust of their fall had ceased to veil the sun.

Money, money, money! Men, men, men! It seemed that no disaster could be so colossal that the wonderful resources and efficiency of the United States could not mock at it.

Before the news of Narragansett’s fall was an hour old, the cities of the United States, including many towns so obscure that few Americans ever had heard their names, had subscribed enough money to raise and equip an army twice over and keep it in the field for months. But the country that was so efficient, so intrepid, so resourceful, was facing a disaster now that it could not conjure away with all the money and men that ever were.

Money, the magician, was futile now. It could not stamp its golden foot and make guns and ammunition spring from the empty ground. It could not send to the army in Connecticut cannon that did not exist or cartridges that had not been made.[65]

Not Enough American Ammunition for Two Days’ Battle

An order had gone out from the American headquarters that morning—an ominous warning that, given in battle, would have indicated, surely, the beginning of the end. It was:

While the futile dollars were being flung to the Government for new armies, the army that was already in the field was counting its small-arms and artillery ammunition, knowing that it did not possess enough for two days’ battle.[66]

From ocean to ocean men with naked hands were crowding to enlist. The generous Nation that never yet had denied a need when the need was made apparent, was as generous with its lives as with its dollars. For two and three blocks around the recruiting stations of regular army and militia the streets were packed with men. They had come from work and pleasure. They had come home from far places. They had dropped shovels and tennis-rackets, pens and picks. They stood shoulder to shoulder, in fine stuffs and in rags, made equal by one loyal purpose. And they were as futile as the dollars.

One million men, it was computed afterward, had offered themselves in America in that one day. But there were no weapons for them. There were not enough rifles. There were no uniforms. There were no tents. There were no shoes.

Keen-eyed men of trails and wilderness offered themselves for the signal corps. There were no signal corps supplies. Telegraphers were there, but all the field telegraph outfits that the country had were with the army. Teamsters volunteered, but there was no reserve of army wagons. Men trained in bridge building and engineering were turned away, because there was no equipment to fit out sorely needed companies of miners and sappers.[67]

Cavalry was needed, urgently; and men who could ride tried to enlist. But there were no mounts for them. Army officers in Texas and New Mexico and Oklahoma were buying, at unheard-of prices, rough horses wild from the range, while in Connecticut were regiments of regular cavalry whose troops were only three-quarters filled with either men or horses.[68]

Money, money, money! Men, men, men! It was too late.

Newport’s Palaces Occupied by Enemy Officers

The bulletins still were displaying the news of the loss of Narragansett’s defenses when the mine-sweepers of the enemy, unhampered now, completed their work in the channels of the great harbor and signaled to their fleet that it was safe to enter.

The big liners crowded in—ships that hitherto never had entered an American harbor except New York or Boston. Followed by horse-transports and vessels laden with artillery, they passed in a gigantic parade past Newport.

Only destroyers and light-draught gun-boats preceded them. There was no further need of cruisers with shotted guns to protect them. The enemy flag was flying over Forts Adam, Wetherill, Greble, Getty, and Philip Kearney. The American guns which the garrison had not been able to destroy now looked down the harbor to hold it for the invader against American attack.

Newport’s villas and palaces were occupied by officers of the invading army and navy. The avenues and gardens and shores of the rich men’s pleasure-place were thronged with bluejackets and marines. The famous power-boats, rich with mahogany and cedar, were brought out of their opulent housings and launched. Glittering steam yachts were being eased down the ways, to take the water and go into commission under the foreign flag.

After the last of the ships had entered, an American sea captain, who had been crouching in a hiding place on Sakonnet Point at the eastern entrance to the harbor, clapped his telescope together, arose cautiously, and straightened out his stiffened old limbs. Taking great care to select by-paths, he went inland to the village of Little Compton, where he found an automobile stage that took him to the railroad station at Tiverton.

Thence he telephoned to Fall River, and Fall River sent it on to Boston, and Boston sent it on to Worcester, whence it went to the army, that an old seaman had not only counted and identified the transports, but was able to say approximately which ships had troops aboard and which vessels probably carried only supplies.

There were liners of more than 40,000 gross tons. There were three ships of more than 25,000 tonnage. Each of them was a famous liner whose character was known to its last details. It was a matter of only a few minutes to figure out that the net tonnage of the troop-laden vessels was 200,400. Under the foreign military allowance of one soldier for each two net tons of ship capacity, it was indicated with fair accuracy that the force that had entered the harbor was at least 100,000 men.[69]

“With the ample landing facilities,” said the American Commanding General to his staff, “the men can, no doubt, be disembarked within twenty hours. Count in the work of landing supplies, artillery, ammunition and horses, and organizing the army for effective movement—we cannot safely figure on more than fifty hours before the enemy will be ready to undertake important operations. He will, no doubt, have occupied Providence and Fall River at once.”[70]

An Incident of the Occupation of Fall River

A gunboat was lying at that moment in the mouth of Taunton River, with 4-inch guns covering tall, smoky Fall River. Its officers were watching the signalmen who had been left behind by a detachment of marines that had been sent in to occupy the river streets.

Crouching behind a third-story window of a square, multi-windowed monster of a cotton mill, three men, roughly clad, watched the bluejackets approach. “I tell you,” said one, “it is no use, no use. Have you not read the order? It is that we must not do anything.”

“We have been made citizens,” answered the other, savagely. “And shall we not fight for this country? Go, then, you, if you fear. Peter and I will kill these men. Is it not so, Peter?”

The man addressed nodded, silently. He had a bomb in his hand. The first speaker, shrugging his shoulder, hurried out.

“Now!” said Peter. His comrade raised the window, and Peter’s arm went out swiftly. He tossed the bomb.

It fell in front of the blue-jackets and burst. The detachment reeled. But the smoke had not quite dissipated before the sailors were in order again, running back, dragging their machine-gun and carrying two men, one dead, one wounded.

At the corner they stopped and aimed the gun at the mill. There was a tearing scream, like the sudden yelp of a circular saw when it bites a plank. A stream of steel-jacketed bullets blew against the building. The windows vanished with a clash of splintering glass. Three men, their heads bent low and their arms covering their faces as if to breast a tempest of hail and wind, ran out of the door. They had not gone ten yards when they were jerked, and tossed high, and flung forward, and dropped into a heap that might have been nothing except a huddle of old clothes.

The man at the machine-gun grunted. Squatting comfortably behind his little demon, he turned it on the factory again like a man manipulating a hose. Exactly as if he were sprinkling, he fanned the rows of windows, systematically.

Behind them the gunboat awoke. Its men had learned by signal what had occurred. Their guns opened fire on the street. Four steel projectiles struck the brick buildings, broke through them and tore up floors and walls and girders. As the shells exploded inside, the walls bent outward, seemed to recover, and then suddenly leaned out again and toppled, with smoke and dust mounting into a column on a cyclone of their own making.

Through the smoke and thick dust sped another flock of shells. A building at the head of a street moved. It seemed to jump, curiously like a frightened man staggering backward. Then there was no building. There was nothing but a pile of stone and twisted iron—with half a dozen men under it.

Providence’s Handful of Desperate Men

The gunboat lowered boats and sent more men ashore. They rushed machine guns into the town. “Our men have been attacked,” said their Commander, appearing at the City Hall. “The town is subject to punishment under the rules of war. Write a proclamation to your people at once. Inform them that a single other hostile act will cause your immediate execution and the complete destruction of your city.”

“Fall River Destroyed!” was the news that went through the country. It was spread by men who had seen the houses fall, and had run away in terror with the roar of tumbling walls and exploding shells in their ears, and who truly believed that they had seen the entire city in flame and ruin.

“Quick! Quick!” shouted a newspaperman in Providence when the news came in. “Get this on the street with the biggest head you can and rush copies to the madmen at the barricade. It’ll probably be the last thing we print; but it may save Providence.”

Behind the barricade, made of stones and wagons and all the useless, pitiable defenses that desperate men in desperate cities have always used, there were a hundred or more men who had lost their heads and would listen to nothing but the voice of their own fury. They were armed with old rifles taken from a plundered marine store’s establishment whose dusty cellar was piled with condemned arms. From the same place they had taken four automatic guns on rusty tripods.

Lashing themselves to greater and blinder rage at every attempt at opposition or argument, they had sworn to turn the weapons on their own police. But the black headlines on the extras that were tossed to them acted like the shock of ice-cold water on a drunken man.

One by one they slouched away. When the enemy arrived, there was nobody to oppose the files of bluejackets and marines that marched past the silent, gloomy crowds to occupy the city for the troops.

Green Scouts for the American Army

“Reports here that Providence is occupied,” Washington telegraphed to the army. “Send details.”

The General laughed sarcastically, and tossed the dispatch to his aide.

“Blazes!” growled the latter. “Since they established their aviation camp back of their lines at Narragansett Pier yesterday, every reconnoisance we’ve attempted has been just like stirring up a nest of yellow-jackets. I’m afraid that we’ve lost another machine, sir. It should have been back here hours ago. If it’s gone, we have only six left; and our crack aviation squadron from San Diego has been whittled down to 14 officers and 90 enlisted men. They simply pile on top of every machine of ours with half a dozen or more of their own.”

“The mounted patrols that we pushed out toward the south last night got good results,” said the General.

“Yes, sir. But,” the aide selected a sheet of paper from the pile, “it’s like trying to build up a monster from a single bone. Look at this, sir. Here’s a green patrol—plucky, too, for they got in farther than most. But see what they give us. They report a regiment of infantry at Exeter, west of Wickford; and they say that there is positively no artillery with it.”

“Of course!” answered the General. “They didn’t know where to look for artillery, or how it is concealed.”[71]

“Nice man-trap that sort of scouting is!” grunted the aide.

“Well, well!” The old General laughed again. “It’s late in the day to kick. We’ve known long ago what sort of soup was being cooked for our eating. The only thing to do now is not to let them ladle it into us too hot.”

An officer with the insignia of the aviation corps appeared before the tent-flap and saluted. A trickle of blood was creeping down his forehead and across one cheek. “Hullo!” said the aide. “Then we haven’t lost that machine after all! Did you get anything?”

The Report of the Air Scout

“Cavalry and artillery have seized all the railroad and electric lines to Providence,” reported the flier. “Apparently they are not moving into the town, but holding tight so that the troops that are landing there can complete their line. Couldn’t get details—three bi-planes got after me within twenty minutes.”

“What delayed you?”

“They drove me south to the coast. Going over Kingston, I got touched up with shrapnel. Then two other fliers came down on me, coming from the direction of our own lines. I had to hustle across the Sound and fly around Montauk Point and inland before I could shake them off.”

“What did you see on Montauk?” asked the General, quickly.

“A small force is holding it, apparently for a supply and repair base,” said the scout. “I saw a row of forges in one place.”

“That’s better news, anyway,” said the General. “I’ve been anxious since we heard that a force had been landed there. Feared it might be a second army moving toward New York. Well, we’d better tell Washington what we’ve gathered.”

“Hostile line,” Washington learned, “is strongly extended through Rhode Island along entire railroad system from Westerly northeast almost to Providence. Enemy’s left flank at Westerly has been strengthened by successful assault on Fort Mansfield near Watch Hill whose two-company garrison was overcome before it could destroy the 5-inch guns.[72]

“The enemy holds in strength Westerly, Niantic, Wood River, Wickford Junction and Landing, River Point and East Greenwich, thus maintaining line that touches Narragansett Bay at one end and the ocean east of Long Island at the other. Extraordinarily powerful artillery supports reported along entire front.”

“No important news from the front,” said Washington, transmitting this information to the newspapers. “Providence appears to have been occupied, as all communication with that place has ceased. It is reported that two blocks of buildings in Fall River have been destroyed, but the rest of the city is intact.”

Washington had become the only source of news, for the time, after the foe had effected a base in Narragansett Bay. The coasts of New Jersey and Long Island suddenly had become as quiet again as if there were no enemy within three thousand miles. No demonstration was made against the ocean defenses of New York City. No ships threatened the defenses of Long Island Sound.

The Plight of New Bedford

Simultaneously with the severance of communication with Providence, Boston had been cut off from direct communication with southern New England, and could telegraph or telephone only by way of Worcester.

Late that night the city transmitted a dispatch that had come to it from Fort Rodman, near New Bedford in Buzzards Bay. A strong force, numbers unknown, had begun moving along the railroad out of Fall River, with evident design against the town or the fort. Trains were being assembled. “Send reinforcements,” said Fort Rodman. “No militia in the city. We have in our defenses only 63 men, Fourth Company, New Bedford Militia Coast Artillery, besides our own two companies of regulars and the two companies that were sent here from Charleston and Mobile.”[73]

The morning newspapers announced that New Bedford was in uproar and had demanded of Washington to know if the Government intended to abandon its sea-board cities utterly. The people had gone out to tear up the railroad tracks leading into the town, but one train of fifteen cars had already advanced half way from Fall River, with another of twelve cars behind it.

Shortly afterward a dispatch from a station along the line informed Boston that three other trains had just passed, close behind each other, going slowly. One train had twelve, one had eight and the other had ten cars.

“Fifty-seven cars,” said the War Department, “would indicate that two regiments with artillery were on the way.”

Two hours later Washington gave out this bulletin:

“New Bedford was occupied at nine A.M. by a regiment of infantry and three batteries of heavy field artillery. Shortly before 10 A.M. this force, augmented by a further regiment of infantry, a strong body of sappers and miners, and a battery of howitzers, proceeded in the direction of Fort Rodman. Since then it has been impossible to gain any intelligence.”

The Demand of the Cities for Protection

At noon an enemy force of unknown strength advanced toward Taunton, Massachusetts, by way of the railroad running north from Fall

River. It was reported that two companies of infantry, Massachusetts Volunteer Militia, had attacked enemy cavalry outside of the town and had defeated it. A little later came a report that the Americans had been surrounded and forced to surrender.

Then Taunton was cut off. Boston telegraphed to Washington: “We have practically stripped ourselves of militia and demand help at once.”

“Hold the army where it is!” said New York, promptly. “To move it toward Boston would simply uncover us, and open all Connecticut to capture.”

“Protect Boston!” demanded Lawrence and Lowell and Haverhill.

“Hold the army in Connecticut!” telegraphed New London and New Haven, Bridgeport and Hartford.

“Most of our militia is with the army!” urged Philadelphia. “We insist that our men be kept between us and the foe.”

“What is the disposition of the enemy forces now?” Washington asked army headquarters.

“Disembarkation proceeding swiftly,” was the reply. “The line Providence to New Bedford appears to be strongly held. Main strength, however, evidently being thrown to face our front. The original army is being steadily augmented by additions from the forces now landing. Believe that hostile line stretching across Rhode Island and threatening us is now fully eighty thousand men, with preponderating artillery.”

The news bulletin that the War Department in Washington gave out as a result of this information was that the American army, though numerically inferior, was holding the invader in check for the time. No immediate movement, said the bulletin, was expected.

To the General in command, however, the Department telegraphed: “It is of the utmost importance to know if you can maintain present position, and if so, how long. We wish to work Springfield arsenal to the last moment. Must have twenty-four hours to dismantle it and ship machinery away.”

Two Days in Which to Make Ammunition for the American Army!

Springfield Arsenal, lying behind the protecting army, was a-glare with light at night and a-roar night and day with labor. It was toiling almost literally over a mine; for the foundations were mined, ready for the dynamite that was to blow them up when the need came.

An army of workmen, each provided with his own specific instruction, were ready, when the word came, to tear out what machinery they could and load it on the trains.[74]

Thus, with men standing ready to pull it apart, the great place was being “speeded” to turn out rifles. Under civilian and military experts all the workers who could find room were working in eight-hour shifts. They had increased the output from the normal one hundred rifles an hour to three thousand in the twenty-four hours.

“Forces in our front constantly increasing,” the army leaders informed Washington, after a council of war. “No doubt of offensive intention. We believe, however, that no forward movement will be made until completion of landing operations. The total destruction of all roads in our front will then delay enemy for not more than two days. Think it safe to delay dismantling works till expiration of that time.”

“Thank God!” said one of the men in Washington. He was thanking God for two days of grace—after fifty years of unused time. Two short days had become suddenly precious. In that time there could be added to the stock of arms 6,000 rifles before the Springfield works should have to be abandoned and the country forced to depend on the output of the Rock Island arsenal in Illinois, whose utmost capacity was only two hundred and fifty rifles in each eight-hour day.[75]

Militia That Had Come in Without Rifles

Already, without a battle, the army had made requisition for 2,500 new rifles. The militia had come in with many rifles corroded from the powerful fumes and acid deposits released by smokeless powder. The rifling of many was ruined by rust, due to lack of cleaning after use. In more than one militia company there were men who had come in without rifles.[76]

Beholding this wastage that had occurred in peace, the authorities were inclined to believe the dictum of some of the military men who insisted that for every infantryman in the field there must be a rifle in reserve. Certainly it was evident enough that when fighting should once begin, the waste of small arms would be enormous.[77]

Two days more! The word went secretly to Hartford and Ansonia, to Bridgeport, to New Haven, to all the crowded world of Connecticut and southern Massachusetts where machines were panting night and day, buildings trembling with their steam fever, men toiling without sleep, to take advantage of the days of grace.

It was not only the brass cases for the fixed ammunition, the fuses for shells, the cartridges for rifles and pistols, the bayonets and entrenching tools for which the army depended on New England. A hundred places of peaceful manufacture were working as desperately as were the manufacturers of quick-firing guns, to provide the food that war devours with such monstrous rapacity when it begins to feed.

There were shops that turned out chains, and shops that turned out cooking utensils. There were workmen who never had done anything more warlike than to make bootlaces. There were manufacturers of whips and hats, and wheelwrights and makers of thread. Up and down all the river valleys, and in all the crowded towns they were working to give the army what it needed before the enemy should reach out and make the land his own.

Now that it was on the verge of being lost, the United States knew suddenly what this New England meant to it. It realized all at once what vast productiveness had enriched the entire Continent with its manifold variety. So accustomed through long generations to the endless supply, even the merchants of America had not realized how much they depended on Connecticut and Massachusetts factories for a thousand articles of daily utility.

From every point in the Union came orders. Had such a torrent arrived in a time of peace, Connecticut might have built one unbroken factory reaching from the Berkshire Hills to Stonington, to meet the demand.

“We Will Play Our Hand Out!”

And all that lay between this treasure-house of the United States and capture was a bluff—a last, desperate American bluff.

The American General knew that his adversary must know that it was a bluff; but bluffing was an American game.

“We will play our hand out,” he said to his staff. “No doubt he knows that he could drive us back now, without waiting for his whole army to land, and all that ungodly mess of artillery that he’s brought with him. But he wants to play safe. He wants to clean the whole thing up in one operation. He wants to lick us, true; but he wants still more to accomplish his bigger job—the possession of the seaboard. We’ll sit tight—and bluff him into going slow.”

The army sat tight. It sat tight while New England worked, and Chambers of Commerce and Committees of Safety argued and resolved and argued and could agree on nothing except that the whole thing was a hopeless mess. It sat tight while a hundred millions stared at the mess, and hooted their Congressmen and politicians who wandered around feebly to explain that it was the fault of somebody else.

In Ohio and Indiana the mess was typified. Here in great camps were gathered the organized militia of the western States to be organized, with 300,000 entirely raw volunteers who had everything to learn. These green men were the pick of the country—physically perfect, intelligent, quick to understand. But there was nobody to teach them.

For years the United States had been warned that if the crisis ever should occur, there would not be any officers available for the work of organizing and training recruits. The warning had been whistled down the wind. Congresses that could find ample time to debate about mileage and constructive recesses and pork barrels had never found a time when they could debate this.

Congresses that could always find the money for increased pension rolls never had been able to find the time to lessen the pension rolls of the future by providing trained officers who would protect their soldiers and teach them to stay alive as long as possible instead of rushing to glorious and unnecessary death.[78]

Even as it was, there were not enough officers for the army that was in the field. For training the new men, the Nation had to call on every aged officer in the land, on every otherwise qualified man who was physically unfit for active service, and on foreigners from foreign armies.

A Land Lacking in War Efficiency

This army in formation was placed in perfect surroundings. Its health, its sanitation and its water-supply were excellent. It was fed on the best that money could buy. In everything that did not depend on military efficiency, its maintenance was beyond criticism.

Uniforms were being made for it in record time. Mills were producing blankets at a speed never before reached. Wherever Americans could help by the efficient execution of duties that they understood, the result was magnificent.

But in everything that demanded the efficiency of men trained to war, the land was entirely lacking. Everything had to be improvised. There were only a few men who knew anything about pitching tents, camp drainage, and the management of large bodies of men. There were practically no men outside of the army who were capable of managing the work of supplying the great camps with what they needed. As in the Spanish-American War, the utter inadequacy of the Quartermaster’s Department under its civilian appointees had become a scandal within a few weeks, and threatened already to demoralize the entire volunteer body.

Perishable provisions were left in freight cars till they rotted. Requisitions for vitally needed supplies were not made until it was too late. Requisitions for one and the same thing were sent out by half a dozen different officials, leading to inextricable confusion. There was not an hour in the day when quartermaster’s transports did not block roads where they had no business to be, and in situations that in war would have made disaster for a hurrying army.[79]

“Six months to train that mob!” said a retired General, reporting to the President. “Well, Mr. President, let’s hope so. I should say nine months, and not even then unless you can give ’em more officers to teach ’em.”

The News the Spy Brought

In Connecticut a spy was reporting to the staff. He was a Captain of Artillery, and he had spent seventy-two hours behind the enemy’s lines.

“They have completed their disembarkation and organization,” he said. “There are at least 150,000 men, as was calculated. They are magnificently organized, with reserves of everything. They have an enormous supply of artillery—at least ten guns to every thousand infantry and cavalry. Their machine gun companies also are extraordinarily large.”[80]

“And what is their disposition?”

“They were still moving men around to our front,” answered the spy. “I should say, General, that you now have, or will have before the end of the day, approximately one hundred thousand men facing you.”

“And the others?”

“Everything indicates that they are planning to move against Boston, while the larger force attacks us, sir. Country people told me that they are holding Taunton now with a strong force. They were moving men through Pawtucket this morning on the Providence railroad line for Boston.”

“Did you see any movement that might menace Worcester immediately?”

“They have already repaired the railroad from Providence to Woonsocket.”

“Then it’s time for us to get out of this. Gentlemen, you all know what to do. Issue your orders at once.”

The Retreat of the American Army

Eight hours later the enemy army advanced suddenly. Its southern wing pushed forward, across Rhode Island and entered Connecticut. Its northern wing, advancing more slowly because it had to repair railroads and clear obstructed roads before it, extended itself gradually northward toward Worcester.

The extreme southern line, advancing from Westerly, took Stonington, Groton and the new London Navy Yard, and held the eastern shore of the Thames River. Another force took Norwich and crossed the Thames at that place.

Gradually the line straightened out and formed into the drive that was to sweep the American army before it, or crush it. But the American army, with everything lacking except transport, was not there, either to be swept or crushed. It was retreating swiftly, in perfect order.

As the last wheel rolled out of Springfield, the town shook with the explosions that were wrecking the dismantled arsenal.

Eastward, two divisions of enemy forces, perfectly appointed to act as independent armies, were converging on Boston.

New England was filmy red with bursting maple buds. Silver troops of rain floated over the low hills in the dawn, and left April shining. The orderly land lay lovely and serene under the tranquil blessing of the New England spring whose memory draws its sons, soon or late, from all the world’s places to go home.

It was such a morning “promising to become hot” as had lain on Massachusetts in the dawn of April 19, 1775, when men were gathering at Concord and Lexington.

The country was as still as it must have been in that far-off day. The mill-towns were still and smokeless. The machineries were still. There was no cry of plowmen in the fields.

It was a supine New England, hushed, apprehensive and conquered. So, at least, it seemed to the invaders whose patrols, spreading fanwise, were beginning to pierce the country in all directions, pushing forward far in advance of their armies, and finding no opposition.

Through New England the church and town clocks struck: Seven. The land was peaceful as death. The hour passed. The lazy clocks began to strike: Eight.

In a village north of New Bedford stood a little crowd of farmers, gathered around the general store and listening to the sheriff. He was warning them that they must not attempt to resist the invading troops when they came.

“I know that you—and you,” said he, pointing to men as he spoke, “brought arms with you. You’d better give them up to me.”

“And you an American!” growled one of the men. The sheriff did not retort. He was scarcely past middle age; but there was a great, slow patience in his face that made him look old.

He shook his head and said: “It’s only for your own sake.”

The Modern Paul Revere

“Look!” cried a farmer. “Who is coming here?”

The man who was coming was a man on a motorcycle. Man and machine were so coated with dust, were speeding so desperately, that even without war in the land one would stare at this flying thing, one would wait with eyes and lips open to learn what startling message it was carrying.

Man, roaring motor, and their brother pillar of dust crashed by. They had disappeared before the breathless watchers realized that the man had waved an arm at them and had screamed: “Soldiers!”

A farmer ran to his wagon and pulled out a rifle from its hiding place under the wagon-seat. “Come on, boys!” he said.

“Listen! Listen!” The sheriff shouldered forward. “Men! Neighbors! Old friends! For God’s sake, listen! You have no right to fight.”

“What?” The sheriff’s young brother, sturdy, handsome, suddenly ferocious, brought his face close to him. “No right to defend our country? Are you crazy, Jim?”

The patient man shook his head again. “It is against the rules of war.”

“Then curse the rules of war!” shouted the younger. “Are you a coward?”

The sheriff reached out and touched his brother’s arm. It was a secret, almost a timid, act. The brother threw off the appealing hand.

“Don’t touch me!” He spoke through set teeth. “If you are a coward and traitor, may you be damned through all eternity! Again! For the last time! Will you fight?”

The sheriff raised his hands, dumbly. The men went to their wagons and returned with arms.

New England’s Stone Wall

“To that stone wall yonder!” said one.

He pointed into a field with a rough stone wall dividing its center three or four hundred yards from the road. This man was an old hunter, and the others had followed him often. He took command now as a matter of course.

The sheriff watched them flounder through the plowed field. He stood still, for a minute. Then he hurried to his house, emerged with a gun, and joined the party.

Two miles away a squad of ten cavalrymen cantered over a ridge and examined the country through their field-glasses. They studied the ground foot by foot, almost inch by inch. Satisfied, they trotted toward the village.

Around a turn they came on a little knot of women and children who scurried, screaming, into the ditch. A rider headed off a woman who was carrying a child. He stooped to her from his tall black horse. Laughing, he nodded and said something to her in a foreign language.

Stooping still lower, he snatched the child suddenly and swung it out of the trembling woman’s arm. He lifted it, and danced it up and down.

He fumbled in his saddle-bag and brought out some chocolate which he fed to the baby. Then he handed it back to the mother, roaring again with laughter at her frightened face. The other riders, laughing also, waved their hands at the group and cantered on.

They entered the village, swiftly examined it, riding through gardens and into alleys, assuring themselves that there was nothing there to mask danger for the troops that were behind them. They passed out of the other end and into the road leading past the plowed field with the stone wall.

It was still, and very lonely. There was not a living being in sight throughout all the softly tinted land. On a tree branch that hung over the stone wall, a bluebird began to sing with all the power of its little throat.

It brought a hot choking to the throat of a farmer who was lying behind the stone wall, just under the bird. Its song had welled out just as he was raising his rifle. But his gray Yankee eye sought the sights, his sinewy brown hand gripped the weapon, and he fired.

The Firing of the First Shot

He fired, and pumped another cartridge into the breech and fired again, so quickly that his second shot had roared out before a cavalryman who had pitched forward with the first bullet through his side, had quite toppled from his saddle.

All along the stone wall they fired, and pumped their magazines, and fired. They were men who had hunted deer in early autumn cover and learned to send bullets driving after them at hot speed on the jump. The big horses and the big men, broad in the open road, were easy targets. But they were not deer. They were men. More than one of the rifle bullets went wild because the marksman’s horror shook his hand.

In the road lay two men, lashing in the dust. Down the road went a bleeding horse that screamed. It dragged its rider, smashing his face against the ground. In the field was a soldier, trying to balance himself on his saddle, with one hand gripping at his breast while the other reached out grotesquely, as if groping for something to which he might hold.

A farmer behind the wall, unable to endure the sight of the men who were rolling in the road like animals trying to bury their agony, fired at them and made them lie still. “My God!” he said, and cried.

The wounded man fell from the saddle and squatted in a queer hunched posture in the field, his head between his knees. It was the cavalryman who had fed the child.

The others scattered, and charged toward the wall. Instantly, the defenders became cool. Their nerves stopped jumping. These riders, looming big, with swords out and fury in their eyes, ceased to be men. They were killers. The farmers shot as steadily as if they were aiming at deer.

Two riders escaped and galloped headlong down the road back to their forces. The New England men arose from behind the wall, and ran across the fields to gain the shelter of a wood-lot. Before they could reach it, there was a yelling behind them and a dozen troopers were in the fields, following them desperately.

In the Stone House

“To the house!” cried the sheriff. He led the way to an old stone house, built in Revolutionary times. The cavalrymen reined up sharply. A glance at the solid little building with window-openings as deep as embrasures, showed them that it was dangerous. They opened out, remaining carefully out of rifle shot, and surrounded the place where they could watch it from all sides. Then one rode back, swiftly.

The watchers sat, easy and careless, as if they had been halted during a peaceful practice march. Half an hour passed. The immobility of the soldiers, their passionless watch, was driving the farmers frantic. More than once the old leader had to growl at a man who wanted to fire, despite the hopeless distance.

If the tension in the house had lasted much longer, some of these men would have rushed out. But there came a great sound from the distance. It might have been thunder, rolling far away. It might have been a river in flood.

“They’re coming!” said the sheriff’s brother. It was hard for him to speak. The defenders were all violently thirsty, and they had not had time to bring water from the well.

They came. Horses, horses, horses! Bayonets, bayonets, bayonets! They came, and passed along the road, and more came on.

They did not turn off to attack the house. They did not even turn their heads to look at it. This infuriated the defenders.

Horses, horses, horses! Bayonets, bayonets, bayonets! If the men in the stone house could have seen other roads, they would have seen each one so filled with silent, steadily moving columns of men.

A little party of men and horses turned off from the column and entered the field. Before it was within the range of the rifles, it wheeled. A shining, glossy little thing pointed at the house. It was field artillery, sleek, beautiful.

The sheriff’s brother, carried away by rage, fired and fired. He emptied his magazine at the distant men.

The War Machine Rolls On

Along the highway the column moved steadily, silently. No soldier checked his foot for so much as an instant at the sound of the shots. Bayonets, bayonets, bayonets! The machine moved on.

It moved on, eyes front, while the captain commanding the cannon snapped an order. It moved on, bayonets twinkling out of sight in front, and twinkling past, and twinkling into sight from behind, while the little gun tore the April morning.

The stone house spouted clouds of dust and powdering stone. It dissolved. It became a ruin that stared phantomlike through the cloud, as if it were looking with horribly expanding eyes at the gun.

If the besieged fired in return, the men at the gun did not know it. Their steel beast drowned the farmers’ tiny efforts in roar and flame. They passed as a breath. The cavalrymen cantered to the ruin. A half wall was standing, jagged. The rest was a mound of dirt. Under it lay fourteen men of Massachusetts. The sheriff lay there, with his face more patient than ever, and his arm around his brother.

The little gun and its horses and men joined the horses and men that were moving northward through New England.

Over the field telegraph wire that unreeled behind the advancing force went the report to the enemy headquarters: “Civilians estimated at about a dozen fired from ambush, killing eight cavalry. Took refuge in building. Annihilated.”

It was a perfunctory report telling of a merely perfunctory incident. But the commander-in-chief, sitting at his ease in headquarters in Providence, stopped smoking for a moment. “See that the news does not spread,” said he. “It might raise the country. Reënforce all patrols and warn them.”

New England Ablaze

He was a quick man. His officers were quick and his system of communication was quick. But the news sped more quickly still. Over every telephone that was intact, over every telegraph wire that still worked in New England, by bicycle, on horseback, by men running, the story was passed from man to man and village to village.

They were fourteen humble men, unknown beyond their own township, when they crouched behind the stone wall. They were fourteen shining names before the ruins that covered them had ceased smoking. New England, like a blazing forest, was ablaze with wrath and fury.

Vain was it now for cautious men to warn or authorities to command. Men who never in their lives had thought harm to any living thing, dashed out with smoldering eyes to fight. Prudent men, who never in their lives had acted on impulse, now acted without a second’s pause for reflection. Men who had cared all their lives only for their own little affairs, were all drunken now and thought it nothing to fire one shot for their country and die behind a stone wall in the dirt.

In Acushnet an old whaling captain, a prosperous, weighty citizen, emptied his shot gun into a raiding party and was left dead under his forsythias with the golden blossoms from the volley-torn shrubs covering him.

Between Taunton and Pawtucket a militia company of field artillery that had been unable to move its gun because it lacked horses, got it from its hiding place, and with a party of volunteers who had no firearms, fought behind piled bags of cement against enemy cavalry till artillery had to be brought from miles away to destroy them.

South of Woonsocket a band, made up of thirty Massachusetts militia infantry and sixty factory hands from the town, prevented two companies of hostile infantry for almost two hours from crossing the Blackstone River. It was not because they could shoot, or knew how to fight. It was because they meant to stay there till they died. And it was not until they were dead that the invaders succeeded in crossing.

New England women who had spent their lives in homely, simple duties, brought out dippers of water to parched men and cheered them on. They hid fleeing men in barns and stood by, defiant, when pursuing soldiers dragged them out and shot them before their eyes.

As the Men of Old

Men took down old muskets that had been over chimney-places for a generation. Their wives and mothers kissed them as they went out to fight.

Grandparents saw their sons and their sons’ sons lie in ambush in ancestral pastures that had not echoed to a ruder sound than the lowing of cows; and they saw them vanish away in red storm, and did not weep.

Dynamite! Dynamite! went the word through Massachusetts and Connecticut. This was something that the unarmed country had, and that it knew how to use. Even the peaceful farmers had it, and were practiced in handling it, from long work in blowing out stumps and rocks. Irish construction gangs, Italian road-makers, workers of every tongue and race from pits and quarries, joined the New England men.

They blew up a sunken road through which artillery was lumbering. They blasted away a steep bank and buried a troop of cavalry. They blew up a mined road in front of infantry and when it retreated, sprang a second mine under the soldiers’ feet that exterminated a battalion.

Railroads and roads were blown up before advancing troops and behind them. Men blew up bridges and prevented their own escape so that the armed forces caught them as in a trap and slaughtered them at leisure. Viaducts and works were dynamited that never could have been of any use to the enemy. It was formless, systemless destruction—but in that very lack of system lay its danger to the enemy forces.

Had all the men in New England who were engaged in this wild fighting been gathered in one body, the trained, disciplined soldiers could have disposed of them in an action so simple that they might scarcely have named it a skirmish. But this was like a forest fire that, stamped out in one spot, breaks into roaring flame in another. As it sweeps from tree tops to tree tops and creeps underground, and flames out in quick fury miles away, so the warfire raved through Massachusetts and Connecticut to be crushed out only in detail with detailed, bitter work through all that long, hot, dusty day.

Serious to the Enemy

It was serious. This uprising of an undisciplined population could not defeat, or even damage seriously, the great army. But it could hamper it. It would force a wide scattering of troops to break down the sporadic opposition. It would make a dangerous country—dangerous in front of the advancing soldiers, dangerous in their rear, continually dangerous around them.

In that sense it was more serious than deliberate, military opposition by the American army would have been. Had the enemy commander faced only a defending army, it would have been a quiet, technical matter of advance guards against advance guards. These pawns in the old game of war would have thrust each other back here, receded before each other there, fighting only when it was forced on them, and so, gradually, properly, they would have cleared the board that the great game might be played.

This incoherent uprising was disorganizing all his tactics. From the western army that had set out to sweep through Connecticut, came

word that everywhere patrols had been attacked. Men in a swift power boat on the Thames River above New London had succeeded in three places in firing on scouting parties with a Hotchkiss rifle, apparently taken from a yacht.

The line north of Norwich along the same river reported four men killed from ambush. At Willimantic there had been firing from mill buildings, which had been destroyed for punishment.

The Commander of the brigade that was advancing on Worcester in Massachusetts from Connecticut had halted his advance, and was asking headquarters if the extent of the disorder were great enough to imperil his communications.

The eastern division, moving on Boston, reported that the patrols had been ordered in from the line North Middleboro—East Middleboro—Plymouth. “Our men can move only in considerable force,” reported the Commander. “Small parties are constantly in danger of being assassinated. The population appears to be in a frenzy. Seven cavalry at Nemasket, engaged in foraging for their horses, were burned alive in a barn. We have fired the town. It is still burning. Have shot ten citizens.”

“My men are getting out of hand,” telegraphed the Commander of a brigade moving toward Mansfield. “Stern reprisals required at once.”

“Let Them Have It!”

“Let them have it!” said the Commander-in-Chief.

“Instant retaliation!” said the field telegraph to the armies. “Order all brigade commanders to execute disorderly civilians in most public and exemplary manner possible. Attach placard to bodies proclaiming why punishment was incurred. Divisional commanders are empowered in their discretion to order partial or total destruction of offending cities.”

The commanders transmitted the orders to their regimental commanders, and these to the officers of their battalions and companies. “Crush all disorder with utmost severity,” they said. What it meant was: “Kill, burn and destroy!” It meant: “Set fury against fury!” It meant: “Let your men go!”

It meant what a war of soldiers against battling civilians in a conquered country always has meant. Both sides had seen their dead. Both sides were maddened. Now the men with arms, restrained no longer by cold discipline, broke loose.

Then New England saw such deeds as that quiet landscape never had framed since the days of its old Indian wars, and perhaps not even then. It saw housewives hanging from budding apple-trees, with placards pinned to their breasts saying that they had helped to murder soldiers. It saw New England people, who, twenty-four hours earlier would not have killed a chicken without a pang of pity, surround solitary soldiers and do them to death with their bare hands, while they begged for mercy. It saw unarmed citizens seized on the roads and hustled to walls and shot while they were screaming for somebody in authority, that they might prove their innocence.

The authorities of a score of towns were hanged in their town squares because troops had been fired on. In many a park that never had seen anything more formidable than children at their play, hung dead men in a row—the executed hostages who paid for the acts of men whom they had not known. A thousand men and women of Connecticut and Massachusetts, it was reported later, were shot or hanged in that one afternoon.

New England’s Funeral Curtain

And over the two States, rising slowly and spreading until the sunny sky was darkened, there hung, like a funeral curtain over the place of death, the black smoke of burning villages and towns.

When that April day ended, and the night came down, there was no place in eastern Connecticut, in all the seventy miles north and south from New London to Worcester where men could not see the fire of burning towns or houses. In Massachusetts from New Bedford to Taunton, and from Taunton north to Brockton, there were fires. All the sky around Providence was red with it. The smoke drifted over Boston and the strangling odor filled its streets.

All night the country burned. All night wounded fugitives lay hidden, gritting their teeth, or, forced by intolerable anguish, crawled out and surrendered. All night long the troops swept through town after town, wreaking vengeance.

It was finished in the morning. “The country is pacified,” were the reports that went to headquarters. There were no gatherings of citizens anywhere within the province of the army’s operations. They were forbidden. There were no arms left in the hands of civilians. Houses in which weapons were found had been destroyed. Men who had been found with them in their possession were shot. Men with explosives were shot. In all New England that morning, every man had to be ready, for his life, to hold out his open hands whenever he met a soldier, and submit to search.

The Machine Shakes Down

Through the two armies ran the orders to restore stiff discipline. The soldiers came to leash and the big machine shook down. The patrols went out grimly, with a new meaning in their peering, scrutinizing frowns. They found a terrorized country, through which they moved unhampered.

“Worcester Occupied” was the early news that went through the United States. “Heavy Cavalry Body Enters Unopposed.”

“Motor Raiders at Fitchburg,” was the next report. It was followed by news of raiders east of Worcester.

Bit by bit the enemy was cutting Boston and all Eastern New England off from the rest of the United States.

East of Providence the advance guard of the army that was threatening Boston reached the line from Attleboro through Bridgewater and Silver Lake to Kingston, thus extending across that part of Massachusetts all the way to Plymouth Bay.[81]

Taunton, according to rumors that reached Boston, was being made the point for a heavy concentration of men and rolling stock.

Washington received news of an enormous unfolding of cavalry. The reports came from East Brookfield, half way between Worcester and Springfield in southern Massachusetts; from Willimantic in Central Connecticut, and from New London on the Long Island Sound shore in the south. Every road across the whole State north and south was held by horsemen who were pressing steadily westward, converting all means of communication to the army’s use and cutting off the population completely from the outside and even from communicating with each other.[82]

From Attleboro there was a sudden thrust along the railroad line Taunton to Mansfield. From this point the enemy moved rapidly along the railroad line to Framingham. In two hours he had in his possession six important junctions of the railroad systems that connect Boston with the rest of New England and with the United States.

Encircling Boston

The enemy was making good a great line that extended in a semi-circle from the west of Boston to the coast south of it.

His grip on Rhode Island had not relaxed. That whole State was in his hands. There was not a village left in it that was not dominated by his troops. Men were quartered in every house. Officers were quartered in every hotel, every mansion. The town halls and churches were occupied. In places where there were not sufficient stable accommodations, the horses were placed in the churches.

There were proud homes there, in “little Rhode Island,” where crossed swords over the old-fashioned mantel-pieces bore witnesses to ancestors who had fought on land and sea in the Wars of the Revolution and of 1812. Foreign soldiers sat under them, and spread out maps of the State on the floors while they debated over the best use to make of roads and houses and towns.

Town and village authorities received orders, not from officers, but from common soldiers, or, at the most, from sergeants or corporals. Only in the most important places did commissioned officers trouble to consult with the officials. Mostly, they limited themselves to sending their requisitions and instructions in curtly written notes.

So it was everywhere throughout the conquered country. Wherever the invader set foot, all old law ceased instantly and new law began. The bulletin boards in town halls, court rooms and post offices were covered, within half an hour after the irruption of soldiery, by placards that were headed, each and every one, with the words: “An Order.”

The people were ordered not to be out of doors after nine at night. They were ordered to bring in an accounting of all horse forage, all food-stuffs and all accommodation they had in their premises for men and animals. They were ordered to bring in all rolling stock for inspection. They were ordered to leave their lights burning behind lowered shades.

Under Foreign Rule

Their officials were ordered to report daily to the army for instructions. Their judges were ordered to make reports of their cases. There was no duty of the day to which a citizen could turn without feeling the invader’s hand upon him. There was no road on which he could move without being challenged by a sentry. There was no woman who dared venture on the street, for fear of offense which her men could not dare to resent, or for the worse fear of the fate that would be theirs if they did.

So, like a great fan opening out from Providence the armies expanded over the conquered country, and each spoke expanded again. The divisions unfolded their brigades, the brigades their regiments, the regiments their battalions, the battalions their companies, and the companies their detachments, reaching everywhere and everywhere keeping in touch with the main body through the marvelous network of intelligence that grew into being behind the soldiers.[83]

It was as if a vast octopus had crawled from the sea at Narragansett Bay. With its body clinging there, fast to its ocean base, it sent its tentacles into every crevice of the land, and gripped tight.

“It is plain now what he is doing,” said the Chief of Staff to the President in Washington. “He is keeping a powerful retaining force in Rhode Island, absolutely assuring his base and holding the gate open for reënforcements. Westward he is throwing masses of cavalry—probably most of the cavalry that he has—to clear the way for his infantry and artillery to march along the coast to New York. Northward those cavalry masses are screening him against any attempt by our army either to fall on his forces in Connecticut, or to move around north of him and attack the rear of his divisions that are marching on Boston. It isn’t tactics. It’s simple, commonsense use of numerical superiority.”[84]

Making a Fight for Boston

The President played with a pile of dispatches. They were from Boston and New York. “You say that those companies of coast artillery from the south got through!”

“I had a message from the Commander of the Artillery District of Boston,” he said. “The six companies arrived at Fort Banks yesterday morning. They had to go around by way of Lake Champlain and Vermont, but they got through. That will at least give the men some relief if there should be a sustained action.”[85]

“You are sure it was not a mistake to—sacrifice them?” asked the President.

The General shrugged his shoulders. “There are some things that one simply must do,” he said. “We had to give New York and Boston something. We absolutely must make some sort of a fight for them.”

The Commander of the harbor defenses of Boston was not concerning himself about the occult reasons that had inspired the reënforcements. He had been praying for men, for he needed half a dozen men wherever he had one. He needed them for the searchlights, he needed men that he might establish defenses to the land approaches, he needed men for protection of base lines and cable stations. There were scout boats to be manned, and outlying islands to be posted with lookouts to guard against approach of ships in fog or darkness.

Now that he had them, he waited for no orders and asked for no instructions. He loaded quartermasters’ boats with detachments and rushed them to the waterfront of Boston and Chelsea where he knew of things he wanted. They returned with two tons of explosives and miscellaneous ordnance material that had been seized from merchants. He seized barb wire. From electric light plants and power works he obtained, by the same simple method, some forty miles of lead-covered cable for his mine-fields, and from ships in the harbor he took half a dozen searchlights.[86]

To Hold the Defenses

Before night, too, he had men entrenched behind entanglements with machine guns on the narrow neck of land that leads to Nahant’s broad cliff promontory on the north of Boston Harbor, to protect position finding stations there and a great 60-inch searchlight.

Southward at Point Allerton, on the long cape that juts toward Boston Harbor from Nantasket Beach, to defend the stations and searchlights and approaches of Fort Revere with its mighty batteries, he placed a strong force with ample artillery.[87]

This was the point where he feared a landing most. He built an armored train, seizing the material from the town of Hull, and armed it with quick-firers that it might be sent to threatened places.

Outposts were sent as far as Nantasket, for fear the enemy should try to land there or cross the narrow neck and take boats over it into the bay behind.

Beyond Fort Revere he destroyed certain houses that would interfere with the firing. At the far outlying islands called The Graves he posted men with signal rockets. He sent scout boats to lie at sea beyond the fire zone, from Nahant to the spot where the Light-ship was moored in times of peace.[88]

Within forty hours he had doubled the strength of his defense because he had the men. He looked up at a hostile aeroplane, flying well beyond gunshot. They had become almost commonplace objects in Boston’s sky during the past days. “Well, come on!” he said. “You and your ships! We’ll give you a whirl.”

He was awakened at one o’clock that morning. The “whirl” had begun. Ships were standing in toward Nahant Bay in the north and off Cohasset in the south. Fifteen minutes afterward the people of Boston and Charlestown and Brookline, of Quincy and Weymouth, Hingham and Lynn, were brought out of their beds by explosions that shook the houses. They came from the sea, northeast and southeast and east. They were not only incessant, but they came two and even three so close together at times that they made a sustained roar as if the very air itself had turned to thunder.

Boston’s Bombardment Begins

Battleships with 15- and 16-inch guns were bombarding Fort Revere and the fort was answering with its 12-inch guns. Armored cruisers were firing on Standish. Armored cruisers and battle cruisers were throwing 12- and 14-inch shells into Deer Island and on Winthrop. Battleships lying north of Nahant in Nahant Bay, and thus invisible to the Boston defenses and not to be reached by searchlights, were bombarding Forts Banks and Heath.[89]

Fort Warren was firing at them, over Boston Light. Fort Andrews loosed its batteries.

There was bombardment from 3-inch guns along the beaches, north and south, where destroyers were attacking the coast stations, under heavy fire in reply from the defenders on the land.

Southeast, on the horizon, there sprang up a dull glow that became greatly red, and grew swiftly to pulsating flame. It was the town of Hull, burning.

The people in South Boston, looking seaward, saw lights appear in the sky over the outer harbor islands. They slipped slowly downward, leaving long trails of stars behind, that hung, burning, in the air as if they had been fixed there.

The falling lights opened, like monster flowers, into glaring, spectrally white flame just before they reached the earth. All the harbor where they fell stood revealed as in a lightning flash; but this flame did not go out like a lightning flash. It burned, steady, inextinguishable, for long minutes.

They were star-bombs that were being dropped on the forts by the great war-fowl, the iron breasted aeroplanes. The white lights glaring below, and the hanging lights in the air that stood like a lighted staff, pointed out the forts to the hooded cannon of their iron sisters out at sea.

Fired at from sea and sky, the forts replied and shook the earth. Faster and faster hurried the fire from the hidden ocean. Five ships were firing their secondary batteries to destroy an out-lying searchlight at a range of 6,000 yards. It was said afterward that at least five hundred projectiles were expended at that one mark alone.[90]

In a great semicircle around Boston Harbor, from Nahant out to sea and curving in again toward Cohasset on the south, lay the flaming, roaring line, firing at the defenses all night long, till the dawn began to whiten.

And behind Boston, inland, the other great armed semicircle was contracting steadily, swiftly.

Boston Harbor should have been impregnable to attack from the sea. Had Nature been a modern army engineer, she could not have constructed an oceanic gate more perfectly designed for modern defense against modern ships.

One might picture Boston as being protected by two great claws that curve seaward and wait there on guard, pointing toward each other. The northern claw would be Winthrop peninsula with its beach and summer cottages. The southern one would be the long, narrow arm of land that has famous Nantasket Beach on it, and ends northward at Point Allerton.

Between these two claws, a prodigal hand has scattered islands. From Deer Island, lying in the north close under Winthrop, to George’s Island in the south, they form a stone wall with gaps that are the channels. Far out, grouped around the portal, the sea is sown with ledges and rocks whose kelp beards stream in an ever-heaving sea. Here are the Brewsters, the Devil’s Back, the Graves, the Roaring Bulls.

Within, there is a glorious harbor great enough for a world’s armada. But the entrance is a Pass of Thermopylæ.

Commanding that pass and all approaches far out to sea with zones of fire whose intersecting circles marked rings of sure destruction, were defenses honestly built. They were ready to receive and withstand that climax of destructiveness which man’s science has embodied in the conical steel projectile fired from the rifled gun.[91]

The navy that invested the harbor entertained no illusions on that score. It had not dared the attempt to force the passages of Narragansett. It would not dare to force the passages of Boston. As at Narragansett, its business was to occupy the defenders and wear them out while the army fell on them and on Boston from the land.[92]

The Deadly Blind Man’s Buff

The ships entered a shrouded, black sea where there was not a light to warn of reef or shoal. Lightless themselves, they groped with deep-sea leads and sounding machines till they assured themselves of safe positions where they might have sea-room to swing around in great closed circles at high speed.

These circles would cut deeply into the circles of the fire zones of the defenses. At close range the vessels, invisible to the forts, could send a furious volley into them, and rush past before the guns could find them, to return on their circle and fire from some other point. It was the penalty that darkness lays on land defenses. But it penalized the ships, also.[93]

They would have to fire without sighting their mark. They dared not betray themselves to the waiting guns on land by throwing their search-lights on the defenses, while the defenses could sweep the sea incessantly, for their searchlights were disposed along miles of coast, far aloof from the batteries.

If the search-lights were effective, the ships should have to flee to the farthest limit of the coast guns’ range. At that distance they, in turn, could not deliver an effective bombardment of the land so long as it was dark. So, then, all the ferocious game of war centered for the time on the search-lights. The death-laden ships, the death-laden guns on land, had to wait till it was learned what the lights would do.[94]

The enemy knew that the American defenses had only about one-half the search-light installation that was needed. The hostile sailors had not been forced to depend on spies for this information. It was in American reports that had been made to Congress session after session.[95]

They had prepared for their game of blind man’s buff by long consultations over charts. Every ship’s officer was provided with minute instructions for every contingency that human wit could forecast in the headlong game of chess that is played with cannon.

Defenders Stand Prepared

The defenders were ready, too. In the human chain that began with the battle commander, and reached from him through links of district commanders to fire commanders and battery commanders, each man had his orders for any one of a hundred things that might occur, however quickly it might come.

They knew what batteries to fire and when, at the extreme fire zone, at the intermediate zone, and at the third fire zone which commanded the mine fields. They had before them, worked out to the ultimate detail, the order of fire if the enemy ships should come in column, in double column, or in scattered formation. Far down the beaches, north and south, they had every range plotted, that the great guns might be turned on landing parties if the secondary shore defenses should fail to hold them.[96]

The ships struck simultaneously all along the line of defenses. They fired close in north and south, and from battleships out at sea. A plunging fire went over Nahant and across into Winthrop. The speeding ships missed the defenses and their bursting shells wrecked the town instead. As its flames reddened the sky, the flames of Hull, at Point Allerton on the end of the southern peninsula, made a red reply.

The quick search-lights caught the ships. Again and again the white light-shafts fell on veering, speeding vessels and made them hurry to get away before the fire-control of the defenses could cover them.

Still they returned. Each time they approached at a new point in the hope of developing a defect in the light-system. Each time they fired all the metal that they could throw in the one instant before the beams fell on them.

There were few hits made by these running ships; but they could afford to waste ammunition, since their continual attack forced the defenders to use their own insufficient supply.

A Game of Wits

While half-naked men in ships’ turrets and half-naked men at coast guns and in mortar pits were toiling to wreak brute destruction, a game of wits was being played just as busily. This game was played, not on the huge armored ships, not in the formidable engine-batteries of the forts, but in places miles away from either.

They were insignificant little places from the point of view of war—summer settlements on friendly beaches, harmless little coves, pleasant shores beset with the fantastic hotels and fantastic towers of American pleasure-places. In the summer days of peace, probably not one in any thousand of the happy crowds that played and laughed there ever imagined that these serene, careless places could have any importance some day in battle.

That night they were playing a part that was full of danger to the venturesome ships. The American engineers had established portable search-lights there, and made base stations and range-finding points of them. Every one of these insignificant out-lying points was endowing the guns in the distant defenses with an added deadliness of accuracy.

The modern rifled gun is fired not by sight but by mathematics. The position of its target is found not by guess but by triangulation. Far away, on either side of land batteries are observers. The straight line from one to the other is the base line. As soon as they sight a ship, each turns his instruments on it and gets the angle from his end of the base line. The ship to be fired at is at the apex of the triangle thus obtained.

The men at the guns get this position by telephone instantly. They know to a foot what their weapons’ elevation must be with a given charge of powder and a given weight of projectile to reach that distant spot. They set their mammoth piece, elevate it above the parapet on its lift, fire it and bring it back into concealment again.

To bombard these base-stations from the sea was nearly futile. The shells that could sweep a fore-shore and make it untenable for an army might never find these few scattered, concealed men or these scattered, hidden, tiny stations. A whole fleet might rave at them for hours, and in vain. There was only one sure, quick way to cripple them.[97]

The Secret Attack on the Shore

Far northward, miles outside of Boston Harbor, beyond the system of the harbor defenses, two ships stood into Nahant Bay, until they were within a line drawn from Fishing Point south of Swampscott to Spouting Horn on Nahant. Here, in 7 fathoms of water, they stopped and lowered their boats.

Manned by crack bluejackets, whose oars were wrapped with cloth that they should not make a sound in the rowlocks, the cutters moved toward the beach at Little Nahant.

Far away the harbor searchlights played like summer lightning. The sailors moved on in utter darkness, toward the invisible beach. They rowed in, in irregular formation, till they could hear the surf. Then the foremost boats lay still, tossing on the swell, waiting for the others to draw abreast. Formless, vaguely gray in the night, the line made a dash.

They were on the first lifting swell of the long waves that tumble toward the land when a fierce white light tore terribly through the night, and blazed on them, and around them. It held them, intangibly, tightly, like the hand of a ghost.

Orange flashes ripped through it. Little Nahant Beach quaked with explosion. In the white light, as if the tossing boats were spectral pictures in a dissolving view, they melted amid the roar of the shore-guns. Black fragments whirled through the steady glare, and shells chopped the sea where there were bobbing heads and clutching hands.

The light stabbed the night, in and out. It veered to sea with enormous speed. A long, black silhouette with three funnels appeared full in the circle of its artificial day. A funnel vanished, and another. A spout of water lifted alongside from a shell that had fallen short. Another, the next instant, smashed into its side and made it reel. The destroyer turned suddenly and rushed at the land. Its steering gear had been shot away. Almost instantly it straightened out again; but Little Nahant was raving. Little Nahant was flaming without pause. The searchlight held the ship. It staggered, like a stumbling animal, pitched twice, each time a little more wildly, and went down bow first.

“Have repulsed attack on search-light station and observers at this point,” went the word

from Bailey’s Hill on Nahant to the battle commander in Fort Warren. “No losses. Destroyer and five ships’ boats with crews completely eliminated.”

Attacks Made Everywhere

They did not have time to cheer at Fort Warren. On Nantasket Beach, as far south as Nahant was north, a landing was being attempted in greater force and with the determined assistance of a destroyer division that was lying close to the beach.

Here there were three hundred men of Massachusetts Volunteer Militia, Coast Artillery, behind barb-wire and sand-bag defenses with two pieces of field artillery and three machine guns. They were being swept by savage fire from the destroyers.

“We can hold the ships’ boats off. Surf high, and landing will be slow,” they reported to the battle commander by field telegraph. “But we must have relief from naval fire, or cannot concentrate efforts on landing parties.”

Their officers sent the exact distance from the beach of the destroyers. In the forts the fire commanders studied their charts, plotted with diagrams of the shore in sections. They calculated the range. A dropping shot from a 6-inch gun fell among the enemy vessels one minute later. The next went over. The third struck a destroyer. Before it disappeared, shells were falling among the division too fast to count. Three guns were firing. They were throwing 12 shells in one minute.[98]

Two destroyers were towed away, crippled. Another escaped from the fire zone but sank at sea.

Undeterred, the boat parties tried to run the surf and rush the defenders. But the sea was heavy, breaking with a sharp over-fall. Unprotected by fire from the sea, unable to work their own machine guns in the rough water, the sailors were pounded in the breakers. The field artillery blew their boats apart. The machine guns slashed them. Rifle fire hammered them.

“Attack beaten off,” reported the militiamen. In the surf there were a few drifting pieces of wood, tossing oars and bodies pitching to and fro as the undertow played with them.

The “Hussars of the Sea”

“Destroyer division off this point.” It was a report from Strawberry Hill, south from Fort Revere. Point Allerton’s search-light swung down the beach, the search-light from Strawberry Hill centered on them. The reckless craft, the hussars of the sea, dashed in to a 400 yard range, and, steaming parallel with the beach at full speed, sent in a heavy broadside fire from all their guns. More than three hundred shells were directed against the Strawberry Hill light in those few minutes. They swung, and fled to the sea as the batteries of the fort opened on them.[99]

“Searchlight intact,” reported Strawberry Hill.

“Men have landed on Marblehead Neck, according to reports from Swampscott,” reported Fort Heath. “Three hundred men at least taking road southward.”

“Push forward and occupy Lynn Beach at narrowest part,” telegraphed the battle commander to the force at Nahant. “Will send one hundred reënforcements by boat to Lynn.”

At Nantasket a second attempt at a landing was made. It was defeated, and the boats withdrew. Two suspicious vessels were sighted almost within Hull Bay and were destroyed by fire from a shore battery. A landing party struck at Strawberry Hill. Another, probably the same that had attempted the second landing at Nantasket, tried to haul three boats over into the Weir River.[100]

All were repulsed. There was hot fighting going on near Lynn. It was difficult for the battle commander to judge what its result would be. Once his forces sent to Fort Heath for more men. Later, they telegraphed that they were holding their ground.

The enemy struck again, and again. He made an attempt on Winthrop, and lost two destroyers in the mine fields. The fleet opened heavy fire at short intervals, to mask the attack of the landing parties. But the telegraph and telephone system of the forts sent word everywhere, to all the outlying posts, of the uniform success of the defense, with the result of making their fight constantly more effective.

The Defenses Hold Out

The defenses were holding out. When word came at last that the raiders who had landed at Marblehead Neck were retreating to their boats, the end of the night’s fighting had arrived. The fleet called off its boats, and took them aboard.

It was near dawn. Once more, for the last time, the ships ran in, passing the batteries at full speed, and fired from every gun that would bear in the instant of their passing. Every huge turret gun, every broadside battery, opened up at once.

For many miles inland the air trembled and hummed. The hills growled with rolling echoes. Windows in distant places blew inward and walls trembled. But the defenses held.

Ship after ship swung in that fierce circle and passed. It was the climax of the night’s bombardment. When the dawn spread far on the ocean horizon, the defenders saw the enemy fleet lying back against it, far out of the zone of fire.

The sea was bare between them and the forts, except for a rent ruin hanging on the Outer Brewster where a shattered destroyer was aground. Off Cohasset lay another, sprawling on the rocks called The Grampuses, half out of the sea as if it were the torn body of a weird monster that had thrown itself ashore in a dying agony.

“No damage,” said Fort Revere. “No damage, except dismounted searchlight,” said Fort Strong. “One 6-inch gun dismantled,” said Standish. “No damage,” reported Andrews and Banks. In Fort Warren two 3-inch quick firers were destroyed.

“We could hold them off forever,” said the battle commander, “if we were protected from the land.”

It Was His Last Fight

The successful fight of his defenses had made it only the more bitter for him. He knew that this was the last fight. He knew that the army that was sweeping northward would take him in the back before night.

He looked at one of his 12-inch rifles. He walked over to it and patted the beautiful thing, so shapely, so graceful that it seemed impossible that it should weigh 35 tons. “If they had just given you that little extra elevation!” he murmured. “Then yonder ships wouldn’t dare lie within 20,000 yards of us.”[101]

But “they” had not given the rifles that little extra elevation. “They” had found time enough and money enough to pay for bridges over muddy creeks, for printing millions of words of oratory, for hundreds of private bills. “They” had been able to find money to pay themselves for constructive recesses of Congress, and mileage for journeys that they had not made. But they had not been able to find money for defense.

Just a little foresight, and Boston, that now was trembling, might be sitting behind that charmed circle of its great guns and laughing at all the navies of the world.

Haggard and pale, Boston’s people looked toward the sea and the dawn. The sullen thunders still rolled out there, but slowly now, and far off. The fleet was using only its heaviest guns, and firing deliberately, though steadily. Having failed to destroy the effectiveness of the defenses, it would content itself with long range fire, simply to wear the defenders out till the army should arrive.

All night long Boston people, moved to unendurable terror by the bombardment, had tried to flee from the city. All night long other crowds had tried to enter it. On all the roads these opposing crowds had met and jostled.

Opposing Streams of Fugitives

They warned each other, and tried to turn each other back. Shells were falling into Boston town, said the people who were fleeing from the city. Crazed by fear, they invented the most monstrous tales and believed them.

The in-coming refugees, too, invented tales. They told of soldiers who had appeared in nearby towns, and who were burning and killing. Nothing so well illustrated the effect of terror on the faculty of reason as the fact that always, after this wild interchange of news, the city people continued to press toward the country, fearing soldiers less than the cannon-shots that had rung in their ears all night; and the country people rushed into the city, so panic-driven by what they had heard of the soldiers and their bloody day of vengeance, that they cared nothing for the heavy thunder that was shaking all the air.

Though the roads out of Boston were thus crowded, the fugitives were only a small proportion of the population. Never before had humanity realized how firmly men are chained to their habitat. Here was a city, terribly beset by land and sea with unknown, terrible fate closing steadily around it. Beyond lay the United States where there was complete freedom still, and safety. Yet who could seek it?

There were none who could go, except those temporarily mad with fear, or those so abjectly poor that it mattered nothing to them where they trudged. The workers could not go. They had to cling to the places that they knew, to the scanty foot-hold that was all the more precious to them for its scantiness. The rich could not go. Money had stopped. All that they owned had become suddenly valueless for producing cash; and without cash they could not flee. The merely well-to-do, whose whole life depended on the town, whose whole possessions lay in real estate, in homes, in shops—where could they turn?

Boston in Hopeless Fear

They stayed. They even tried, dully, to attend to business, though there was no business. Mail was still coming in and going out, but in a vastly circuitous way, as it had to go around by way of Burlington, and so through Vermont and New Hampshire to its destination. Boston could communicate still by telegraph and telephone with the United States outside of southern and western New England; but this, too, was in an equally circuitous way, and even such service as existed was constantly in danger of being severed.

Motor traffic had almost ceased on the streets. The trolley and train services were cut down to the merest necessity. Gasoline and coal shortage already had begun to make itself felt. Prices had gone up for flour and for meat. The fish wharves held none except empty vessels.

There was an unreasoning fear of the waterfront streets. People shrank from them, and used the side streets, as if the tiny difference of a block or two could save them, should shells begin to fall.

There was a fear, less unreasoning, of tall buildings. Most of the upper stories in high office buildings were deserted, except for daring ones who went in temporarily to look toward the harbor.

A renewed fear of aeroplanes also had seized the city. For days they had passed and repassed, till the people had become almost accustomed to them, since they threw no bombs nor made other demonstrations. Now, with the steady cannonading, the old fear returned. There were wild flights when the whirring roar was heard. More than once, men and women were trampled in those sudden dumb panics. Hypnotized by the impending of a greater tragedy, the citizens scarcely noted these episodes that, in any other time, would have shocked the town.

A rumor went through the streets that the fleet had been driven off. Survivors from Winthrop appeared in the city. They clutched at strangers and told with quivering mouths how the shells had crashed into their town, and how they and theirs in night clothes had fled between falling walls through a night ruddy with fire.

Refugees from Breed’s Island told how the ground was all ploughed by shells falling wild. They told of the water tower, flung far down the hill.

Cities Destroyed and Taken

Hull was destroyed utterly. There was nothing left of it. All gay Nantasket had vanished. Between it and Point Allerton the houses along shore were thrown on each other and torn apart or burned.

On the last train to come in from the direction of Brockton were some who had fled from that city. It had been taken by the advancing army in the small hours of the morning. The town authorities, ordered out of bed by soldiers, had been escorted to the enemy commander, who had made them write announcements. Before sunrise all the streets flaunted placards ordering the inhabitants to continue their business. Other placards warned them to deliver up all arms of any description.

Twenty of the most prominent men, said the fugitives, had been seized as hostages.

Every little while now Boston’s communication with some point was being cut. These severed lines told of the advance of the hostile army as eloquently as messages might.

Up and down Washington street moved the multitude, waiting for news. The Old South Meeting House that has looked down on so many dramatic Boston spectacles never had looked on one so tragic as this—on a proud and not timorous city that was waiting impotently to be taken and dealt with.

Had the enemy come quickly, had the army advanced into Boston with a swift rush, it would have been less agonizing for the waiting city than this slow, systematic, machine-like advance like the jaws of a great pincer that were closing down with cruel deliberation.

The armed circle was contracting all the time, but it contracted slowly. Though the enemy’s scouts had assured him long ago that the road was free, he was taking no chances in that hostile land, whose sting he had felt. Far as he might throw out his advance guards, he took care that they should remain in constant touch with the main force and with each other. He moved his divisions in fighting array. He kept an unbroken line of communications.

Making Good His Possessions

Wherever the army passed, it made good its possession wholly. It left no village behind it in its march whose means of existence, communication, food supply and machinery of labor and business it had not made entirely its own.

Where there were destroyed places, the invader organized the population to rebuild them. He levied on every community, large and small, for funds. He paid out nothing of his own, except written scrip. At one blow the whole financial system of the conquered country was converted into one great source of tribute.

Suddenly there came a storm of news to the Boston papers. It came from the country to the south of the harbor—from Cohasset and Hingham, Weymouth and Quincy.[102]

Heavy artillery was being unloaded all along the line of the south shore branch of the Old Colony Railroad. Horses and limbers were moving along all the roads to the shore. Soldiers were advancing into all the towns.

Before the Hingham wires were cut, the correspondent in that town reported that enormous guns were being moved through it, on heavy motors.

Quincy telegraphed that troops had hurried through there and seized the 100-foot Great Hill, and also the yacht club house on Hough’s Neck. Then Quincy, too, was cut off.

Scarcely half an hour later the fire from the forts broke out furiously. It was answered, with greater speed and fury, from the shore, where the foe had posted his great guns to enfilade the harbor defenses.

At Fort Revere the commandant cut away concrete emplacements and succeeded in swinging one of his 12-inch guns around to fight the assailants, putting a heavy howitzer near Hingham out of action.

A second plunging shot fell near a gun behind Baker Hill; but the assailants, from howitzer batteries concealed under Turkey and Scituate Hills, concentrated a desperate bombardment on him that drove the Americans from the works.[103]

Firing from heavy caliber weapons at short range, pouring explosives and common shell and shrapnel from every vantage point along all the shore, the hostile army swept the rear of the harbor defenses with such blasts that the mere impact of the solid shells made a din like the pounding of monstrous rivetters’ hammers.[104]

From the sea all the big guns of the ships struck into the chorus. The vessels pressed in as closely as they dared and opened with every cannon that could get the range.

Boston Completely Isolated

Boston’s populace, listening to the clamour from the sea, scarcely noted that the bulletins were announcing that all the railroad lines of the Boston and Maine Railroad leading north and northwest to Portsmouth, Haverhill, Lawrence and Lowell had been seized, and that Boston was completely cut off.

Silent policemen appeared all at once followed by men with posters and paste-pails. The crowds saw posters go up on their walls, signed by the Boston Citizens’ Committee.

There was a poster in great red letters warning the inhabitants to deliver any firearms that they possessed in the City Hall within six hours.

“Attention!” said another placard. “In case of military occupation of the city, a single disorderly act may mean the ruin of all. It is the duty of all citizens to offer no resistance, and to report to the authorities any plan toward resistance.”

There was a great stir in the crowd. A cab was pushing its way through Washington Street. Two dishevelled and blood-stained artillerymen, and an equally dishevelled civilian were in it.

While the soldiers went on to the City Hall, the civilian got out and entered a newspaper office. He was a reporter.

The rumor sped from man to man in the crowd before the building and from street to street that news had arrived from the forts. There was a tremendous press into Washington Street, where men and women, crushed together, stared at the building.

The cab hardly had stopped at the City Hall before a bulletin went up.

FORT ANDREWS GARRISON
DIES AT ITS POST
———
IGNORES SUMMONS TO SURRENDER
———
ONLY THREE MEN ESCAPE FROM RUINS
———

Ten minutes later the “extras” appeared and were whirled through the town. They passed with the speed almost of the wind; for men passed them from hand to hand. They shouted the news to people looking from windows, in a delirium half of dismay, half of exultation. The newspaper man had brought in such a tale as would live in American history.

The Newspaper Man’s Story

He had been writing his story during the night’s bombardments while the mortar pits quaked around him with the eruptions of their steel volcanoes. He told how, in the morning, there had come suddenly from the shore the enfilading fire that caught the works in the back.

The men at the mortars, unable to turn their ordnance against these assailants, continued to fire at the ships, obedient to the instructions from the range-stations, till the blasts from the bursting charges above and around them tore away all the systems of fire control.[105]

One enemy howitzer, trained at the very edge of a pit, threw shot on shot till a group of mortars was buried under the débris that was hurled down from the torn mounds.

The mortars ceased action. The assailant, suspending his bombardment, demanded instant surrender, with the condition that the works must be delivered intact. The remnants of the garrison, black with smoke and grime, wounded and burned, replied by manning such movable artillery as was left. There was only one end to that. It was death. In twenty minutes there were four men left alive in the defenses—two artillerymen, the newspaper man and a noncommissioned officer.

They lay flat under a mound. There was a small boat hidden below the far end of the island. “Get out of this if you can!” said the noncommissioned man, an electrician sergeant. “Hurry! I’ll give you five minutes! Good-by!”

He crawled back into the works. As they rowed away, they saw boats with invaders leaving the mainland for the island. Then there came a lick of flame out of the mortar battery that expanded instantly into a spraying fountain. An enormous detonation nearly blew their boat out of the water. The sergeant had found the firing key and touched off the hidden mine to demolish the defenses.

In the excitement over this news that had broken the dull strain of waiting, the people of Boston scarcely noticed that all at once the firing at sea had stopped.

Demanding Surrender

Down the harbor a boat with a flag of truce was lying under Fort Warren. An officer, led blind-folded into the works, presented a summons transmitted from the headquarters of the army. It called on the commander to surrender the entire system of defenses without further damage. It demanded also that a complete diagram of all the mine fields be delivered at once.

“You have four hours,” continued this summons. “At the end of that time, we shall bring our artillery to bear on the city from every quarter. Every five minutes thereafter we shall fire on a given section. You have made a brave and magnificent defense. By surrendering now, you will save your city from unnecessary destruction which you are unable to prevent otherwise.”

“I will reply in half an hour,” said the commander. At the end of that time he sent this answer:

“I shall surrender the defenses on condition that the city be left inviolate: that no troops occupy it: that the civil authorities be left in control: and that no levy be made on the municipality.”

“Absolutely refused,” the hostile commander replied promptly. “Unconditional surrender, or bombardment begins at time stated. If any attempt is made to dismantle works, bombardment will begin at once.”

This was at noon. The hour-hand of the Old South Meeting House clock had not quite touched one, when artillery was passing through Waltham and Newton Centre, and along all the roads crossing the Charles and Neponset Rivers.

There were cavalry and cycle and motor troops on these roads, and trains full of infantry. But always and everywhere was artillery. The sleek guns, pounding along New England’s highways, spoke so wickedly of destructiveness, that they were more terrifying to the population than long columns of heavily armed men.

At Jamaica Plain big howitzers were detrained and taken to the ridge running west by north from the line of the New York and New England railroad. More guns were unloaded in Brookline and posted on the crests from whose tops, 200 feet high, they had all Brookline, all Boston to the bay, and Cambridge and Somerville under their long range fire.[106]

Infantry with field guns occupied Cambridge and Somerville, and laid their ordnance on all points that covered Boston from there. A regiment pushed quickly through Charlestown, took possession of the great grounds of the Navy Yard and stationed a battery of 3-inch field pieces under the Bunker Hill Monument.

The Final Threat

At quarter past three the hostile General sent a message to the American commander at Fort Warren apprising him of the disposition of the guns. “In one quarter of an hour,” said he, “the bombardment will begin. We shall fire at Brookline first.”

The commander walked to the shattered flagstaff of the fort, on whose splintered top the American flag was waving in the wind from the Atlantic. He bared his head, and with his own hand hauled down the colors that he had defended so well.

Five minutes later the colors on all the defenses dropped.

Until then no soldiers had appeared in the city of Boston itself. The armed ring had contented itself with encircling all the suburbs. Now the telephone bell rang in the City Hall, and a voice asked for the Mayor.

The voice was that of the hostile commander, speaking from Brookline.

“Your defenses are in our hands,” he said. “Our guns command every part of your city. I have the honor to demand unconditional and peaceable surrender at once, with all property of every kind. I regret to say that I can give you no time for discussion. I must request you to give me your answer now.”

The Mayor, with the instrument at his ear, looked around at the members of the Committee. “It is the army commander,” he said. “He demands unconditional surrender.”

“There is only one answer to make,” said one of the Committee.

“We Surrender”

The Mayor turned to the telephone. “We surrender,” he said.

“Very well,” was the response. “A body of troops under a general officer will enter the city at once. They will have orders to punish any disturbance severely. I shall have the honor of calling on you shortly after my men have occupied the town.”

A little later the Citizens’ Committee saw cavalry with machine guns approach the City Hall. Similar bodies were taking position in all the squares and parks, and posting their little guns where they could sweep the intersecting streets. Up and down Washington Avenue, and up and down all the side streets, were sentinels and guard parties. A wagon train was encamped on the Common.

And a little later still, preceded by light cavalry, three automobiles rolled through the streets to the City Hall. In each sat four men, dressed in campaign uniforms. They were leaning back, smoking, and looking with interest at the buildings. They seemed not to see the silent crowds that lined the sidewalks.

These sedate, cheerful, interested gentlemen were the commander and his staff, arriving to take formal possession of the city. With machine guns and rifles threatening all around them, the silent people of Boston saw their conquerors enter the City Hall, and knew that their sovereignty had passed into alien hands.

“What is happening in Boston?” The question stood before the United States and there was no answer. All communication with it had been annihilated as if by a lightning stroke.

Maine, Vermont and New Hampshire still were able to reach the rest of the country with entire freedom, except that everything, mail, telegraph messages and freight, had to pass by way of the Lake Champlain Valley exclusively. But Boston, the richest half of Massachusetts, all of Rhode Island and the whole eastern end of Connecticut were as completely cut off as if all that great territory had been torn from the continent and dropped into the sea.

Of the 195 American cities with more than thirty thousand population, twenty-two were in the section that had been lost by the United States. The assessed valuation of those cities alone was more than two billions seven hundred millions of dollars. Ten thousand manufacturing establishments were in the grip of the conqueror.[107]

The grip lay on the captured country like a thing of iron. Telegraph and telephone could be used only under the supervision of soldiers who controlled every central operating station and scrutinized everything, cutting out any expression that did not suit them or refusing transmission altogether. Against these decisions there was no appeal.

Post Offices Occupied

The post offices were occupied by censors. Every piece of mail passed under their eyes and reached those to whom it was addressed only after long delay and generally with parts of it obliterated by heavy daubs of printing ink.

All the springs of creative work were broken. Shops and manufactories were open, under orders from the military commanders, but the owners and managers did not know what to do. They continued to produce, dully and without plan. They dared not make even the most unimportant contract, for no man could guess what might happen next. There was no money to be had, except for pressing needs. The banks throughout the conquered territory had been commanded to hold all cash in their vaults. Every man who applied for money had to prove to military officers that it was for immediate subsistence.

In the banks and trust companies’ offices everywhere there were posted placards reading as follows:

The richest man in New England was on a level with the poorest. However much wealth he might have lying in the banks, he could draw only enough for daily food. He could not take anything from his safety deposit vaults. They were guarded by armed sentries who permitted access only to those who came accompanied by officers.

This condition would last, as the invaders informed the people, until a complete list of all funds had been made.

In every financial department of cities and towns were uniformed men demanding cash statements and lists of assessed valuations for the purpose of apportioning the amount of contribution to be levied on each community.

While the enemy was going thus systematically to work to ascertain the full money value of his prize, he made requisitions for immediate needs in every place occupied by him. The troops demanded hay, oats, corn and other forage. They paid for the supplies with written papers that acknowledged receipt; but it was noticed that these receipts did not promise payment.[109]

$50,000 a Day Levied

In Boston the municipal authorities were informed that the city was subject to a cash levy for the support of troops at the rate of $1 daily for each man of the occupying army, making an amount payable in bank funds of $50,000 a day.[110]

The authorities had no recourse except to find the money. Nominally in control, they were held rigorously to account for the obedience of their city. The Headquarters Staff of the invading army had possession of the State House, and from this point sent out brief orders.

Prominent among the notices that were posted here and in all public places of Boston was the announcement of the institution of the new government. It was:

Had Boston town gone under in flame and terror, the very fury of the catastrophe might

have carried men through it with less of despair than this cold conquest. Instead of blows to be struck, or blood to be shed, there was only humiliation—humiliation intensified hourly by the cool, unimpassioned correctness with which the enemy treated the fallen city.

He did not even fill the city with troops. Only four thousand infantry and a regiment of cavalry were sent in to hold all Boston. The rest of the army remained outside, encamped or quartered on the people of the suburbs and the towns of the metropolitan district.

Unconcerned Conquerors

Unconcerned, almost unguarded, the commander and his officers moved about the town. They went in and out of the City Hall with the assurance of superiors. They occupied the two largest hotels. Brookline people reported that the Country Club there had been turned into a brigade headquarters.

Dazed, as if in the bonds of an ugly nightmare that must vanish if they could only awaken, the people of Boston looked at this handful of men who had so easily, so calmly, made themselves utter masters of a metropolitan district of 39 municipalities—13 cities and 26 towns all within fifteen miles of the State House. From the State House this dozen or two dozen quiet, business-like men in uniform ruled with a word or two over 415 square miles with a population of more than a million and a half of people, and a taxable value of more than two and one-half billions of dollars.[112]

In the city so helplessly given over to them, there were, according to the certificate then lying in the City Clerk’s office, 124,000 men liable to enrollment in the State Militia. These were part of those “millions of men” of whom passionate orators had spoken so often—the millions of heroic, strong, intelligent American freemen who would instantly spring to arms at the call of need and sweep the most daring invader back into the sea.[113]

They were heroic. They were strong. They were intelligent. But they were confronted by the cold truth. It stared at them from all their squares, from all their parks, from the approaches to all their bridges. It was the cold truth—in the shape of cannon. Even the grounds of Harvard and of Boston University were occupied by batteries. Sentinels were on watch in Boston’s church towers with machine guns that pointed down into the streets.

Against that machinery of war, courage was as futile as a dream. Strength was as helpless as an infant in a cyclone. Intelligence was naked against the unintelligent steel.

Helpless as Any Village

So this city, one of the richest of the world, next to New York in its imports, with its enormous railroad terminals that drew together the roads of a continent’s commerce, had dropped into the invader’s hand almost for the picking, and lay in his grasp as incapable of resistance as if, instead of being the fourth greatest city of the United States, it had been a seaside village.[114]

There had not been a shot fired after the last shot had sounded from the harbor forts and the American flag had vanished from the harbor sky.

There was nothing to do. Slowly, systematically as it had invested Boston, so the army had taken Boston. There was no commanding point in all the country around it that was not crowned with heavy artillery. There was no road to the city that was not held by troops who demanded passes. Patrols moved constantly through the streets.

Through the whole metropolitan district had been sent a proclamation issued by the local authorities, warning the people that all intercourse between the territories occupied by belligerent armies whether by letter, by travel, or in any other way, had been interdicted and was punishable by fine or imprisonment, or, in cases of serious infraction, by death after summary trial. This proclamation was countersigned by the military commanders of the various districts.[115]

Another proclamation, issued from headquarters in the State House, said:

Clearing the Wharves

Along the water-front an order was given to clear all the big wharves. Owners of vessels berthed there were instructed to have them towed to basins or anchored in the stream. Provided with diagrams of the mine-fields that had been surrendered under the conditions of capitulation, the mine-sweepers cleared the harbor for the entrance of the fleet.

Floating from more than a score of warships and transports, the Coalition’s flags moved toward the city. Cannon saluted them from the forts, and they saluted in reply. Among the stricken thousands on shore there were many who sobbed as they heard the foreign thunders peal around their bay, and saw the foreign flags against their sky, with never a starry banner on all those ancient American waters.

There were foreign ships lying under the forts, unloading spare guns to replace those that were destroyed. All the works were busy with enemy sailors, repairing the defenses to protect conquered Boston against attack from its own navy.

Naval and army transports steamed up to the city, and took possession of the wharves and the Navy Yard basins. Destroyers and small craft moved up the channel to the Mystic River and occupied the naval and marine hospitals. Marines and sailors came ashore in South Boston and established a signal station on Telegraph Hill.

The naval commander seized all Federal property that had anything to do with the conduct of the harbor. He assumed control of the quarantine and pilot service and declared the port open under his supervision.[117]

The News Shut Off

All this, and all else of importance that was happening in their city, the people of Boston could learn only slowly and in fragments, as the news spread from man to man by word of month. The newspapers were under armed guard, like all other important places that touched on public business. Censors sitting at editorial desks permitted only the printing of the most trivial routine news of local happenings that did not touch on the real concerns of the invaded country and city.

The first pages of all the newspapers were reserved by the military government for its announcements. These were headed:

OFFICIAL!
———
ORDERS AND DECISIONS BY THE MILITARY
GOVERNMENT OF MASSACHUSETTS AND
THE CITY OF BOSTON
———

There were so many of them that there was no room for news on the first pages, even had news been permitted.

Within twenty-four hours the city had been set back to its condition in the seventeenth century when Boston’s first newspaper was throttled by a reactionary legislature.[118]

The people of Boston did not know if Connecticut had been conquered. They did not know if New York had fallen. They did not know where their army was or what it was doing. A great battle might be deciding the fate of the entire country, but no whisper reached them.

As in Colonial days, they were reduced to such knowledge as might come from rumor or from information whispered by those who learned something by chance.

It was in this way that nearly everybody in Boston came to know that in the State House there sat a council, dressed in uniform and bearing military rank, but in reality a council of men learned in international and United States law. Surrounded by great rows of books which they had brought with them, these men were the real rulers of the conquered land.[119]

The Commanding General and his field staff might act with summary authority under the rules of war. The Commanding General’s name might be signed to all the scores of orders that issued daily. But this council of military lawyers acted as governors, judges and soldiers at once. Their decisions in all mooted cases, their ingeniously worded orders, were perfecting the enemy’s complete possession.[120]

Stripping Boston of Its Treasure

No American, great or humble, might go a step beyond the prescribed and routine affairs of the day without first learning what their orders were. No man held property, whether it were priceless or beggarly, except by their favor. No man knew at any moment what remaining liberties might not be taken from him at a word from them.[121]

With the impersonal coldness of a judicial machine they went about the work of stripping the city of treasure. In all the departments of the municipality were soldier experts, studying the books. In the Custom House were half a hundred others searching the records of exports and imports. Every financial institution of the city had been ordered to present its accounts in the State House.

During all this time the invader made daily requisitions for the use of the troops or for other military purposes. He demanded for the navy a supply of 10,000 pounds of smoking tobacco, 1,000 pounds of roasted coffee, one ton of rice, 500 pounds of salt, and 50,000 pounds of fresh meat. He made requisition for paint, cable, ropes, hose, and steel for the ships.[122]

There were requisitions for medical supplies, for cloth and for shoes. To the harassed officials, who remonstrated against the hardships that were laid on the city, and pointed to the state of its trade, the reply was that it was one of the richest cities in the world and that the levies were modest. When a deputation of citizens pressed the protest, the council printed its reply in the “official” columns of the newspapers.

“In regard to the requisitions made by the occupying army,” said this statement, “attention is called to the fact that the United States Supreme Court in the case New Orleans versus Steamship Company, 20 Wall, 394, decided that the military governing authority ‘may do anything to strengthen itself and to weaken the enemy,’ and that the Court further stated that ‘there is no limit to the powers that may be exerted in such cases save those which are found in the laws and usages of war.’ ”[123]

The Old Spirit

Despite the cannon that glowered in all the streets, Boston’s fury at this ironic rejoinder nearly broke through all restraint. In the old city that had the famous Tea Party among its prized achievements, the spirit of that past age awoke again, and spread, almost without concerted thought or intention. Wherever men could meet they formed in groups to ease their minds by free speech, if they could do nothing else. In several quarters of the city there were incipient riots, suppressed by the police only just in time to avoid bloody interference by the soldiers.

“We must curb this town,” said the Commanding General to the military council in the State House. “It is not one to remain cowed for long, without repressive measures.”

The council nodded. Next morning’s newspapers had on their first pages an announcement that made many readers rub their eyes and stare incredulously at the printed page, for on it was such a proclamation as might have been read in Boston town in the reign of Charles I. It was headed:

SEDITION LAW

1. Every person resident in the territory occupied by
the power exercising sovereignty by right of conquest, who
shall utter seditious words or speeches, or write, publish or
circulate scurrilous libels against the governing authority,
or who shall conceal such practices that come to his knowledge,
shall be punished summarily and severely.

2. Every person who joins a secret society or attends a
secret meeting for the purpose of advocating sedition or
rebellion shall be punished summarily and severely.[124]

Again the citizens’ committee protested. Boston lawyers represented to the military council that American citizens could not be held guilty of sedition or rebellion if they adhered to their country.

Citizens of No Country

“The inhabitants of conquered territory,” answered the council, “are citizens of no country. They are under the jurisdiction of the occupying army; but they are not even entitled to the privileges of citizens of the country which controls that army.”[125]

“But mere conquest does not entitle you to treat them as rebels,” urged the committee. “They are within their rights to preserve their allegiance, so long as they do not violate the rules of war by opposing you with arms.”

One of the officers smiled. He opened a book. “Once more I must respectfully refer you to your own court decisions,” he said, and read from a United States Supreme Court verdict: “ ‘Conquest is a valid title while the victor maintains exclusive territory of the conquered country.’ ”[126]

“There is nothing that we can do,” the committee reported to the people. It was the refrain that sounded in all the United States just then. To the wild projects for desperate defense that were being broached every day in the city of New York, to the frenzied demands that the volunteers in the western camps be rushed into the field, to the curses directed at the American army because it refused to fight, the same answer formulated itself because there was no other. Always, from all quarters, to all demands and imprecations, the only answer that was possible was: “There is nothing that we can do!”

The city multitudes surrendered wearily to the situation; but there were men whom the helpless reply drove frantic.

There were hundreds of these men in New York, Brooklyn, Jersey City, Newark, and all the towns eastward from there into Connecticut. They were militiamen who had not been able to join their organizations when they went to the front, or whose organizations had been merely paper ones. There were members of sportsmen’s clubs, accustomed to the use of heavy-caliber fire-arms and to the trail, and there were many men who were moved simply by the recklessness of courage.[127]

During the days while there drifted through the United States the broken, incomplete but ever-growing story of New England’s uprising and its fearful suppression, these men had begun to assemble in Connecticut’s country between New Haven and Hartford, urged by no settled plan but moving to that district simply because it was the last American front between New York and the invading army.

The Foe’s Slow Advance

The enemy was moving westward slowly. He had to hold out a mighty screen northwestward against the American army that now lay beyond the Berkshire Hills, holding the land between western Connecticut and Albany. That army, intact and out of his reach, was a constant, acute danger. It endangered his communications, it endangered his base, it endangered his divisions that occupied Boston. It forced him to advance only in continual readiness for battle on flanks and rear-lines.

During the slow approach the men who had gathered between New Haven and Hartford began to form some sort of an organization. Almost it evolved itself.

The enemy pushing forward along the north, took Springfield with cavalry and artillery. The undefended city surrendered without a blow.

From New Haven and Hartford, to the factory cities of Wallingford and Meriden, Middletown and New Britain, along all the factory-lined valleys, there passed a word that gathered workers from shops and idle men from streets. All one long day, and all one evening, they moved toward the two cities. They seemed aimless enough; but there were leaders who put themselves at their head secretly in the night.

Suddenly they were angry, determined, united bodies of men. Suddenly, like a suddenly awakened wind, they stormed the great arms factories of the two towns.

They came with guns and pistols. They came with crowbars and picks. They came with stones, and with nothing except their bare hands. They hauled their dead aside and withered under the fire of the guards, and burst through and took the works.

In Hartford they seized a whole train-load of rapid-firers and machine guns that had been loaded for the American army. In New Haven they took almost four thousand sporting rifles.

The riot fever spread to Bridgeport. The mob arose and seized the cartridge factories.

The Mad Adventure

It was a mad thing, springing less from purpose than from the insanity that invasion had laid on men’s minds. It could have but one mad end. Yet this army of madmen was moved and molded by a touch of the American ability to “do things”—that very ability on which the people might, indeed, have depended with perfect assurance, if only they had not depended on it wholly.

America did, truly, have men who would fight. They were here; and they were to fight such a fight as would be remembered many a long day. America had the men to lead, too. Though they knew that this was a hopeless thing, they “took hold.”

They took hold of men armed with magnificent rifles, but of a score of different patterns for different kinds of sport, and demanding a score of different shapes and calibers of cartridges. They took hold of infantry militia fragments whose companies had had only two or three assemblies a year for target practice with average attendances of only 11 or 12 men. They improvised scout detachments of volunteers with bicycles and motors.[128]

Young doctors took hold with nothing but emergency kits, without ambulances, without litters, without even helpers who would know how to find a wound or apply a first aid bandage.

The army of madmen went forward to the Connecticut River to hold the western bank from Hartford to Middletown.

They did not know how to dig trenches.

They dug ditches. They did not know how to make defenses for their machine guns. They piled trees that would skewer them with splinters under shell fire, or heaped up rocks that would fly into fragments and kill like shrapnel.

They were all of three thousand men. They were the kind of men whom America has expected always in times of peace to call to its defense. They were callous-handed workers in metal and wood and leather; bleached workers from woolen mills and cotton spindles; ‘longshoremen from the harbor cities of the Sound; professional men resolute with the fervor of the time; road-makers and teamsters and shoemakers; hunters, yachtsmen, and football players.

What Americans Could Have Done

That day along the Connecticut River they showed what America’s men could have done had they learned how to do it in advance and had they been armed for the work.

They lay behind their pitiable defenses, with their motley weapons, commanded by men who did not know war. They bore the shock of machine gun assaults from advance patrols. They bore the shock of cavalry charges from scouting detachments.

At Middletown they were attacked in force by heavy cavalry that crossed under cover of gun-fire and outflanked them, and charged in mass. They sent the charge back, broken, with many empty saddles.

They lay under the fire of a 3-inch gun at Cromwell for an hour, and endured, and died—but they denied the river crossing to a battalion.

For two long hours they held the river along their whole line. It seemed to them that they were fighting a great battle. Surely their dead testified to it, and the hot fire that beat on them testified to it, and across the river, or floating down with the stream, were many enemy dead to testify to it.

They cheered and shouted to each other hoarsely that they were winning. They watched, with ever-growing savage lust, for more assailants.

In the headquarters of the advancing army there was received this report from the brigade commander: “Two or three thousand raw but determined Americans disputing passage of Connecticut River with our advance guards. They have machine guns, no artillery. Am sending field guns forward. Shall have passage clear in an hour.”

“Use ample force,” answered the commander. “These Americans!” he said to his aid. “They aren’t to be underestimated. A little more preparation—”

“And we wouldn’t be here!” laughed the aid.

Thirty Minutes Later

Thirty minutes afterward, from points wholly invisible to the Americans, there burst the shattering thunder of field-artillery. Explosive shells flew over and into the trenches. Shrapnel screamed at them, and burst like sentient things right in their faces, to drive rattling bullets in all directions.[129]

Their machine guns were useless. There was nothing in sight at which to fire. The men lay face down, clutching dirt, choking with fumes and smoke, stunned by the blasting things that burrowed into their earth-works and blew them apart and tore living bodies to pieces.

At Rocky Hill a militia company of artillery tried to move its gun into better shelter. The plow-horses that had been seized to drag it, wild with terror, became entangled in the traces and fell. Cutting them away, the men wheeled the cannon into position by hand. But their armory never had been fitted for sub-caliber practice, as it never had been fitted for mounted instruction. None of the men had been qualified as first class or even as second class gunners. They fired, and their shots went wild, serving only to betray their situation to the enemy. They did not know how to place themselves for protection from indirect fire. So they died.[130]

A troop of militia cavalry, trying to move forward near Hartford, was cut off by an advance patrol of enemy cavalry that had crossed the river to outflank the defenders from the north. The Americans charged. But they were mounted on horses never used before for cavalry work. The enemy riders were men trained to swordsmanship. The American troop had averaged only 13 men in mounted drill in a whole year, because they had possessed neither horses nor armory.[131]

The green brutes reared at the sight of weapons. They pitched into each other as the enemy cavalry dashed at them, and added their iron hoofs to the mêlée. For one brief moment eyes stared into eyes, and it was hack and thrust. Then the enemy riders were through them, and whirled like a gale and swept through them again, and killed and killed.

The Massacre of the Connecticut River

“Annihilated,” reported the scout cavalry a little later, when its squadrons came up. “Our loss one dead, three slightly wounded.”

Annihilated! Yes, gentlemen of Congress, sitting in Washington at that moment and passing resolutions and appropriations, and uttering fine sentiments about millions for defense and not one cent for tribute! There were ugly things there on the Connecticut River shore that answered you more loudly in their eternal silence than if they had spoken with a thousand angry tongues.

That day’s battle that filled the fields of Connecticut with dead men’s bones to be plowed up in many a year afterward, went down in American history as the massacre of the Connecticut River. A massacre it was—an American massacre, carefully prepared by elaborate carelessness through many a year before.

Less than a thousand men, it was said afterward, escaped from the massacre. They crawled away down gullies or swam down the river, and hid under weeds and panted, and tied up their wounds with rags from their ragged garments. They were never able to tell what had occurred. They knew only that they had thought there was victory—and then, in front of them, and on their flanks, and behind them, there had come flames as if a hot line of blast furnaces had opened to blow in their very faces, wherever they turned.

“We have taught them their lesson!” said the hostile commander. “We shall have no more trouble.”

It was true. Western Connecticut was broken under the invader’s rod as Eastern Massachusetts had been broken. That night the army occupied Hartford, Meriden, New Britain, and New Haven, though not before the arms factories had been blown up, to welcome the soldiers with flaming ruins.

The next morning cavalry detachments began cautiously to scout into the Berkshire Hills, to feel for the American outposts.

When the news of the Battle of Connecticut went through the United States, there was a temporary end to all patience, to all calculations of prudence. There was an end to everything except blind passion. The United States was not a patient Nation, but no Nation, however patient, could have remained so at such a time. No man, however deeply admired, could have counseled wisdom then. No interests, however great, could have controlled.

All the knowledge that had gone to the public about the utter unreadiness of the freshly enlisted volunteers to take the firing line; all the information that had been given to the people about the condition of their army; all the proofs that the foe had given with blood and fire of his immense superiority—all these were as nothing. That the army, if it had fought now, must be destroyed, was as nothing. The cry was that the army must fight!

Trusted leaders pointed in vain to the history of the United States to prove that whenever its raw forces had hurried into battle in obedience to popular demand, the result had been only to hurry disaster. In vain they pointed to the Civil War and the hideous death-tolls paid by both sides without military advantage to either.

Men would not listen. They would not reason. They hated those who remained cool enough to reason. It was the human equation that, at some time or another, defies all the combination of man’s intelligence.

The President Goes to the Army

No administration, however determined, could have ignored it. Secretly, a special train was made ready in Washington. Secretly, in the night, the President of the United States with his advisers and staff boarded it and were taken northward.

No dispatches went ahead of it, except railroad orders to clear tracks. After passing Baltimore, it went by way of Harrisburg and Wilkesbarre, avoiding Philadelphia and the city of New York. Through the sad, black iron and coal country of Pennsylvania it passed to the New York State line without a welcome anywhere.

“We might be fugitives,” said the President, looking out with sleepless eyes.

At Jefferson Junction an armored train with machine guns and a 3-inch rifle slid in ahead of them from a siding where it had been waiting. An officer entered the President’s train and requested that all shades be kept down. Thus, furtively, the Nation’s ruler entered Albany.

Army Headquarters had been a target, like the White House, for messages that had shaken those to whom they were addressed. More than once the Commanding General had felt that it was more than human men could bear. More than once, in council, officers, infuriated by the veiled accusations of cowardice in the dispatches, had spoken in favor of giving the army the fatal order to go into action.

What the Commander Faced

The President, when he looked at the General’s deeply lined features, knew that the old soldier had more to gain from a battle, however disastrous, than from life. “If he does not interpose between the invader and New York City,” thought the Chief Magistrate, “he will live only to see his name blasted. There will be a thousand tacticians in future years who will assert that he was a blunderer, if not a traitor.”

“The country demands a battle! I know!” The soldier laid before the President a sheaf of papers. “Some reports, sir, bearing on the matter.”

The first sheet was a report from brigade headquarters. “Twenty batteries of 5.1 inch artillery moved westward through New Haven last night,” it said. “Our spy reports that these guns appear to be of the type that is known to have a range of seven miles, far outranging our field guns. Accompanied by heavy convoys of shrapnel and explosive shell.”[132]

“They are bringing up heavier guns still,” said the General, selecting another report. “Between New London and Saybrook Junction flat cars were seen with 11.02 inch howitzers, which, we presume, must be the type that throws a 760-pound projectile. We have nothing near that type in our artillery to oppose them. As they have a range of 12,000 yards, they can be placed wherever it may please the enemy, and we might as well bombard them with roman candles as with our guns.”[133]

Men Disabled Before Battle

The President, without replying, picked up a third report. It was from a major of the Medical Corps, and ran:

“A considerable proportion of militia infantry still suffer severely from blistered feet after only a few miles of march over rough country. More men are being disabled from ill-fitting shoes and unsuitable socks (thread and cotton) than from all other causes combined. Habit of prophylactic care of the feet almost wholly lacking. Few regimental or infirmary supplies include foot-powder.”[134]

“If you take men from their office chairs or from seats by the side of machines in shops,” growled one of the staff, “you can’t expect them to hike the same day. Men who insist on living near trolley cars, which is a great American habit, must expect to get sore feet after walking three miles. In a fifty mile march, sir, this army in its present condition will lose fifteen per cent. of its militia strength from straggling and falling out.”[135]

“But they have improved very greatly, have they not?” asked the President.

“Some of them,” answered the General, “notably the New York, Massachusetts and Pennsylvania troops, are excellent and can go into battle with the regulars at any time. But—” he turned to an artillery officer. “Will you tell the President about yesterday’s field artillery practice?”

What Untrained Batteries Did

“We sent five untrained batteries to an indicated position,” said the officer. “They had practiced only about half a dozen times in the last year, and then they had merely drilled in the motions of handling their pieces, as their armories were equipped neither for mounted drill or sub-caliber practice. When they reached the positions that they were to hold, they had lost the locations of their own side, and within half an hour they were blazing into cover occupied by their own infantry. If they had been using shell instead of blanks—whew!”[136]

“We are only just getting several organizations to learn how to deploy as skirmishers from close order,” said the Commander. “You know how vital that is under fire. Their company commanders appear to have had no previous experience at it, and the corporals let their squads get out of hand hopelessly. There have been some sad mix-ups. The result in battle would have been sickening.”[137]

“But I tell you,” said the President, “the country is wild! The people know that you have the whole of a magnificent railroad system from here to New York at your disposal. They know that the invading army must have been spread out tremendously to hold all the territory that it occupies. They cannot understand why you should not be able to engage the force that is advancing on New York.”

What the Public Did Not Know

The General walked to the wall map. “The enemy is thinned out. Yes!” He laid his finger on the chart. “But to meet him, we must move due south 140 miles down the Hudson Valley, with the river on one side of us and the Berkshire and Litchfield Hills of Massachusetts and Connecticut on the other. We cannot leave men behind us to protect that length of line and hold open our road for us if we have to retreat. When General Sherman marched to Atlanta, he left 115,000 men behind him to guard his 300 mile line back through Chattanooga to Nashville. We have less than fifty thousand men in our whole army, even if we scrape together all the very latest green arrivals.

“The moment we leave our base,” continued the Commander, “the enemy headquarters will know it. They will instantly begin a big shifting of their New England forces. They will push them across into New York State behind us, and we’ll be trapped.”

“You think that they can concentrate swiftly enough?” asked the Secretary of War.

The soldier pulled a paper out of the pile, and read: “Observer at Providence reports that hostile forces entrained cavalry, field and heavy artillery and ammunition columns at regular rate of two hours for full military train. Time for loading siege material, 3½ hours.”[138]

Officers Had Never Handled Men

He tossed the papers aside. “When did any of our officers ever have to handle thirty thousand men?” he asked. “How many of them ever handled as many as ten thousand? Last week, two regiments were left without food for two meals on a practice march because their commissary failed to supply travel rations. Day before yesterday seven boxes of provisions were found lying in a company street without any one to claim them. Those were militia; but our own officers equally lack experience in handling such a big contract as a whole army.[139]

“Do you know what it means to see that an infantry division gets its material? Do you know what we’ve got to send into battle with it? It means an ammunition train of 165 4-mule wagons, and more than 700 mules and horses. Then there are the other supply trains, the pack trains and the engineer trains—135 more wagons and 600 animals. There are ninety ambulances and wagons with their animals. And this is without counting the horses for the cavalry and the signal corps! I tell you, Mr. President, if we unload that mess in the face of an enemy like the one down there,” he pointed southeastward, “it will never get back here!”[140]

“And if you stay here! Won’t you be attacked?” asked a member of the President’s party.

“I think not.” The General turned to the chart again. “See here! He’s got a great big territory to hold already. When he has New York City and Harbor to control also, I think he’ll be too well occupied to attack us until he brings reënforcements across. At any rate, he can’t come at us, except from the direction of New York City up the narrow river valley, or from the direction of Massachusetts through the Berkshire Hills. We can make the banks of the Hudson a difficult place for him. And the longer we can hold on here, the longer the ordnance works at Watervliet can continue to turn out the heavy guns that we need so sorely. Watervliet, Mr. President, in my eyes, is the most precious thing we’ve got to guard just now.”[141]

“Stay!” Says the President

The President arose and walked to the window. For a quarter of an hour he looked out over the rolling country to the East where the soft blue curves of the hills were cloud-like against the April sky. Then he returned. “Stay where you are,” he said, “as long as you can, or think wise. New York will have to fall. Good-by. We’ll go back to Washington and do our best. Good luck to you, and to your Berkshire Hills.”

“They are good American hills,” said the General, smiling for the first time. “They are giving our men the only protection they’ve had against aeroplanes since this thing began.”

The spreading, crowding groves that crowned them and made them famous for their loveliness, now made the multi-folded Hills a welcome cover for the harassed American troops. They reduced to a minimum the effectiveness of scouting from the air, and increased to a maximum extent the efficiency of cavalry and motor troops that knew the country. Among their laureled slopes and in their vales and intervales, was good territory for artillery defense.

The rich men whose pleasure grounds they are gave the army their motors, their horses and themselves. Quick-witted and keen, aware of every foot of the ravines and roads and by-roads, they helped the picked men who had been selected by the commanders to guard and hold the “escapes” through the Hills.

Americans Hold the Wall

At the southern end, on the open summit of Mount Everett that old settlers prefer to call “The Dome,” whence the sight can command the sweep of the Housatonic Valley through the Hills, all the approaches from Massachusetts in the eastward, the Litchfield Hills south in Connecticut, and the basin of the Hudson River to the west, a signal corps had erected its wireless and its heliograph. At their feet, on the lower slopes, hidden in the great wild laurel that is most beautiful there, was artillery.

There were guns at Great Barrington. At Stockbridge gleaming batteries guarded the road from Hartford, which once had been the stage coach road between Boston and Albany.

Limbers and guns jolted past the great houses and estates of Lenox and vanished in the cover on both sides, to be posted on the hilly ground that commanded the Housatonic Valley. More guns passed under the elms of high Pittsfield. Motors and cavalry and cannon held North Adams and Williamstown, where Williams College stood almost deserted because students and professors had volunteered to act as sentinels and patrols.

On the old trail that had been the trail of the Mohawk Indians of New York when they went on the war-path against Massachusetts, men in olive drab were scouting and lying in cover with machine guns.

On the green hills behind Bennington, Vermont, where Yankee breastworks had been thrown up in the Revolution, there were more batteries. Here outposts and patrols guarded the road leading to Lake George, the last gateway to the territory held by the American forces in New York State. North of this were Vermont’s Green Mountains—barriers indomitable as of old when Ethan Allen, wroth at Congress, threatened to retire into those fastnesses and “wage eternal warfare against Hell, the Devil and Human Nature in general.”

Impassable by Rail

The long barrier thus running northward from Connecticut like a wall separating New England and New York, would check any except a powerful, well-supported force, advancing with the determination to break through. Long before such an army could make its way, the Americans could either front the enemy in battle, or retire safely beyond his reach.

The invaders could not break through the wall by rail. The railroad line that led from Greenfield, Massachusetts, to Troy and Albany, had in it a famous link that was vital to its operation. This link was the celebrated Hoosac Tunnel, bored for 4¾ miles through Hoosac Mountain. It was now a solid mass of blasted and piled rock that could not be cleared away in the time demanded by any military operation.

In the south, on the Long Island Sound coast of Connecticut, were other ruins almost as big and as costly. They were the wreckage of Bridgeport’s big cartridge factories, blown up as the hostile patrols entered the outskirts of the town.

It was the last source of ammunition and arms supply in New England. With it there were lost, too, three submarines that were on the stocks in the harbor ship yards, and the works that had been manufacturing naval sea-planes and military tractors for the army’s flying scouts.

The aerial motor works of Hyde Park in Massachusetts, the Marblehead factory that made gun-carrying convertible land and marine flying machines, and the Norwich factory for tractor biplanes and hydro-monoplanes had been captured almost in the beginning.[142]

New England’s Conquest Complete

As the army entered Bridgeport, another column advancing parallel with it captured the great manufacturing city of Waterbury in the North. With these two cities, the invader’s conquest of New England was complete. Excepting only Portland in Maine, he now possessed every city of more than 30,000 population. He possessed every source of manufacture. He held every port on the northern shore of Long Island Sound. He held the three great harbors of New England. In addition to the vessels building in Bridgeport, he possessed Fore River, with a battleship and two destroyers on the ways; Quincy, with eight submarines in course of construction, and the Portsmouth Navy Yard with one.[143]

The division that had taken Waterbury turned southerly to the coast after it passed through that town, to join the division that had taken Bridgeport and was pressing westward.

An hour later the American army, apprised by its spies, began to block the rock cuts on all the New York Central systems leading northward out of New York City.

When New York heard this news, it knew that it had been abandoned.

In that moment of despair, the population would have done what every loosely knit, heterogeneous multitude does almost spontaneously in the face of catastrophe. It would have grown into mobs to riot against itself. If the huge population had been organized, if it had possessed a single will, nothing could have prevented it and nothing could have withstood it. But facing the overwhelming numbers were a few thousand men who were moved by a single will and who were firmly welded together for its accomplishment.

The Power of Organized Discipline

They were the police. Whatever their faults were, they possessed the one thing that all the city and all the United States lacked. It was Organized Discipline. In the face of millions unorganized and undisciplined, the 11,000 policemen of the city, armed with no visible weapons except clubs, maintained the peace. They scarcely needed the assistance of the ten thousand men who had been enlisted hastily as volunteer militia and deputy sheriffs, and who patroled the streets with clubs and riot guns.[144]

Their work was facilitated by the fact that for many days past there had been a great disarmament in the city. Under the autocratic latitude of martial law, all suspected individuals had been searched wherever they were met. Houses had been visited. Warned by the riots in Connecticut, the authorities had stripped every sporting goods shop and every pawnbroker’s establishment of weapons, and stored them under heavy guard in the armories.

It had been a necessary precaution. During the days that came after the enemy forces had begun to land, factory after factory and industry after industry had stopped. Now the greater part of the city was dead. Seventeen thousand longshoremen and stevedores loitered in the water-front streets, with ten thousand sailors of all nationalities, whose ships were tied up. Fifty thousand unskilled laborers wandered around town with nothing to do. Altogether it was estimated that on this day there were 200,000 people in New York whose occupations had been lost, and fully as many again who were working on half time.[145]

The Wholly Helpless Metropolis

The leaders of commerce and finance, the most resourceful of the city’s business men, were utterly unable to suggest anything. The Chamber of Commerce, that had met many crises and evolved practical plans of action, could suggest nothing now.

The banks were practically closed. The United States Treasury Department already had declared that the center of the Second Federal Reserve District would be considered as temporarily merged with the Third District in Philadelphia.

The fire insurance companies were refusing all new business, and had called attention to the fact that existing policies on every kind of property provided that they were not liable for loss “caused directly or indirectly by invasion, insurrection, riot, civil war or commotion, or military or usurped power.”

There were thousands of other contracts and agreements that would lapse automatically the moment the first hostile soldier set foot in the city. Men had laughed for a generation at the mediæval expression in many printed legal forms that provided that the signers were not responsible for anything that might occur under “the acts of any foreign Prince or Potentate.” Now, suddenly, these mediæval words were alive.

The mails were piled high in the Post Office and in every substation. The whole United States was striving to settle urgent affairs with the city, and the city was trying as desperately to settle with the United States. It was impossible to handle the mass. It remained in bags for days, untouched, while the postal forces, heavily increased from near-by cities, struggled with the accumulations of days before.

The long distance telephone systems were so crowded that connections could be obtained only by asking for them many hours in advance. Telegraph dispatches were twenty-four hours old before they could be forwarded, and steadily their increasing accumulation was leaving the armies of swift operators farther behind.

Days of Frantic Perplexity

During the days of frantic perplexity there had been talk of dismantling the factories and shipping their machineries to the interior. But when the owners of the city’s 26,000 manufacturing establishments faced the problem, they realized that it could not be done. They were not like the government that could afford to pull plants apart and move them at more expense than would be involved in building new ones.[146]

They were as helpless as their 500,000 employees. To leave their city meant for owners and workers alike to go away bare-handed and pauperized. There was nothing to do except to stay.

All these manufactories and industries of the city had labored so furiously in the last weeks to produce merchandise and ship it that at last the railroads were unable to handle the rush of freight. Every yard was piled high with goods destined for the interior that could not be loaded. All the sidings were clogged. There were lines of freight trains with not a gap between them stretching from the Hudson River straight across the New Jersey meadows and on into the yards and sidings of New Jersey towns miles from New York.

No freight was coming in. For three days everything had been side-tracked far away from the city, in order to clear the tracks for provisions. The authorities, with the Citizens’ Committee, unable to guess what the enemy might do, had decided that all efforts must be subservient to the effort to stock the town with food.

Already the city had taken over the entire business of distributing food-stuffs. Nothing could be sold except in quantities and at prices fixed by ordinance.

The Edge of Famine

The city’s people often had been told by their statisticians that they always were within a few days of famine. Now they realized what it meant. The congested tracks had cut down their coal supply. All interurban transportation had to be reduced to save power. Somewhere in the narrow valleys leading from Lake Champlain on crowded rails were the enormous rolls of paper needed to feed the city’s presses. The morning newspapers had to be cut down to four pages of small size. There was no sporting news in the papers, no foreign news and no financial news.

Within the short time that had elapsed since the occupation of New England’s mill cities, the city had used up a great part of its stocks of textiles. There was shortage of coffee, of spices, of all the stuffs that ordinarily came in by sea.

Hostile cruisers and destroyers patrolled all the Atlantic coast, taking the precaution merely to stay out of range of the harbor defenses. They captured every vessel, large or small, that

ventured to leave a port, and sent it into Narragansett Bay or Buzzards Bay as a prize.

So thoroughly had New York’s sea-gate been locked, that it had trouble even to dispose of its garbage, because tugboat captains feared to venture far enough to sea to dump it.

Wherever men turned, whatever they tried to do, it was as if there lay a great, dead hand on the city.

Closing in on New York

The only activity that remained in full progress, apparently, was the activity of the news bulletin-boards. The newspapers had erected them everywhere, in all the squares. Far into the night they were served.

Almost continually since the Battle of the Connecticut they had been announcing the names of New England places successively taken by the approaching army. Now, suddenly, their news shifted. A bulletin went up dated from Eaton’s Neck, Long Island. “Large fleet of steamers,” it said, “crossing Long Island Sound from direction of New Haven, apparently bound for this shore.”

“Two passenger steamers of New Haven Line,” said the next bulletin, “five large freighters, eight lighters. Making for coast east of Oyster Bay.”

From Oyster Bay came a dispatch: “Fifteen vessels putting into Cold Spring Harbor, with large number of troops. It is believed that these are forces convoyed over the Sound in vessels captured at New Haven, to move against New York through Long Island.”

“Village of Cold Spring occupied. Troops approaching Oyster Bay,” was the news that grew in great letters on the boards an hour later. Nothing more came from either of these two points. Evidently the enemy had cut communications at once.

Along the Connecticut Shore

News began to arrive now from the Connecticut shore. The advancing forces, having joined west of Bridgeport, were moving in mass along the contracted coastal plain of southwestern Connecticut. Troop trains, preceded by armored pilot engines, rolled in long procession along the whole system of the New York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad, all the tracks of which had been repaired by civilians impressed to do the work. On all the many tracks there was traffic in only one direction,—westward, toward New York. The trains, moving in echelon, went forward steadily as clock work.

Along the magnificent motor road that was the old Boston Post Road, cavalry and motor patrols and detachments advancing in the same direction, seized town after town.

They occupied Fairfield, where Paul Revere stopped over night on his way to report to Washington. They entered with swords clanking and imperious motor horns croaking into old Saugatuck, where the Colonials had fought General Tryon when he landed to burn Danbury. They took Norwalk and South Norwalk. They quartered men in the estates of Darien.

They swept on through rich Stamford, whose inhabitants are Connecticut people by residence and New Yorkers by occupation. They took Greenwich.

The Invaders of Long Island

From Roslyn, Long Island, came word that all the invading vessels that could find room at the Cold Spring wharves were unloading material. The character of the derricks that had been rigged, said the report, indicated that extremely heavy guns were being handled.

A bulletin that went up immediately afterward announced that the army was crossing the State line from Connecticut into New York, and that advance patrols already were passing through the New York State town of Port Chester.

The enemy was now only twenty-five miles from New York City. This, and the actual entrance into State territory, caused a senseless, headlong fright. It spread even into the councils of the Citizens’ Committee and city officials in the City Hall. Men jumped to their feet and exclaimed that the bridges over the Harlem must be dynamited at once. Others proposed to demolish the great suspension bridges by cutting away the suspending rods and letting the roadways fall into the East River, that the Long Island invader might be kept from crossing.

It was only the final flare-up of nerve-rasped, helplessly cornered men. The least intelligent people in the streets could perceive that nothing except cannons, and cannons again, could stop this invader who came with a war-machine that made war a matter of systematic business. As Boston had learned it, so New York was learning it. There could not be even the barren relief of desperate, futile activity. The city, richer than many a kingdom, more populous than any State in the Union except three, was as utterly unable to ward off its doom as a trapped animal. Trapped by its own wealth, it could only wait for the hunter to take it.

If any men adhered to the belief that the city might gain anything by destroying its approaches, a telephone message that came through from Port Chester presently was sufficient to convince even the most recklessly daring that it would be madness in the face of the iron will that actuated the enemy. The telephone call was from the corps commander, who asked for the Mayor.

“I have the honor,” he said, “to inform you that the American army, having abandoned the defense of the City of New York and surrounding territory, all military resistance against us has ceased, and we claim occupation. Under the rules of war, your civilian citizens lay themselves open to penalties if they destroy bridges, railways, or other lines of communication. Should such destruction occur, I shall have to exact compensation for any suffering that it may cause to the troops under my command.”

“Invader Can Do What He Pleases”

“He is straining the law!” cried one of the Citizens’ Committee who was an authority on international law. “He has not yet occupied the territory contiguous to the city.”

“I think that he has made his occupation good,” said another. “In our own Army’s Rules of Warfare, paragraph 290 expressly states that ‘it is sufficient that the occupying army can, within a reasonable time, send detachments of troops to make its authority felt within the occupied district.’ ”

“It makes little difference,” interposed the Mayor. “We can’t take him before a Court of Appeals to argue hair-splitting distinctions. He has us, and can do to us what he pleases. He needs only the color of law to go to any extremity. We should be insane to argue with him. The only thing to do is to give renewed and urgent orders that the population must absolutely avoid any act of violence.”

Again the cold logic of inexorable circumstances forced humble submission. Through all the districts north of the Harlem and through Westchester County almost to the line of the enemy patrols, there was sent by every possible method of communication the following warning:

“The invading forces assert occupation of the territory in which you reside. Under this occupation, any act of disorder involving raiding, espionage, damage to railways, war material, bridges, roads, canals, telegraphs or other means of communication is punishable by death as war treason. Communities in which such acts occur may be punished collectively. All persons are warned earnestly to yield full obedience to the occupying military forces and to abstain from all offensive acts.”[147]

A Matter of Lawyers’ Logic

Thus for the men of New York war was no matter of glorious resistance or of a splendid death. It was a matter of cold lawyers’ logic with imprisonment or execution as felons the only answer should they try to assert their manhood.

The knowledge held all the territory passive. Men and horses and motors moved into Westchester County with no more opposition than if they were pleasure-seekers moving through friendly country. Guns jolted along the highways with their artillerists sitting at ease. The Westchester hills and valleys echoed no shots, no cries of battle.

In every village and town the American flag fluttered down from the flag-staffs of schools and town halls.

The corps commander that evening established his headquarters in one of the great houses in the famous residence colony of Orienta Point, Mamaroneck. His columns, advancing along the shore, spread out, occupied New Rochelle and Mount Vernon, and encamped for the night in a great line that stretched from the Long Island Sound to the Hudson River, fencing New York City on the north with a wall of men and artillery.

It was a wall of silence. Not a word came through to the city from Yonkers, from Mount Vernon, from Pelham, or from any of the other places already taken.

The Battle in the Night

Only the harbor defenses of the city were still speaking to each other. From the forts on Throgs Neck in Westchester County and from Fort Totten on Long Island, the commanders at Forts Hamilton and Wadsworth in the Narrows received requests for more men. Large forces, said the Sound defenses, were closing in rapidly to invest them on land from the rear. It would be an artillery and infantry fight in which the mammoth coast guns could take little part, if any. The end was certain if reënforcements could not be sent through the East River and the Sound.

The commanders of the Narrows were helpless to give aid. The commanders of the Sandy Hook defenses were helpless. All the men, regulars and militia, of the coast artillery who could be obtained, were not enough. Fort Hamilton, being on the Long Island shore itself, dared not denude itself further than it had done. At any moment there might be an attack on it, too. The southern defenses had no choice but to tell the eastern defenses that they must do the best they could.

It was about one o’clock in the morning when the people of northern Long Island, and the inhabitants of the Borough of the Bronx and Westchester County, sprang from their beds in wild alarm. Without warning, as if a hurricane had struck with instant concentrated force, all their windows had crashed. Their walls were shaking, and pictures and plaster falling. The air itself was shaking like a throbbing pulse.

It was like no gun-fire that men ever had imagined. It was not a series of explosions. It was like one explosion, whose crescent violence would not dwindle. The people of far Brooklyn and the people of lower Manhattan heard it. To their ears it was as if all the thunders of a storm-riven Heaven had been loosed to roll incessantly.

Bands of Flame

Men on vantage points along the Sound that night saw the attacking lines from end to end plainly as if it were day. So continuous was their fire, that it painted their positions with broad, unwavering bands of flame. It needed not the star bombs and rockets that curved everywhere under the sky to fall glaring into the defenses. It needed not the magnesium lights that floated from parachutes dropped by aeroplanes. On both sides of the Sound the night was a red sea.

Into the mortar pits and gun emplacements of the defenses, like a red surf from that red sea, beat the unending fire. Shrapnel that wailed like the bride of the storm, and flew apart in the air, and flung bullets as if mines had burst inside of the defense! Eleven inch shells that hammered into concrete facing, and split it apart with the irresistible agony of their explosion! Five inch shell and solid projectile! Bombs from the air, and every agency that man had yet devised to wreck and destroy!

As suddenly as it had begun, the fire stopped. The night became utterly still. The rockets ceased curving. But in all the defenses there shone white glares, from search-lights and magnesium flares, illuminating rushing masses of men who clambered over the ruins of guns and mounds, and took the works. There was none left to oppose them.

When the dawn came, the watchers rubbed their eyes. The great defenses lay apparently unharmed. Their mounds and embankments betrayed nothing of the ruin that the night’s battle had worked within. But against the brightening sky there arose a visible sign of what had been done. The flag of the Coalition floated over them and greeted the American sunrise.

Within a few hours after dawn, artillery began to move through Long Island’s boulevards toward Brooklyn. North of the city, the army began marching through the Borough of the Bronx toward the Harlem River. Before noon, guns were posted along the Harlem Heights, on University Heights, at High Bridge, and down past the mouth of the Harlem River. The Long Island Railroad brought guns to the high ground behind Newtown Creek, to the summit of Eastern Parkway, and to the Prospect Park Slope.

Captured Vessels Enter River

Through Hell Gate into the East River came a motley fleet—Sound and River steamers captured at New Haven and Bridgeport, wall-sided freighters and lighters, side-wheelers and screw propellers, and a flotilla of motor boats, the pick of the beautiful little navy of pleasure that filled all the Sound harbors.

This fleet anchored in a long line below Blackwell’s Island close under the Manhattan shore.

All the larger vessels had guns on their forward and upper decks. As soon as the craft had swung to the tide, the weapons were pointed at the city.

Then the telephone bell in the City Hall called the Mayor again. The corps commander, speaking from temporary quarters in the University of New York buildings, announced that he wished to send commissioners into the city to treat with the authorities for the terms of capitulation. He desired that the Mayor send an escort to meet them at the Lenox Avenue Bridge over the Harlem.

None of the people in the streets realized that the automobiles that sped down Lenox Avenue a few hours later, through Central Park and down Broadway, were bearing enemy soldiers. The population had become accustomed to men in field uniforms hurrying through the city.

Demand Surrender of Forts

Arrived in the City Hall, the commissioners presented a demand signed by the commander, for unconditional surrender of the city. The Mayor and his advisers read it, and turned to the soldiers.

“What does this mean?” asked the Mayor, pointing to a clause that called for the surrender of all fortifications with troops and munitions of war. “We possess no fortifications.”

“It means Forts Hamilton and Wadsworth, on the Narrows,” answered the Chief Commissioner.

“But those are United States property,” said the Mayor. “We have no authority over them.”

“Then I should advise you to consult with the commandant of these places at once,” answered the Commissioner. “Their surrender is an indispensable condition in the terms of capitulation.”

The Mayor reached for the telephone. “Stop all other business, however important,” he said to the operator. “Connect me with the Commandant at Fort Hamilton.”

His conversation with that officer was brief. “He declines absolutely to surrender any part of the defenses or other government property,” he reported.

“Then, sir,” said the officer, rising, “I regret to inform you that we shall shell the city. We are authorized to give you twenty-four hours. Precisely at the end of that time, we shall order the firing to begin. I call your attention to the fact that our artillery, as at present placed, commands the Borough of Manhattan to about 59th Street, and that our guns in Brooklyn command a great part of the most valuable sections of that borough. You will take note, also, that guns on the vessels anchored in the river can sweep both the New York and Brooklyn streets.”

Claims That City Is Unfortified

“But,” exclaimed an old Judge who was on the Citizens’ Committee, “we are willing to surrender the city without opposition. As a matter of fact, it lies wide open to your entrance. You cannot possibly mean to bombard an undefended and unfortified town!”

Without hesitation the officer drew a paper from his pocket and presented it. It read: “The City of New York, having Forts Hamilton and Wadsworth not only within its harbor limits, but actually within its municipal limits, is plainly a fortified place under all accepted definitions. Also, while troops occupy these forts the town clearly falls under the definition of a ‘defended place,’ under the clause that ‘a place that is occupied by a military force is a defended place.’ ”[148]

With a bow he handed the paper to the Mayor.

“We shall bombard the city within twenty-four hours,” he repeated.

The New York men looked at each other. “We are quite helpless, sir,” said the old Judge, then. “We cannot force United States officers to surrender. I propose to my colleagues that a deputation shall go to Washington at once to lay your terms before the President as Commander-in-Chief of the Army and Navy. I assure you that we shall represent to him, most strongly, the advisability of yielding. Will you, for your part, give us more time?”

“I cannot go beyond my orders,” answered the officer. “Twenty-four hours, I fear, is the extreme limit. It will give you ample time, since the matter to be considered is most simple. You might inform His Excellency the President, if you wish, that we have succeeded in reducing and taking Forts Schuyler, Slocum and Totten. We shall proceed to invest Fort Hamilton before to-morrow morning. Surrender will prevent useless loss of life and destruction of property.”

Government Surrenders Forts

A special train brought the deputation into Washington before daylight next morning. The New York men went at once to the White House where they were received by the President, who had not been in bed. “You have no doubt that they mean to make good their threat of bombardment?” asked the President, after receiving their report. “Then, gentlemen, there is only one action for this Government to take.” He sighed, and echoed the refrain of all the past days. “There is nothing else that we can do.”

An hour later the wires to New York, cleared by orders from the War Department, carried a dispatch to the commandants at Fort Hamilton and Fort Wadsworth. It ordered them to surrender.

From his headquarters the enemy commander ordered detachments to go down the harbor in boats and occupy the captured defenses. Then he sent his troops forward into the City.

And now the New Yorkers who had expected that their streets would be flooded by a great army, were amazed at the ease and simplicity with which the city fell into military control. Instead of brigades entering the city, there were not even regiments. Troops of cavalry, companies of infantry, single machine-gun detachments, moving separately down separated avenues, with big intervals between them, were all the force that entered.

Some boatloads of men and artillery passed down the river and landed in Brooklyn, some to occupy the Navy Yard and others to reënforce the men who had come in through Long Island; but the army remained outside, holding the northern districts from the Sound to the Hudson, and guarding the Hudson River and Putnam Valleys against surprise attack from the direction of Albany.

An Easy City to Occupy

The officers in charge of the men who entered the city asked no questions and required no directions. Unhesitatingly each led his force to the point that he wanted. Within two hours New York was wholly in the hands of the soldiers.

Nobody had thought of it before. Now, all at once, when it was accomplished, it amazed the people of New York to learn how easy it was to control the city’s whole life, civic and commercial.

A battalion of infantry occupied the Grand Central Terminal. Another battalion took the great Pennsylvania terminal with its under-river tunnels to New Jersey and Long Island. Detachments appeared at the Twenty-third Street and Forty-second Street ferries over the Hudson River and by that one seizure controlled all railroad connections with the West from uptown. The occupation of half a dozen other Hudson River railroad ferries down-town, and of the Hudson Terminal Tube System, completed the entire control of all the city’s railroad traffic in every direction.

Equally simple was the control of its communications. Men appeared at the two great telegraph buildings and at the telephone building. Within half an hour they had every trunk line of wires in their hands and could strike the city dumb at will.

Thus less than three thousand men had their fingers on the big town’s spinal nerves, and could paralyze it with a slight pressure.

Still Easier to Guard

It was still easier to control the city from a military point of view. The citizens who had expected to see their streets commanded by cannon on limbers, did not at first comprehend why there were hardly any of these to be seen, while machine gun detachments scattered and disappeared as soon as they got well into the town. Only gradually did the citizens discover that their big, sprawling metropolis was being held subject by a very simple utilization of the city’s characteristic feature.

This feature was the sky-scraper. To the eye of the soldier, these high buildings were nothing so much as inviting and magnificent eminences for controlling the street-valleys and their population below.

Four men with a machine gun and abundance of ammunition in one of these stone and steel summits could control more area than half a dozen heavy field gun batteries posted in the streets could command.

These sentinel watchers were as aloof and as sure as fate. They could neither be rushed by a mob nor sniped from concealment. At a word from the telephone in their eyries, they could start death dancing among the pygmy hordes far under them.

From the top of the Woolworth Building two of the little guns pointed down into Broadway. Turned southward, they could sweep the town as far as the Battery. Eastward, they could rain their steel-jacketed bullets into the river front streets and over the two lower bridges that cross the East River. Northward, they had Broadway as far up as Canal Street under their fire.

They were supplemented by a gun on top of the great Municipal Building. It held a good part of the crowded tenement house district of the Lower East Side under its zone of fire, notably the doubtful sections of Cherry Street and other areas known to the police.

Church Towers as Gun Stations

On the tall towers of the suspension bridges themselves were other detachments with a gun each. The churches were not forgotten by the soldiers. The graceful steeple of Grace Church, standing at an acute angle of Broadway so that it can be seen from far down town, had been before men’s eyes so long that they had ceased, almost, to note its soft beauty. Now they looked at it with a new and acute perception, for its steeple held a gun that pointed down Broadway, whose southern zone of fire would just about reach to where the northern zone of fire from the Woolworth Building would end.

Trinity, too, had a gun in its tower, pointing down Wall Street. North and south on upper Broadway, guns on the Flatiron Building could reach any important street or any place where dangerous crowds might conceivably form. This eminence controlled both Madison and Union Squares. The tower of Madison Square Garden, near-by, also was armed. From it men could watch and reach any part of the East Side that was out of reach of the detachments in the bridge towers. Uptown New York was governed more easily still. The wide, geometrically regular streets with many open squares, were overlooked by tall apartment buildings and hotels that commanded long sweeps of avenue. As a result, many of the city squares and smaller parts had no artillery in them at all, and others had only half a battery.

The people knew that wherever they might move, they were within the range of cannon that were loaded and ready. Their Citizens’ Committee and their officials worked under guns. Every foot of their Great White Way could be changed into a Way of Death at a moment’s notice. Their women could not shop, their children could not play, except under the menace of weapons.

Small need was there in New York City of the many placards and notices warning the people against disorder. Every man’s eye was on every other man; and had one plotted mischief or rebellion, there would have been a hundred witnesses ready to suppress him, to betray him—anything to prevent those steel devils in the city towers from setting death loose in the streets!

Not until the City of New York actually was surrendered did the people of the Middle and Far West become startled into a really acute perception of the catastrophe that had fallen on the whole country.

Though they were fiery with patriotism and anger, and though they were giving not only lavishly but extravagantly of their wealth and men, they were free, unconquered and untouched. They had seen no invader. With a suddenly freshened realization of the hugeness of the country, they had attained the conviction that there was little danger that any foe possibly could reach them from the Atlantic.

They were willing to defend the East with all that they had. They were willing to toss to the air all their royal plans for the splendid future that was all but built. They were the real America, and they were willing to ruin themselves and die for America. But—the men of Chicago were a thousand miles from an enemy. Three thousand miles separated the men of the Pacific from the armed enemies in New England.

So their customary life and their business had continued. They continued to work and barter and plan. The loss of the industries of New England had made itself felt at once, but there was an enormous land left. Even the locking of all the Atlantic and Gulf ports with the attendant calamities could not wholly shatter their great web of trade.

Pacific Remains Open

Their commerce could go and enter through their own ports unimpeded, for happily in this crisis there was no danger threatening from across the Pacific.

Therefore, though the surrender of Boston had shaken them, it had not terrified them. The great inland country clung to the belief that the army would do something. During the enemy’s slow movement through Connecticut in the advance toward New York, the people of the West remained inspired by that hope, as men in past ages, stricken dumb by a darkened Heaven and a smoking mountain, still clung to the belief that a kindly miracle would interpose to save them, though the earth of their market places was trembling under their feet.

That spiritual self-defense with which men armor themselves against inevitable fates had not given way until the Administration announced the surrender of the City of New York and its two great forts, with the statement:

Then the West began to fear with a great fear that its Pacific coast was not safe, after all. It thought, appalled, that an enemy so formidable and successful, confronting opposition so futile, might succeed in breaking the defenses of the Panama Canal as easily as he had broken the defenses of the Atlantic.

Panama Canal Safe

But the Panama Canal was being held. The United States fleet, having failed to prevent the hostile landing on the New England coast, had turned at once to defend the one vital spot that it could protect even against superior numbers. That was the Caribbean entrance to the Canal.

It raced there under forced draught. It surprised and destroyed an inferior force of cruisers and battleships that the enemy had stationed there for blockade. Again it was mathematics. The foe, forced to assure himself against attack on his transports off the New England coast, had held all his powerful ships north of the American fleet. The weaker blockaders in the South, facing guns of superior range, ships of superior speed, and superior volume of gun-fire, went down to destruction without even the satisfaction of biting hard as they died.

Now the country that had been sick with humiliation because its navy would not fight, thanked Heaven that the fleet had kept itself intact: that instead of going down in glorious disaster, it had worked out a scientific problem coolly. The big navy, intact to its smallest torpedo boat, was lying fully potent under the strong defenses of Limon Harbor.

The guns of the fortifications protected the ships, and the ships protected the fortifications. Three thousand naval officers and sixty thousand sailors and marines, added to the land forces in the defenses, made a force of highly trained, completely efficient men.[149]

The Defenses Perfect

The defenses were perfect. This precious possession was one American possession at least that could be held to the last. Its guns were fully installed. It had ammunition. Its range finding systems and its systems of fire control were complete. Without the navy, it, too, would have been sorely weak in men and would have been open, like America’s continental defenses, to attack from the land. But with the naval forces, it was able to hold out.[150]

The navy was ready to throw men ashore to meet any attempt at landings along the coast. The navy’s torpedo boats and destroyers crept to sea in the night and guarded all weak places. The American submarines, with a safe harbor for a base, worked under ideal submarine conditions. When the hostile navy, freed from the task of protecting its army, at last appeared in force off the Isthmus, it dared not institute anything like a close blockade.

It dared not even venture in to bombard. There were 16-inch guns at Panama. It was an object lesson for the United States. Exactly thus, had there been an army to protect them, the Atlantic coast defenses could have defied any attempt from the sea to force a harbor.

Hostile Navy Powerless

The enemy navy, overwhelming as it was, could do nothing except to wait and watch. It cruised up and down, far out in the purple Caribbean. Its only trophies in the South were Porto Rico and the United States Naval station of Guantanamo in Cuba. It had taken the latter by the simple method of steaming in, for this “naval station” was only an unfortified harbor.[151]

The news of Panama’s safety was the first and only good news that had been given to the country since the declaration of war. The relief that it gave was so great that the people received almost with equanimity the news which followed—that word had come from spies of the arrival of more transports in Boston Harbor and Narragansett Bay, bringing forces estimated at figures varying from 50,000 to 100,000 more men.

Soon after this landing had been accomplished, cavalry and light artillery moved northward through Vermont. They seized and occupied in force Bellows Falls and the White River, Wells River and St. Johnsbury Junctions of the Vermont railroads. This cut the last communication of New England with the United States. It gave the invader absolute command of the St. Johnsbury and Lake Champlain Railroad, the Central Vermont, the Maine Central, the Boston and Maine and the Rutland branch railroads. Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont were in his power like the rest of New England. Blockaded from the sea, and cut off from railroad connection with the interior, they were subjugated even without the unfolding of forces that now began through their area.

Here, too, the invaders, despite their grown power, moved slowly, cautiously. They cut districts from each other, and occupied them one by one systematically, making united action by the population impossible even had it been feasible. By the simple method of disorganizing all the accustomed political and governmental affiliations, they turned to their purpose the ever-present lack of coherence between State governments and city governments, township authorities and County authorities. The machinery fell apart; and the enemy dealt with the bits as he chose.

The Conquest Complete

The few big cities of the three States could offer no resistance. Within a few days the conquest of all New England was complete. Not a word came out of it to the rest of the United States. The City of New York was equally sealed. Nothing was permitted to pass out of the gagged and fettered town. The messages that stormed at it were delivered to censors who did what they pleased with them, and passed practically none to the persons for whom they had been destined.

In this sealed city, for the first time in men’s memory, there were no crowds on the streets. Broadway from 59th Street to the Battery was almost naked of people by day and by night. Its electric signs were dark. Its hotels and theaters were all but dark.

Whenever, by chance, people found themselves in a given block in numbers sufficient to make a throng, there always was a hasty scattering, as if they feared to touch each other. As these little knots scattered, they cast swift glances of apprehension at the high roofs.

There had been an official notice on the front pages of all the New York newspapers on the morning after the occupation:

ALL ASSEMBLAGES OR GATHERINGS ON THE
STREETS ARE STRICTLY FORBIDDEN

By Order of the Military Government.[152]

There was no threat as to penalty for infraction. None was needed. The machine guns in all the towers and sky-scrapers were sufficient warning.

The shape of the island on which the Borough of Manhattan lay, with immensely long straight streets running north and south through its narrow width, made it a simple matter to isolate all sections in which there were populations who might become unruly. The crowded tenement districts of the East Side were cut off from those in the West. They were separated into units within themselves. Very soon, the soldiers moved around the city with the ease of careless visitors. Officers, mounted and in automobiles, went where they pleased. They paid apparently no attention to the people, and these, in turn, could not guess anything that the conquerors had in mind or what would be their next act in the next minute.

Surrounded by the Unknown

The city’s newspapers, like those of Boston and all New England, were controlled and edited by military censors. They were permitted to tell their readers nothing of importance. This utter ignorance in which the multitudes were kept, made them more helpless than did even the guns that watched them everywhere.

It was a city surrounded, perpetually confronted and oppressed by the unknown. The veil of secrecy and silence was lifted only when newspapers or placards printed some new proclamation in formal, legal verbiage.

The first one to be issued had proclaimed the occupation, and the institution of a Military Government. It had added that the existing civil authorities had been empowered and ordered to continue their administration with the sanction and participation of the Military Government, and that all civil and criminal laws remained in effect subject to changes demanded by military exigency.[153]

But immediately under this announcement was a paragraph headed:

LAWS SUSPENDED

Another announcement that struck home after the people saw its real meaning under its smooth wording was:

At first this announcement seemed to the citizens to be for their protection, but the sharper readers soon pointed out that it was only a skillful way of intimating that the soldiers were above all the laws that controlled the conquered population.

A Mysterious Flotilla

A few days after the surrender, people along the water-front noticed a great movement of vessels. The big Fall River Line and other Sound steamers moved down the Upper Bay in long procession, with some steamships seized at the wharves.

They were full of troops. Some of the vessels towed railroad floats with flat cars on which were lashed cannon so big that even from the shore the eye could perceive their unusual size. Other craft towed strings of small scows, and still others towed floating derricks.

The flotilla passed down the Upper Bay, but it did not go out through the Narrows. It disappeared in the narrow water-way of the Kill von Kull that winds between Staten Island and the mainland of New Jersey, and connects with the Lower Harbor through Raritan Bay.

The story of the mysterious flotilla spread quickly through a city whose lack of newspapers made its apprehensive curiosity only the more keen. Robbed of its news and bulletin service, the people, without any conscious plan, had organized a news service of their own. They had fallen back on the primitive method of circulating information from man to man.

New York’s “Bush Telegraph”

Within twenty-four hours of the suppression of the liberty of its press, the highly modern, highly artificial city had in operation the same form of news-transmission that has so often puzzled and even awed travelers in savage lands. Under the sky-scrapers the “bush telegraph” carried its messages with almost the same astonishing swiftness as in the jungle.

It was done by hasty whispers and by furtive conversation, for among the Orders and Regulations that were promulgated daily there was a little warning that severe punishment would be inflicted on any person who “spread false news, communicated the movement of land and sea forces, made noises or uttered outcries of a nature to disturb troops, or inspected, sketched, photographed or made descriptions of views on land or sea without authority.”[156]

There were enough ominous elasticity and inclusiveness in this Order to cover almost any exchange of words. Yet men, even though they were mortally afraid while they did it, could not resist the human impulse to transmit anything that they learned.

The news merely puzzled the great mass of the population. Accustomed all their lives to turn to their newspapers for knowledge about everything, they were quite helpless with their one means of enlightenment shut off.

To Open the Harbor

The Citizens’ Committee and the city officials, however, were able to guess pretty clearly what this movement of troops and heavy artillery meant. There was nothing in the lower harbor that possibly could demand such force except one place—the forts on Sandy Hook, the last remaining harbor defense that still was under the American flag. Solitary though it was, so long as it remained intact it forbade the entrance of New York Harbor to any hostile vessel.

There had been wonder before because the enemy commander had not demanded the surrender of the Sandy Hook defenses under threat of bombarding the city, as he had demanded and forced the surrender of Forts Hamilton and Wadsworth.

“Because Sandy Hook is not within the city, as the other two forts were,” was the solution at which the city’s lawyers arrived, after considering the rules governing military action. “The invader plainly is adhering carefully to all the accepted Rules of War. By doing so, he can, and does, hold us to account rigorously under the same Rules. This is profitable to him, for despite all their apparent stipulations in favor of a conquered territory, the Rules of War are made, after all, to facilitate war.”

It was impossible to warn the commander at Sandy Hook. Private service over the telephone and telegraph systems was suspended entirely. The fire alarm system was operated under the watchful control of soldiers. In Police Headquarters sat a Colonel of Cavalry whose countersign was necessary for every order issued by the Police Commissioner.

This was a stern officer, who held the police force in a hard, masterful hand. The men were accountable more than ever for strict enforcement of all laws, but they were subject also to summary control by every military officer. Even guards and posts of private soldiers had some authority over them.

There were many daily experiences and sights in their streets that served to make the people tractable, but few things were so powerful as the daily spectacle of their pugnacious police yielding sullen but complete obedience.

“It is unlawful to disobey orders given by our army.” This short regulation covered a great deal. It tied the police and the citizens hand and foot.[157]

Taking of Sandy Hook

On Sandy Hook, fifteen miles down the harbor from the Battery, there were being demonstrated the inexorable mathematics of war that had been demonstrated at Narragansett, at Boston, at Forts Schuyler and Slocum in Westchester, and at Fort Totten in Long Island.

Fort Hancock on Sandy Hook, almost invulnerable to ship-attack from the sea, was being reduced from the land. The fort commander had disposed his men in the most formidable positions possible, and they made the narrow sandy neck of the Hook that led from the mainland to their fortifications a pass that no force, however contemptuous of death, would attack hastily. Barb wire and great sand mounds, rapid fire guns and big guns behind them, made them no despicable sentinels. But the Americans numbered companies where the enemy numbered battalions and regiments. The American mobile guns numbered pairs where the enemy’s artillery was counted by dozens.

The steel mass of fort that could protect harbor and city could not protect itself. The motley flotilla, emerging into Raritan Bay, landed its men on the New Jersey shore at Keyport inside of the lower harbor, and behind Sandy Hook. The defenses had not been devised or built to withstand attack from their own bay. The great rifled guns and the steel mortars were ponderous. They were mounted on complex engines, equally ponderous, whose bases were firmly anchored in concrete and steel. These mammoths were not things that could be swung around to all points of the compass. They were set in their solid beds for the one purpose of fighting things out at sea.

The Open Back of the Fort

The commander had succeeded, with desperate labor, by blasting away concrete emplacements and facings, in turning two of his big guns around to face the land and protect the open back of the fort. But the giant steel guns with their 1,000-pound projectiles that could fight 30,000-ton battleships, could not fight little two-legged men. They might, by chance of fortune, find and destroy one of the siege guns that were attacking them. But if they missed a gun and fell merely among soldiers, they would be scarcely more murderous than a little field gun that fires bursting charges or shrapnel.

The enemy did not try to rush the works. He had time and means and did not need to sacrifice men. To the heights of the Atlantic and Navesink Highlands, that ascend so strangely out of the sea and out of the flat-sea country there, he lifted guns of great caliber. He placed guns in cover behind every undulation. When he had placed all these weapons with scientific precision, they began to fire.

None of the mobile artillery installed for the defense of the fort against land attack could reach the invaders’ heavier artillery with any hope of effect. The men in the defenses, cowering under bomb-proofs and in pits, held out for a day and a night. They held out for another day. Then there was nothing left to defend. Dismounted and broken, their armament was destroyed. The survivors surrendered.

New York City did not know that the Sandy Hook defenses had fallen till three light enemy cruisers appeared in the upper bay and steamed through the East River to the Navy Yard. Then the city knew that its harbor was open.

Enemy Invades New Jersey

The army that took Sandy Hook did not return to New York. The flotilla took the troops and their light artillery aboard at the Atlantic Highlands, and steamed back through Raritan Bay, through the narrow sound behind Staten Island and into Newark Bay. Here other boats met it with cavalry and motor troops from Yonkers.

Troops landed at both sides of the entrance to the bay, taking Bayonne and Elizabethport, with their oil refineries and tanks, and their ship yards. Then the flotilla moved up the bay, and put great bodies of soldiers of all arms ashore at the great factory town of Newark. A big city, and a difficult city to control, it kept the commanders occupied for three days before they had made their footing good; but then it was an admirable and a vastly valuable base. From it the troops spread out and took Rutherford, Passaic, Hackensack, and Paterson.

It was rich commercial territory that complemented the value of possessing New York, for these factory cities were a part of the Metropolitan District counted with New York City in every National estimate of industrial wealth. This district contained almost thirty-two thousand factories. In wealth and productiveness, it was as choice a prize as New England.[158]

Army Ceases Operations

Having made good its hold on the new conquest across the Hudson River, the invading army ceased to expand. Even with the accretion that had been made to its forces, it had none to spare for further operations, for it now had under its charge 62,000 square miles of domain with more than thirty millions of people.

This was a Kingdom. The victor set himself to the task of organizing his government, which meant the task of turning it to profit.

From the beginning, he had taught the conquered people that an invading army lives on the country. Wherever his troops entered, the inhabitants were ordered to supply all that was needed by men and horses.

The occupying troops demanded lodgings and stable-room. They demanded accommodations for everything belonging to the army. They requisitioned fuel and straw. They called for teams, cars, motors, wagons, boats, and claimed the services of their owners. They occupied flour mills and bakeries. They took machinery, material, tools and equipment for repairing their munitions of war, bridges, and roads.[159]

In all the towns they seized parts of the hospitals and set them aside for the care of their men, impressing the hospital attendants into the service. For the use of their own medical service they forced the towns to contribute drugs and medicines.

They seized all appliances on land, on water or in the air that might serve for the transmission of news. Under the allegation that they were susceptible of use in war, they took all sorts of subjects of peaceful commerce or industry, from telegraph wire to houses.[160]

Putting on the Screws

Already they had subjected Boston to a levy of $50,000 a day for the maintenance of the troops. They laid on New York and the factory cities of New Jersey a joint levy of $100,000. They laid another impost for the same purpose on the big cities of New England of seventy-five thousand. This one levy alone amounted to 1 million, 575 thousand dollars a week; and it was only one of many.[161]

They confiscated outright all the cash, funds, realizable securities and notes belonging to the state, city and local governments. Every bank was warned under threat of condign punishment to deliver over everything that might be considered public property. In New York City they seized from a bank $100,000 that was deposited by a State Department to pay a draft; and they issued a warning that if the holder of the draft attempted to collect the amount or permitted it to pass from his possession, his house and lands would be confiscated.[162]

They declared themselves possessed as absolute owners by right of conquest of all public property besides cash. Thus in New York they asserted ownership of ninety-nine million dollars’ worth of suspension bridges and in Boston they took bridges to the value of ten and a quarter millions. They took the New York City armories valued at fifteen millions. They declared that they owned the subways valued at 100 millions.

All United States property, comprising fortifications everywhere in the conquered territory, navy yards, post offices, customs houses, lighthouses, treasury buildings, and court houses were listed in proclamations throughout the occupied country as good and legal prizes of war. The property so seized in the city of New York alone amounted to sixty-six millions.[163]

Working Furiously for Defense

The United States was working furiously for defense. In the steel country of Pennsylvania and the West, all the works were being altered to turn them into factories for shells, shrapnel, big guns and gun carriages. At Watervliet and Indian Head the capacity of the shops had been enlarged immensely and there was not a moment in the day or the night when there was a pause in the headlong labor. Powder was being made in the Middle West, in places safe from any possible attack by aeroplanes. The flying machine works of Hammondsport, and Buffalo, in New York, San Diego, and Overland Park, were turning out machines at the rate of one and sometimes two a month. Half a dozen other factories were being erected.[164]

A group of automobile factories had agreed to turn out 2-ton trucks at the rate of forty a day, and, indeed, already were producing thirty a day. One concern was working under a contract to produce enough automobiles every day to carry one regiment, each machine capable of making 100 miles an hour with four men and ten days’ rations of food and ammunition. Others had agreed between them to produce enough motors in every working day to carry five or six regiments.[165]

The Handicap of Unpreparedness

The efficient land was rising to the occasion with magnificent ability and temper. So far, those were justified who had said that America could meet a crisis with miraculous speed. But there were things that could not be met with speed—and these things were vital.

All the industrial efficiency on the land could not provide 35,000 trained and experienced officers: and that number was needed if the country was to put half a million volunteers into the field.

All the efficiency of men and engines could not correct, except by tedious, slow training, the defects in an army system that had made it impossible in peace times to concentrate 16,000 men and officers at the San Antonio border of Texas in less than three months after the order was issued.[166]

All the efficiency could not alter the fact that of the whole militia force of the United States, enrolled as “men armed with the rifle,” exclusive of the four divisions already with the army, there were only 24,000, or 38 per cent., who could shoot well enough to make them suitable for battle purposes.[167]

The capture of Massachusetts and Connecticut had cut off at one blow the source of 68 per cent. of all the ammunition and weapon works of the United States. The army, already short of cartridges, would have to remain short till all the complicated and minutely accurate machinery for making them could be built and established.[168]

There were only 425,000 rifles in reserve. The volunteers would have to drill without arms till factories could be put into operation.

What Had Been Lost

Seven militia mobilization camps were in the territory lost to the United States. One thousand acres of powder works in New Jersey were in the possession of the invaders.

The volunteers needed shirts, breeches, underwear. The four leading cities in the manufacture of cotton goods, the four that led in making woolen goods and the leaders in making clothing were cut off from the United States.

The volunteers needed shoes. More than all, they needed shoes. Shoes, shoes, and again shoes! Americans realized with heavy hearts how these unromantic things were making them helpless—what a blow it had been to their defense when the great Massachusetts factories of Lynn, Brockton, Haverhill, and Boston with their un-replaceable machinery had been taken. These cities and cities scattered through the rest of lost New England, had produced 57 per cent. of the boots and shoes for the United States.

The army was short, even under its old, economical estimates of more than 500 field artillery. To put the army of 300,000 volunteers into the field, it would need at least 1,500. In the days of peace it had been calculated that the shortage then existing could not be made good in less than two years. Now, with half a hundred factories toiling, with blackened Watervliet roaring and clanging as never a factory had labored before, guns were being turned out at a rate that promised to reach surprising dimensions when all the shops were fully at work.

Six Months of Helplessness

But at best there were six months during which nothing could be done except to prepare. During those six months, while the country poured forth its money prodigally to make up in wasteful speed what it had neglected during long years, the invader could sit in the conquered seaboard cities and suck them dry.

Nothing on earth could alter it. The volunteers had to learn everything. They had to learn to shoot, to survive slush and rain and cold, to dig trenches. They had to become hardened enough to march twenty and more miles a day with blankets, half a tent, frying pan, plate, knife, fork, water bottle, first aid kit, an emergency ration, an intrenching tool and bayonet, a heavy rifle and ninety heavy cartridges.

The militia regiments had to be raised from peace strength to war strength. That meant that into every company of 65 trained or partially trained men there would have to be an influx of 85 utterly untrained ones who would, of course, instantly destroy the original efficiency of the organization till they were trained up to it.[169]

“Six months at the very lowest possible estimate!” said the Secretary of War. “And it will be six months of such work as this country never did before in its history.”[170]

Six Months of Bleeding

“Six months with the North Atlantic Seaboard amputated,” said the President, “means six months of bleeding to death.”

Even without the mortal blow that was struck at the country’s commerce by the locking of its Atlantic and Gulf ports, this severance of New England and the metropolitan district of New York did, indeed, cause a huge, bleeding wound.

Of the seventy-five manufacturing cities of the United States whose manufactured product ranked highest in value and played the greatest part in the industrial wealth of the country, the invader possessed twenty-seven, or more than one-third.

Fifty-six thousand manufacturing establishments were in his control. Those of the New England States had produced 30 per cent. of the total wealth of the country in manufactures. When they were cut off, the blow struck every human being in the continent who needed their products, and every human being who depended directly or indirectly on the income from their purchases of raw material.

The United States had lost the source of 65 per cent. of its woolen manufactures in value, 48 per cent. of the cotton manufactures, 45 per cent. of the bronze and brass products.

All the amounts involved were enormous. The annual value of the raw material used by the conquered territory was beyond 2 billion dollars. The value of the completed products was 5 billions, 642 millions.[171]

An Incalculable Prize

The Nation, thus maimed, stared aghast at the value of the prize that had been wrested from it for lack of a little insurance. Its individuals had paid scrupulously each year for insurance against fire and crime and had scrutinized their policies with the utmost care. But they had permitted their chosen representatives in Legislatures and Congress to do as they chose about insuring against war, to spend money as they would or not at all, and to accept a worthless policy obtained at an extravagant price.

Now they faced a loss that, for the time at least, might well be called total. The value of Boston and the city of New York alone in taxable property was 9 billions and 880 millions. Five cities of Connecticut were worth 483 millions. Massachusetts had 22 cities exclusive of Boston whose value was 1 billion and 415 millions. Counting all New England, with New York and Boston, and leaving out the New Jersey conquest, the enemy’s loot was 15 billions and 386 millions, exclusive of the public city, State and Federal property that he had seized.[172]

What Can He Do With It?

“But what can he do with it?” the people of the rest of the United States began to ask each other presently.

Men had prophesied in the beginning that the conqueror with his guns turned on the great cities, would extort vast tribute under threat of leveling them. But there had swept through the land a spirit that would face anything rather than to purchase safety and ignoble peace. “Let him destroy the cities and all the land!” said America. “We will build the sea-board up again, better than before. We will recompense our fellow-citizens for every scrap that they lose. But we shall never pay blackmail!”

Had the invader entertained any such plan, this spirit that flamed unmistakably through the continent would have daunted him. But he had no such puerile design as to turn his wonderful prize into ashes. If his errand was one of brigandage and robbery, it was brigandage and robbery in the most scientific modern terms. It was brigandage that enlisted in its conception and prosecution the brains of a world’s financiers, the keen wit of a world’s merchants who wanted to win back the markets of the earth and the far-sighted policy of international diplomats.

For almost a month the conqueror did not show his hand. For almost a month the seaboard from the end of Maine to New Jersey remained sealed. Then, suddenly, he gave the United States his reply to the question: “What Can He Do With It?”

The Invader’s Reply

He opened the wires. He did not send out a word over them. The people of New England and New York did it. They sent out a flood of dispatches that were like a great cry for help. It was the invader’s reply, through them. The reply was “Starvation!”

“We need coal! We need iron and steel! We need cotton!” cried the people of New England. “We have used up all our raw materials. We cannot work any longer unless you ship to us.”

“We must re-open our banks!” said Boston and New York and the hundred other cities. “We are paralyzed without our exchanges and relations with the financial system of the country.”

“We need foodstuffs!” said they all.

The first quick decision of the country was one of wrathful refusal to furnish the supplies that the enemy might fatten himself. But the importunities from the conquered places grew. They went to all the land, west and north and south. They came at the White House like a storm.

“We are on the edge of panic! We have three millions of factory workers who will starve unless we can instantly reëstablish our industries and our finances!”

“It is intolerable!” said the President, his face white with anger. “It is simply a disguised form of blackmail. He means to make us finance him; for, of course, he will levy contributions on the country as soon as money begins to flow in.”

“He Has Us!”

“He has us!” said the Secretary of the Treasury. “As we were helpless against his cannon, so we are helpless against the new weapon that he has drawn—the starvation of our own people. All the messages that we have received prove that. He has shown them that their fate is wholly in our hands—that if we refuse to send them money and foodstuffs and raw material, they will have to blame us for the consequences.”

The President of the United States arose. “Gentlemen,” he said, “they are our own people. There is nothing else that we can do!”[173]

  .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .

That is the story of The Invasion of America. There was nothing else that we could do!

How the land labored heart-breakingly to put an army into the field; how the invader for eight long months held the conquered land, and under his efficient mastery made its soil produce prodigally, its manufactories pour forth their wealth in redoubled measure; how he laid tax after tax on the men whose necks were under his foot; how, toward the end, he gathered his transports in all the harbors; and how, when three American armies, each 500,000 strong, began to move toward the coast from three grand bases, he embarked all his men within one hundred and twenty hours and sailed away unscathed—these things were but inevitable consequences.

The United States of America never knew how much wealth the Conquestadore had squeezed from the conquered territory in requisitions, in fines, in license fees, in taxes on imports and exports, and in war levies. Statisticians figured for years afterward to discover from the wildly tangled accounts how much he had extorted. They figured and quarreled for a generation over the vast amounts that the United States had lost by losing the markets of the world; for when her ports were opened, she found that the markets were gone.

Men said that from first to last the invading army had taken a sum not short of four billions of dollars. But whatever the sum, it was as nothing to the wound that had struck America near the heart—a brave Nation, a greatly capable Nation, made to grovel for her life because, in a world of men, she had failed to prepare for what men might do.

 
THE END

Typographical error corrected by the etext transcriber:
one of the men in Wash-ton=> one of the men in Washington {pg 156}

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