Image unavailable: “There were ships moving toward the Long Island Coast as if to threaten New York.”“There were ships moving toward the Long Island Coast as if to threaten New York.”
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 shiphad 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 telephonemessages 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 haveno 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.
Image unavailable: “There in Connecticut lay the Army.... Miles of tents separated by geometrically straight rows of Company streets.”“There in Connecticut lay the Army.... Miles of tents separated by geometrically straight rows of Company streets.”
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 qualificationcourse 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 passagesso 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 thearmy 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 willgive 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 hospitaland 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 thehighways, 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 onthe 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 preventedthem 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 enemyplanes 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,
Image unavailable: “Up mounted a hydro-aeroplane.”“Up mounted a hydro-aeroplane.”
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,
Image unavailable: “The Dragons of twelve-inch mortars that squatted in hidden pits.”“The Dragons of twelve-inch mortars that squatted in hidden pits.”
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 secondarybatteries 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 upwardswing 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 nearthem. 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 forthem 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 newAdmiral. 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.
Thefirst 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
Image unavailable: “Destroyers moved straight for the harbor in a long line.”“Destroyers moved straight for the harbor in a long line.”
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 communicationswith 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. Theywill 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 toprotect 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 theseunits 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 partsof 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 wirelessagain. “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