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,
[Illustration: “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,
[Illustration: “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 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.
III
THE LANDING
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
[Illustration: “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.