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
[Illustration: “He steered his craft, awash, from behind Fisher’s
Island, at dawn.”]
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.