lay batteries of 12-inch all-steel rifled cannon. Hidden under facings
of earth, steel and concrete, they sat on disappearing carriages and
pneumatic gun-lifts that would swing them up as if they weighed ounces
instead of tons, and instantly plunge them back again into cover after
firing.
Deep under earth embankments, squatting in concrete-lined graves,
12-inch mortars, sixteen to a group, stared upward at the patches of sky
over their heads, which was all that their men would see while they were
firing, however bitter the fight might be.
A single shot from one of the long, graceful rifles might sink a ship,
if it were well placed. A single salvo from the mortars, the sixteen
firing together, assuredly would. And they could do it. Aimed by
mathematics, they were sure to strike the spot.[38]
A score of serving devices in the defenses were slaves to the steel
champions. Searchlights in armor waited like men-at-arms to point with a
long white finger at their prey. Mine fields and emplacements and cable
conduits were there to force the ships to steer where the guns could
strike them most surely. Masked by trees and mounds, concealed by every
device against betrayal, were range-finders and fire-control stations.
Here sat experts who had studied the most occult questions of
arithmetic, geometry, surveying, navigation, and cartography for one
purpose--to direct those long guns true. They were provided with
exquisite instruments for calculating angles and distances to an inch,
though the point to be ascertained were ten nautical miles and more
away.
Before them lay charts of the sea-area that they were guarding. Let a
ship come within the limit of their apparatus, and in the time required
to speak into a telephone the gun-pits miles away down the defense-line
would crack with the explosion of tons of smokeless powder.
They were nearly perfect, those works--as engineering works. They were
fully armed with the engines to make them malignant to the ultimate
fatal degree. The ten-mile area of sea that lay so bright and dimpled
that morning might well have been black as the Wings of Death; for a few
little motions of the waiting men under the pretty grassy mounds would
unfold those pinions.
_The Joint in America’s Armor_
But under the iron visages was weakness. In none of the defenses on this
morning when the time had come for their test, were there more than
one-half the number of men required to hold them.[39]
They could fight the guns, so long as the action remained a ship-to-fort
action; but if the enemy attacked at the rear, from the land, they were
not in sufficient force to meet him and throw him back. Attacked from
the land, the men of the defenses would have to retire to the inner keep
and fight from shelter with rapid-fire guns. And when the defenses thus
began to defend themselves, their hour would have struck.[40]
Still, for the time they were deadly. The enemy fleet paid them the
supreme tribute of scrupulous respect. Not a vessel ventured after dawn
into the deadly circle of their reach. To make sure that no vessel
should expose itself by accident, the mine-layers of the enemy fleet
were even then moving well outside of the zone of extreme fire, and
laying immense steel buoys, painted a vivid scarlet.
These scarlet buoys outlined an area of safety that was shaped somewhat
like a pentagon with its apex at Block Island and its base on the Rhode
Island coast between Watch Hill and Point Judith.
It was a base marking out five miles of beach that was safe both from
the fire of the Long Island Sound defenses and from the shots of the
Narragansett defenses.
Here day-light revealed a land occupied in orderly, quiet, perfect
military manner. Inland, as far as the naval guns could protect them,
lay the men of the advance landing party behind their machine-gun
positions. For miles beyond that, east and west, their patrols had cut
telegraph and telephone wires, and occupied points that commanded roads
by which attacking forces might approach.
[Illustration: “For miles beyond that the enemy’s patrols had occupied
points....”]
On the beach, where the blocks and tackle and hoisting derricks had been
rigged in the night, gun-floats were being brought to the beach with
cannon and caissons. Under the pull of centrifugal blocks these were
hoisted out and dropped in shore on railway tracks that led over the
sand to firm ground.
There motor trucks and traction engines, all brought to land during the
night, took them and hurried them to positions ready for fight, or to
park them ready for moving when the advance should begin.
_Destroying the Railroad of Southern New England_
From vantage points inland, from hills on Fisher’s Island, from such
venturesome spies as M-9, went the news to Washington, and so through
the land. The crowds in the cities, dense even at that early hour of the
morning, read on the bulletin boards:
“Enemy effected a landing during the night on Rhode Island between
Narragansett Bay and Long Island Sound. Transports are now close in
preparing to put troops ashore. Scouts report four liners aggregating
one hundred thousand tons. Army officials estimate that at the usual
allowance of two men per ton this means fifty thousand men. More
transports waiting under Block Island.”
“Now is the time to strike ’em!” It was not one man in one crowd who
said it. In every city where there were crowds there arose these
speakers--the excitable, passionate orators who are born of every great
crisis and who, in such moments, find willing listeners.
“Now is the time to strike ’em, before they can bring more men ashore!
They should have been attacked in the night! What kind of Generals have
we got, to let ’em land, instead of throwing ’em back into the sea as
fast as they came? Where is our army? Keeping itself safe?”
The army, with ten thousand civilian workers impressed as they were
needed, was destroying the railroad of southern New England. It was
tearing up the shore line of the New York, New Haven and Hartford
Railroad from New Haven to New London and from New London to Providence.
It was throwing the rails on flat cars to be whirled away westward and
northward. Concrete and stone embankments, steel bridges, and tunnels
were sent skyward through the night with dynamite.
All the connecting system from New Haven north to Hartford and from New
London north to Worcester was being destroyed. Locomotives and rolling
stock that could not be removed were being sent down grades to crash
into wreckage, or blown up or set afire. A curious intoxication of
destruction was on the population that night. Prosperous, dignified
citizens came out with axes or with oil and fire, and helped in the
ruin.
In fire and dirt and amid shattering roars of explosion and rumbling of
falling trestles they worked on hundreds of miles of iron highway,
desperately, frantically, shouting aloud, willing to tear their soft
hands and to risk limb and even life, rather than to wait inactive, and
listen for news, and dread what was to happen.
They were tearing up their civilization; and they did it with a savage
delight, that nothing might be left to the foe.
_The American Army’s Lack of “Eyes”_
In the Army Headquarters, where a single short order had set loose all
this saturnalia of destruction, the Commanding General and his staff
were busied with something that was of more immediate importance to
them. Desperately they were thrusting out for information, and always
they were baffled by superior numbers, superior resources.
They had pushed cavalry toward the coast, and it had been driven back by
artillery and long-range fire from the ships, whose aim was controlled
by aeroplane signals from the sky and wireless from the shore. They had
pushed out motor scouts, and the artillery had found them. Always, at
every approach, during the night or since daylight, the ships’ fire had
swept the roads.
Now, scarcely an hour after sunrise, the army aeroplanes had come back,
after only haphazard scouting. They had not been able to fly over the
invaded coast. Wherever they tried it, they reported, they were met by
enemy planes in superior numbers.
One United States air-man had been driven by four enemy planes into
Narragansett Bay where he had been picked up by boats from the Newport
Torpedo Station. Two others, borne down by three enemy machines faster
than they, and fired at by anti-air-craft guns from an in-lying ship,
had barely managed to escape behind the defenses of Fort Wright in the
Sound.
The others had been pressed back, inexorably, by the screen of naval
planes that swarmed over the coast.[41]
The enemy planes came from the sea. To the marveling eyes in the
American defenses, it seemed as if the ocean were spewing them forth.
One after another rose from the Atlantic under Block Island.
Three strange vessels lay there. They had funnels set extremely far aft,
like certain types of clumsy tramp-ships, but they were big as passenger
liners and their lines showed all the efficiency of the naval architect.
The great sweep of their decks forward was as bare as the deck of a
racing schooner yacht.
A structure on short trestles like a skid-way rose from this deck at the
bow, projecting slightly.
It was there that the aeroplanes were being spewed. These were
mother-ships.
Torpedo-netted, guarded by destroyers, guarded even by a small
semi-rigid dirigible that hovered a thousand feet high over-head, they
were sending out spies to search the land.
_Twenty-Five Aeroplanes Against a Swarm_
The two United States fliers, standing by their machines in Fort Wright,
looked at the ascending swarm. “No wonder!” said one. “You know how many
one of those Nations had at last accounts? Twelve hundred!”[42]
“And we’ve got thirteen in the Army and twelve in the Navy!” His
companion laughed. “And Servia had sixty, before the Great War!”
They said no more, but watched in silence. That ascending, continually
growing line of flying things was like something that was writing into
the sky the word: “Resources!”
Suddenly the American air-men noticed that these new machines were not
flying to the coast near them. They were turning off, in regular order.
One turned west, to fly over Long Island. The next one turned east,
toward Buzzards Bay. They alternated thus till the entire division had
separated, and disappeared.
One of the scouts slapped his thigh. “I believe,” said he, “that they
are going to show themselves to Boston and New York!”
That was at nine o’clock in the morning. At noon the crowds in the two
cities were startled by a distant roar that grew, almost before they had
first heard it, into a thundering that shook the air. They stared upward
and beheld the first squadron of armed flying machines that America ever
had seen.
IV
THE COAST DEFENSES FALL
Armored, with the bright colors of the enemy on their under-bodies, the
aeroplanes from the enemy fleet flew low. What few anti-aircraft guns
the United States possessed were with the army. Around the peaceful
American cities were no encircling fortifications, no batteries, no
military works that might conceal marksmen. The air-men knew that there
was nothing to fear.
They skimmed close to the State House on Boston’s Beacon Hill. They flew
over the tall municipal building of New York and dipped toward the City
Hall. They appeared over Providence and Fall River, over Brockton, over
Bridgeport and New Haven. They passed over every one of the
factory-cities of New Jersey that crowd to be near New York’s harbor.
Where they appeared it was as if they bore some instant charm to turn
the world to stone.
[Illustration: “They flew over the tall municipal building of New
York.”]
All the city noises stopped, dead. All motion stopped. Wheels stopped
turning and feet stopped moving and every white face was turned upward.
For that long moment of dumb fear, men saw nothing except the
wide-winged bodies. They heard nothing except the yelping and droning of
the hundred-horse-power motors over them.
Then they fled. Motor-men and drivers bent low, and yelled, and sent
their vehicles ahead blindly. The crowds rushed every door-way. They
fought for the protection of narrow cornices as if they were
bomb-proofs. They squeezed themselves close to the sides of buildings,
and clung to smooth iron and granite, and stared upward, waiting for
bombs.
Instead of bombs, they saw things raining down gently, lightly--little
weighted pennants that circled downward in lovely spirals and dropped on
the streets with scarcely a sound.
Into every crowded street, into every open square of half a hundred
cities that day, the hostile air-men dropped these pennants.
They were printed. They bore proclamations addressed to the people of
America.
THE ENEMY’S PROCLAMATION
“Our armies have landed,” said the proclamation. “We shall advance
on your cities at once. Any attempt to defend them will mean their
destruction. Civilians are warned against making any demonstration,
whether with arms or otherwise. Infractions of this Rule of War
will be punished by summary execution. Houses from which hostile
acts are committed will be destroyed. Towns whose civilian
population resists will be destroyed. Take warning!”
Recovering from their shock of fear, the first impulse of the Americans
who read these proclamations was one of rage. Their cities had grown
proud in unchallenged greatness. These pennants, slowly raining from
their sky, were infuriating insults.
Had the invader appeared in that moment, the people would have torn up
the paving blocks to fight him.
In the State House in Boston there were said the words that uttered the
emotion of all the cities along the Atlantic coast. In that old,
rebellious town, where American liberty had been nurtured in the very
presence of an armed foe, there were gathered many eminent citizens,
with the officials, the Mayor and the Governor of their State.
One of these officials had a pennant in his hands. “What can we do?” he
asked. “If we had all the militia of the State here, we would have less
than 6,000 men. If the foe arrives, and lays his guns on the
town--gentlemen, they will be guns that fire high explosives and
incendiary shells. We have nothing to fight with. If the army cannot
check him before he arrives, we must--to save our people’s lives, we
must surrender peaceably!”[43]
He turned to a man who bore a family name identified with Boston’s
history from the time of its settlement. His ancestors had stood in
Faneuil Hall with James Otis when he dedicated it to the cause of
liberty.
“_Let Us Destroy It!_”
He took the proclamation, held it for a moment while he looked around
the circle, and then crumpled it suddenly, angrily, in his fist.
Throwing it to the floor, he set his foot on it.
“I say,” he cried with flashing eyes, “let him destroy it! Better still,
let us destroy it! When the enemy approaches, let us send our Boston
town up in flame and fragments! Let us leave him not so much as a rivet
to pick up for loot!”
There were many men there, of many minds. They had many interests to
guard, and many responsibilities to bear. But for a moment he carried
them with him. They waved their hands and shouted assent.
It was only for a moment. “If all thought like you!” said one, an old,
grave man. “But we have 700,000 people, and they are not soldiers or
philosophers. They’re human men. It is laid on us to protect them, at
whatever price to our National pride. If humiliation is the price that
we must pay for our past carelessness, why, gentlemen, we must pay it,
bitter though it is.”
So it was in New York, in Philadelphia, in a score of cities between and
around them. Everywhere was the first outburst of fury and unrecking
heroism, and then the sober second thought born not of cowardice but of
cold logic. This north-eastern Atlantic seaboard with its chain of
twelve million city dwellers, was no Holland to drown itself under its
own sea in order to destroy its foe. These cities were no Moscows, to
devour themselves in fire that the enemy might perish with them. This
was the United States of America, and this was the Twentieth
Century--and the men, no less brave, no less patriotic, faced the
conditions of their place and time.
They faced it from Portland, Maine, to the Capes of Virginia. If the
army could not stop the invader, they must fall.
They formed committees of safety. They wrestled with their top-heavy
municipal machineries to make them answer the sharp need. Under the
stress, all the defects of their political rule stood out
uncompromisingly, not to be denied. Their over-staffed departments were
lost in the ingenious mazes of their own contriving. There was only one
answer to the inextricable, blind confusion. It was martial law.
_Volunteers Who Could Not Even Be Shod_
But here, too, there was inefficiency--inefficiency that had been
cultivated and tended, like a plant, by politics through the heedless
years. In the armories there were no reserve supplies of weapons or
ammunition for the volunteers who came to offer their services.
Although the United States government had given the States enough money
annually for many years back to equip them to full war-strength; and
although the militia nowhere had maintained even one-half of that
strength, there were no reserves of blankets, of uniforms, of tents, of
cots. Doctors who offered their services found that there was no place
for them, because there were no ambulances, no field hospitals, no
surgical instruments, no anæsthetics and no medicines. There had not
been enough for the troops that took the field, though every company had
less men than even its insufficient peace strength demanded.[44]
The volunteers could not even be shod. Those who were accepted had to
drill in their worthless street shoes, that never could survive the
test of rough roads and mud and water.
Politics! Politics! It stared the appalled citizens in the face wherever
they turned, as it had stared them in the face for a generation--but now
they had to look and see! It was politics that had left their State
militias to blunder along, each by itself, without agreement or settled
plan. It was politics that now had sent their plucky, intelligent,
capable young men into the field insufficiently equipped, trained or
organized. It was politics that now left their cities bare, to be made a
sport of.
At the recruiting depots of the regular army it was politics again that
over-bore the recruiting officers with eager, courageous applicants whom
they could not use. What they needed now was men who were ready NOW--not
men who needed six months’ training. These applicants, offering
themselves by thousands, were city-born and city-bred. They were men who
never in all their lives had slept except under a roof; who never had
lain in rain and storm; who had been saved by their city from doing a
dozen simple things that men of the open do for themselves without a
second thought.
Not one in a thousand of these volunteers ever had built a fire of
sticks, or pitched a tent or even washed dishes. Not one of five
thousand ever had held a gun in his hands. There were thousands there,
and thousands again, who did not even know what it was to be in the
dark--for they had slept all their lives in the electrically lighted
city.
_Needed--Not Men But Reserves!_
It was not men that the regular army needed. It was reserves! And never
a Congress of all the Congresses that had talked and voted and
appropriated had voted a practical system of army reserves![45]
Of all the men who had been trained by previous army experience, the War
Department could not call on one unless he chose to volunteer. If those
men--invaluable to the country at this moment--offered themselves, they
offered themselves one by one, here and there and everywhere, scattered
through a land of three and a quarter million square miles. Enlisted
thus, they were futile individuals lost in hordes
[Illustration]
[Illustration: “The efficient, prepared, resourceful invader was landing
his army, not only without losing a man, but without getting a man’s
feet wet.”]
of raw recruits. Could they have been called together by their
government, they would have formed perfect regiments, ready for instant,
efficient, priceless service.
While the United States, civilian and military, was working hopelessly
to make up in desperate hours for long years of waste, the efficient,
prepared, resourceful invader was landing his army, not only without
losing a man, but without getting a man’s feet wet. So perfect were the
dispositions of this expedition that the commander had been able to
order, “Our troops must land perfectly dry,” and the order was carried
out.[46]
Every transport had three broad gangways to a side. Never for a moment
were these gangways bare of equipped men, moving file after file into
the enormous flat-bottomed landing barges. Never for a moment was the
sea without long tows of them, each bearing two hundred men to shore
with their rifles between their knees, ready.[47]
_Preparedness Versus Unpreparedness_
In the camp of the United States Army at that moment men were breaking
green horses for cavalry and artillery purposes. On the coast, the
enemy’s four-decked horse transports were sending trained mounts into
broad floats with derricks and slings, lowering away with head and tail
lines to prevent struggling, with nose lines to bridles to prevent them
from turning in the air, with men standing by below to put little bags
of salt into each horse’s mouth to quiet it as soon as it touched the
floats.[48]
Nothing had been forgotten, nothing left to be improvised. The
horse-floats had hinged sterns. Backed into the beach, these hinged
boards dropped down and formed gang-planks. Sailors threw collision mats
on them to prevent slipping. It required less than a minute to lower a
horse from the ships to the floats. In less than half a minute each
horse was unloaded from them and set ashore. To empty each float of its
cargo of twenty horses, and to have each craft off the beach and under
tow again for another load, was a matter of less than forty minutes.
Almost as swiftly, at another end of the beach, guns were being landed
from the same type of floats, shoal and wide-beamed, that could be run
well up on shore and could withstand the pounding of the surf. They
brought four light field pieces with their limbers to a load, or two
heavy field artillery pieces. They were landing field howitzers of
calibers that the United States Army did not possess. This artillery has
been coming ashore for hours. It had begun to come before dawn. Still
there was more arriving.
Yet the beach never was occupied for a moment. The guns were rushed
inland, the men were rushed inland, the horses were rushed inland.
Twelve hours after the first landing party had prepared the way, Rhode
Island was occupied by 30,000 foot, 3,000 cavalry and 50 batteries of
artillery--almost two full divisions that lay in a great belligerent
front snarling with guns--a perfect, complex, often-assembled,
often-tested machine.[49]
This was the time for the American army to strike, before the enemy
could increase his forces and move forward to attack.
But the American army was a complex machine that never had been
assembled before, or tested before. The Regular Army never had been
together with the Organized Militia, and the Organized Militias of the
various States never had seen each other. “An uncoördinated army of
allies,” its Commander had called it, “with all the inherent weakness of
allies, emphasized by the unusual number of allies.”[50]
_The Uncoördinated and Unorganized American Army_
It was an army of which neither the regulars nor the militia had been
organized into divisions at the time when it should have been done, the
only time when it could have been done--in the long days of peace. Until
it was so organized, it was an army only in numbers. For operation
against a prepared, organized enemy it was not an army but merely a
multitude of units, whose trained and perfect ones would inevitably be
sacrificed to the errors and weaknesses of the imperfect ones.[51]