“There are at least 150,000 men, as was calculated. They are
magnificently organized, with reserves of everything. They have an
enormous supply of artillery--at least ten guns to every thousand
infantry and cavalry. Their machine gun companies also are
extraordinarily large.”[80]
“And what is their disposition?”
“They were still moving men around to our front,” answered the spy. “I
should say, General, that you now have, or will have before the end of
the day, approximately one hundred thousand men facing you.”
“And the others?”
“Everything indicates that they are planning to move against Boston,
while the larger force attacks us, sir. Country people told me that they
are holding Taunton now with a strong force. They were moving men
through Pawtucket this morning on the Providence railroad line for
Boston.”
“Did you see any movement that might menace Worcester immediately?”
“They have already repaired the railroad from Providence to Woonsocket.”
“Then it’s time for us to get out of this. Gentlemen, you all know what
to do. Issue your orders at once.”
_The Retreat of the American Army_
Eight hours later the enemy army advanced suddenly. Its southern wing
pushed forward, across Rhode Island and entered Connecticut. Its
northern wing, advancing more slowly because it had to repair railroads
and clear obstructed roads before it, extended itself gradually
northward toward Worcester.
The extreme southern line, advancing from Westerly, took Stonington,
Groton and the new London Navy Yard, and held the eastern shore of the
Thames River. Another force took Norwich and crossed the Thames at that
place.
Gradually the line straightened out and formed into the drive that was
to sweep the American army before it, or crush it. But the American
army, with everything lacking except transport, was not there, either
to be swept or crushed. It was retreating swiftly, in perfect order.
As the last wheel rolled out of Springfield, the town shook with the
explosions that were wrecking the dismantled arsenal.
Eastward, two divisions of enemy forces, perfectly appointed to act as
independent armies, were converging on Boston.
VI
THE RISING OF NEW ENGLAND
New England was filmy red with bursting maple buds. Silver troops of
rain floated over the low hills in the dawn, and left April shining. The
orderly land lay lovely and serene under the tranquil blessing of the
New England spring whose memory draws its sons, soon or late, from all
the world’s places to go home.
It was such a morning “promising to become hot” as had lain on
Massachusetts in the dawn of April 19, 1775, when men were gathering at
Concord and Lexington.
The country was as still as it must have been in that far-off day. The
mill-towns were still and smokeless. The machineries were still. There
was no cry of plowmen in the fields.
It was a supine New England, hushed, apprehensive and conquered. So, at
least, it seemed to the invaders whose patrols, spreading fanwise, were
beginning to pierce the country in all directions, pushing forward far
in advance of their armies, and finding no opposition.
Through New England the church and town clocks struck: Seven. The land
was peaceful as death. The hour passed. The lazy clocks began to strike:
Eight.
In a village north of New Bedford stood a little crowd of farmers,
gathered around the general store and listening to the sheriff. He was
warning them that they must not attempt to resist the invading troops
when they came.
“I know that you--and you,” said he, pointing to men as he spoke,
“brought arms with you. You’d better give them up to me.”
“And you an American!” growled one of the men. The sheriff did not
retort. He was scarcely past middle age; but there was a great, slow
patience in his face that made him look old.
He shook his head and said: “It’s only for your own sake.”
_The Modern Paul Revere_
“Look!” cried a farmer. “Who is coming here?”
The man who was coming was a man on a motorcycle. Man and machine were
so coated with dust, were speeding so desperately, that even without war
in the land one would stare at this flying thing, one would wait with
eyes and lips open to learn what startling message it was carrying.
Man, roaring motor, and their brother pillar of dust crashed by. They
had disappeared before the breathless watchers realized that the man had
waved an arm at them and had screamed: “Soldiers!”
A farmer ran to his wagon and pulled out a rifle from its hiding place
under the wagon-seat. “Come on, boys!” he said.
“Listen! Listen!” The sheriff shouldered forward. “Men! Neighbors! Old
friends! For God’s sake, listen! You have no right to fight.”
“What?” The sheriff’s young brother, sturdy, handsome, suddenly
ferocious, brought his face close to him. “No right to defend our
country? Are you crazy, Jim?”
The patient man shook his head again. “It is against the rules of war.”
“Then curse the rules of war!” shouted the younger. “Are you a coward?”
The sheriff reached out and touched his brother’s arm. It was a secret,
almost a timid, act. The brother threw off the appealing hand.
“Don’t touch me!” He spoke through set teeth. “If you are a coward and
traitor, may you be damned through all eternity! Again! For the last
time! Will you fight?”
The sheriff raised his hands, dumbly. The men went to their wagons and
returned with arms.
_New England’s Stone Wall_
“To that stone wall yonder!” said one.
He pointed into a field with a rough stone wall dividing its center
three or four hundred yards from the road. This man was an old hunter,
and the others had followed him often. He took command now as a matter
of course.
The sheriff watched them flounder through the plowed field. He stood
still, for a minute. Then he hurried to his house, emerged with a gun,
and joined the party.
Two miles away a squad of ten cavalrymen cantered over a ridge and
examined the country through their field-glasses. They studied the
ground foot by foot, almost inch by inch. Satisfied, they trotted
toward the village.
Around a turn they came on a little knot of women and children who
scurried, screaming, into the ditch. A rider headed off a woman who was
carrying a child. He stooped to her from his tall black horse. Laughing,
he nodded and said something to her in a foreign language.
Stooping still lower, he snatched the child suddenly and swung it out of
the trembling woman’s arm. He lifted it, and danced it up and down.
He fumbled in his saddle-bag and brought out some chocolate which he fed
to the baby. Then he handed it back to the mother, roaring again with
laughter at her frightened face. The other riders, laughing also, waved
their hands at the group and cantered on.
They entered the village, swiftly examined it, riding through gardens
and into alleys, assuring themselves that there was nothing there to
mask danger for the troops that were behind them. They passed out of the
other end and into the road leading past the plowed field with the stone
wall.
It was still, and very lonely. There was not a living being in sight
throughout all the softly tinted land. On a tree branch that hung over
the stone wall, a bluebird began to sing with all the power of its
little throat.
It brought a hot choking to the throat of a farmer who was lying behind
the stone wall, just under the bird. Its song had welled out just as he
was raising his rifle. But his gray Yankee eye sought the sights, his
sinewy brown hand gripped the weapon, and he fired.
_The Firing of the First Shot_
He fired, and pumped another cartridge into the breech and fired again,
so quickly that his second shot had roared out before a cavalryman who
had pitched forward with the first bullet through his side, had quite
toppled from his saddle.
All along the stone wall they fired, and pumped their magazines, and
fired. They were men who had hunted deer in early autumn cover and
learned to send bullets driving after them at hot speed on the jump. The
big horses and the big men, broad in the open road, were easy targets.
But they were not deer. They were men. More than one of the rifle
bullets went wild because the marksman’s horror shook his hand.
In the road lay two men, lashing in the dust. Down the road went a
bleeding horse that screamed. It dragged its rider, smashing his face
against the ground. In the field was a soldier, trying to balance
himself on his saddle, with one hand gripping at his breast while the
other reached out grotesquely, as if groping for something to which he
might hold.
A farmer behind the wall, unable to endure the sight of the men who were
rolling in the road like animals trying to bury their agony, fired at
them and made them lie still. “My God!” he said, and cried.
The wounded man fell from the saddle and squatted in a queer hunched
posture in the field, his head between his knees. It was the cavalryman
who had fed the child.
The others scattered, and charged toward the wall. Instantly, the
defenders became cool. Their nerves stopped jumping. These riders,
looming big, with swords out and fury in their eyes, ceased to be men.
They were killers. The farmers shot as steadily as if they were aiming
at deer.
Two riders escaped and galloped headlong down the road back to their
forces. The New England men arose from behind the wall, and ran across
the fields to gain the shelter of a wood-lot. Before they could reach
it, there was a yelling behind them and a dozen troopers were in the
fields, following them desperately.
_In the Stone House_
“To the house!” cried the sheriff. He led the way to an old stone house,
built in Revolutionary times. The cavalrymen reined up sharply. A glance
at the solid little building with window-openings as deep as embrasures,
showed them that it was dangerous. They opened out, remaining carefully
out of rifle shot, and surrounded the place where they could watch it
from all sides. Then one rode back, swiftly.
The watchers sat, easy and careless, as if they had been halted during a
peaceful practice march. Half an hour passed. The immobility of the
soldiers, their passionless watch, was driving the farmers frantic. More
than once the old leader had to growl at a man who wanted to fire,
despite the hopeless distance.
If the tension in the house had lasted much longer, some of these men
would have rushed out. But there came a great sound from the distance.
It might have been thunder, rolling far away. It might have been a river
in flood.
“They’re coming!” said the sheriff’s brother. It was hard for him to
speak. The defenders were all violently thirsty, and they had not had
time to bring water from the well.
They came. Horses, horses, horses! Bayonets, bayonets, bayonets! They
came, and passed along the road, and more came on.
They did not turn off to attack the house. They did not even turn their
heads to look at it. This infuriated the defenders.
Horses, horses, horses! Bayonets, bayonets, bayonets! If the men in the
stone house could have seen other roads, they would have seen each one
so filled with silent, steadily moving columns of men.
A little party of men and horses turned off from the column and entered
the field. Before it was within the range of the rifles, it wheeled. A
shining, glossy little thing pointed at the house. It was field
artillery, sleek, beautiful.
The sheriff’s brother, carried away by rage, fired and fired. He emptied
his magazine at the distant men.
_The War Machine Rolls On_
Along the highway the column moved steadily, silently. No soldier
checked his foot for so much as an instant at the sound of the shots.
Bayonets, bayonets, bayonets! The machine moved on.
It moved on, eyes front, while the captain commanding the cannon snapped
an order. It moved on, bayonets twinkling out of sight in front, and
twinkling past, and twinkling into sight from behind, while the little
gun tore the April morning.
The stone house spouted clouds of dust and powdering stone. It
dissolved. It became a ruin that stared phantomlike through the cloud,
as if it were looking with horribly expanding eyes at the gun.
If the besieged fired in return, the men at the gun did not know it.
Their steel beast drowned the farmers’ tiny efforts in roar and flame.
They passed as a breath. The cavalrymen cantered to the ruin. A half
wall was standing, jagged. The rest was a mound of dirt. Under it lay
fourteen men of Massachusetts. The sheriff lay there, with his face more
patient than ever, and his arm around his brother.
The little gun and its horses and men joined the horses and men that
were moving northward through New England.
Over the field telegraph wire that unreeled behind the advancing force
went the report to the enemy headquarters: “Civilians estimated at about
a dozen fired from ambush, killing eight cavalry. Took refuge in
building. Annihilated.”
It was a perfunctory report telling of a merely perfunctory incident.
But the commander-in-chief, sitting at his ease in headquarters in
Providence, stopped smoking for a moment. “See that the news does not
spread,” said he. “It might raise the country. Reënforce all patrols and
warn them.”
_New England Ablaze_
He was a quick man. His officers were quick and his system of
communication was quick. But the news sped more quickly still. Over
every telephone that was intact, over every telegraph wire that still
worked in New England, by bicycle, on horseback, by men running, the
story was passed from man to man and village to village.
They were fourteen humble men, unknown beyond their own township, when
they crouched behind the stone wall. They were fourteen shining names
before the ruins that covered them had ceased smoking. New England, like
a blazing forest, was ablaze with wrath and fury.
Vain was it now for cautious men to warn or authorities to command. Men
who never in their lives had thought harm to any living thing, dashed
out with smoldering eyes to fight. Prudent men, who never in their lives
had acted on impulse, now acted without a second’s pause for reflection.
Men who had cared all their lives only for their own little affairs,
were all drunken now and thought it nothing to fire one shot for their
country and die behind a stone wall in the dirt.
In Acushnet an old whaling captain, a prosperous, weighty citizen,
emptied his shot gun into a raiding party and was left dead under his
forsythias with the golden blossoms from the volley-torn shrubs covering
him.
Between Taunton and Pawtucket a militia company of field artillery that
had been unable to move its gun because it lacked horses, got it from
its hiding place, and with a party of volunteers who had no firearms,
fought behind piled bags of cement against enemy cavalry till artillery
had to be brought from miles away to destroy them.
South of Woonsocket a band, made up of thirty Massachusetts militia
infantry and sixty factory hands from the town, prevented two companies
of hostile infantry for almost two hours from crossing the Blackstone
River. It was not because they could shoot, or knew how to fight. It was
because they meant to stay there till they died. And it was not until
they were dead that the invaders succeeded in crossing.
New England women who had spent their lives in homely, simple duties,
brought out dippers of water to parched men and cheered them on. They
hid fleeing men in barns and stood by, defiant, when pursuing soldiers
dragged them out and shot them before their eyes.
_As the Men of Old_
Men took down old muskets that had been over chimney-places for a
generation. Their wives and mothers kissed them as they went out to
fight.
Grandparents saw their sons and their sons’ sons lie in ambush in
ancestral pastures that had not echoed to a ruder sound than the lowing
of cows; and they saw them vanish away in red storm, and did not weep.
Dynamite! Dynamite! went the word through Massachusetts and Connecticut.
This was something that the unarmed country had, and that it knew how to
use. Even the peaceful farmers had it, and were practiced in handling
it, from long work in blowing out stumps and rocks. Irish construction
gangs, Italian road-makers, workers of every tongue and race from pits
and quarries, joined the New England men.
They blew up a sunken road through which artillery was lumbering. They
blasted away a steep bank and buried a troop of cavalry. They blew up a
mined road in front of infantry and when it retreated, sprang a second
mine under the soldiers’ feet that exterminated a battalion.
Railroads and roads were blown up before advancing troops and behind
them. Men blew up bridges and prevented their own escape so that the
armed forces caught them as in a trap and slaughtered them at leisure.
Viaducts and works were dynamited that never could have been of any use
to the enemy. It was formless, systemless destruction--but in that very
lack of system lay its danger to the enemy forces.
Had all the men in New England who were engaged in this wild fighting
been gathered in one body, the trained, disciplined soldiers could have
disposed of them in an action so simple that they might scarcely have
named it a skirmish. But this was like a forest fire that, stamped out
in one spot, breaks into roaring flame in another. As it sweeps from
tree tops to tree tops and creeps underground, and flames out in quick
fury miles away, so the warfire raved through Massachusetts and
Connecticut to be crushed out only in detail with detailed, bitter work
through all that long, hot, dusty day.
_Serious to the Enemy_
It was serious. This uprising of an undisciplined population could not
defeat, or even damage seriously, the great army. But it could hamper
it. It would force a wide scattering of troops to break down the
sporadic opposition. It would make a dangerous country--dangerous in
front of the advancing soldiers, dangerous in their rear, continually
dangerous around them.
In that sense it was more serious than deliberate, military opposition
by the American army would have been. Had the enemy commander faced only
a defending army, it would have been a quiet, technical matter of
advance guards against advance guards. These pawns in the old game of
war would have thrust each other back here, receded before each other
there, fighting only when it was forced on them, and so, gradually,
properly, they would have cleared the board that the great game might be
played.
This incoherent uprising was disorganizing all his tactics. From the
western army that had set out to sweep through Connecticut, came
[Illustration: “There had been firing from mill-buildings, which had
been destroyed for punishment.”]
word that everywhere patrols had been attacked. Men in a swift power
boat on the Thames River above New London had succeeded in three places
in firing on scouting parties with a Hotchkiss rifle, apparently taken
from a yacht.
The line north of Norwich along the same river reported four men killed
from ambush. At Willimantic there had been firing from mill buildings,
which had been destroyed for punishment.
The Commander of the brigade that was advancing on Worcester in
Massachusetts from Connecticut had halted his advance, and was asking
headquarters if the extent of the disorder were great enough to imperil
his communications.
The eastern division, moving on Boston, reported that the patrols
had been ordered in from the line North Middleboro--East
Middleboro--Plymouth. “Our men can move only in considerable force,”
reported the Commander. “Small parties are constantly in danger of being
assassinated. The population appears to be in a frenzy. Seven cavalry at
Nemasket, engaged in foraging for their horses, were burned alive in a
barn. We have fired the town. It is still burning. Have shot ten
citizens.”
“My men are getting out of hand,” telegraphed the Commander of a brigade
moving toward Mansfield. “Stern reprisals required at once.”
“_Let Them Have It!_”
“Let them have it!” said the Commander-in-Chief.
“Instant retaliation!” said the field telegraph to the armies. “Order
all brigade commanders to execute disorderly civilians in most public
and exemplary manner possible. Attach placard to bodies proclaiming why
punishment was incurred. Divisional commanders are empowered in their
discretion to order partial or total destruction of offending cities.”
The commanders transmitted the orders to their regimental commanders,
and these to the officers of their battalions and companies. “Crush all
disorder with utmost severity,” they said. What it meant was: “Kill,
burn and destroy!” It meant: “Set fury against fury!” It meant: “Let
your men go!”
It meant what a war of soldiers against battling civilians in a
conquered country always has meant. Both sides had seen their dead. Both
sides were maddened. Now the men with arms, restrained no longer by cold
discipline, broke loose.
Then New England saw such deeds as that quiet landscape never had framed
since the days of its old Indian wars, and perhaps not even then. It saw
housewives hanging from budding apple-trees, with placards pinned to
their breasts saying that they had helped to murder soldiers. It saw New
England people, who, twenty-four hours earlier would not have killed a
chicken without a pang of pity, surround solitary soldiers and do them
to death with their bare hands, while they begged for mercy. It saw
unarmed citizens seized on the roads and hustled to walls and shot while
they were screaming for somebody in authority, that they might prove
their innocence.
The authorities of a score of towns were hanged in their town squares
because troops had been fired on. In many a park that never had seen
anything more formidable than children at their play, hung dead men in a
row--the executed hostages who paid for the acts of men whom they had
not known. A thousand men and women of Connecticut and Massachusetts, it
was reported later, were shot or hanged in that one afternoon.
_New England’s Funeral Curtain_
And over the two States, rising slowly and spreading until the sunny sky
was darkened, there hung, like a funeral curtain over the place of
death, the black smoke of burning villages and towns.
When that April day ended, and the night came down, there was no place
in eastern Connecticut, in all the seventy miles north and south from
New London to Worcester where men could not see the fire of burning
towns or houses. In Massachusetts from New Bedford to Taunton, and from
Taunton north to Brockton, there were fires. All the sky around
Providence was red with it. The smoke drifted over Boston and the
strangling odor filled its streets.
All night the country burned. All night wounded fugitives lay hidden,
gritting their teeth, or, forced by intolerable anguish, crawled out and
surrendered. All night long the troops swept through town after town,
wreaking vengeance.
It was finished in the morning. “The country is pacified,” were the
reports that went to headquarters. There were no gatherings of citizens
anywhere within the province of the army’s operations. They were
forbidden. There were no arms left in the hands of civilians. Houses in
which weapons were found had been destroyed. Men who had been found with
them in their possession were shot. Men with explosives were shot. In
all New England that morning, every man had to be ready, for his life,
to hold out his open hands whenever he met a soldier, and submit to
search.
_The Machine Shakes Down_
Through the two armies ran the orders to restore stiff discipline. The
soldiers came to leash and the big machine shook down. The patrols went
out grimly, with a new meaning in their peering, scrutinizing frowns.
They found a terrorized country, through which they moved unhampered.
“Worcester Occupied” was the early news that went through the United
States. “Heavy Cavalry Body Enters Unopposed.”
“Motor Raiders at Fitchburg,” was the next report. It was followed by
news of raiders east of Worcester.
Bit by bit the enemy was cutting Boston and all Eastern New England off
from the rest of the United States.
East of Providence the advance guard of the army that was threatening
Boston reached the line from Attleboro through Bridgewater and Silver
Lake to Kingston, thus extending across that part of Massachusetts all
the way to Plymouth Bay.[81]
Taunton, according to rumors that reached Boston, was being made the
point for a heavy concentration of men and rolling stock.