reports came from East Brookfield, half way between Worcester and
Springfield in southern Massachusetts; from Willimantic in Central
Connecticut, and from New London on the Long Island Sound shore in the
south. Every road across the whole State north and south was held by
horsemen who were pressing steadily westward, converting all means of
communication to the army’s use and cutting off the population
completely from the outside and even from communicating with each
other.[82]
From Attleboro there was a sudden thrust along the railroad line Taunton
to Mansfield. From this point the enemy moved rapidly along the railroad
line to Framingham. In two hours he had in his possession six important
junctions of the railroad systems that connect Boston with the rest of
New England and with the United States.
_Encircling Boston_
The enemy was making good a great line that extended in a semi-circle
from the west of Boston to the coast south of it.
His grip on Rhode Island had not relaxed. That whole State was in his
hands. There was not a village left in it that was not dominated by his
troops. Men were quartered in every house. Officers were quartered in
every hotel, every mansion. The town halls and churches were occupied.
In places where there were not sufficient stable accommodations, the
horses were placed in the churches.
There were proud homes there, in “little Rhode Island,” where crossed
swords over the old-fashioned mantel-pieces bore witnesses to ancestors
who had fought on land and sea in the Wars of the Revolution and of
1812. Foreign soldiers sat under them, and spread out maps of the State
on the floors while they debated over the best use to make of roads and
houses and towns.
Town and village authorities received orders, not from officers, but
from common soldiers, or, at the most, from sergeants or corporals. Only
in the most important places did commissioned officers trouble to
consult with the officials. Mostly, they limited themselves to sending
their requisitions and instructions in curtly written notes.
So it was everywhere throughout the conquered country. Wherever the
invader set foot, all old law ceased instantly and new law began. The
bulletin boards in town halls, court rooms and post offices were
covered, within half an hour after the irruption of soldiery, by
placards that were headed, each and every one, with the words: “An
Order.”
The people were ordered not to be out of doors after nine at night. They
were ordered to bring in an accounting of all horse forage, all
food-stuffs and all accommodation they had in their premises for men and
animals. They were ordered to bring in all rolling stock for inspection.
They were ordered to leave their lights burning behind lowered shades.
_Under Foreign Rule_
Their officials were ordered to report daily to the army for
instructions. Their judges were ordered to make reports of their cases.
There was no duty of the day to which a citizen could turn without
feeling the invader’s hand upon him. There was no road on which he could
move without being challenged by a sentry. There was no woman who dared
venture on the street, for fear of offense which her men could not dare
to resent, or for the worse fear of the fate that would be theirs if
they did.
So, like a great fan opening out from Providence the armies expanded
over the conquered country, and each spoke expanded again. The divisions
unfolded their brigades, the brigades their regiments, the regiments
their battalions, the battalions their companies, and the companies
their detachments, reaching everywhere and everywhere keeping in touch
with the main body through the marvelous network of intelligence that
grew into being behind the soldiers.[83]
It was as if a vast octopus had crawled from the sea at Narragansett
Bay. With its body clinging there, fast to its ocean base, it sent its
tentacles into every crevice of the land, and gripped tight.
“It is plain now what he is doing,” said the Chief of Staff to the
President in Washington. “He is keeping a powerful retaining force in
Rhode Island, absolutely assuring his base and holding the gate open for
reënforcements. Westward he is throwing masses of cavalry--probably most
of the cavalry that he has--to clear the way for his infantry and
artillery to march along the coast to New York. Northward those cavalry
masses are screening him against any attempt by our army either to fall
on his forces in Connecticut, or to move around north of him and attack
the rear of his divisions that are marching on Boston. It isn’t tactics.
It’s simple, commonsense use of numerical superiority.”[84]
_Making a Fight for Boston_
The President played with a pile of dispatches. They were from Boston
and New York. “You say that those companies of coast artillery from the
south got through!”
“I had a message from the Commander of the Artillery District of
Boston,” he said. “The six companies arrived at Fort Banks yesterday
morning. They had to go around by way of Lake Champlain and Vermont, but
they got through. That will at least give the men some relief if there
should be a sustained action.”[85]
“You are sure it was not a mistake to--sacrifice them?” asked the
President.
The General shrugged his shoulders. “There are some things that one
simply must do,” he said. “We had to give New York and Boston something.
We absolutely must make some sort of a fight for them.”
The Commander of the harbor defenses of Boston was not concerning
himself about the occult reasons that had inspired the reënforcements.
He had been praying for men, for he needed half a dozen men wherever he
had one. He needed them for the searchlights, he needed men that he
might establish defenses to the land approaches, he needed men for
protection of base lines and cable stations. There were scout boats to
be manned, and outlying islands to be posted with lookouts to guard
against approach of ships in fog or darkness.
Now that he had them, he waited for no orders and asked for no
instructions. He loaded quartermasters’ boats with detachments and
rushed them to the waterfront of Boston and Chelsea where he knew of
things he wanted. They returned with two tons of explosives and
miscellaneous ordnance material that had been seized from merchants. He
seized barb wire. From electric light plants and power works he
obtained, by the same simple method, some forty miles of lead-covered
cable for his mine-fields, and from ships in the harbor he took half a
dozen searchlights.[86]
_To Hold the Defenses_
Before night, too, he had men entrenched behind entanglements with
machine guns on the narrow neck of land that leads to Nahant’s broad
cliff promontory on the north of Boston Harbor, to protect position
finding stations there and a great 60-inch searchlight.
Southward at Point Allerton, on the long cape that juts toward Boston
Harbor from Nantasket Beach, to defend the stations and searchlights and
approaches of Fort Revere with its mighty batteries, he placed a strong
force with ample artillery.[87]
This was the point where he feared a landing most. He built an armored
train, seizing the material from the town of Hull, and armed it with
quick-firers that it might be sent to threatened places.
Outposts were sent as far as Nantasket, for fear the enemy should try to
land there or cross the narrow neck and take boats over it into the bay
behind.
Beyond Fort Revere he destroyed certain houses that would interfere with
the firing. At the far outlying islands called The Graves he posted men
with signal rockets. He sent scout boats to lie at sea beyond the fire
zone, from Nahant to the spot where the Light-ship was moored in times
of peace.[88]
Within forty hours he had doubled the strength of his defense because he
had the men. He looked up at a hostile aeroplane, flying well beyond
gunshot. They had become almost commonplace objects in Boston’s sky
during the past days. “Well, come on!” he said. “You and your ships!
We’ll give you a whirl.”
He was awakened at one o’clock that morning. The “whirl” had begun.
Ships were standing in toward Nahant Bay in the north and off Cohasset
in the south. Fifteen minutes afterward the people of Boston and
Charlestown and Brookline, of Quincy and Weymouth, Hingham and Lynn,
were brought out of their beds by explosions that shook the houses. They
came from the sea, northeast and southeast and east. They were not only
incessant, but they came two and even three so close together at times
that they made a sustained roar as if the very air itself had turned to
thunder.
_Boston’s Bombardment Begins_
Battleships with 15- and 16-inch guns were bombarding Fort Revere and the
fort was answering with its 12-inch guns. Armored cruisers were firing
on Standish. Armored cruisers and battle cruisers were throwing 12- and
14-inch shells into Deer Island and on Winthrop. Battleships lying north
of Nahant in Nahant Bay, and thus invisible to the Boston defenses and
not to be reached by searchlights, were bombarding Forts Banks and
Heath.[89]
Fort Warren was firing at them, over Boston Light. Fort Andrews loosed
its batteries.
There was bombardment from 3-inch guns along the beaches, north and
south, where destroyers were attacking the coast stations, under heavy
fire in reply from the defenders on the land.
Southeast, on the horizon, there sprang up a dull glow that became
greatly red, and grew swiftly to pulsating flame. It was the town of
Hull, burning.
The people in South Boston, looking seaward, saw lights appear in the
sky over the outer harbor islands. They slipped slowly downward, leaving
long trails of stars behind, that hung, burning, in the air as if they
had been fixed there.
The falling lights opened, like monster flowers, into glaring,
spectrally white flame just before they reached the earth. All the
harbor where they fell stood revealed as in a lightning flash; but this
flame did not go out like a lightning flash. It burned, steady,
inextinguishable, for long minutes.
They were star-bombs that were being dropped on the forts by the great
war-fowl, the iron breasted aeroplanes. The white lights glaring below,
and the hanging lights in the air that stood like a lighted staff,
pointed out the forts to the hooded cannon of their iron sisters out at
sea.
Fired at from sea and sky, the forts replied and shook the earth. Faster
and faster hurried the fire from the hidden ocean. Five ships were
firing their secondary batteries to destroy an out-lying searchlight at
a range of 6,000 yards. It was said afterward that at least five hundred
projectiles were expended at that one mark alone.[90]
In a great semicircle around Boston Harbor, from Nahant out to sea and
curving in again toward Cohasset on the south, lay the flaming, roaring
line, firing at the defenses all night long, till the dawn began to
whiten.
And behind Boston, inland, the other great armed semicircle was
contracting steadily, swiftly.
VII
THE INVESTMENT OF BOSTON
Boston Harbor should have been impregnable to attack from the sea. Had
Nature been a modern army engineer, she could not have constructed an
oceanic gate more perfectly designed for modern defense against modern
ships.
One might picture Boston as being protected by two great claws that
curve seaward and wait there on guard, pointing toward each other. The
northern claw would be Winthrop peninsula with its beach and summer
cottages. The southern one would be the long, narrow arm of land that
has famous Nantasket Beach on it, and ends northward at Point Allerton.
Between these two claws, a prodigal hand has scattered islands. From
Deer Island, lying in the north close under Winthrop, to George’s Island
in the south, they form a stone wall with gaps that are the channels.
Far out, grouped around the portal, the sea is sown with ledges and
rocks whose kelp beards stream in an ever-heaving sea. Here are the
Brewsters, the Devil’s Back, the Graves, the Roaring Bulls.
Within, there is a glorious harbor great enough for a world’s armada.
But the entrance is a Pass of Thermopylæ.
Commanding that pass and all approaches far out to sea with zones of
fire whose intersecting circles marked rings of sure destruction, were
defenses honestly built. They were ready to receive and withstand that
climax of destructiveness which man’s science has embodied in the
conical steel projectile fired from the rifled gun.[91]
The navy that invested the harbor entertained no illusions on that
score. It had not dared the attempt to force the passages of
Narragansett. It would not dare to force the passages of Boston. As at
Narragansett, its business was to occupy the defenders and wear them out
while the army fell on them and on Boston from the land.[92]
[Illustration: MAP ILLUSTRATING THE ENEMY ATTACK ON BOSTON AND
NEIGHBORING CITIES]
_The Deadly Blind Man’s Buff_
The ships entered a shrouded, black sea where there was not a light to
warn of reef or shoal. Lightless themselves, they groped with deep-sea
leads and sounding machines till they assured themselves of safe
positions where they might have sea-room to swing around in great closed
circles at high speed.
These circles would cut deeply into the circles of the fire zones of the
defenses. At close range the vessels, invisible to the forts, could send
a furious volley into them, and rush past before the guns could find
them, to return on their circle and fire from some other point. It was
the penalty that darkness lays on land defenses. But it penalized the
ships, also.[93]
They would have to fire without sighting their mark. They dared not
betray themselves to the waiting guns on land by throwing their
search-lights on the defenses, while the defenses could sweep the sea
incessantly, for their searchlights were disposed along miles of coast,
far aloof from the batteries.
If the search-lights were effective, the ships should have to flee to
the farthest limit of the coast guns’ range. At that distance they, in
turn, could not deliver an effective bombardment of the land so long as
it was dark. So, then, all the ferocious game of war centered for the
time on the search-lights. The death-laden ships, the death-laden guns
on land, had to wait till it was learned what the lights would do.[94]
The enemy knew that the American defenses had only about one-half the
search-light installation that was needed. The hostile sailors had not
been forced to depend on spies for this information. It was in American
reports that had been made to Congress session after session.[95]
They had prepared for their game of blind man’s buff by long
consultations over charts. Every ship’s officer was provided with minute
instructions for every contingency that human wit could forecast in the
headlong game of chess that is played with cannon.
_Defenders Stand Prepared_
The defenders were ready, too. In the human chain that began with the
battle commander, and reached from him through links of district
commanders to fire commanders and battery commanders, each man had his
orders for any one of a hundred things that might occur, however
quickly it might come.
They knew what batteries to fire and when, at the extreme fire zone, at
the intermediate zone, and at the third fire zone which commanded the
mine fields. They had before them, worked out to the ultimate detail,
the order of fire if the enemy ships should come in column, in double
column, or in scattered formation. Far down the beaches, north and
south, they had every range plotted, that the great guns might be turned
on landing parties if the secondary shore defenses should fail to hold
them.[96]
The ships struck simultaneously all along the line of defenses. They
fired close in north and south, and from battleships out at sea. A
plunging fire went over Nahant and across into Winthrop. The speeding
ships missed the defenses and their bursting shells wrecked the town
instead. As its flames reddened the sky, the flames of Hull, at Point
Allerton on the end of the southern peninsula, made a red reply.
The quick search-lights caught the ships. Again and again the white
light-shafts fell on veering, speeding vessels and made them hurry to
get away before the fire-control of the defenses could cover them.
Still they returned. Each time they approached at a new point in the
hope of developing a defect in the light-system. Each time they fired
all the metal that they could throw in the one instant before the beams
fell on them.
There were few hits made by these running ships; but they could afford
to waste ammunition, since their continual attack forced the defenders
to use their own insufficient supply.
_A Game of Wits_
While half-naked men in ships’ turrets and half-naked men at coast guns
and in mortar pits were toiling to wreak brute destruction, a game of
wits was being played just as busily. This game was played, not on the
huge armored ships, not in the formidable engine-batteries of the forts,
but in places miles away from either.
[Illustration: “The quick searchlights caught the ships.”]
They were insignificant little places from the point of view of
war--summer settlements on friendly beaches, harmless little coves,
pleasant shores beset with the fantastic hotels and fantastic towers of
American pleasure-places. In the summer days of peace, probably not one
in any thousand of the happy crowds that played and laughed there ever
imagined that these serene, careless places could have any importance
some day in battle.
That night they were playing a part that was full of danger to the
venturesome ships. The American engineers had established portable
search-lights there, and made base stations and range-finding points of
them. Every one of these insignificant out-lying points was endowing the
guns in the distant defenses with an added deadliness of accuracy.
The modern rifled gun is fired not by sight but by mathematics. The
position of its target is found not by guess but by triangulation. Far
away, on either side of land batteries are observers. The straight line
from one to the other is the base line. As soon as they sight a ship,
each turns his instruments on it and gets the angle from his end of the
base line. The ship to be fired at is at the apex of the triangle thus
obtained.
The men at the guns get this position by telephone instantly. They know
to a foot what their weapons’ elevation must be with a given charge of
powder and a given weight of projectile to reach that distant spot. They
set their mammoth piece, elevate it above the parapet on its lift, fire
it and bring it back into concealment again.
To bombard these base-stations from the sea was nearly futile. The
shells that could sweep a fore-shore and make it untenable for an army
might never find these few scattered, concealed men or these scattered,
hidden, tiny stations. A whole fleet might rave at them for hours, and
in vain. There was only one sure, quick way to cripple them.[97]
_The Secret Attack on the Shore_
Far northward, miles outside of Boston Harbor, beyond the system of the
harbor defenses, two ships stood into Nahant Bay, until they were within
a line drawn from Fishing Point south of Swampscott to Spouting Horn on
Nahant. Here, in 7 fathoms of water, they stopped and lowered their
boats.
Manned by crack bluejackets, whose oars were wrapped with cloth that
they should not make a sound in the rowlocks, the cutters moved toward
the beach at Little Nahant.
Far away the harbor searchlights played like summer lightning. The
sailors moved on in utter darkness, toward the invisible beach. They
rowed in, in irregular formation, till they could hear the surf. Then
the foremost boats lay still, tossing on the swell, waiting for the
others to draw abreast. Formless, vaguely gray in the night, the line
made a dash.
They were on the first lifting swell of the long waves that tumble
toward the land when a fierce white light tore terribly through the
night, and blazed on them, and around them. It held them, intangibly,
tightly, like the hand of a ghost.
Orange flashes ripped through it. Little Nahant Beach quaked with
explosion. In the white light, as if the tossing boats were spectral
pictures in a dissolving view, they melted amid the roar of the
shore-guns. Black fragments whirled through the steady glare, and shells
chopped the sea where there were bobbing heads and clutching hands.
The light stabbed the night, in and out. It veered to sea with enormous
speed. A long, black silhouette with three funnels appeared full in the
circle of its artificial day. A funnel vanished, and another. A spout of
water lifted alongside from a shell that had fallen short. Another, the
next instant, smashed into its side and made it reel. The destroyer
turned suddenly and rushed at the land. Its steering gear had been shot
away. Almost instantly it straightened out again; but Little Nahant was
raving. Little Nahant was flaming without pause. The searchlight held
the ship. It staggered, like a stumbling animal, pitched twice, each
time a little more wildly, and went down bow first.
“Have repulsed attack on search-light station and observers at this
point,” went the word
[Illustration: “A landing was attempted in greater force, with the
assistance of a destroyer division lying close to the beach.”]
from Bailey’s Hill on Nahant to the battle commander in Fort Warren. “No
losses. Destroyer and five ships’ boats with crews completely
eliminated.”
_Attacks Made Everywhere_
They did not have time to cheer at Fort Warren. On Nantasket Beach, as
far south as Nahant was north, a landing was being attempted in greater
force and with the determined assistance of a destroyer division that
was lying close to the beach.
Here there were three hundred men of Massachusetts Volunteer Militia,
Coast Artillery, behind barb-wire and sand-bag defenses with two pieces
of field artillery and three machine guns. They were being swept by
savage fire from the destroyers.
“We can hold the ships’ boats off. Surf high, and landing will be slow,”
they reported to the battle commander by field telegraph. “But we must
have relief from naval fire, or cannot concentrate efforts on landing
parties.”
Their officers sent the exact distance from the beach of the destroyers.
In the forts the fire commanders studied their charts, plotted with
diagrams of the shore in sections. They calculated the range. A dropping
shot from a 6-inch gun fell among the enemy vessels one minute later.
The next went over. The third struck a destroyer. Before it disappeared,
shells were falling among the division too fast to count. Three guns
were firing. They were throwing 12 shells in one minute.[98]
Two destroyers were towed away, crippled. Another escaped from the fire
zone but sank at sea.
Undeterred, the boat parties tried to run the surf and rush the
defenders. But the sea was heavy, breaking with a sharp over-fall.
Unprotected by fire from the sea, unable to work their own machine guns
in the rough water, the sailors were pounded in the breakers. The field
artillery blew their boats apart. The machine guns slashed them. Rifle
fire hammered them.
“Attack beaten off,” reported the militiamen. In the surf there were a
few drifting pieces of wood, tossing oars and bodies pitching to and fro
as the undertow played with them.
_The “Hussars of the Sea”_
“Destroyer division off this point.” It was a report from Strawberry
Hill, south from Fort Revere. Point Allerton’s search-light swung down
the beach, the search-light from Strawberry Hill centered on them. The
reckless craft, the hussars of the sea, dashed in to a 400 yard range,
and, steaming parallel with the beach at full speed, sent in a heavy
broadside fire from all their guns. More than three hundred shells were
directed against the Strawberry Hill light in those few minutes. They
swung, and fled to the sea as the batteries of the fort opened on
them.[99]
“Searchlight intact,” reported Strawberry Hill.
“Men have landed on Marblehead Neck, according to reports from
Swampscott,” reported Fort Heath. “Three hundred men at least taking
road southward.”
“Push forward and occupy Lynn Beach at narrowest part,” telegraphed the
battle commander to the force at Nahant. “Will send one hundred
reënforcements by boat to Lynn.”