and the boats withdrew. Two suspicious vessels were sighted almost
within Hull Bay and were destroyed by fire from a shore battery. A
landing party struck at Strawberry Hill. Another, probably the same that
had attempted the second landing at Nantasket, tried to haul three boats
over into the Weir River.[100]
All were repulsed. There was hot fighting going on near Lynn. It was
difficult for the battle commander to judge what its result would be.
Once his forces sent to Fort Heath for more men. Later, they telegraphed
that they were holding their ground.
The enemy struck again, and again. He made an attempt on Winthrop, and
lost two destroyers in the mine fields. The fleet opened heavy fire at
short intervals, to mask the attack of the landing parties. But the
telegraph and telephone system of the forts sent word everywhere, to all
the outlying posts, of the uniform success of the defense, with the
result of making their fight constantly more effective.
_The Defenses Hold Out_
The defenses were holding out. When word came at last that the raiders
who had landed at Marblehead Neck were retreating to their boats, the
end of the night’s fighting had arrived. The fleet called off its boats,
and took them aboard.
It was near dawn. Once more, for the last time, the ships ran in,
passing the batteries at full speed, and fired from every gun that would
bear in the instant of their passing. Every huge turret gun, every
broadside battery, opened up at once.
For many miles inland the air trembled and hummed. The hills growled
with rolling echoes. Windows in distant places blew inward and walls
trembled. But the defenses held.
Ship after ship swung in that fierce circle and passed. It was the
climax of the night’s bombardment. When the dawn spread far on the ocean
horizon, the defenders saw the enemy fleet lying back against it, far
out of the zone of fire.
The sea was bare between them and the forts, except for a rent ruin
hanging on the Outer Brewster where a shattered destroyer was aground.
Off Cohasset lay another, sprawling on the rocks called The Grampuses,
half out of the sea as if it were the torn body of a weird monster that
had thrown itself ashore in a dying agony.
“No damage,” said Fort Revere. “No damage, except dismounted
searchlight,” said Fort Strong. “One 6-inch gun dismantled,” said
Standish. “No damage,” reported Andrews and Banks. In Fort Warren two
3-inch quick firers were destroyed.
“We could hold them off forever,” said the battle commander, “if we were
protected from the land.”
_It Was His Last Fight_
The successful fight of his defenses had made it only the more bitter
for him. He knew that this was the last fight. He knew that the army
that was sweeping northward would take him in the back before night.
He looked at one of his 12-inch rifles. He walked over to it and patted
the beautiful thing, so shapely, so graceful that it seemed impossible
that it should weigh 35 tons. “If they had just given you that little
extra elevation!” he murmured. “Then yonder ships wouldn’t dare lie
within 20,000 yards of us.”[101]
But “they” had not given the rifles that little extra elevation. “They”
had found time enough and money enough to pay for bridges over muddy
creeks, for printing millions of words of oratory, for hundreds of
private bills. “They” had been able to find money to pay themselves for
constructive recesses of Congress, and mileage for journeys that they
had not made. But they had not been able to find money for defense.
Just a little foresight, and Boston, that now was trembling, might be
sitting behind that charmed circle of its great guns and laughing at all
the navies of the world.
Haggard and pale, Boston’s people looked toward the sea and the dawn.
The sullen thunders still rolled out there, but slowly now, and far off.
The fleet was using only its heaviest guns, and firing deliberately,
though steadily. Having failed to destroy the effectiveness of the
defenses, it would content itself with long range fire, simply to wear
the defenders out till the army should arrive.
All night long Boston people, moved to unendurable terror by the
bombardment, had tried to flee from the city. All night long other
crowds had tried to enter it. On all the roads these opposing crowds had
met and jostled.
_Opposing Streams of Fugitives_
They warned each other, and tried to turn each other back. Shells were
falling into Boston town, said the people who were fleeing from the
city. Crazed by fear, they invented the most monstrous tales and
believed them.
The in-coming refugees, too, invented tales. They told of soldiers who
had appeared in nearby towns, and who were burning and killing. Nothing
so well illustrated the effect of terror on the faculty of reason as the
fact that always, after this wild interchange of news, the city people
continued to press toward the country, fearing soldiers less than the
cannon-shots that had rung in their ears all night; and the country
people rushed into the city, so panic-driven by what they had heard of
the soldiers and their bloody day of vengeance, that they cared nothing
for the heavy thunder that was shaking all the air.
Though the roads out of Boston were thus crowded, the fugitives were
only a small proportion of the population. Never before had humanity
realized how firmly men are chained to their habitat. Here was a city,
terribly beset by land and sea with unknown, terrible fate closing
steadily around it. Beyond lay the United States where there was
complete freedom still, and safety. Yet who could seek it?
There were none who could go, except those temporarily mad with fear, or
those so abjectly poor that it mattered nothing to them where they
trudged. The workers could not go. They had to cling to the places that
they knew, to the scanty foot-hold that was all the more precious to
them for its scantiness. The rich could not go. Money had stopped. All
that they owned had become suddenly valueless for producing cash; and
without cash they could not flee. The merely well-to-do, whose whole
life depended on the town, whose whole possessions lay in real estate,
in homes, in shops--where could they turn?
_Boston in Hopeless Fear_
They stayed. They even tried, dully, to attend to business, though there
was no business. Mail was still coming in and going out, but in a vastly
circuitous way, as it had to go around by way of Burlington, and so
through Vermont and New Hampshire to its destination. Boston could
communicate still by telegraph and telephone with the United States
outside of southern and western New England; but this, too, was in an
equally circuitous way, and even such service as existed was constantly
in danger of being severed.
Motor traffic had almost ceased on the streets. The trolley and train
services were cut down to the merest necessity. Gasoline and coal
shortage already had begun to make itself felt. Prices had gone up for
flour and for meat. The fish wharves held none except empty vessels.
There was an unreasoning fear of the waterfront streets. People shrank
from them, and used the side streets, as if the tiny difference of a
block or two could save them, should shells begin to fall.
There was a fear, less unreasoning, of tall buildings. Most of the upper
stories in high office buildings were deserted, except for daring ones
who went in temporarily to look toward the harbor.
A renewed fear of aeroplanes also had seized the city. For days they had
passed and repassed, till the people had become almost accustomed to
them, since they threw no bombs nor made other demonstrations. Now, with
the steady cannonading, the old fear returned. There were wild flights
when the whirring roar was heard. More than once, men and women were
trampled in those sudden dumb panics. Hypnotized by the impending of a
greater tragedy, the citizens scarcely noted these episodes that, in any
other time, would have shocked the town.
A rumor went through the streets that the fleet had been driven off.
Survivors from Winthrop appeared in the city. They clutched at strangers
and told with quivering mouths how the shells had crashed into their
town, and how they and theirs in night clothes had fled between falling
walls through a night ruddy with fire.
Refugees from Breed’s Island told how the ground was all ploughed by
shells falling wild. They told of the water tower, flung far down the
hill.
_Cities Destroyed and Taken_
Hull was destroyed utterly. There was nothing left of it. All gay
Nantasket had vanished. Between it and Point Allerton the houses along
shore were thrown on each other and torn apart or burned.
On the last train to come in from the direction of Brockton were some
who had fled from that city. It had been taken by the advancing army in
the small hours of the morning. The town authorities, ordered out of bed
by soldiers, had been escorted to the enemy commander, who had made them
write announcements. Before sunrise all the streets flaunted placards
ordering the inhabitants to continue their business. Other placards
warned them to deliver up all arms of any description.
Twenty of the most prominent men, said the fugitives, had been seized
as hostages.
Every little while now Boston’s communication with some point was being
cut. These severed lines told of the advance of the hostile army as
eloquently as messages might.
Up and down Washington street moved the multitude, waiting for news. The
Old South Meeting House that has looked down on so many dramatic Boston
spectacles never had looked on one so tragic as this--on a proud and not
timorous city that was waiting impotently to be taken and dealt with.
Had the enemy come quickly, had the army advanced into Boston with a
swift rush, it would have been less agonizing for the waiting city than
this slow, systematic, machine-like advance like the jaws of a great
pincer that were closing down with cruel deliberation.
The armed circle was contracting all the time, but it contracted slowly.
Though the enemy’s scouts had assured him long ago that the road was
free, he was taking no chances in that hostile land, whose sting he had
felt. Far as he might throw out his advance guards, he took care that
they should remain in constant touch with the main force and with each
other. He moved his divisions in fighting array. He kept an unbroken
line of communications.
_Making Good His Possessions_
Wherever the army passed, it made good its possession wholly. It left no
village behind it in its march whose means of existence, communication,
food supply and machinery of labor and business it had not made entirely
its own.
Where there were destroyed places, the invader organized the population
to rebuild them. He levied on every community, large and small, for
funds. He paid out nothing of his own, except written scrip. At one blow
the whole financial system of the conquered country was converted into
one great source of tribute.
Suddenly there came a storm of news to the Boston papers. It came from
the country to the south of the harbor--from Cohasset and Hingham,
Weymouth and Quincy.[102]
Heavy artillery was being unloaded all along the line of the south shore
branch of the Old Colony Railroad. Horses and limbers were moving along
all the roads to the shore. Soldiers were advancing into all the towns.
Before the Hingham wires were cut, the correspondent in that town
reported that enormous guns were being moved through it, on heavy
motors.
Quincy telegraphed that troops had hurried through there and seized the
100-foot Great Hill, and also the yacht club house on Hough’s Neck. Then
Quincy, too, was cut off.
Scarcely half an hour later the fire from the forts broke out furiously.
It was answered, with greater speed and fury, from the shore, where the
foe had posted his great guns to enfilade the harbor defenses.
At Fort Revere the commandant cut away concrete emplacements and
succeeded in swinging one of his 12-inch guns around to fight the
assailants, putting a heavy howitzer near Hingham out of action.
A second plunging shot fell near a gun behind Baker Hill; but the
assailants, from howitzer batteries concealed under Turkey and Scituate
Hills, concentrated a desperate bombardment on him that drove the
Americans from the works.[103]
Firing from heavy caliber weapons at short range, pouring explosives and
common shell and shrapnel from every vantage point along all the shore,
the hostile army swept the rear of the harbor defenses with such blasts
that the mere impact of the solid shells made a din like the pounding of
monstrous rivetters’ hammers.[104]
From the sea all the big guns of the ships struck into the chorus. The
vessels pressed in as closely as they dared and opened with every cannon
that could get the range.
_Boston Completely Isolated_
Boston’s populace, listening to the clamour from the sea, scarcely noted
that the bulletins were announcing that all the railroad lines of the
Boston and Maine Railroad leading north and northwest to Portsmouth,
Haverhill, Lawrence and Lowell had been seized, and that Boston was
completely cut off.
Silent policemen appeared all at once followed by men with posters and
paste-pails. The crowds saw posters go up on their walls, signed by the
Boston Citizens’ Committee.
There was a poster in great red letters warning the inhabitants to
deliver any firearms that they possessed in the City Hall within six
hours.
“ATTENTION!” said another placard. “In case of military occupation of
the city, a single disorderly act may mean the ruin of all. It is the
duty of all citizens to offer no resistance, and to report to the
authorities any plan toward resistance.”
There was a great stir in the crowd. A cab was pushing its way through
Washington Street. Two dishevelled and blood-stained artillerymen, and
an equally dishevelled civilian were in it.
While the soldiers went on to the City Hall, the civilian got out and
entered a newspaper office. He was a reporter.
The rumor sped from man to man in the crowd before the building and from
street to street that news had arrived from the forts. There was a
tremendous press into Washington Street, where men and women, crushed
together, stared at the building.
The cab hardly had stopped at the City Hall before a bulletin went up.
FORT ANDREWS GARRISON
DIES AT ITS POST
IGNORES SUMMONS TO SURRENDER
ONLY THREE MEN ESCAPE FROM RUINS
Ten minutes later the “extras” appeared and were whirled through the
town. They passed with the speed almost of the wind; for men passed them
from hand to hand. They shouted the news to people looking from windows,
in a delirium half of dismay, half of exultation. The newspaper man had
brought in such a tale as would live in American history.
_The Newspaper Man’s Story_
He had been writing his story during the night’s bombardments while the
mortar pits quaked around him with the eruptions of their steel
volcanoes. He told how, in the morning, there had come suddenly from the
shore the enfilading fire that caught the works in the back.
The men at the mortars, unable to turn their ordnance against these
assailants, continued to fire at the ships, obedient to the instructions
from the range-stations, till the blasts from the bursting charges above
and around them tore away all the systems of fire control.[105]
One enemy howitzer, trained at the very edge of a pit, threw shot on
shot till a group of mortars was buried under the débris that was hurled
down from the torn mounds.
The mortars ceased action. The assailant, suspending his bombardment,
demanded instant surrender, with the condition that the works must be
delivered intact. The remnants of the garrison, black with smoke and
grime, wounded and burned, replied by manning such movable artillery as
was left. There was only one end to that. It was death. In twenty
minutes there were four men left alive in the defenses--two
artillerymen, the newspaper man and a noncommissioned officer.
They lay flat under a mound. There was a small boat hidden below the far
end of the island. “Get out of this if you can!” said the
noncommissioned man, an electrician sergeant. “Hurry! I’ll give you five
minutes! Good-by!”
He crawled back into the works. As they rowed away, they saw boats with
invaders leaving the mainland for the island. Then there came a lick of
flame out of the mortar battery that expanded instantly into a spraying
fountain. An enormous detonation nearly blew their boat out of the
water. The sergeant had found the firing key and touched off the hidden
mine to demolish the defenses.
In the excitement over this news that had broken the dull strain of
waiting, the people of Boston scarcely noticed that all at once the
firing at sea had stopped.
_Demanding Surrender_
Down the harbor a boat with a flag of truce was lying under Fort Warren.
An officer, led blind-folded into the works, presented a summons
transmitted from the headquarters of the army. It called on the
commander to surrender the entire system of defenses without further
damage. It demanded also that a complete diagram of all the mine fields
be delivered at once.
“You have four hours,” continued this summons. “At the end of that time,
we shall bring our artillery to bear on the city from every quarter.
Every five minutes thereafter we shall fire on a given section. You have
made a brave and magnificent defense. By surrendering now, you will save
your city from unnecessary destruction which you are unable to prevent
otherwise.”
“I will reply in half an hour,” said the commander. At the end of that
time he sent this answer:
“I shall surrender the defenses on condition that the city be left
inviolate: that no troops occupy it: that the civil authorities be left
in control: and that no levy be made on the municipality.”
“Absolutely refused,” the hostile commander replied promptly.
“Unconditional surrender, or bombardment begins at time stated. If any
attempt is made to dismantle works, bombardment will begin at once.”
This was at noon. The hour-hand of the Old South Meeting House clock had
not quite touched one, when artillery was passing through Waltham and
Newton Centre, and along all the roads crossing the Charles and Neponset
Rivers.
There were cavalry and cycle and motor troops on these roads, and trains
full of infantry. But always and everywhere was artillery. The sleek
guns, pounding along New England’s highways, spoke so wickedly of
destructiveness, that they were more terrifying to the population than
long columns of heavily armed men.
At Jamaica Plain big howitzers were detrained and taken to the ridge
running west by north from the line of the New York and New England
railroad. More guns were unloaded in Brookline and posted on the crests
from whose tops, 200 feet high, they had all Brookline, all Boston to
the bay, and Cambridge and Somerville under their long range fire.[106]
Infantry with field guns occupied Cambridge and Somerville, and laid
their ordnance on all points that covered Boston from there. A regiment
pushed quickly through Charlestown, took possession of the great grounds
of the Navy Yard and stationed a battery of 3-inch field pieces under
the Bunker Hill Monument.
_The Final Threat_
At quarter past three the hostile General sent a message to the American
commander at Fort Warren apprising him of the disposition of the guns.
“In one quarter of an hour,” said he, “the bombardment will begin. We
shall fire at Brookline first.”
The commander walked to the shattered flagstaff of the fort, on whose
splintered top the American flag was waving in the wind from the
Atlantic. He bared his head, and with his own hand hauled down the
colors that he had defended so well.
Five minutes later the colors on all the defenses dropped.
Until then no soldiers had appeared in the city of Boston itself. The
armed ring had contented itself with encircling all the suburbs. Now
the telephone bell rang in the City Hall, and a voice asked for the
Mayor.
The voice was that of the hostile commander, speaking from Brookline.
“Your defenses are in our hands,” he said. “Our guns command every part
of your city. I have the honor to demand unconditional and peaceable
surrender at once, with all property of every kind. I regret to say that
I can give you no time for discussion. I must request you to give me
your answer now.”
The Mayor, with the instrument at his ear, looked around at the members
of the Committee. “It is the army commander,” he said. “He demands
unconditional surrender.”
“There is only one answer to make,” said one of the Committee.
“WE SURRENDER”
The Mayor turned to the telephone. “We surrender,” he said.
“Very well,” was the response. “A body of troops under a general officer
will enter the city at once. They will have orders to punish any
disturbance severely. I shall have the honor of calling on you shortly
after my men have occupied the town.”
A little later the Citizens’ Committee saw cavalry with machine guns
approach the City Hall. Similar bodies were taking position in all the
squares and parks, and posting their little guns where they could sweep
the intersecting streets. Up and down Washington Avenue, and up and down
all the side streets, were sentinels and guard parties. A wagon train
was encamped on the Common.
And a little later still, preceded by light cavalry, three automobiles
rolled through the streets to the City Hall. In each sat four men,
dressed in campaign uniforms. They were leaning back, smoking, and
looking with interest at the buildings. They seemed not to see the
silent crowds that lined the sidewalks.
These sedate, cheerful, interested gentlemen were the commander and his
staff, arriving to take formal possession of the city. With machine guns
and rifles threatening all around them, the silent people of Boston saw
their conquerors enter the City Hall, and knew that their sovereignty
had passed into alien hands.
VIII
DEFENDING CONNECTICUT
“What is happening in Boston?” The question stood before the United
States and there was no answer. All communication with it had been
annihilated as if by a lightning stroke.
Maine, Vermont and New Hampshire still were able to reach the rest of
the country with entire freedom, except that everything, mail, telegraph
messages and freight, had to pass by way of the Lake Champlain Valley
exclusively. But Boston, the richest half of Massachusetts, all of Rhode
Island and the whole eastern end of Connecticut were as completely cut
off as if all that great territory had been torn from the continent and
dropped into the sea.
Of the 195 American cities with more than thirty thousand population,
twenty-two were in the section that had been lost by the United States.
The assessed valuation of those cities alone was more than two billions
seven hundred millions of dollars. Ten thousand manufacturing
establishments were in the grip of the conqueror.[107]
The grip lay on the captured country like a thing of iron. Telegraph and
telephone could be used only under the supervision of soldiers who
controlled every central operating station and scrutinized everything,
cutting out any expression that did not suit them or refusing
transmission altogether. Against these decisions there was no appeal.
_Post Offices Occupied_
The post offices were occupied by censors. Every piece of mail passed
under their eyes and reached those to whom it was addressed only after
long delay and generally with parts of it obliterated by heavy daubs of
printing ink.
All the springs of creative work were broken. Shops and manufactories
were open, under orders from the military commanders, but the owners and
managers did not know what to do. They continued to produce, dully and
without plan. They dared not make even the most unimportant contract,
for no man could guess what might happen next. There was no money to be
had, except for pressing needs. The banks throughout the conquered
territory had been commanded to hold all cash in their vaults. Every man
who applied for money had to prove to military officers that it was for
immediate subsistence.
In the banks and trust companies’ offices everywhere there were posted
placards reading as follows: