cut off by an advance patrol of enemy cavalry that had crossed the river
to outflank the defenders from the north. The Americans charged. But
they were mounted on horses never used before for cavalry work. The
enemy riders were men trained to swordsmanship. The American troop had
averaged only 13 men in mounted drill in a whole year, because they had
possessed neither horses nor armory.[131]
The green brutes reared at the sight of weapons. They pitched into each
other as the enemy cavalry dashed at them, and added their iron hoofs to
the mêlée. For one brief moment eyes stared into eyes, and it was hack
and thrust. Then the enemy riders were through them, and whirled like a
gale and swept through them again, and killed and killed.
_The Massacre of the Connecticut River_
“Annihilated,” reported the scout cavalry a little later, when its
squadrons came up. “Our loss one dead, three slightly wounded.”
Annihilated! Yes, gentlemen of Congress, sitting in Washington at that
moment and passing resolutions and appropriations, and uttering fine
sentiments about millions for defense and not one cent for tribute!
There were ugly things there on the Connecticut River shore that
answered you more loudly in their eternal silence than if they had
spoken with a thousand angry tongues.
That day’s battle that filled the fields of Connecticut with dead men’s
bones to be plowed up in many a year afterward, went down in American
history as the massacre of the Connecticut River. A massacre it was--an
American massacre, carefully prepared by elaborate carelessness through
many a year before.
Less than a thousand men, it was said afterward, escaped from the
massacre. They crawled away down gullies or swam down the river, and hid
under weeds and panted, and tied up their wounds with rags from their
ragged garments. They were never able to tell what had occurred. They
knew only that they had thought there was victory--and then, in front of
them, and on their flanks, and behind them, there had come flames as if
a hot line of blast furnaces had opened to blow in their very faces,
wherever they turned.
“We have taught them their lesson!” said the hostile commander. “We
shall have no more trouble.”
It was true. Western Connecticut was broken under the invader’s rod as
Eastern Massachusetts had been broken. That night the army occupied
Hartford, Meriden, New Britain, and New Haven, though not before the
arms factories had been blown up, to welcome the soldiers with flaming
ruins.
The next morning cavalry detachments began cautiously to scout into the
Berkshire Hills, to feel for the American outposts.
IX
THE CAPTURE OF NEW YORK CITY
When the news of the Battle of Connecticut went through the United
States, there was a temporary end to all patience, to all calculations
of prudence. There was an end to everything except blind passion. The
United States was not a patient Nation, but no Nation, however patient,
could have remained so at such a time. No man, however deeply admired,
could have counseled wisdom then. No interests, however great, could
have controlled.
All the knowledge that had gone to the public about the utter
unreadiness of the freshly enlisted volunteers to take the firing line;
all the information that had been given to the people about the
condition of their army; all the proofs that the foe had given with
blood and fire of his immense superiority--all these were as nothing.
That the army, if it had fought now, must be destroyed, was as nothing.
The cry was that the army must fight!
Trusted leaders pointed in vain to the history of the United States to
prove that whenever its raw forces had hurried into battle in obedience
to popular demand, the result had been only to hurry disaster. In vain
they pointed to the Civil War and the hideous death-tolls paid by both
sides without military advantage to either.
Men would not listen. They would not reason. They hated those who
remained cool enough to reason. It was the human equation that, at some
time or another, defies all the combination of man’s intelligence.
_The President Goes to the Army_
No administration, however determined, could have ignored it. Secretly,
a special train was made ready in Washington. Secretly, in the night,
the President of the United States with his advisers and staff boarded
it and were taken northward.
No dispatches went ahead of it, except railroad orders to clear tracks.
After passing Baltimore, it went by way of Harrisburg and Wilkesbarre,
avoiding Philadelphia and the city of New York. Through the sad, black
iron and coal country of Pennsylvania it passed to the New York State
line without a welcome anywhere.
“We might be fugitives,” said the President, looking out with sleepless
eyes.
At Jefferson Junction an armored train with machine guns and a 3-inch
rifle slid in ahead of them from a siding where it had been waiting. An
officer entered the President’s train and requested that all shades be
kept down. Thus, furtively, the Nation’s ruler entered Albany.
Army Headquarters had been a target, like the White House, for messages
that had shaken those to whom they were addressed. More than once the
Commanding General had felt that it was more than human men could bear.
More than once, in council, officers, infuriated by the veiled
accusations of cowardice in the dispatches, had spoken in favor of
giving the army the fatal order to go into action.
_What the Commander Faced_
The President, when he looked at the General’s deeply lined features,
knew that the old soldier had more to gain from a battle, however
disastrous, than from life. “If he does not interpose between the
invader and New York City,” thought the Chief Magistrate, “he will live
only to see his name blasted. There will be a thousand tacticians in
future years who will assert that he was a blunderer, if not a traitor.”
“The country demands a battle! I know!” The soldier laid before the
President a sheaf of papers. “Some reports, sir, bearing on the matter.”
The first sheet was a report from brigade headquarters. “Twenty
batteries of 5.1 inch artillery moved westward through New Haven last
night,” it said. “Our spy reports that these guns appear to be of the
type that is known to have a range of seven miles, far outranging our
field guns. Accompanied by heavy convoys of shrapnel and explosive
shell.”[132]
“They are bringing up heavier guns still,” said the General, selecting
another report. “Between New London and Saybrook Junction flat cars were
seen with 11.02 inch howitzers, which, we presume, must be the type that
throws a 760-pound projectile. We have nothing near that type in our
artillery to oppose them. As they have a range of 12,000 yards, they can
be placed wherever it may please the enemy, and we might as well bombard
them with roman candles as with our guns.”[133]
_Men Disabled Before Battle_
The President, without replying, picked up a third report. It was from a
major of the Medical Corps, and ran:
“A considerable proportion of militia infantry still suffer severely
from blistered feet after only a few miles of march over rough country.
More men are being disabled from ill-fitting shoes and unsuitable socks
(thread and cotton) than from all other causes combined. Habit of
prophylactic care of the feet almost wholly lacking. Few regimental or
infirmary supplies include foot-powder.”[134]
“If you take men from their office chairs or from seats by the side of
machines in shops,” growled one of the staff, “you can’t expect them to
hike the same day. Men who insist on living near trolley cars, which is
a great American habit, must expect to get sore feet after walking three
miles. In a fifty mile march, sir, this army in its present condition
will lose fifteen per cent. of its militia strength from straggling and
falling out.”[135]
“But they have improved very greatly, have they not?” asked the
President.
“Some of them,” answered the General, “notably the New York,
Massachusetts and Pennsylvania troops, are excellent and can go into
battle with the regulars at any time. But--” he turned to an artillery
officer. “Will you tell the President about yesterday’s field artillery
practice?”
_What Untrained Batteries Did_
“We sent five untrained batteries to an indicated position,” said the
officer. “They had practiced only about half a dozen times in the last
year, and then they had merely drilled in the motions of handling their
pieces, as their armories were equipped neither for mounted drill or
sub-caliber practice. When they reached the positions that they were to
hold, they had lost the locations of their own side, and within half an
hour they were blazing into cover occupied by their own infantry. If
they had been using shell instead of blanks--whew!”[136]
“We are only just getting several organizations to learn how to deploy
as skirmishers from close order,” said the Commander. “You know how
vital that is under fire. Their company commanders appear to have had no
previous experience at it, and the corporals let their squads get out of
hand hopelessly. There have been some sad mix-ups. The result in battle
would have been sickening.”[137]
“But I tell you,” said the President, “the country is wild! The people
know that you have the whole of a magnificent railroad system from here
to New York at your disposal. They know that the invading army must
have been spread out tremendously to hold all the territory that it
occupies. They cannot understand why you should not be able to engage
the force that is advancing on New York.”
_What the Public Did Not Know_
The General walked to the wall map. “The enemy is thinned out. Yes!” He
laid his finger on the chart. “But to meet him, we must move due south
140 miles down the Hudson Valley, with the river on one side of us and
the Berkshire and Litchfield Hills of Massachusetts and Connecticut on
the other. We cannot leave men behind us to protect that length of line
and hold open our road for us if we have to retreat. When General
Sherman marched to Atlanta, he left 115,000 men behind him to guard his
300 mile line back through Chattanooga to Nashville. We have less than
fifty thousand men in our whole army, even if we scrape together all the
very latest green arrivals.
“The moment we leave our base,” continued the Commander, “the enemy
headquarters will know it. They will instantly begin a big shifting of
their New England forces. They will push them across into New York
State behind us, and we’ll be trapped.”
“You think that they can concentrate swiftly enough?” asked the
Secretary of War.
The soldier pulled a paper out of the pile, and read: “Observer at
Providence reports that hostile forces entrained cavalry, field and
heavy artillery and ammunition columns at regular rate of two hours for
full military train. Time for loading siege material, 3½ hours.”[138]
_Officers Had Never Handled Men_
He tossed the papers aside. “When did any of our officers ever have to
handle thirty thousand men?” he asked. “How many of them ever handled as
many as ten thousand? Last week, two regiments were left without food
for two meals on a practice march because their commissary failed to
supply travel rations. Day before yesterday seven boxes of provisions
were found lying in a company street without any one to claim them.
Those were militia; but our own officers equally lack experience in
handling such a big contract as a whole army.[139]
“Do you know what it means to see that an infantry division gets its
material? Do you know what we’ve got to send into battle with it? It
means an ammunition train of 165 4-mule wagons, and more than 700 mules
and horses. Then there are the other supply trains, the pack trains and
the engineer trains--135 more wagons and 600 animals. There are ninety
ambulances and wagons with their animals. And this is without counting
the horses for the cavalry and the signal corps! I tell you, Mr.
President, if we unload that mess in the face of an enemy like the one
down there,” he pointed southeastward, “it will never get back
here!”[140]
“And if you stay here! Won’t you be attacked?” asked a member of the
President’s party.
“I think not.” The General turned to the chart again. “See here! He’s
got a great big territory to hold already. When he has New York City and
Harbor to control also, I think he’ll be too well occupied to attack us
until he brings reënforcements across. At any rate, he can’t come at us,
except from the direction of New York City up the narrow river valley,
or from the direction of Massachusetts through the Berkshire Hills. We
can make the banks of the Hudson a difficult place for him. And the
longer we can hold on here, the longer the ordnance works at Watervliet
can continue to turn out the heavy guns that we need so sorely.
Watervliet, Mr. President, in my eyes, is the most precious thing we’ve
got to guard just now.”[141]
_“Stay!” Says the President_
The President arose and walked to the window. For a quarter of an hour
he looked out over the rolling country to the East where the soft blue
curves of the hills were cloud-like against the April sky. Then he
returned. “Stay where you are,” he said, “as long as you can, or think
wise. New York will have to fall. Good-by. We’ll go back to Washington
and do our best. Good luck to you, and to your Berkshire Hills.”
“They are good American hills,” said the General, smiling for the first
time. “They are giving our men the only protection they’ve had against
aeroplanes since this thing began.”
The spreading, crowding groves that crowned them and made them famous
for their loveliness, now made the multi-folded Hills a welcome cover
for the harassed American troops. They reduced to a minimum the
effectiveness of scouting from the air, and increased to a maximum
extent the efficiency of cavalry and motor troops that knew the country.
Among their laureled slopes and in their vales and intervales, was good
territory for artillery defense.
The rich men whose pleasure grounds they are gave the army their motors,
their horses and themselves. Quick-witted and keen, aware of every foot
of the ravines and roads and by-roads, they helped the picked men who
had been selected by the commanders to guard and hold the “escapes”
through the Hills.
_Americans Hold the Wall_
At the southern end, on the open summit of Mount Everett that old
settlers prefer to call “The Dome,” whence the sight can command the
sweep of the Housatonic Valley through the Hills, all the approaches
from Massachusetts in the eastward, the Litchfield Hills south in
Connecticut, and the basin of the Hudson River to the west, a signal
corps had erected its wireless and its heliograph. At their feet, on the
lower slopes, hidden in the great wild laurel that is most beautiful
there, was artillery.
There were guns at Great Barrington. At Stockbridge gleaming batteries
guarded the road from Hartford, which once had been the stage coach road
between Boston and Albany.
Limbers and guns jolted past the great houses and estates of Lenox and
vanished in the cover on both sides, to be posted on the hilly ground
that commanded the Housatonic Valley. More guns passed under the elms of
high Pittsfield. Motors and cavalry and cannon held North Adams and
Williamstown, where Williams College stood almost deserted because
students and professors had volunteered to act as sentinels and patrols.
On the old trail that had been the trail of the Mohawk Indians of New
York when they went on the war-path against Massachusetts, men in olive
drab were scouting and lying in cover with machine guns.
On the green hills behind Bennington, Vermont, where Yankee breastworks
had been thrown up in the Revolution, there were more batteries. Here
outposts and patrols guarded the road leading to Lake George, the last
gateway to the territory held by the American forces in New York State.
North of this were Vermont’s Green Mountains--barriers indomitable as of
old when Ethan Allen, wroth at Congress, threatened to retire into those
fastnesses and “wage eternal warfare against Hell, the Devil and Human
Nature in general.”
_Impassable by Rail_
The long barrier thus running northward from Connecticut like a wall
separating New England and New York, would check any except a powerful,
well-supported force, advancing with the determination to break
through. Long before such an army could make its way, the Americans
could either front the enemy in battle, or retire safely beyond his
reach.
The invaders could not break through the wall by rail. The railroad line
that led from Greenfield, Massachusetts, to Troy and Albany, had in it a
famous link that was vital to its operation. This link was the
celebrated Hoosac Tunnel, bored for 4¾ miles through Hoosac Mountain. It
was now a solid mass of blasted and piled rock that could not be cleared
away in the time demanded by any military operation.
In the south, on the Long Island Sound coast of Connecticut, were other
ruins almost as big and as costly. They were the wreckage of
Bridgeport’s big cartridge factories, blown up as the hostile patrols
entered the outskirts of the town.
It was the last source of ammunition and arms supply in New England.
With it there were lost, too, three submarines that were on the stocks
in the harbor ship yards, and the works that had been manufacturing
naval sea-planes and military tractors for the army’s flying scouts.
The aerial motor works of Hyde Park in Massachusetts, the Marblehead
factory that made gun-carrying convertible land and marine flying
machines, and the Norwich factory for tractor biplanes and
hydro-monoplanes had been captured almost in the beginning.[142]
_New England’s Conquest Complete_
As the army entered Bridgeport, another column advancing parallel with
it captured the great manufacturing city of Waterbury in the North. With
these two cities, the invader’s conquest of New England was complete.
Excepting only Portland in Maine, he now possessed every city of more
than 30,000 population. He possessed every source of manufacture. He
held every port on the northern shore of Long Island Sound. He held the
three great harbors of New England. In addition to the vessels building
in Bridgeport, he possessed Fore River, with a battleship and two
destroyers on the ways; Quincy, with eight submarines in course of
construction, and the Portsmouth Navy Yard with one.[143]
The division that had taken Waterbury turned southerly to the coast
after it passed through that town, to join the division that had taken
Bridgeport and was pressing westward.
An hour later the American army, apprised by its spies, began to block
the rock cuts on all the New York Central systems leading northward out
of New York City.
When New York heard this news, it knew that it had been abandoned.
In that moment of despair, the population would have done what every
loosely knit, heterogeneous multitude does almost spontaneously in the
face of catastrophe. It would have grown into mobs to riot against
itself. If the huge population had been organized, if it had possessed a
single will, nothing could have prevented it and nothing could have
withstood it. But facing the overwhelming numbers were a few thousand
men who were moved by a single will and who were firmly welded together
for its accomplishment.
_The Power of Organized Discipline_
They were the police. Whatever their faults were, they possessed the one
thing that all the city and all the United States lacked. It was
Organized Discipline. In the face of millions unorganized and
undisciplined, the 11,000 policemen of the city, armed with no visible
weapons except clubs, maintained the peace. They scarcely needed the
assistance of the ten thousand men who had been enlisted hastily as
volunteer militia and deputy sheriffs, and who patroled the streets with
clubs and riot guns.[144]
Their work was facilitated by the fact that for many days past there had
been a great disarmament in the city. Under the autocratic latitude of
martial law, all suspected individuals had been searched wherever they
were met. Houses had been visited. Warned by the riots in Connecticut,
the authorities had stripped every sporting goods shop and every
pawnbroker’s establishment of weapons, and stored them under heavy guard
in the armories.
It had been a necessary precaution. During the days that came after the
enemy forces had begun to land, factory after factory and industry after
industry had stopped. Now the greater part of the city was dead.
Seventeen thousand longshoremen and stevedores loitered in the
water-front streets, with ten thousand sailors of all nationalities,
whose ships were tied up. Fifty thousand unskilled laborers wandered
around town with nothing to do. Altogether it was estimated that on this
day there were 200,000 people in New York whose occupations had been
lost, and fully as many again who were working on half time.[145]
_The Wholly Helpless Metropolis_
The leaders of commerce and finance, the most resourceful of the city’s
business men, were utterly unable to suggest anything. The Chamber of
Commerce, that had met many crises and evolved practical plans of
action, could suggest nothing now.
The banks were practically closed. The United States Treasury Department
already had declared that the center of the Second Federal Reserve
District would be considered as temporarily merged with the Third
District in Philadelphia.
The fire insurance companies were refusing all new business, and had
called attention to the fact that existing policies on every kind of
property provided that they were not liable for loss “caused directly or
indirectly by invasion, insurrection, riot, civil war or commotion, or
military or usurped power.”
There were thousands of other contracts and agreements that would lapse
automatically the moment the first hostile soldier set foot in the city.
Men had laughed for a generation at the mediæval expression in many
printed legal forms that provided that the signers were not responsible
for anything that might occur under “the acts of any foreign Prince or
Potentate.” Now, suddenly, these mediæval words were alive.
The mails were piled high in the Post Office and in every substation.
The whole United States was striving to settle urgent affairs with the
city, and the city was trying as desperately to settle with the United
States. It was impossible to handle the mass. It remained in bags for
days, untouched, while the postal forces, heavily increased from
near-by cities, struggled with the accumulations of days before.
The long distance telephone systems were so crowded that connections
could be obtained only by asking for them many hours in advance.
Telegraph dispatches were twenty-four hours old before they could be
forwarded, and steadily their increasing accumulation was leaving the
armies of swift operators farther behind.
_Days of Frantic Perplexity_
During the days of frantic perplexity there had been talk of dismantling
the factories and shipping their machineries to the interior. But when
the owners of the city’s 26,000 manufacturing establishments faced the
problem, they realized that it could not be done. They were not like the
government that could afford to pull plants apart and move them at more
expense than would be involved in building new ones.[146]
They were as helpless as their 500,000 employees. To leave their city
meant for owners and workers alike to go away bare-handed and
pauperized. There was nothing to do except to stay.
All these manufactories and industries of the city had labored so
furiously in the last weeks to produce merchandise and ship it that at
last the railroads were unable to handle the rush of freight. Every yard
was piled high with goods destined for the interior that could not be
loaded. All the sidings were clogged. There were lines of freight trains
with not a gap between them stretching from the Hudson River straight
across the New Jersey meadows and on into the yards and sidings of New
Jersey towns miles from New York.