The General hastened to give orders for the retirement. By noon the next
day his battleline stretched from Patchogue through Holtsville to Port
Jefferson and a hundred thousand men were wielding pick and shovel with
savage determination. There was one thing these men didn’t lack whatever
was missing in their equipment. They hadn’t enough guns. They had no
uniforms--save on the handful of regulars sprinkled among them. They
hadn’t much ammunition. They did have courage. They were there to do and
die.
For three days the wind blew a steady gale from the southwest and piled
the white foaming breakers high on the sand dunes.
Through the pounding surf the sea lifted our bloated dead until they lay
in grim blue heaps on the white sands at low tide. General Hood
despatched Vassar to see that they were buried. He piled them in big
trenches one on top of the other.
The wind died to a gentle caress as Vassar stood and watched them dumped
into unmarked trenches--brave boys whose lives we could have saved with
a few paltry millions spent in preparation.
His thoughts were bitter.
Had we been prepared no nation on earth had dared attack us. Our
fighting force in men would fill an army of 16,000,000. Our strength in
money was greater than Continental Europe combined. We had the men. We
had the money. We were just not ready--that was all. We could have
whipped combined Europe had we been prepared, and combined Europe,
knowing this, would have courted our favor with bows and smiles.
The thin line of the new moon broke through the soft fleece of clouds
and the stars came out in countless thousands. The lights were playing
far out at sea too, the big searchlights of the scouts and battle
cruisers. They flashed on the grave diggers now, held steady for a
moment and swung in search of guns. They were not interested in the
dead.
Vassar’s heart went out in a throb of pity as he watched the scene--pity
for the men whom a mighty nation had murdered for nothing--pity for the
well-meaning but foolish men and women whose childish theories of peace
had made this stupendous crime possible.
He thought too with the keenest pang of the anguish that would come to
the heart of the woman he loved when the magnitude of this betrayal of
a nation crushed her soul. Men like Barker and Pike would continue their
parrot talk perhaps until Death called them. The heart of Virginia
Holland would be crushed by this appalling tragedy. If he could only
take her in his arms and whisper his love!
At dawn next morning Vassar stayed to watch from the hills the landing
of the armada. They had scorned to waste a shot from their big guns to
cover the landing. It was unnecessary. Their airmen had reconnoitered
and reported the defending army miles away hastily digging their
trenches.
“Good!” the imperial commander replied on receiving this report. “The
bigger and longer their trenches, the bigger the battle. What we want is
one fight and that settles it.”
Through four days the landing proceeded with marvelous precision, each
man at his post. The whole great movement went forward without a hitch
with scarcely an accident to mar its almost festive character.
Twenty-five huge transports lay in the offing discharging their
thousands of troops from barges and lighters. The men swarmed on the
sands like locusts. Nothing had been left to chance. Nothing had been
forgotten. They had cavalry in thousands--huge artillery that covered
acres. Fifty magnificent horses were hitched to a single gun of the
largest type. Their food supplies were apparently exhaustless. Each
regiment had its moving kitchens, its laundry wagons, its bakery.
The signal corps were already stringing their wires. A wireless plant
had been in communication with the commander on the flagship since the
work of landing began.
When the last ship had discharged her cargo, it was known that four full
army corps, each with complete equipment of cavalry, artillery and
machine guns, had been landed and that this first division of the
invading host consisted of not less than one hundred and sixty thousand
officers and men--every one of whom spoke good English as well as his
native tongue.
The news spread with lightning rapidity through the army of defense and
on past their lines into the terror-stricken city. The thousands of
half-mad refugees who had fled to the country began now to turn again
toward New York. They had slept in the fields and woods for more than a
week. Their condition was pitiful and their suffering a source of
constant worry to the officers.
On the day that the invaders began their march from the beach to form on
the turnpike for their final sweep against the trenches, Hood had massed
from all sources two hundred pieces of artillery to defend his trenches
against more than five hundred of the enemy. What the range and caliber
of these hostile guns might be he could only guess. He knew one thing
with painful certainty--whatever their range and caliber might be they
were manned by veteran artillerymen who had fought them for years under
the hideous conditions of modern war. Not a man in his army had ever
been under the fire of modern artillery. That his gunners would give a
good account of themselves, however, he had not the slightest doubt.
The rub would come when they began to fall. Trained men to take their
places were not to be had. If it should come to cold steel, he could
trust the raw volunteers in his trenches to defend their homes against a
horde of devils. The trouble was but a handful of his men were equipped
with bayonets.
He had just inspected his lines and given his final instructions to his
brigade commanders when an extraordinary procession marched into his
lines from Brooklyn, headed by the Honorable Plato Barker and the
Reverend Dr. A. Cuthbert Pike, still president of the Peace Union.
The General refused to see or speak to them. Pike sought Vassar and
begged him as an old political associate of Barker’s to secure ten
minutes’ interview.
“I assure you, Congressman,” Pike insisted in his nervous fidgety way,
“that Barker may be able to open negotiations with the invaders if you
will let us through the lines!”
Vassar sought for ten minutes to dissuade Pike from his purpose. His
faith was unshaken--in sheer asinine fatuity it was sublime. It was so
ridiculous that the young leader decided that the best thing that could
happen to the country was to get both Barker and Pike inside the enemy’s
lines.
Barker had not been able to reach New York for the Peace Jubilee. He had
regarded this great work of his career complete--crowned with glorious
success. He had passed on to greater things. So remarkable had been his
triumph in the Parliament of Man, so complete the vindication of his
theories of arbitration and moral suasion as a substitute for war, that
he had been able to raise the price of his Chautauqua lecture fees to
five hundred dollars guarantee and one-third the gate receipts.
When the tragic crash came which threatened at one stroke to dislocate
his process of reasoning and destroy his lecture bookings at the same
moment, he was at the little town of Winona, Indiana, lecturing to five
thousand enraptured Chautauqua peace enthusiasts. He had just finished
counting the gate receipts, twenty-five hundred dollars on the day. His
share was five hundred dollars and the half of the remaining thousand,
making fifteen hundred dollars--the largest fee ever received by a
lecturer in the history of the country.
With a regretful look at their pile, he was congratulating the
management on having so much left over after he had been paid, when the
astounding message was read announcing the insurrection of two hundred
thousand armed foreigners, their capture of the President, his Cabinet,
the Capitol and the fall of the cities.
The great man laughed.
“It’s a huge hoax, my friends!” he shouted in soothing tones. “A wag is
putting up a joke on me--that’s all. I’m an old timer. I take these
things as they come--don’t worry.”
His soothing words quieted the crowd for an hour until the second
message arrived announcing the surrender of Chicago, and St. Louis to
the same mysterious power and announcing that the landing from a great
armada of the hostile army was hourly expected at New York.
The silver-tongued orator at once took up his burden and hastened East
to meet the coming foe.
He lifted his hand in solemn invocation over the vast throng of
panic-stricken hearers as he took his departure.
“Be of good cheer, my friends!” he cried. “I have always held the high
faith that if we appeal to the heart of the misguided foe who invades
our soil we can make him a good American. I, for one, will set my life
on the issue. I will go as your ambassador to this foe. He is a man of
the same hopes and faith even as you and I. Touched by the same divine
influences that have lifted us from the barbarism of war we can save him
also!
“Have no fear--this is all senseless panic. Personally I do not believe
this wild canard of a foreign invasion. Our cities may be the victims of
a wide conspiracy of dissatisfied Socialists and Anarchists--but a
foreign foe--bah! I go to meet him with faith serene!”
Pike related the story of this scene with a hush of awe in his voice as
if he had seen a vision of the living God and the sight had stricken him
partly dumb.
Vassar appealed finally to the General to give them a pass through the
lines.
“Tell those two windbags to go through my lines if they wish--I don’t
give a damn where they go,” Hood snapped. “I only hope and pray that a
friendly bayonet lets the air out of them so that we shall never hear
them again. I won’t see them. I won’t speak to them. I won’t give them a
scrap of paper. If they dare to pass with any fool proposition of their
disordered brains, it’s their affair--not mine. Tell them to get out of
this camp quick--I don’t care which way they go.”
At Pike’s solicitation Vassar escorted Barker through the lines and
watched the pair disappear arm in arm down the turnpike toward
Southampton.
They walked five miles before they found a conveyance. They tried to
hire a rig from a farmer. He refused to move at any price--even after
Barker explained who he was and the tremendous import of his mission.
Through much dickering they succeeded in buying of him an old horse that
had been turned out to graze. The Long Islander drove a hard bargain.
After loud protests, and finally denunciation for his lack of
patriotism, Barker counted out two hundred and fifty dollars of his last
lecture fee. He still carried the fifteen hundred dollars in cash in his
inside pocket.
They tried in vain to find another horse. For this one they had no
saddle. As Barker was getting stout, and puffed painfully at the hills,
little Pike insisted that he ride.
“You first, Brother Pike--“ the orator maintained.
“No--no--Brother Barker, you ride, I can walk!” Pike protested.
They finally compromised on the principles of the peace propaganda and
both of them mounted the old steed--the silver-tongued orator in front
and his faithful henchman behind holding to his ample waist.
The compromise worked until the horse got tired of it. At the end of an
hour’s journey he refused to move another inch, bucked and threw them
both in a heap. In vain they tried to move him. He not only refused to
carry double, he bucked and threw Barker, who ventured to mount alone.
To Pike’s horror the great orator lost his temper, swore a mighty oath
and smote the beast with a gold-headed cane which he had received as a
token of his supremacy as an advocate of peace.
They now had the horse on their hands as an encumbrance. Barker refused
to let him loose. He was of a thrifty turn of mind even in a crisis. He
determined to ship that horse West and make him earn the two fifty. So
leading the steed, with stout hearts still undaunted, the two apostles
passed on toward the coming foe.