1
The City of New York was in the year of the German attack the largest,
richest, in many respects the most splendid, and in some, the wickedest
city the world had ever seen. She was the supreme type of the City of
the Scientific Commercial Age; she displayed its greatness, its power,
its ruthless anarchic enterprise, and its social disorganisation most
strikingly and completely. She had long ousted London from her pride of
place as the modern Babylon, she was the centre of the world's finance,
the world's trade, and the world's pleasure; and men likened her to
the apocalyptic cities of the ancient prophets. She sat drinking up the
wealth of a continent as Rome once drank the wealth of the Mediterranean
and Babylon the wealth of the east. In her streets one found the
extremes of magnificence and misery, of civilisation and disorder. In
one quarter, palaces of marble, laced and crowned with light and flame
and flowers, towered up into her marvellous twilights beautiful, beyond
description; in another, a black and sinister polyglot population
sweltered in indescribable congestion in warrens, and excavations beyond
the power and knowledge of government. Her vice, her crime, her law
alike were inspired by a fierce and terrible energy, and like the great
cities of mediaeval Italy, her ways were dark and adventurous with
private war.
It was the peculiar shape of Manhattan Island, pressed in by arms of the
sea on either side, and incapable of comfortable expansion, except along
a narrow northward belt, that first gave the New York architects their
bias for extreme vertical dimensions. Every need was lavishly supplied
them--money, material, labour; only space was restricted. To begin,
therefore, they built high perforce. But to do so was to discover a
whole new world of architectural beauty, of exquisite ascendant lines,
and long after the central congestion had been relieved by tunnels
under the sea, four colossal bridges over the east river, and a dozen
mono-rail cables east and west, the upward growth went on. In many ways
New York and her gorgeous plutocracy repeated Venice in the magnificence
of her architecture, painting, metal-work and sculpture, for example,
in the grim intensity of her political method, in her maritime and
commercial ascendancy. But she repeated no previous state at all in the
lax disorder of her internal administration, a laxity that made vast
sections of her area lawless beyond precedent, so that it was possible
for whole districts to be impassable, while civil war raged between
street and street, and for Alsatias to exist in her midst in which the
official police never set foot. She was an ethnic whirlpool. The flags
of all nations flew in her harbour, and at the climax, the yearly
coming and going overseas numbered together upwards of two million human
beings. To Europe she was America, to America she was the gateway of
the world. But to tell the story of New York would be to write a social
history of the world; saints and martyrs, dreamers and scoundrels, the
traditions of a thousand races and a thousand religions, went to her
making and throbbed and jostled in her streets. And over all that
torrential confusion of men and purposes fluttered that strange flag,
the stars and stripes, that meant at once the noblest thing in life,
and the least noble, that is to say, Liberty on the one hand, and on
the other the base jealousy the individual self-seeker feels towards the
common purpose of the State.
For many generations New York had taken no heed of war, save as a thing
that happened far away, that affected prices and supplied the newspapers
with exciting headlines and pictures. The New Yorkers felt perhaps even
more certainly than the English had done that war in their own land
was an impossible thing. In that they shared the delusion of all North
America. They felt as secure as spectators at a bullfight; they risked
their money perhaps on the result, but that was all. And such ideas of
war as the common Americans possessed were derived from the limited,
picturesque, adventurous war of the past. They saw war as they saw
history, through an iridescent mist, deodorised, scented indeed, with
all its essential cruelties tactfully hidden away. They were inclined to
regret it as something ennobling, to sigh that it could no longer come
into their own private experience. They read with interest, if not with
avidity, of their new guns, of their immense and still more immense
ironclads, of their incredible and still more incredible explosives, but
just what these tremendous engines of destruction might mean for their
personal lives never entered their heads. They did not, so far as one
can judge from their contemporary literature, think that they meant
anything to their personal lives at all. They thought America was safe
amidst all this piling up of explosives. They cheered the flag by habit
and tradition, they despised other nations, and whenever there was an
international difficulty they were intensely patriotic, that is to
say, they were ardently against any native politician who did not say,
threaten, and do harsh and uncompromising things to the antagonist
people. They were spirited to Asia, spirited to Germany, so spirited to
Great Britain that the international attitude of the mother country to
her great daughter was constantly compared in contemporary caricature to
that between a hen-pecked husband and a vicious young wife. And for the
rest, they all went about their business and pleasure as if war had died
out with the megatherium....
And then suddenly, into a world peacefully busied for the most part upon
armaments and the perfection of explosives, war came; came the shock of
realising that the guns were going off, that the masses of inflammable
material all over the world were at last ablaze.
2
The immediate effect upon New York of the sudden onset of war was merely
to intensify her normal vehemence.
The newspapers and magazines that fed the American mind--for books upon
this impatient continent had become simply material for the energy
of collectors--were instantly a coruscation of war pictures and of
headlines that rose like rockets and burst like shells. To the normal
high-strung energy of New York streets was added a touch of war-fever.
Great crowds assembled, more especially in the dinner hour, in Madison
Square about the Farragut monument, to listen to and cheer patriotic
speeches, and a veritable epidemic of little flags and buttons swept
through these great torrents of swiftly moving young people, who poured
into New York of a morning by car and mono-rail and subway and train,
to toil, and ebb home again between the hours of five and seven. It was
dangerous not to wear a war button. The splendid music-halls of the time
sank every topic in patriotism and evolved scenes of wild enthusiasm,
strong men wept at the sight of the national banner sustained by the
whole strength of the ballet, and special searchlights and illuminations
amazed the watching angels. The churches re-echoed the national
enthusiasm in graver key and slower measure, and the aerial and naval
preparations on the East River were greatly incommoded by the multitude
of excursion steamers which thronged, helpfully cheering, about them.
The trade in small-arms was enormously stimulated, and many overwrought
citizens found an immediate relief for their emotions in letting off
fireworks of a more or less heroic, dangerous, and national character
in the public streets. Small children's air-balloons of the latest model
attached to string became a serious check to the pedestrian in Central
Park. And amidst scenes of indescribable emotion the Albany legislature
in permanent session, and with a generous suspension of rules and
precedents, passed through both Houses the long-disputed Bill for
universal military service in New York State.
Critics of the American character are disposed to consider--that up
to the actual impact of the German attack the people of New York dealt
altogether too much with the war as if it was a political demonstration.
Little or no damage, they urge, was done to either the German or
Japanese forces by the wearing of buttons, the waving of small flags,
the fireworks, or the songs. They forgot that, under the conditions of
warfare a century of science had brought about, the non-military section
of the population could do no serious damage in any form to their
enemies, and that there was no reason, therefore, why they should not do
as they did. The balance of military efficiency was shifting back from
the many to the few, from the common to the specialised.
The days when the emotional infantryman decided battles had passed by
for ever. War had become a matter of apparatus of special training
and skill of the most intricate kind. It had become undemocratic. And
whatever the value of the popular excitement, there can be no denying
that the small regular establishment of the United States Government,
confronted by this totally unexpected emergency of an armed invasion
from Europe, acted with vigour, science, and imagination. They were
taken by surprise so far as the diplomatic situation was concerned,
and their equipment for building either navigables or aeroplanes was
contemptible in comparison with the huge German parks. Still they set to
work at once to prove to the world that the spirit that had created the
Monitor and the Southern submarines of 1864 was not dead. The chief of
the aeronautic establishment near West Point was Cabot Sinclair, and
he allowed himself but one single moment of the posturing that was so
universal in that democratic time. “We have chosen our epitaphs,”
he said to a reporter, “and we are going to have, 'They did all they
could.' Now run away!”
The curious thing is that they did all do all they could; there is no
exception known. Their only defect indeed was a defect of style. One of
the most striking facts historically about this war, and the one that
makes the complete separation that had arisen between the methods
of warfare and the necessity of democratic support, is the effectual
secrecy of the Washington authorities about their airships. They did
not bother to confide a single fact of their preparations to the public.
They did not even condescend to talk to Congress. They burked and
suppressed every inquiry. The war was fought by the President and the
Secretaries of State in an entirely autocratic manner. Such publicity as
they sought was merely to anticipate and prevent inconvenient agitation
to defend particular points. They realised that the chief danger in
aerial warfare from an excitable and intelligent public would be a
clamour for local airships and aeroplanes to defend local interests.
This, with such resources as they possessed, might lead to a fatal
division and distribution of the national forces. Particularly they
feared that they might be forced into a premature action to defend
New York. They realised with prophetic insight that this would be the
particular advantage the Germans would seek. So they took great pains
to direct the popular mind towards defensive artillery, and to divert it
from any thought of aerial battle. Their real preparations they masked
beneath ostensible ones. There was at Washington a large reserve of
naval guns, and these were distributed rapidly, conspicuously, and with
much press attention, among the Eastern cities. They were mounted for
the most part upon hills and prominent crests around the threatened
centres of population. They were mounted upon rough adaptations of the
Doan swivel, which at that time gave the maximum vertical range to a
heavy gun. Much of this artillery was still unmounted, and nearly all of
it was unprotected when the German air-fleet reached New York. And down
in the crowded streets, when that occurred, the readers of the New
York papers were regaling themselves with wonderful and wonderfully
illustrated accounts of such matters as:--
THE SECRET OF THE THUNDERBOLT
AGED SCIENTIST PERFECTS ELECTRIC GUN
TO ELECTROCUTE AIRSHIP CREWS BY UPWARD LIGHTNING
WASHINGTON ORDERS FIVE HUNDRED
WAR SECRETARY LODGE DELIGHTED
SAYS THEY WILL SUIT THE GERMANS DOWN TO THE GROUND
PRESIDENT PUBLICLY APPLAUDS THIS MERRY QUIP
3
The German fleet reached New York in advance of the news of the American
naval disaster. It reached New York in the late afternoon and was first
seen by watchers at Ocean Grove and Long Branch coming swiftly out of
the southward sea and going away to the northwest. The flagship passed
almost vertically over the Sandy Hook observation station, rising
rapidly as it did so, and in a few minutes all New York was vibrating to
the Staten Island guns.
Several of these guns, and especially that at Giffords and the one on
Beacon Hill above Matawan, were remarkably well handled. The former, at
a distance of five miles, and with an elevation of six thousand feet,
sent a shell to burst so close to the Vaterland that a pane of the
Prince's forward window was smashed by a fragment. This sudden explosion
made Bert tuck in his head with the celerity of a startled tortoise. The
whole air-fleet immediately went up steeply to a height of about twelve
thousand feet and at that level passed unscathed over the ineffectual
guns. The airships lined out as they moved forward into the form of a
flattened V, with its apex towards the city, and with the flagship going
highest at the apex. The two ends of the V passed over Plumfield and
Jamaica Bay, respectively, and the Prince directed his course a little
to the east of the Narrows, soared over Upper Bay, and came to rest
over Jersey City in a position that dominated lower New York. There
the monsters hung, large and wonderful in the evening light, serenely
regardless of the occasional rocket explosions and flashing shell-bursts
in the lower air.
It was a pause of mutual inspection. For a time naive humanity swamped
the conventions of warfare altogether; the interest of the millions
below and of the thousands above alike was spectacular. The evening was
unexpectedly fine--only a few thin level bands of clouds at seven or
eight thousand feet broke its luminous clarity. The wind had dropped; it
was an evening infinitely peaceful and still. The heavy concussions of
the distant guns and those incidental harmless pyrotechnics at the level
of the clouds seemed to have as little to do with killing and force,
terror and submission, as a salute at a naval review. Below, every
point of vantage bristled with spectators, the roofs of the towering
buildings, the public squares, the active ferry boats, and every
favourable street intersection had its crowds: all the river piers
were dense with people, the Battery Park was solid black with east-side
population, and every position of advantage in Central Park and along
Riverside Drive had its peculiar and characteristic assembly from the
adjacent streets. The footways of the great bridges over the East River
were also closely packed and blocked. Everywhere shopkeepers had left
their shops, men their work, and women and children their homes, to come
out and see the marvel.
“It beat,” they declared, “the newspapers.”
And from above, many of the occupants of the airships stared with an
equal curiosity. No city in the world was ever so finely placed as New
York, so magnificently cut up by sea and bluff and river, so admirably
disposed to display the tall effects of buildings, the complex
immensities of bridges and mono-railways and feats of engineering.
London, Paris, Berlin, were shapeless, low agglomerations beside it. Its
port reached to its heart like Venice, and, like Venice, it was obvious,
dramatic, and proud. Seen from above it was alive with crawling
trains and cars, and at a thousand points it was already breaking into
quivering light. New York was altogether at its best that evening, its
splendid best.
“Gaw! What a place!” said Bert.
It was so great, and in its collective effect so pacifically
magnificent, that to make war upon it seemed incongruous beyond measure,
like laying siege to the National Gallery or attacking respectable
people in an hotel dining-room with battle-axe and mail. It was in its
entirety so large, so complex, so delicately immense, that to bring it
to the issue of warfare was like driving a crowbar into the mechanism
of a clock. And the fish-like shoal of great airships hovering light
and sunlit above, filling the sky, seemed equally remote from the ugly
forcefulness of war. To Kurt, to Smallways, to I know not how many more
of the people in the air-fleet came the distinctest apprehension of
these incompatibilities. But in the head of the Prince Karl Albert were
the vapours of romance: he was a conqueror, and this was the enemy's
city. The greater the city, the greater the triumph. No doubt he had a
time of tremendous exultation and sensed beyond all precedent the sense
of power that night.
There came an end at last to that pause. Some wireless communications
had failed of a satisfactory ending, and fleet and city remembered they
were hostile powers. “Look!” cried the multitude; “look!”
“What are they doing?”
“What?”... Down through the twilight sank five attacking airships, one
to the Navy Yard on East River, one to City Hall, two over the great
business buildings of Wall Street and Lower Broadway, one to the
Brooklyn Bridge, dropping from among their fellows through the danger
zone from the distant guns smoothly and rapidly to a safe proximity to
the city masses. At that descent all the cars in the streets stopped
with dramatic suddenness, and all the lights that had been coming on in
the streets and houses went out again. For the City Hall had awakened
and was conferring by telephone with the Federal command and taking
measures for defence. The City Hall was asking for airships, refusing to
surrender as Washington advised, and developing into a centre of intense
emotion, of hectic activity. Everywhere and hastily the police began to
clear the assembled crowds. “Go to your homes,” they said; and the word
was passed from mouth to mouth, “There's going to be trouble.” A chill
of apprehension ran through the city, and men hurrying in the unwonted
darkness across City Hall Park and Union Square came upon the dim forms
of soldiers and guns, and were challenged and sent back. In half an
hour New York had passed from serene sunset and gaping admiration to a
troubled and threatening twilight.
The first loss of life occurred in the panic rush from Brooklyn Bridge
as the airship approached it. With the cessation of the traffic an
unusual stillness came upon New York, and the disturbing concussions of
the futile defending guns on the hills about grew more and more audible.
At last these ceased also. A pause of further negotiation followed.
People sat in darkness, sought counsel from telephones that were dumb.
Then into the expectant hush came a great crash and uproar, the breaking
down of the Brooklyn Bridge, the rifle fire from the Navy Yard, and the
bursting of bombs in Wall Street and the City Hall. New York as a whole
could do nothing, could understand nothing. New York in the darkness
peered and listened to these distant sounds until presently they died
away as suddenly as they had begun. “What could be happening?” They
asked it in vain.
A long, vague period intervened, and people looking out of the windows
of upper rooms discovered the dark hulls of German airships, gliding
slowly and noiselessly, quite close at hand. Then quietly the electric
lights came on again, and an uproar of nocturnal newsvendors began in
the streets.
The units of that vast and varied population bought and learnt what
had happened; there had been a fight and New York had hoisted the white
flag.
4
The lamentable incidents that followed the surrender of New York seem
now in the retrospect to be but the necessary and inevitable consequence
of the clash of modern appliances and social conditions produced by
the scientific century on the one hand, and the tradition of a crude,
romantic patriotism on the other. At first people received the fact
with an irresponsible detachment, much as they would have received the
slowing down of the train in which they were travelling or the erection
of a public monument by the city to which they belonged.
“We have surrendered. Dear me! HAVE we?” was rather the manner in which
the first news was met. They took it in the same spectacular spirit they
had displayed at the first apparition of the air-fleet. Only slowly was
this realisation of a capitulation suffused with the flush of passion,
only with reflection did they make any personal application. “WE have
surrendered!” came later; “in us America is defeated.” Then they began
to burn and tingle.
The newspapers, which were issued about one in the morning contained no
particulars of the terms upon which New York had yielded--nor did
they give any intimation of the quality of the brief conflict that had
preceded the capitulation. The later issues remedied these deficiencies.
There came the explicit statement of the agreement to victual the
German airships, to supply the complement of explosives to replace
those employed in the fight and in the destruction of the North Atlantic
fleet, to pay the enormous ransom of forty million dollars, and to
surrender the flotilla in the East River. There came, too, longer and longer
descriptions of the smashing up of the City Hall and the Navy Yard, and
people began to realise faintly what those brief minutes of uproar had
meant. They read the tale of men blown to bits, of futile soldiers
in that localised battle fighting against hope amidst an indescribable
wreckage, of flags hauled down by weeping men. And these strange
nocturnal editions contained also the first brief cables from Europe
of the fleet disaster, the North Atlantic fleet for which New York had
always felt an especial pride and solicitude. Slowly, hour by hour, the
collective consciousness woke up, the tide of patriotic astonishment and
humiliation came floating in. America had come upon disaster; suddenly
New York discovered herself with amazement giving place to wrath
unspeakable, a conquered city under the hand of her conqueror.
As that fact shaped itself in the public mind, there sprang up, as
flames spring up, an angry repudiation. “No!” cried New York, waking in
the dawn. “No! I am not defeated. This is a dream.” Before day broke
the swift American anger was running through all the city, through every
soul in those contagious millions. Before it took action, before it took
shape, the men in the airships could feel the gigantic insurgence of
emotion, as cattle and natural creatures feel, it is said, the coming
of an earthquake. The newspapers of the Knype group first gave the thing
words and a formula. “We do not agree,” they said simply. “We have been
betrayed!” Men took that up everywhere, it passed from mouth to mouth,
at every street corner under the paling lights of dawn orators stood
unchecked, calling upon the spirit of America to arise, making the
shame a personal reality to every one who heard. To Bert, listening five
hundred feet above, it seemed that the city, which had at first produced
only confused noises, was now humming like a hive of bees--of very angry
bees.
After the smashing of the City Hall and Post-Office, the white flag had
been hoisted from a tower of the old Park Row building, and thither had
gone Mayor O'Hagen, urged thither indeed by the terror-stricken property
owners of lower New York, to negotiate the capitulation with Von
Winterfeld. The Vaterland, having dropped the secretary by a rope
ladder, remained hovering, circling very slowly above the great
buildings, old and new, that clustered round City Hall Park, while the
Helmholz, which had done the fighting there, rose overhead to a height
of perhaps two thousand feet. So Bert had a near view of all that
occurred in that central place. The City Hall and Court House, the
Post-Office and a mass of buildings on the west side of Broadway, had
been badly damaged, and the three former were a heap of blackened ruins.
In the case of the first two the loss of life had not been considerable,
but a great multitude of workers, including many girls and women, had
been caught in the destruction of the Post-Office, and a little army of
volunteers with white badges entered behind the firemen, bringing out
the often still living bodies, for the most part frightfully charred,
and carrying them into the big Monson building close at hand. Everywhere
the busy firemen were directing their bright streams of water upon the
smouldering masses: their hose lay about the square, and long cordons of
police held back the gathering black masses of people, chiefly from the
east side, from these central activities.
In violent and extraordinary contrast with this scene of destruction,
close at hand were the huge newspaper establishments of Park Row. They
were all alight and working; they had not been abandoned even while
the actual bomb throwing was going on, and now staff and presses were
vehemently active, getting out the story, the immense and dreadful story
of the night, developing comment and, in most cases, spreading the idea
of resistance under the very noses of the airships. For a long time Bert
could not imagine what these callously active offices could be, then he
detected the noise of the presses and emitted his “Gaw!”
Beyond these newspaper buildings again, and partially hidden by the
arches of the old Elevated Railway of New York (long since converted
into a mono-rail), there was another cordon of police and a sort of
encampment of ambulances and doctors, busy with the dead and wounded who
had been killed early in the night by the panic upon Brooklyn Bridge.
All this he saw in the perspectives of a bird's-eye view, as things
happening in a big, irregular-shaped pit below him, between cliffs of
high building. Northward he looked along the steep canon of Broadway,
down whose length at intervals crowds were assembling about excited
speakers; and when he lifted his eyes he saw the chimneys and
cable-stacks and roof spaces of New York, and everywhere now over these
the watching, debating people clustered, except where the fires raged
and the jets of water flew. Everywhere, too, were flagstaffs devoid of
flags; one white sheet drooped and flapped and drooped again over the
Park Row buildings. And upon the lurid lights, the festering movement
and intense shadows of this strange scene, there was breaking now the
cold, impartial dawn.
For Bert Smallways all this was framed in the frame of the open
porthole. It was a pale, dim world outside that dark and tangible
rim. All night he had clutched at that rim, jumped and quivered at
explosions, and watched phantom events. Now he had been high and now
low; now almost beyond hearing, now flying close to crashings and shouts
and outcries. He had seen airships flying low and swift over darkened
and groaning streets; watched great buildings, suddenly red-lit amidst
the shadows, crumple at the smashing impact of bombs; witnessed for
the first time in his life the grotesque, swift onset of insatiable
conflagrations. From it all he felt detached, disembodied. The Vaterland
did not even fling a bomb; she watched and ruled. Then down they had
come at last to hover over City Hall Park, and it had crept in upon his
mind, chillingly, terrifyingly, that these illuminated black masses
were great offices afire, and that the going to and fro of minute, dim
spectres of lantern-lit grey and white was a harvesting of the wounded
and the dead. As the light grew clearer he began to understand more and
more what these crumpled black things signified....
He had watched hour after hour since first New York had risen out of the
blue indistinctness of the landfall. With the daylight he experienced an
intolerable fatigue.
He lifted weary eyes to the pink flush in the sky, yawned immensely, and
crawled back whispering to himself across the cabin to the locker. He
did not so much lie down upon that as fall upon it and instantly become
asleep.
There, hours after, sprawling undignified and sleeping profoundly,
Kurt found him, a very image of the democratic mind confronted with the
problems of a time too complex for its apprehension. His face was
pale and indifferent, his mouth wide open, and he snored. He snored
disagreeably.
Kurt regarded him for a moment with a mild distaste. Then he kicked his
ankle.
“Wake up,” he said to Smallways' stare, “and lie down decent.”
Bert sat up and rubbed his eyes.
“Any more fightin' yet?” he asked.
“No,” said Kurt, and sat down, a tired man.
“Gott!” he cried presently, rubbing his hands over his face, “but
I'd like a cold bath! I've been looking for stray bullet holes in the
air-chambers all night until now.” He yawned. “I must sleep. You'd
better clear out, Smallways. I can't stand you here this morning. You're
so infernally ugly and useless. Have you had your rations? No! Well, go
in and get 'em, and don't come back. Stick in the gallery....”
5
So Bert, slightly refreshed by coffee and sleep, resumed his helpless
co-operation in the War in the Air. He went down into the little gallery
as the lieutenant had directed, and clung to the rail at the extreme end
beyond the look-out man, trying to seem as inconspicuous and harmless a
fragment of life as possible.
A wind was rising rather strongly from the south-east. It obliged the
Vaterland to come about in that direction, and made her roll a
great deal as she went to and fro over Manhattan Island. Away in the
north-west clouds gathered. The throb-throb of her slow screw working
against the breeze was much more perceptible than when she was going
full speed ahead; and the friction of the wind against the underside of
the gas-chamber drove a series of shallow ripples along it and made
a faint flapping sound like, but fainter than, the beating of ripples
under the stem of a boat. She was stationed over the temporary City Hall
in the Park Row building, and every now and then she would descend
to resume communication with the mayor and with Washington. But the
restlessness of the Prince would not suffer him to remain for long in
any one place. Now he would circle over the Hudson and East River; now
he would go up high, as if to peer away into the blue distances; once he
ascended so swiftly and so far that mountain sickness overtook him and
the crew and forced him down again; and Bert shared the dizziness and
nausea.
The swaying view varied with these changes of altitude. Now they would
be low and close, and he would distinguish in that steep, unusual
perspective, windows, doors, street and sky signs, people and the
minutest details, and watch the enigmatical behaviour of crowds and
clusters upon the roofs and in the streets; then as they soared the
details would shrink, the sides of streets draw together, the view
widen, the people cease to be significant. At the highest the effect
was that of a concave relief map; Bert saw the dark and crowded land
everywhere intersected by shining waters, saw the Hudson River like a
spear of silver, and Lower Island Sound like a shield. Even to Bert's
unphilosophical mind the contrast of city below and fleet above pointed
an opposition, the opposition of the adventurous American's tradition
and character with German order and discipline. Below, the immense
buildings, tremendous and fine as they were, seemed like the giant trees
of a jungle fighting for life; their picturesque magnificence was as
planless as the chances of crag and gorge, their casualty enhanced by
the smoke and confusion of still unsubdued and spreading conflagrations.
In the sky soared the German airships like beings in a different,
entirely more orderly world, all oriented to the same angle of the
horizon, uniform in build and appearance, moving accurately with one
purpose as a pack of wolves will move, distributed with the most precise
and effectual co-operation.
It dawned upon Bert that hardly a third of the fleet was visible. The
others had gone upon errands he could not imagine, beyond the compass of
that great circle of earth and sky. He wondered, but there was no one to
ask. As the day wore on, about a dozen reappeared in the east with
their stores replenished from the flotilla and towing a number of
drachenflieger. Towards afternoon the weather thickened, driving clouds
appeared in the south-west and ran together and seemed to engender more
clouds, and the wind came round into that quarter and blew stronger.
Towards the evening the wind became a gale into which the now tossing
airships had to beat.
All that day the Prince was negotiating with Washington, while his
detached scouts sought far and wide over the Eastern States looking for
anything resembling an aeronautic park. A squadron of twenty airships
detached overnight had dropped out of the air upon Niagara and was
holding the town and power works.
Meanwhile the insurrectionary movement in the giant city grew
uncontrollable. In spite of five great fires already involving many
acres, and spreading steadily, New York was still not satisfied that she
was beaten.
At first the rebellious spirit below found vent only in isolated shouts,
street-crowd speeches, and newspaper suggestions; then it found much
more definite expression in the appearance in the morning sunlight of
American flags at point after point above the architectural cliffs of
the city. It is quite possible that in many cases this spirited display
of bunting by a city already surrendered was the outcome of the innocent
informality of the American mind, but it is also undeniable that in many
it was a deliberate indication that the people “felt wicked.”
The German sense of correctitude was deeply shocked by this outbreak.
The Graf von Winterfeld immediately communicated with the mayor, and
pointed out the irregularity, and the fire look-out stations were
instructed in the matter. The New York police was speedily hard at
work, and a foolish contest in full swing between impassioned citizens
resolved to keep the flag flying, and irritated and worried officers
instructed to pull it down.
The trouble became acute at last in the streets above Columbia
University. The captain of the airship watching this quarter seems to
have stooped to lasso and drag from its staff a flag hoisted upon Morgan
Hall. As he did so a volley of rifle and revolver shots was fired from
the upper windows of the huge apartment building that stands between the
University and Riverside Drive.
Most of these were ineffectual, but two or three perforated
gas-chambers, and one smashed the hand and arm of a man upon the forward
platform; The sentinel on the lower gallery immediately replied, and the
machine gun on the shield of the eagle let fly and promptly stopped
any further shots. The airship rose and signalled the flagship and City
Hall, police and militiamen were directed at once to the spot, and this
particular incident closed.
But hard upon that came the desperate attempt of a party of young
clubmen from New York, who, inspired by patriotic and adventurous
imaginations, slipped off in half a dozen motor-cars to Beacon Hill, and
set to work with remarkable vigour to improvise a fort about the Doan
swivel gun that had been placed there. They found it still in the hands
of the disgusted gunners, who had been ordered to cease fire at the
capitulation, and it was easy to infect these men with their own spirit.
They declared their gun hadn't had half a chance, and were burning to
show what it could do. Directed by the newcomers, they made a trench
and bank about the mounting of the piece, and constructed flimsy
shelter-pits of corrugated iron.
They were actually loading the gun when they were observed by the
airship Preussen and the shell they succeeded in firing before the bombs
of the latter smashed them and their crude defences to fragments, burst
over the middle gas-chambers of the Bingen, and brought her to earth,
disabled, upon Staten Island. She was badly deflated, and dropped among
trees, over which her empty central gas-bags spread in canopies and
festoons. Nothing, however, had caught fire, and her men were speedily
at work upon her repair. They behaved with a confidence that verged upon
indiscretion. While most of them commenced patching the tears of the
membrane, half a dozen of them started off for the nearest road in
search of a gas main, and presently found themselves prisoners in
the hands of a hostile crowd. Close at hand was a number of villa
residences, whose occupants speedily developed from an unfriendly
curiosity to aggression. At that time the police control of the large
polyglot population of Staten Island had become very lax, and scarcely
a household but had its rifle or pistols and ammunition. These were
presently produced, and after two or three misses, one of the men at
work was hit in the foot. Thereupon the Germans left their sewing and
mending, took cover among the trees, and replied.
The crackling of shots speedily brought the Preussen and Kiel on the
scene, and with a few hand grenades they made short work of every
villa within a mile. A number of non-combatant American men, women, and
children were killed and the actual assailants driven off. For a time
the repairs went on in peace under the immediate protection of these
two airships. Then when they returned to their quarters, an intermittent
sniping and fighting round the stranded Bingen was resumed, and went
on all the afternoon, and merged at last in the general combat of the
evening....
About eight the Bingen was rushed by an armed mob, and all its defenders
killed after a fierce, disorderly struggle.
The difficulty of the Germans in both these cases came from the
impossibility of landing any efficient force or, indeed, any force at
all from the air-fleet. The airships were quite unequal to the transport
of any adequate landing parties; their complement of men was just
sufficient to manoeuvre and fight them in the air. From above they could
inflict immense damage; they could reduce any organised Government to a
capitulation in the briefest space, but they could not disarm, much less
could they occupy, the surrendered areas below. They had to trust to
the pressure upon the authorities below of a threat to renew the
bombardment. It was their sole resource. No doubt, with a
highly organised and undamaged Government and a homogeneous and
well-disciplined people that would have sufficed to keep the peace. But
this was not the American case. Not only was the New York Government a
weak one and insufficiently provided with police, but the destruction of
the City Hall and Post-Office and other central ganglia had hopelessly
disorganised the co-operation of part with part. The street cars and
railways had ceased; the telephone service was out of gear and only
worked intermittently. The Germans had struck at the head, and the head
was conquered and stunned--only to release the body from its rule. New
York had become a headless monster, no longer capable of collective
submission. Everywhere it lifted itself rebelliously; everywhere
authorities and officials left to their own imitative were joining in
the arming and flag-hoisting and excitement of that afternoon.
6
The disintegrating truce gave place to a definite general breach with
the assassination of the Wetterhorn--for that is the only possible word
for the act--above Union Square, and not a mile away from the exemplary
ruins of City Hall. This occurred late in the afternoon, between five
and six. By that time the weather had changed very much for the worse,
and the operations of the airships were embarrassed by the necessity
they were under of keeping head on to the gusts. A series of squalls,
with hail and thunder, followed one another from the south by
south-east, and in order to avoid these as much as possible, the
air-fleet came low over the houses, diminishing its range of observation
and exposing itself to a rifle attack.
Overnight there had been a gun placed in Union Square. It had never been
mounted, much less fired, and in the darkness after the surrender it was
taken with its supplies and put out of the way under the arches of the
great Dexter building. Here late in the morning it was remarked by a
number of patriotic spirits. They set to work to hoist and mount it
inside the upper floors of the place. They made, in fact, a masked
battery behind the decorous office blinds, and there lay in wait as
simply excited as children until at last the stem of the luckless
Wetterhorn appeared, beating and rolling at quarter speed over the
recently reconstructed pinnacles of Tiffany's. Promptly that one-gun
battery unmasked. The airship's look-out man must have seen the whole
of the tenth story of the Dexter building crumble out and smash in the
street below to discover the black muzzle looking out from the shadows
behind. Then perhaps the shell hit him.
The gun fired two shells before the frame of the Dexter building
collapsed, and each shell raked the Wetterhorn from stem to stern.
They smashed her exhaustively. She crumpled up like a can that has been
kicked by a heavy boot, her forepart came down in the square, and the
rest of her length, with a great snapping and twisting of shafts and
stays, descended, collapsing athwart Tammany Hall and the streets
towards Second Avenue. Her gas escaped to mix with air, and the air of
her rent balloonette poured into her deflating gas-chambers. Then with
an immense impact she exploded....
The Vaterland at that time was beating up to the south of City Hall
from over the ruins of the Brooklyn Bridge, and the reports of the gun,
followed by the first crashes of the collapsing Dexter building, brought
Kurt and, Smallways to the cabin porthole. They were in time to see the
flash of the exploding gun, and then they were first flattened against
the window and then rolled head over heels across the floor of the cabin
by the air wave of the explosion. The Vaterland bounded like a football
some one has kicked and when they looked out again, Union Square was
small and remote and shattered, as though some cosmically vast giant had
rolled over it. The buildings to the east of it were ablaze at a dozen
points, under the flaming tatters and warping skeleton of the airship,
and all the roofs and walls were ridiculously askew and crumbling as one
looked. “Gaw!” said Bert. “What's happened? Look at the people!”
But before Kurt could produce an explanation, the shrill bells of the
airship were ringing to quarters, and he had to go. Bert hesitated and
stepped thoughtfully into the passage, looking back at the window as
he did so. He was knocked off his feet at once by the Prince, who was
rushing headlong from his cabin to the central magazine.
Bert had a momentary impression of the great figure of the Prince, white
with rage, bristling with gigantic anger, his huge fist swinging. “Blut
und Eisen!” cried the Prince, as one who swears. “Oh! Blut und Eisen!”
Some one fell over Bert--something in the manner of falling suggested
Von Winterfeld--and some one else paused and kicked him spitefully and
hard. Then he was sitting up in the passage, rubbing a freshly bruised
cheek and readjusting the bandage he still wore on his head. “Dem that
Prince,” said Bert, indignant beyond measure. “'E 'asn't the menners of
a 'og!”
He stood up, collected his wits for a minute, and then went slowly
towards the gangway of the little gallery. As he did so he heard noises
suggestive of the return of the Prince. The lot of them were coming back
again. He shot into his cabin like a rabbit into its burrow, just in
time to escape that shouting terror.
He shut the door, waited until the passage was still, then went across
to the window and looked out. A drift of cloud made the prospect of
the streets and squares hazy, and the rolling of the airship swung the
picture up and down. A few people were running to and fro, but for the
most part the aspect of the district was desertion. The streets seemed
to broaden out, they became clearer, and the little dots that were
people larger as the Vaterland came down again. Presently she was
swaying along above the lower end of Broadway. The dots below, Bert saw,
were not running now, but standing and looking up. Then suddenly they
were all running again.
Something had dropped from the aeroplane, something that looked small
and flimsy. It hit the pavement near a big archway just underneath Bert.
A little man was sprinting along the sidewalk within half a dozen yards,
and two or three others and one woman were bolting across the roadway.
They were odd little figures, so very small were they about the heads,
so very active about the elbows and legs. It was really funny to see
their legs going. Foreshortened, humanity has no dignity. The little man
on the pavement jumped comically--no doubt with terror, as the bomb fell
beside him.
Then blinding flames squirted out in all directions from the point of
impact, and the little man who had jumped became, for an instant, a
flash of fire and vanished--vanished absolutely. The people running out
into the road took preposterous clumsy leaps, then flopped down and lay
still, with their torn clothes smouldering into flame. Then pieces of
the archway began to drop, and the lower masonry of the building to fall
in with the rumbling sound of coals being shot into a cellar. A faint
screaming reached Bert, and then a crowd of people ran out into the
street, one man limping and gesticulating awkwardly. He halted, and went
back towards the building. A falling mass of brick-work hit him and sent
him sprawling to lie still and crumpled where he fell. Dust and black
smoke came pouring into the street, and were presently shot with red
flame....
In this manner the massacre of New York began. She was the first of the
great cities of the Scientific Age to suffer by the enormous powers
and grotesque limitations of aerial warfare. She was wrecked as in the
previous century endless barbaric cities had been bombarded, because she
was at once too strong to be occupied and too undisciplined and proud to
surrender in order to escape destruction. Given the circumstances, the
thing had to be done. It was impossible for the Prince to desist, and
own himself defeated, and it was impossible to subdue the city except
by largely destroying it. The catastrophe was the logical outcome of
the situation, created by the application of science to warfare. It
was unavoidable that great cities should be destroyed. In spite of his
intense exasperation with his dilemma, the Prince sought to be moderate
even in massacre. He tried to give a memorable lesson with the minimum
waste of life and the minimum expenditure of explosives. For that night
he proposed only the wrecking of Broadway. He directed the air-fleet to
move in column over the route of this thoroughfare, dropping bombs, the
Vaterland leading. And so our Bert Smallways became a participant in one
of the most cold-blooded slaughters in the world's history, in which
men who were neither excited nor, except for the remotest chance of
a bullet, in any danger, poured death and destruction upon homes and
crowds below.
He clung to the frame of the porthole as the airship tossed and swayed,
and stared down through the light rain that now drove before the wind,
into the twilight streets, watching people running out of the houses,
watching buildings collapse and fires begin. As the airships sailed
along they smashed up the city as a child will shatter its cities of
brick and card. Below, they left ruins and blazing conflagrations and
heaped and scattered dead; men, women, and children mixed together as
though they had been no more than Moors, or Zulus, or Chinese. Lower
New York was soon a furnace of crimson flames, from which there was no
escape. Cars, railways, ferries, all had ceased, and never a light lit
the way of the distracted fugitives in that dusky confusion but the
light of burning. He had glimpses of what it must mean to be down
there--glimpses. And it came to him suddenly as an incredible discovery,
that such disasters were not only possible now in this strange,
gigantic, foreign New York, but also in London--in Bun Hill! that the
little island in the silver seas was at the end of its immunity, that
nowhere in the world any more was there a place left where a Smallways
might lift his head proudly and vote for war and a spirited foreign
policy, and go secure from such horrible things.