chain-mail hung far down into the sea to catch any torpedo that might come driving at the keel.

There was more protection than that. It would be day soon, and then the submarines would be blind no longer. All around the area chosen for the transports to lie in, the fishing boats taken from the sea-islands were being towed by destroyers, to drop their nets. Their wooden buoys formed odd geometrical outlines on the sea.

These thin things of meshed twine, made only to hold little, inoffensive fish, were suspended like submarine fences, north and south and east and west of the field of operations.

That such trivial things should be of any avail against under-water craft with death in their heads, might well have seemed absurd to a landsman. They did not seem absurd to the Lieutenant who commanded United States submarine M-9, when he steered his craft, awash, out from behind Fisher’s Island Sound at dawn, and looked eastward through his glasses.[32]

Ten miles away lay the transports, quite motionless, beautifully assembled as a target for him. At that distance their masts and funnels seemed huddled. He had a vivid picture in his mind, for an instant. It was a picture of fat, slow sheep crowding together with a wolf among them.

Woven Twine Versus Submarine M-9

But between them and his wolf lay the net buoys, dotting all the surface, in and out as if they had been laid by some laboring artist to make a maze.

The sea-wolf went slowly nearer. With its tanks full of water, it lay so far submerged that the sea washed the coaming around the manhole hatch. The Lieutenant was like a man wading breast-high in the ocean. It would be hard to see him from any distance.

He studied the traceries of buoys. There were spaces between them, that betokened gaps in the fences. One might find a gap and go through.

But to find a gap, the submarine must raise her periscope above water, and look around. But at each gap, sweeping incessantly to and fro, like galloping cavalry, were destroyers.[33]

Could one dive and go through blind? The Lieutenant knew the limitations of his terrible little animal. Its kiss could draw a twenty thousand ton ship into the abyss, but the woven twine would laugh at it.

Its nose could cut through them like the threads that they were. But the torn ends would catch conning tower and masts and periscope tubes. Even if it tore away from them, the whirl of the propellor remained to renew the danger, sucking the trailing cords to itself and in one instant switching them around and around the spinning shaft.

With the propellor blocked, the submarine must rise; for only with its propellor thrusting and its horizontal fins set to hold it down, can the submarine stay under. It submerges, not by sinking but by diving with main strength.

Another rather vivid picture flashed into the Lieutenant’s mind. It was not a picture, this time, of a wolf among sheep. It was a picture of a sudden enormous commotion among those quiet net-buoys, as of something struggling down below; and then of a violent surge as the tangled nets were dragged to and fro by a helpless submarine, held fast by the tail.[34]

A breeze arose with the rising sun, and the water roughened. The submarine stopped. It could not meet rough water while it was awash. Although its buoyancy when it was sealed was such that its propellor had to thrust full speed to make it dive, yet with its hatches open two hundred gallons of water, far less than is contained in a single big wave, would send it down like a tin can.[35]

The Commander held on as long as he could, watching the whitening water in the east, and watching the transports.

He saw that at a thousand yards’ distance around them (just what he would have chosen as neat torpedo range), there lay a little fleet of gun-boats, all thrusting out booms with steel nets, that made them look oddly as if they were hooped and wide-skirted. Disposed in an oval, they guarded the transports with a second wall of steel wire.

And overhead, soaring in spirals, never flying far away, and always returning, were three naval planes. The Commander of the M-9 knew that they were waiting and watching for just one thing—the “shadow” of a submerged submarine.[36]

This enemy, plainly, was taking no chances. The fleet had power and time. It bent them to one object—to land its men safely. It would not engage the harbor defenses, and so open itself to the risks of plunging fire and torpedo attack. It would not blockade harbors, and so make itself a chosen mark for such terrors as M-9.

The Three Harbor Gates to New York and Boston

Very scientifically, very thoughtfully, had the enemy staked out the vital spot at which he had decided to strike. Here, facing each to each almost like the salients of a fortification, lay three harbor gates to the northeastern United States—Buzzards Bay, gashing deeply into Massachusetts: Narragansett Bay, almost cutting Rhode Island in two: and the eastern entrance to Long Island Sound and the cities of Connecticut.[37]

Open any one of these gates, and it opened the way at one blow to both New York and Boston.

These three sea-salients were greatly armed for defense. In each harbor lay batteries of 12-inch all-steel rifled cannon. Hidden under facings of earth, steel and concrete, they sat on disappearing carriages and pneumatic gun-lifts that would swing them up as if they weighed ounces instead of tons, and instantly plunge them back again into cover after firing.

Deep under earth embankments, squatting in concrete-lined graves, 12-inch mortars, sixteen to a group, stared upward at the patches of sky over their heads, which was all that their men would see while they were firing, however bitter the fight might be.

A single shot from one of the long, graceful rifles might sink a ship, if it were well placed. A single salvo from the mortars, the sixteen firing together, assuredly would. And they could do it. Aimed by mathematics, they were sure to strike the spot.[38]

A score of serving devices in the defenses were slaves to the steel champions. Searchlights in armor waited like men-at-arms to point with a long white finger at their prey. Mine fields and emplacements and cable conduits were there to force the ships to steer where the guns could strike them most surely. Masked by trees and mounds, concealed by every device against betrayal, were range-finders and fire-control stations.

Here sat experts who had studied the most occult questions of arithmetic, geometry, surveying, navigation, and cartography for one purpose—to direct those long guns true. They were provided with exquisite instruments for calculating angles and distances to an inch, though the point to be ascertained were ten nautical miles and more away.

Before them lay charts of the sea-area that they were guarding. Let a ship come within the limit of their apparatus, and in the time required to speak into a telephone the gun-pits miles away down the defense-line would crack with the explosion of tons of smokeless powder.

They were nearly perfect, those works—as engineering works. They were fully armed with the engines to make them malignant to the ultimate fatal degree. The ten-mile area of sea that lay so bright and dimpled that morning might well have been black as the Wings of Death; for a few little motions of the waiting men under the pretty grassy mounds would unfold those pinions.

The Joint in America’s Armor

But under the iron visages was weakness. In none of the defenses on this morning when the time had come for their test, were there more than one-half the number of men required to hold them.[39]

They could fight the guns, so long as the action remained a ship-to-fort action; but if the enemy attacked at the rear, from the land, they were not in sufficient force to meet him and throw him back. Attacked from the land, the men of the defenses would have to retire to the inner keep and fight from shelter with rapid-fire guns. And when the defenses thus began to defend themselves, their hour would have struck.[40]

Still, for the time they were deadly. The enemy fleet paid them the supreme tribute of scrupulous respect. Not a vessel ventured after dawn into the deadly circle of their reach. To make sure that no vessel should expose itself by accident, the mine-layers of the enemy fleet were even then moving well outside of the zone of extreme fire, and laying immense steel buoys, painted a vivid scarlet.

These scarlet buoys outlined an area of safety that was shaped somewhat like a pentagon with its apex at Block Island and its base on the Rhode Island coast between Watch Hill and Point Judith.

It was a base marking out five miles of beach that was safe both from the fire of the Long Island Sound defenses and from the shots of the Narragansett defenses.

Here day-light revealed a land occupied in orderly, quiet, perfect military manner. Inland, as far as the naval guns could protect them, lay the men of the advance landing party behind their machine-gun positions. For miles beyond that, east and west, their patrols had cut telegraph and telephone wires, and occupied points that commanded roads by which attacking forces might approach.

On the beach, where the blocks and tackle and hoisting derricks had been rigged in the night, gun-floats were being brought to the beach with cannon and caissons. Under the pull of centrifugal blocks these were hoisted out and dropped in shore on railway tracks that led over the sand to firm ground.

There motor trucks and traction engines, all brought to land during the night, took them and hurried them to positions ready for fight, or to park them ready for moving when the advance should begin.

Destroying the Railroad of Southern New England

From vantage points inland, from hills on Fisher’s Island, from such venturesome spies as M-9, went the news to Washington, and so through the land. The crowds in the cities, dense even at that early hour of the morning, read on the bulletin boards:

“Enemy effected a landing during the night on Rhode Island between Narragansett Bay and Long Island Sound. Transports are now close in preparing to put troops ashore. Scouts report four liners aggregating one hundred thousand tons. Army officials estimate that at the usual allowance of two men per ton this means fifty thousand men. More transports waiting under Block Island.”

“Now is the time to strike ’em!” It was not one man in one crowd who said it. In every city where there were crowds there arose these speakers—the excitable, passionate orators who are born of every great crisis and who, in such moments, find willing listeners.

“Now is the time to strike ’em, before they can bring more men ashore! They should have been attacked in the night! What kind of Generals have we got, to let ’em land, instead of throwing ’em back into the sea as fast as they came? Where is our army? Keeping itself safe?”

The army, with ten thousand civilian workers impressed as they were needed, was destroying the railroad of southern New England. It was tearing up the shore line of the New York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad from New Haven to New London and from New London to Providence. It was throwing the rails on flat cars to be whirled away westward and northward. Concrete and stone embankments, steel bridges, and tunnels were sent skyward through the night with dynamite.

All the connecting system from New Haven north to Hartford and from New London north to Worcester was being destroyed. Locomotives and rolling stock that could not be removed were being sent down grades to crash into wreckage, or blown up or set afire. A curious intoxication of destruction was on the population that night. Prosperous, dignified citizens came out with axes or with oil and fire, and helped in the ruin.

In fire and dirt and amid shattering roars of explosion and rumbling of falling trestles they worked on hundreds of miles of iron highway, desperately, frantically, shouting aloud, willing to tear their soft hands and to risk limb and even life, rather than to wait inactive, and listen for news, and dread what was to happen.

They were tearing up their civilization; and they did it with a savage delight, that nothing might be left to the foe.

The American Army’s Lack of “Eyes”

In the Army Headquarters, where a single short order had set loose all this saturnalia of destruction, the Commanding General and his staff were busied with something that was of more immediate importance to them. Desperately they were thrusting out for information, and always they were baffled by superior numbers, superior resources.

They had pushed cavalry toward the coast, and it had been driven back by artillery and long-range fire from the ships, whose aim was controlled by aeroplane signals from the sky and wireless from the shore. They had pushed out motor scouts, and the artillery had found them. Always, at every approach, during the night or since daylight, the ships’ fire had swept the roads.

Now, scarcely an hour after sunrise, the army aeroplanes had come back, after only haphazard scouting. They had not been able to fly over the invaded coast. Wherever they tried it, they reported, they were met by enemy planes in superior numbers.

One United States air-man had been driven by four enemy planes into Narragansett Bay where he had been picked up by boats from the Newport Torpedo Station. Two others, borne down by three enemy machines faster than they, and fired at by anti-air-craft guns from an in-lying ship, had barely managed to escape behind the defenses of Fort Wright in the Sound.

The others had been pressed back, inexorably, by the screen of naval planes that swarmed over the coast.[41]

The enemy planes came from the sea. To the marveling eyes in the American defenses, it seemed as if the ocean were spewing them forth. One after another rose from the Atlantic under Block Island.

Three strange vessels lay there. They had funnels set extremely far aft, like certain types of clumsy tramp-ships, but they were big as passenger liners and their lines showed all the efficiency of the naval architect. The great sweep of their decks forward was as bare as the deck of a racing schooner yacht.

A structure on short trestles like a skid-way rose from this deck at the bow, projecting slightly.

It was there that the aeroplanes were being spewed. These were mother-ships.

Torpedo-netted, guarded by destroyers, guarded even by a small semi-rigid dirigible that hovered a thousand feet high over-head, they were sending out spies to search the land.

Twenty-Five Aeroplanes Against a Swarm

The two United States fliers, standing by their machines in Fort Wright, looked at the ascending swarm. “No wonder!” said one. “You know how many one of those Nations had at last accounts? Twelve hundred!”[42]

“And we’ve got thirteen in the Army and twelve in the Navy!” His companion laughed. “And Servia had sixty, before the Great War!”

They said no more, but watched in silence. That ascending, continually growing line of flying things was like something that was writing into the sky the word: “Resources!”

Suddenly the American air-men noticed that these new machines were not flying to the coast near them. They were turning off, in regular order. One turned west, to fly over Long Island. The next one turned east, toward Buzzards Bay. They alternated thus till the entire division had separated, and disappeared.

One of the scouts slapped his thigh. “I believe,” said he, “that they are going to show themselves to Boston and New York!”

That was at nine o’clock in the morning. At noon the crowds in the two cities were startled by a distant roar that grew, almost before they had first heard it, into a thundering that shook the air. They stared upward and beheld the first squadron of armed flying machines that America ever had seen.

IV

THE COAST DEFENSES FALL

Where they appeared it was as if they bore some instant charm to turn the world to stone.

All the city noises stopped, dead. All motion stopped. Wheels stopped turning and feet stopped moving and every white face was turned upward. For that long moment of dumb fear, men saw nothing except the wide-winged bodies. They heard nothing except the yelping and droning of the hundred-horse-power motors over them.

Then they fled. Motor-men and drivers bent low, and yelled, and sent their vehicles ahead blindly. The crowds rushed every door-way. They fought for the protection of narrow cornices as if they were bomb-proofs. They squeezed themselves close to the sides of buildings, and clung to smooth iron and granite, and stared upward, waiting for bombs.

Instead of bombs, they saw things raining down gently, lightly—little weighted pennants that circled downward in lovely spirals and dropped on the streets with scarcely a sound.

Into every crowded street, into every open square of half a hundred cities that day, the hostile air-men dropped these pennants.

They were printed. They bore proclamations addressed to the people of America.

THE ENEMY’S PROCLAMATION

Recovering from their shock of fear, the first impulse of the Americans who read these proclamations was one of rage. Their cities had grown proud in unchallenged greatness. These pennants, slowly raining from their sky, were infuriating insults.

Had the invader appeared in that moment, the people would have torn up the paving blocks to fight him.

In the State House in Boston there were said the words that uttered the emotion of all the cities along the Atlantic coast. In that old, rebellious town, where American liberty had been nurtured in the very presence of an armed foe, there were gathered many eminent citizens, with the officials, the Mayor and the Governor of their State.

One of these officials had a pennant in his hands. “What can we do?” he asked. “If we had all the militia of the State here, we would have less than 6,000 men. If the foe arrives, and lays his guns on the town—gentlemen, they will be guns that fire high explosives and incendiary shells. We have nothing to fight with. If the army cannot check him before he arrives, we must—to save our people’s lives, we must surrender peaceably!”[43]

He turned to a man who bore a family name identified with Boston’s history from the time of its settlement. His ancestors had stood in Faneuil Hall with James Otis when he dedicated it to the cause of liberty.

“Let Us Destroy It!”

He took the proclamation, held it for a moment while he looked around the circle, and then crumpled it suddenly, angrily, in his fist. Throwing it to the floor, he set his foot on it.

“I say,” he cried with flashing eyes, “let him destroy it! Better still, let us destroy it! When the enemy approaches, let us send our Boston town up in flame and fragments! Let us leave him not so much as a rivet to pick up for loot!”

There were many men there, of many minds. They had many interests to guard, and many responsibilities to bear. But for a moment he carried them with him. They waved their hands and shouted assent.

It was only for a moment. “If all thought like you!” said one, an old, grave man. “But we have 700,000 people, and they are not soldiers or philosophers. They’re human men. It is laid on us to protect them, at whatever price to our National pride. If humiliation is the price that we must pay for our past carelessness, why, gentlemen, we must pay it, bitter though it is.”

So it was in New York, in Philadelphia, in a score of cities between and around them. Everywhere was the first outburst of fury and unrecking heroism, and then the sober second thought born not of cowardice but of cold logic. This north-eastern Atlantic seaboard with its chain of twelve million city dwellers, was no Holland to drown itself under its own sea in order to destroy its foe. These cities were no Moscows, to devour themselves in fire that the enemy might perish with them. This was the United States of America, and this was the Twentieth Century—and the men, no less brave, no less patriotic, faced the conditions of their place and time.

They faced it from Portland, Maine, to the Capes of Virginia. If the army could not stop the invader, they must fall.

They formed committees of safety. They wrestled with their top-heavy municipal machineries to make them answer the sharp need. Under the stress, all the defects of their political rule stood out uncompromisingly, not to be denied. Their over-staffed departments were lost in the ingenious mazes of their own contriving. There was only one answer to the inextricable, blind confusion. It was martial law.

Volunteers Who Could Not Even Be Shod

But here, too, there was inefficiency—inefficiency that had been cultivated and tended, like a plant, by politics through the heedless years. In the armories there were no reserve supplies of weapons or ammunition for the volunteers who came to offer their services. Although the United States government had given the States enough money annually for many years back to equip them to full war-strength; and although the militia nowhere had maintained even one-half of that strength, there were no reserves of blankets, of uniforms, of tents, of cots. Doctors who offered their services found that there was no place for them, because there were no ambulances, no field hospitals, no surgical instruments, no anæsthetics and no medicines. There had not been enough for the troops that took the field, though every company had less men than even its insufficient peace strength demanded.[44]

The volunteers could not even be shod. Those who were accepted had to drill in their worthless street shoes, that never could survive the test of rough roads and mud and water.

Politics! Politics! It stared the appalled citizens in the face wherever they turned, as it had stared them in the face for a generation—but now they had to look and see! It was politics that had left their State militias to blunder along, each by itself, without agreement or settled plan. It was politics that now had sent their plucky, intelligent, capable young men into the field insufficiently equipped, trained or organized. It was politics that now left their cities bare, to be made a sport of.

At the recruiting depots of the regular army it was politics again that over-bore the recruiting officers with eager, courageous applicants whom they could not use. What they needed now was men who were ready NOW—not men who needed six months’ training. These applicants, offering themselves by thousands, were city-born and city-bred. They were men who never in all their lives had slept except under a roof; who never had lain in rain and storm; who had been saved by their city from doing a dozen simple things that men of the open do for themselves without a second thought.

Not one in a thousand of these volunteers ever had built a fire of sticks, or pitched a tent or even washed dishes. Not one of five thousand ever had held a gun in his hands. There were thousands there, and thousands again, who did not even know what it was to be in the dark—for they had slept all their lives in the electrically lighted city.

Needed—Not Men But Reserves!

It was not men that the regular army needed. It was reserves! And never a Congress of all the Congresses that had talked and voted and appropriated had voted a practical system of army reserves![45]

Of all the men who had been trained by previous army experience, the War Department could not call on one unless he chose to volunteer. If those men—invaluable to the country at this moment—offered themselves, they offered themselves one by one, here and there and everywhere, scattered through a land of three and a quarter million square miles. Enlisted thus, they were futile individuals lost in hordes

of raw recruits. Could they have been called together by their government, they would have formed perfect regiments, ready for instant, efficient, priceless service.

While the United States, civilian and military, was working hopelessly to make up in desperate hours for long years of waste, the efficient, prepared, resourceful invader was landing his army, not only without losing a man, but without getting a man’s feet wet. So perfect were the dispositions of this expedition that the commander had been able to order, “Our troops must land perfectly dry,” and the order was carried out.[46]

Every transport had three broad gangways to a side. Never for a moment were these gangways bare of equipped men, moving file after file into the enormous flat-bottomed landing barges. Never for a moment was the sea without long tows of them, each bearing two hundred men to shore with their rifles between their knees, ready.[47]

Preparedness Versus Unpreparedness

In the camp of the United States Army at that moment men were breaking green horses for cavalry and artillery purposes. On the coast, the enemy’s four-decked horse transports were sending trained mounts into broad floats with derricks and slings, lowering away with head and tail lines to prevent struggling, with nose lines to bridles to prevent them from turning in the air, with men standing by below to put little bags of salt into each horse’s mouth to quiet it as soon as it touched the floats.[48]

Nothing had been forgotten, nothing left to be improvised. The horse-floats had hinged sterns. Backed into the beach, these hinged boards dropped down and formed gang-planks. Sailors threw collision mats on them to prevent slipping. It required less than a minute to lower a horse from the ships to the floats. In less than half a minute each horse was unloaded from them and set ashore. To empty each float of its cargo of twenty horses, and to have each craft off the beach and under tow again for another load, was a matter of less than forty minutes.

Almost as swiftly, at another end of the beach, guns were being landed from the same type of floats, shoal and wide-beamed, that could be run well up on shore and could withstand the pounding of the surf. They brought four light field pieces with their limbers to a load, or two heavy field artillery pieces. They were landing field howitzers of calibers that the United States Army did not possess. This artillery has been coming ashore for hours. It had begun to come before dawn. Still there was more arriving.

Yet the beach never was occupied for a moment. The guns were rushed inland, the men were rushed inland, the horses were rushed inland. Twelve hours after the first landing party had prepared the way, Rhode Island was occupied by 30,000 foot, 3,000 cavalry and 50 batteries of artillery—almost two full divisions that lay in a great belligerent front snarling with guns—a perfect, complex, often-assembled, often-tested machine.[49]

This was the time for the American army to strike, before the enemy could increase his forces and move forward to attack.

But the American army was a complex machine that never had been assembled before, or tested before. The Regular Army never had been together with the Organized Militia, and the Organized Militias of the various States never had seen each other. “An uncoördinated army of allies,” its Commander had called it, “with all the inherent weakness of allies, emphasized by the unusual number of allies.”[50]

The Uncoördinated and Unorganized American Army

It was an army of which neither the regulars nor the militia had been organized into divisions at the time when it should have been done, the only time when it could have been done—in the long days of peace. Until it was so organized, it was an army only in numbers. For operation against a prepared, organized enemy it was not an army but merely a multitude of units, whose trained and perfect ones would inevitably be sacrificed to the errors and weaknesses of the imperfect ones.[51]

The division is the true Weapon of War. It alone contains in vitally correct proportion the various troops that must sustain each other when cannons and explosives begin that arbitration from which there is no appeal on earth. It is the division, and the division alone, that possesses all the limbs and organs—the signal corps and cavalry that are the eyes and ears: the infantry and engineers and sanitary corps that are the body and feet: and the artillery that is the smiting fists.[52]

In the City Hall Park in New York, a speaker, lifted above the crowd that watched the newspaper bulletins, was cursing the army amid savage cheers. He cursed its Generals and its men because they did not fight. He cursed the Government.

The crowd listened, and forgot that again and again they had been warned that this would be if war should ever come.

With the blind wrath of helpless men they could reason only that at this moment when everything should be done, nothing was being done. They shouted approval when the frantic orator screamed: “Tell Washington to order ’em to fight. Fight! Fight! That’s what they’re for!”

The crowds could perceive only that they had an army that did not strike a blow. They could not know that the American commanders were fighting a better fight just then by fighting to organize, than if they fought with guns. They could not know that to these officers, grown gray in the service of their country, this fight was more heart-breaking than it would have been to fight in the hot blast of shells.

Regiments of Infantry Without a Single Cannon to Protect Them

To organize an army in the face of the foe is like organizing a fire department when the streets of a city are already in flames. This is what the Chiefs of the Army were trying to do—had been doing, day and night, desperately, ever since the troops had come together. And in Washington, in the archives of Congress, there were lying sheaves of reports, gathering dust, that had demanded nothing except the chance to do it in time.

Here were regiments of militia so “organized” by their States that if they were permitted to go into battle as they were, 170 companies of infantry would face the enemy without a single cannon to protect them. Of all the eastern militia cavalry in that camp, only one regiment had a machine gun company.[53]

Even the regular army was efficient only in those things that could be maintained and perfected by the steady, personal efforts of officers and men. In everything that depended on legislation it was lacking. Instead of 150 men to a company of infantry some had only 65. Its troops of cavalry were not full. It had no siege artillery corps. It was a skeleton army which, according to optimists, was to be clothed with substance when war arrived. Now war had come; and to clothe that skeleton with untrained men would have meant that for every 65 skilled soldiers there would be 85 utterly useless ones in each company.

Shortage of men was not the only curse that was laid on the army by the policy of neglect. In the enemy headquarters, two or at the most three orders were sent to department chiefs for every movement. In the American headquarters, the staff had to deal with units. Every problem had to be handled in detail by men who should have been free to direct one great, comprehensive movement. Every order issued by the Commanding General demanded intolerable duplication.

American Commanders Who Had Never Commanded

The General had under him commanders of brigade who had commanded posts that contained only fragments of regiments. Their brigades, never assembled in any one place, not only did not approximate to war conditions, but had to be disrupted and divided and re-formed before the General could dare to offer them in battle. Hardly a brigade commander had under him troops that he had known and trained and handled himself.[54]

With exception of those who had been on the Mexican border, when a part of the small army had been mobilized in a body for the first time, these men had tried to prepare themselves with the best that Congress would give them—battalions and companies and single batteries instead of assembled armies, because the politicians would not let the army come together.

The 49 army posts of the United States, long a subject of derision among all except those who fattened on them, might well have been symbolized now in that camp by forty-nine skeletons—a skeleton army waiting to lead the other skeleton army to death.[55]

To none was this better known than to the enemy. The invaders’ commander, standing idly with his hands in his pockets, was able to say confidently: “They’ll not bother us seriously. The only thing they’ll do, the only thing they can do, is to retreat when we begin to threaten them.”

He held in his grip the sea, the land and the air. In shore lay ships ready to sweep part of his front with protective fire. On land his advance forces had seized roads and railroads, his engineers were repairing what had been destroyed, and his cavalry was guarding all approaches. His air-men, overwhelmingly numerous, spied on the American army almost with impunity, and parried with sure aerial thrusts all American attempts to spy on their own lines.

The aerial guard, steel-breasted, with the wings of speed and talons of fire, could be broken only by equal numbers, equally terrible. Individual daring, individual skill, were nothing against this armored brood. Five times American fliers rose to try it; and five times they were grappled in mid-air and torn with shot, and dropped to the earth far below. “No more!” said the General in command.

He sat with his chin in his hand, studying the dispatches that were laid before him. They were piled high, though twenty operators and half a dozen aides struggled to eliminate from the torrential confusion the news that might be deemed most reliable.[56]

The “Fog of War”

There were messages from Washington, messages from coast defenses, messages from patrols and outposts, from scouts and from company commanders. There were wild reports of enemy invasion from places so far inland that it was palpable that they could not be true. There were reports from places so nearby that they might mean imminent danger.

Excited officials of towns and cities sent long, involved dispatches or hung for long minutes to telephones to recount interminable tales.

One hundred thousand men had landed, according to spies who had made their way into Fort Greble in the Narragansett defenses. It was two hundred thousand, telephoned Providence, transmitting messages from the coast. The army’s own scouts and spies and patrols, groping in insufficient numbers and finding a wall of cavalry and foot and machine gun detachments opposed to them everywhere, sent in estimates that varied all the way from twenty-five thousand to eighty thousand.

These American advance detachments were striking the enemy outposts east and west. Near Watch Hill three American motor cycle companies with machine guns ambushed and cut up two troops of cavalry. American cavalry drove back a battalion of engineers who had begun work on the railroad at Kingston. At Niantic two American motor patrols ran into the fire of a concealed field gun and were destroyed.

From Fort Michie on Gull Island came the news, brought by a Montauk Point fisherman who had managed to make his way across the Sound in a small boat, that men had landed on that end of Long Island. They had destroyed all communication immediately and had seized the railroad leading to New York; but it was impossible to guess how great this force was.[57]

Only one certain fact was developed from all the news. It was that the transports were unloading troops still.

The Enemy Moves

Suddenly, almost simultaneously, the American patrols were driven back all along the line. On a front that extended quickly, irresistibly, clear across Washington County, Rhode Island, from east to west, the invader army expanded. It seized Watch Hill. Kingston was occupied in force. Wickford Junction was occupied. Narragansett Pier was flooded, all at once, with men and guns.

With the swiftness of a blow from a fighter’s fist, the invader had struck and won the entire railroad system of the New York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad in Rhode Island, and commanded the way to Providence.

The foe had filled his divisions. Forty thousand men were ready for battle on American soil, with ten thousand in reserve on the coast.

Now the wind turned south-east. Point Judith, Rhode Island’s cape that coast-wise mariners call The Fog-Hole, began to brew one of its April fogs, gray and blind and wet.

Its first effect was kind to the Americans. The enemy air-craft, seeing the vapory bank growing from the sea, fled toward their lines. From all directions they came in, like gulls fleeing before a storm. They could not dare to remain in strange territory. All their fine maps, all their ingenious instruments, would be impotent against it. They came in, and alighted behind their army.

Freed from them, and masked by the fog, the American scouts went forward again and groped once more along the foe’s front. In an