Congresses that could always find the money for increased pension rolls never had been able to find the time to lessen the pension rolls of the future by providing trained officers who would protect their soldiers and teach them to stay alive as long as possible instead of rushing to glorious and unnecessary death.[78]

Even as it was, there were not enough officers for the army that was in the field. For training the new men, the Nation had to call on every aged officer in the land, on every otherwise qualified man who was physically unfit for active service, and on foreigners from foreign armies.

A Land Lacking in War Efficiency

This army in formation was placed in perfect surroundings. Its health, its sanitation and its water-supply were excellent. It was fed on the best that money could buy. In everything that did not depend on military efficiency, its maintenance was beyond criticism.

Uniforms were being made for it in record time. Mills were producing blankets at a speed never before reached. Wherever Americans could help by the efficient execution of duties that they understood, the result was magnificent.

But in everything that demanded the efficiency of men trained to war, the land was entirely lacking. Everything had to be improvised. There were only a few men who knew anything about pitching tents, camp drainage, and the management of large bodies of men. There were practically no men outside of the army who were capable of managing the work of supplying the great camps with what they needed. As in the Spanish-American War, the utter inadequacy of the Quartermaster’s Department under its civilian appointees had become a scandal within a few weeks, and threatened already to demoralize the entire volunteer body.

Perishable provisions were left in freight cars till they rotted. Requisitions for vitally needed supplies were not made until it was too late. Requisitions for one and the same thing were sent out by half a dozen different officials, leading to inextricable confusion. There was not an hour in the day when quartermaster’s transports did not block roads where they had no business to be, and in situations that in war would have made disaster for a hurrying army.[79]

“Six months to train that mob!” said a retired General, reporting to the President. “Well, Mr. President, let’s hope so. I should say nine months, and not even then unless you can give ’em more officers to teach ’em.”

The News the Spy Brought

In Connecticut a spy was reporting to the staff. He was a Captain of Artillery, and he had spent seventy-two hours behind the enemy’s lines.

“They have completed their disembarkation and organization,” he said. “There are at least 150,000 men, as was calculated. They are magnificently organized, with reserves of everything. They have an enormous supply of artillery—at least ten guns to every thousand infantry and cavalry. Their machine gun companies also are extraordinarily large.”[80]

“And what is their disposition?”

“They were still moving men around to our front,” answered the spy. “I should say, General, that you now have, or will have before the end of the day, approximately one hundred thousand men facing you.”

“And the others?”

“Everything indicates that they are planning to move against Boston, while the larger force attacks us, sir. Country people told me that they are holding Taunton now with a strong force. They were moving men through Pawtucket this morning on the Providence railroad line for Boston.”

“Did you see any movement that might menace Worcester immediately?”

“They have already repaired the railroad from Providence to Woonsocket.”

“Then it’s time for us to get out of this. Gentlemen, you all know what to do. Issue your orders at once.”

The Retreat of the American Army

Eight hours later the enemy army advanced suddenly. Its southern wing pushed forward, across Rhode Island and entered Connecticut. Its northern wing, advancing more slowly because it had to repair railroads and clear obstructed roads before it, extended itself gradually northward toward Worcester.

The extreme southern line, advancing from Westerly, took Stonington, Groton and the new London Navy Yard, and held the eastern shore of the Thames River. Another force took Norwich and crossed the Thames at that place.

Gradually the line straightened out and formed into the drive that was to sweep the American army before it, or crush it. But the American army, with everything lacking except transport, was not there, either to be swept or crushed. It was retreating swiftly, in perfect order.

As the last wheel rolled out of Springfield, the town shook with the explosions that were wrecking the dismantled arsenal.

Eastward, two divisions of enemy forces, perfectly appointed to act as independent armies, were converging on Boston.

VI

THE RISING OF NEW ENGLAND

It was a supine New England, hushed, apprehensive and conquered. So, at least, it seemed to the invaders whose patrols, spreading fanwise, were beginning to pierce the country in all directions, pushing forward far in advance of their armies, and finding no opposition.

Through New England the church and town clocks struck: Seven. The land was peaceful as death. The hour passed. The lazy clocks began to strike: Eight.

In a village north of New Bedford stood a little crowd of farmers, gathered around the general store and listening to the sheriff. He was warning them that they must not attempt to resist the invading troops when they came.

“I know that you—and you,” said he, pointing to men as he spoke, “brought arms with you. You’d better give them up to me.”

“And you an American!” growled one of the men. The sheriff did not retort. He was scarcely past middle age; but there was a great, slow patience in his face that made him look old.

He shook his head and said: “It’s only for your own sake.”

The Modern Paul Revere

“Look!” cried a farmer. “Who is coming here?”

The man who was coming was a man on a motorcycle. Man and machine were so coated with dust, were speeding so desperately, that even without war in the land one would stare at this flying thing, one would wait with eyes and lips open to learn what startling message it was carrying.

Man, roaring motor, and their brother pillar of dust crashed by. They had disappeared before the breathless watchers realized that the man had waved an arm at them and had screamed: “Soldiers!”

A farmer ran to his wagon and pulled out a rifle from its hiding place under the wagon-seat. “Come on, boys!” he said.

“Listen! Listen!” The sheriff shouldered forward. “Men! Neighbors! Old friends! For God’s sake, listen! You have no right to fight.”

“What?” The sheriff’s young brother, sturdy, handsome, suddenly ferocious, brought his face close to him. “No right to defend our country? Are you crazy, Jim?”

The patient man shook his head again. “It is against the rules of war.”

“Then curse the rules of war!” shouted the younger. “Are you a coward?”

The sheriff reached out and touched his brother’s arm. It was a secret, almost a timid, act. The brother threw off the appealing hand.

“Don’t touch me!” He spoke through set teeth. “If you are a coward and traitor, may you be damned through all eternity! Again! For the last time! Will you fight?”

The sheriff raised his hands, dumbly. The men went to their wagons and returned with arms.

New England’s Stone Wall

“To that stone wall yonder!” said one.

He pointed into a field with a rough stone wall dividing its center three or four hundred yards from the road. This man was an old hunter, and the others had followed him often. He took command now as a matter of course.

The sheriff watched them flounder through the plowed field. He stood still, for a minute. Then he hurried to his house, emerged with a gun, and joined the party.

Two miles away a squad of ten cavalrymen cantered over a ridge and examined the country through their field-glasses. They studied the ground foot by foot, almost inch by inch. Satisfied, they trotted toward the village.

Around a turn they came on a little knot of women and children who scurried, screaming, into the ditch. A rider headed off a woman who was carrying a child. He stooped to her from his tall black horse. Laughing, he nodded and said something to her in a foreign language.

Stooping still lower, he snatched the child suddenly and swung it out of the trembling woman’s arm. He lifted it, and danced it up and down.

He fumbled in his saddle-bag and brought out some chocolate which he fed to the baby. Then he handed it back to the mother, roaring again with laughter at her frightened face. The other riders, laughing also, waved their hands at the group and cantered on.

They entered the village, swiftly examined it, riding through gardens and into alleys, assuring themselves that there was nothing there to mask danger for the troops that were behind them. They passed out of the other end and into the road leading past the plowed field with the stone wall.

It was still, and very lonely. There was not a living being in sight throughout all the softly tinted land. On a tree branch that hung over the stone wall, a bluebird began to sing with all the power of its little throat.

It brought a hot choking to the throat of a farmer who was lying behind the stone wall, just under the bird. Its song had welled out just as he was raising his rifle. But his gray Yankee eye sought the sights, his sinewy brown hand gripped the weapon, and he fired.

The Firing of the First Shot

He fired, and pumped another cartridge into the breech and fired again, so quickly that his second shot had roared out before a cavalryman who had pitched forward with the first bullet through his side, had quite toppled from his saddle.

All along the stone wall they fired, and pumped their magazines, and fired. They were men who had hunted deer in early autumn cover and learned to send bullets driving after them at hot speed on the jump. The big horses and the big men, broad in the open road, were easy targets. But they were not deer. They were men. More than one of the rifle bullets went wild because the marksman’s horror shook his hand.

In the road lay two men, lashing in the dust. Down the road went a bleeding horse that screamed. It dragged its rider, smashing his face against the ground. In the field was a soldier, trying to balance himself on his saddle, with one hand gripping at his breast while the other reached out grotesquely, as if groping for something to which he might hold.

A farmer behind the wall, unable to endure the sight of the men who were rolling in the road like animals trying to bury their agony, fired at them and made them lie still. “My God!” he said, and cried.

The wounded man fell from the saddle and squatted in a queer hunched posture in the field, his head between his knees. It was the cavalryman who had fed the child.

The others scattered, and charged toward the wall. Instantly, the defenders became cool. Their nerves stopped jumping. These riders, looming big, with swords out and fury in their eyes, ceased to be men. They were killers. The farmers shot as steadily as if they were aiming at deer.

Two riders escaped and galloped headlong down the road back to their forces. The New England men arose from behind the wall, and ran across the fields to gain the shelter of a wood-lot. Before they could reach it, there was a yelling behind them and a dozen troopers were in the fields, following them desperately.

In the Stone House

“To the house!” cried the sheriff. He led the way to an old stone house, built in Revolutionary times. The cavalrymen reined up sharply. A glance at the solid little building with window-openings as deep as embrasures, showed them that it was dangerous. They opened out, remaining carefully out of rifle shot, and surrounded the place where they could watch it from all sides. Then one rode back, swiftly.

The watchers sat, easy and careless, as if they had been halted during a peaceful practice march. Half an hour passed. The immobility of the soldiers, their passionless watch, was driving the farmers frantic. More than once the old leader had to growl at a man who wanted to fire, despite the hopeless distance.

If the tension in the house had lasted much longer, some of these men would have rushed out. But there came a great sound from the distance. It might have been thunder, rolling far away. It might have been a river in flood.

“They’re coming!” said the sheriff’s brother. It was hard for him to speak. The defenders were all violently thirsty, and they had not had time to bring water from the well.

They came. Horses, horses, horses! Bayonets, bayonets, bayonets! They came, and passed along the road, and more came on.

They did not turn off to attack the house. They did not even turn their heads to look at it. This infuriated the defenders.

Horses, horses, horses! Bayonets, bayonets, bayonets! If the men in the stone house could have seen other roads, they would have seen each one so filled with silent, steadily moving columns of men.

A little party of men and horses turned off from the column and entered the field. Before it was within the range of the rifles, it wheeled. A shining, glossy little thing pointed at the house. It was field artillery, sleek, beautiful.

The sheriff’s brother, carried away by rage, fired and fired. He emptied his magazine at the distant men.

The War Machine Rolls On

Along the highway the column moved steadily, silently. No soldier checked his foot for so much as an instant at the sound of the shots. Bayonets, bayonets, bayonets! The machine moved on.

It moved on, eyes front, while the captain commanding the cannon snapped an order. It moved on, bayonets twinkling out of sight in front, and twinkling past, and twinkling into sight from behind, while the little gun tore the April morning.

The stone house spouted clouds of dust and powdering stone. It dissolved. It became a ruin that stared phantomlike through the cloud, as if it were looking with horribly expanding eyes at the gun.

If the besieged fired in return, the men at the gun did not know it. Their steel beast drowned the farmers’ tiny efforts in roar and flame. They passed as a breath. The cavalrymen cantered to the ruin. A half wall was standing, jagged. The rest was a mound of dirt. Under it lay fourteen men of Massachusetts. The sheriff lay there, with his face more patient than ever, and his arm around his brother.

The little gun and its horses and men joined the horses and men that were moving northward through New England.

Over the field telegraph wire that unreeled behind the advancing force went the report to the enemy headquarters: “Civilians estimated at about a dozen fired from ambush, killing eight cavalry. Took refuge in building. Annihilated.”

It was a perfunctory report telling of a merely perfunctory incident. But the commander-in-chief, sitting at his ease in headquarters in Providence, stopped smoking for a moment. “See that the news does not spread,” said he. “It might raise the country. Reënforce all patrols and warn them.”

New England Ablaze

He was a quick man. His officers were quick and his system of communication was quick. But the news sped more quickly still. Over every telephone that was intact, over every telegraph wire that still worked in New England, by bicycle, on horseback, by men running, the story was passed from man to man and village to village.

They were fourteen humble men, unknown beyond their own township, when they crouched behind the stone wall. They were fourteen shining names before the ruins that covered them had ceased smoking. New England, like a blazing forest, was ablaze with wrath and fury.

Vain was it now for cautious men to warn or authorities to command. Men who never in their lives had thought harm to any living thing, dashed out with smoldering eyes to fight. Prudent men, who never in their lives had acted on impulse, now acted without a second’s pause for reflection. Men who had cared all their lives only for their own little affairs, were all drunken now and thought it nothing to fire one shot for their country and die behind a stone wall in the dirt.

In Acushnet an old whaling captain, a prosperous, weighty citizen, emptied his shot gun into a raiding party and was left dead under his forsythias with the golden blossoms from the volley-torn shrubs covering him.

Between Taunton and Pawtucket a militia company of field artillery that had been unable to move its gun because it lacked horses, got it from its hiding place, and with a party of volunteers who had no firearms, fought behind piled bags of cement against enemy cavalry till artillery had to be brought from miles away to destroy them.

South of Woonsocket a band, made up of thirty Massachusetts militia infantry and sixty factory hands from the town, prevented two companies of hostile infantry for almost two hours from crossing the Blackstone River. It was not because they could shoot, or knew how to fight. It was because they meant to stay there till they died. And it was not until they were dead that the invaders succeeded in crossing.

New England women who had spent their lives in homely, simple duties, brought out dippers of water to parched men and cheered them on. They hid fleeing men in barns and stood by, defiant, when pursuing soldiers dragged them out and shot them before their eyes.

As the Men of Old

Men took down old muskets that had been over chimney-places for a generation. Their wives and mothers kissed them as they went out to fight.

Grandparents saw their sons and their sons’ sons lie in ambush in ancestral pastures that had not echoed to a ruder sound than the lowing of cows; and they saw them vanish away in red storm, and did not weep.

Dynamite! Dynamite! went the word through Massachusetts and Connecticut. This was something that the unarmed country had, and that it knew how to use. Even the peaceful farmers had it, and were practiced in handling it, from long work in blowing out stumps and rocks. Irish construction gangs, Italian road-makers, workers of every tongue and race from pits and quarries, joined the New England men.

They blew up a sunken road through which artillery was lumbering. They blasted away a steep bank and buried a troop of cavalry. They blew up a mined road in front of infantry and when it retreated, sprang a second mine under the soldiers’ feet that exterminated a battalion.

Railroads and roads were blown up before advancing troops and behind them. Men blew up bridges and prevented their own escape so that the armed forces caught them as in a trap and slaughtered them at leisure. Viaducts and works were dynamited that never could have been of any use to the enemy. It was formless, systemless destruction—but in that very lack of system lay its danger to the enemy forces.

Had all the men in New England who were engaged in this wild fighting been gathered in one body, the trained, disciplined soldiers could have disposed of them in an action so simple that they might scarcely have named it a skirmish. But this was like a forest fire that, stamped out in one spot, breaks into roaring flame in another. As it sweeps from tree tops to tree tops and creeps underground, and flames out in quick fury miles away, so the warfire raved through Massachusetts and Connecticut to be crushed out only in detail with detailed, bitter work through all that long, hot, dusty day.

Serious to the Enemy

It was serious. This uprising of an undisciplined population could not defeat, or even damage seriously, the great army. But it could hamper it. It would force a wide scattering of troops to break down the sporadic opposition. It would make a dangerous country—dangerous in front of the advancing soldiers, dangerous in their rear, continually dangerous around them.

In that sense it was more serious than deliberate, military opposition by the American army would have been. Had the enemy commander faced only a defending army, it would have been a quiet, technical matter of advance guards against advance guards. These pawns in the old game of war would have thrust each other back here, receded before each other there, fighting only when it was forced on them, and so, gradually, properly, they would have cleared the board that the great game might be played.

This incoherent uprising was disorganizing all his tactics. From the western army that had set out to sweep through Connecticut, came

word that everywhere patrols had been attacked. Men in a swift power boat on the Thames River above New London had succeeded in three places in firing on scouting parties with a Hotchkiss rifle, apparently taken from a yacht.

The line north of Norwich along the same river reported four men killed from ambush. At Willimantic there had been firing from mill buildings, which had been destroyed for punishment.

The Commander of the brigade that was advancing on Worcester in Massachusetts from Connecticut had halted his advance, and was asking headquarters if the extent of the disorder were great enough to imperil his communications.

The eastern division, moving on Boston, reported that the patrols had been ordered in from the line North Middleboro—East Middleboro—Plymouth. “Our men can move only in considerable force,” reported the Commander. “Small parties are constantly in danger of being assassinated. The population appears to be in a frenzy. Seven cavalry at Nemasket, engaged in foraging for their horses, were burned alive in a barn. We have fired the town. It is still burning. Have shot ten citizens.”

“My men are getting out of hand,” telegraphed the Commander of a brigade moving toward Mansfield. “Stern reprisals required at once.”

“Let Them Have It!”

“Let them have it!” said the Commander-in-Chief.

“Instant retaliation!” said the field telegraph to the armies. “Order all brigade commanders to execute disorderly civilians in most public and exemplary manner possible. Attach placard to bodies proclaiming why punishment was incurred. Divisional commanders are empowered in their discretion to order partial or total destruction of offending cities.”

The commanders transmitted the orders to their regimental commanders, and these to the officers of their battalions and companies. “Crush all disorder with utmost severity,” they said. What it meant was: “Kill, burn and destroy!” It meant: “Set fury against fury!” It meant: “Let your men go!”

It meant what a war of soldiers against battling civilians in a conquered country always has meant. Both sides had seen their dead. Both sides were maddened. Now the men with arms, restrained no longer by cold discipline, broke loose.

Then New England saw such deeds as that quiet landscape never had framed since the days of its old Indian wars, and perhaps not even then. It saw housewives hanging from budding apple-trees, with placards pinned to their breasts saying that they had helped to murder soldiers. It saw New England people, who, twenty-four hours earlier would not have killed a chicken without a pang of pity, surround solitary soldiers and do them to death with their bare hands, while they begged for mercy. It saw unarmed citizens seized on the roads and hustled to walls and shot while they were screaming for somebody in authority, that they might prove their innocence.

The authorities of a score of towns were hanged in their town squares because troops had been fired on. In many a park that never had seen anything more formidable than children at their play, hung dead men in a row—the executed hostages who paid for the acts of men whom they had not known. A thousand men and women of Connecticut and Massachusetts, it was reported later, were shot or hanged in that one afternoon.

New England’s Funeral Curtain

And over the two States, rising slowly and spreading until the sunny sky was darkened, there hung, like a funeral curtain over the place of death, the black smoke of burning villages and towns.

When that April day ended, and the night came down, there was no place in eastern Connecticut, in all the seventy miles north and south from New London to Worcester where men could not see the fire of burning towns or houses. In Massachusetts from New Bedford to Taunton, and from Taunton north to Brockton, there were fires. All the sky around Providence was red with it. The smoke drifted over Boston and the strangling odor filled its streets.

All night the country burned. All night wounded fugitives lay hidden, gritting their teeth, or, forced by intolerable anguish, crawled out and surrendered. All night long the troops swept through town after town, wreaking vengeance.

It was finished in the morning. “The country is pacified,” were the reports that went to headquarters. There were no gatherings of citizens anywhere within the province of the army’s operations. They were forbidden. There were no arms left in the hands of civilians. Houses in which weapons were found had been destroyed. Men who had been found with them in their possession were shot. Men with explosives were shot. In all New England that morning, every man had to be ready, for his life, to hold out his open hands whenever he met a soldier, and submit to search.

The Machine Shakes Down

Through the two armies ran the orders to restore stiff discipline. The soldiers came to leash and the big machine shook down. The patrols went out grimly, with a new meaning in their peering, scrutinizing frowns. They found a terrorized country, through which they moved unhampered.

“Worcester Occupied” was the early news that went through the United States. “Heavy Cavalry Body Enters Unopposed.”

“Motor Raiders at Fitchburg,” was the next report. It was followed by news of raiders east of Worcester.

Bit by bit the enemy was cutting Boston and all Eastern New England off from the rest of the United States.

East of Providence the advance guard of the army that was threatening Boston reached the line from Attleboro through Bridgewater and Silver Lake to Kingston, thus extending across that part of Massachusetts all the way to Plymouth Bay.[81]

Taunton, according to rumors that reached Boston, was being made the point for a heavy concentration of men and rolling stock.

Washington received news of an enormous unfolding of cavalry. The reports came from East Brookfield, half way between Worcester and Springfield in southern Massachusetts; from Willimantic in Central Connecticut, and from New London on the Long Island Sound shore in the south. Every road across the whole State north and south was held by horsemen who were pressing steadily westward, converting all means of communication to the army’s use and cutting off the population completely from the outside and even from communicating with each other.[82]

From Attleboro there was a sudden thrust along the railroad line Taunton to Mansfield. From this point the enemy moved rapidly along the railroad line to Framingham. In two hours he had in his possession six important junctions of the railroad systems that connect Boston with the rest of New England and with the United States.

Encircling Boston

The enemy was making good a great line that extended in a semi-circle from the west of Boston to the coast south of it.

His grip on Rhode Island had not relaxed. That whole State was in his hands. There was not a village left in it that was not dominated by his troops. Men were quartered in every house. Officers were quartered in every hotel, every mansion. The town halls and churches were occupied. In places where there were not sufficient stable accommodations, the horses were placed in the churches.

There were proud homes there, in “little Rhode Island,” where crossed swords over the old-fashioned mantel-pieces bore witnesses to ancestors who had fought on land and sea in the Wars of the Revolution and of 1812. Foreign soldiers sat under them, and spread out maps of the State on the floors while they debated over the best use to make of roads and houses and towns.

Town and village authorities received orders, not from officers, but from common soldiers, or, at the most, from sergeants or corporals. Only in the most important places did commissioned officers trouble to consult with the officials. Mostly, they limited themselves to sending their requisitions and instructions in curtly written notes.

So it was everywhere throughout the conquered country. Wherever the invader set foot, all old law ceased instantly and new law began. The bulletin boards in town halls, court rooms and post offices were covered, within half an hour after the irruption of soldiery, by placards that were headed, each and every one, with the words: “An Order.”

The people were ordered not to be out of doors after nine at night. They were ordered to bring in an accounting of all horse forage, all food-stuffs and all accommodation they had in their premises for men and animals. They were ordered to bring in all rolling stock for inspection. They were ordered to leave their lights burning behind lowered shades.

Under Foreign Rule

Their officials were ordered to report daily to the army for instructions. Their judges were ordered to make reports of their cases. There was no duty of the day to which a citizen could turn without feeling the invader’s hand upon him. There was no road on which he could move without being challenged by a sentry. There was no woman who dared venture on the street, for fear of offense which her men could not dare to resent, or for the worse fear of the fate that would be theirs if they did.

So, like a great fan opening out from Providence the armies expanded over the conquered country, and each spoke expanded again. The divisions unfolded their brigades, the brigades their regiments, the regiments their battalions, the battalions their companies, and the companies their detachments, reaching everywhere and everywhere keeping in touch with the main body through the marvelous network of intelligence that grew into being behind the soldiers.[83]

It was as if a vast octopus had crawled from the sea at Narragansett Bay. With its body clinging there, fast to its ocean base, it sent its tentacles into every crevice of the land, and gripped tight.

“It is plain now what he is doing,” said the Chief of Staff to the President in Washington. “He is keeping a powerful retaining force in Rhode Island, absolutely assuring his base and holding the gate open for reënforcements. Westward he is throwing masses of cavalry—probably most of the cavalry that he has—to clear the way for his infantry and artillery to march along the coast to New York. Northward those cavalry masses are screening him against any attempt by our army either to fall on his forces in Connecticut, or to move around north of him and attack the rear of his divisions that are marching on Boston. It isn’t tactics. It’s simple, commonsense use of numerical superiority.”[84]

Making a Fight for Boston

The President played with a pile of dispatches. They were from Boston and New York. “You say that those companies of coast artillery from the south got through!”

“I had a message from the Commander of the Artillery District of Boston,” he said. “The six companies arrived at Fort Banks yesterday morning. They had to go around by way of Lake Champlain and Vermont, but they got through. That will at least give the men some relief if there should be a sustained action.”[85]

“You are sure it was not a mistake to—sacrifice them?” asked the President.

The General shrugged his shoulders. “There are some things that one simply must do,” he said. “We had to give New York and Boston something. We absolutely must make some sort of a fight for them.”

The Commander of the harbor defenses of Boston was not concerning himself about the occult reasons that had inspired the reënforcements. He had been praying for men, for he needed half a dozen men wherever he had one. He needed them for the searchlights, he needed men that he might establish defenses to the land approaches, he needed men for protection of base lines and cable stations. There were scout boats to be manned, and outlying islands to be posted with lookouts to guard against approach of ships in fog or darkness.

Now that he had them, he waited for no orders and asked for no instructions. He loaded quartermasters’ boats with detachments and rushed them to the waterfront of Boston and Chelsea where he knew of things he wanted. They returned with two tons of explosives and miscellaneous ordnance material that had been seized from merchants. He seized barb wire. From electric light plants and power works he obtained, by the same simple method, some forty miles of lead-covered cable for his mine-fields, and from ships in the harbor he took half a dozen searchlights.[86]

To Hold the Defenses

Before night, too, he had men entrenched behind entanglements with machine guns on the narrow neck of land that leads to Nahant’s broad cliff promontory on the north of Boston Harbor, to protect position finding stations there and a great 60-inch searchlight.

Southward at Point Allerton, on the long cape that juts toward Boston Harbor from Nantasket Beach, to defend the stations and searchlights and approaches of Fort Revere with its mighty batteries, he placed a strong force with ample artillery.[87]

This was the point where he feared a landing most. He built an armored train, seizing the material from the town of Hull, and armed it with quick-firers that it might be sent to threatened places.

Outposts were sent as far as Nantasket, for fear the enemy should try to land there or cross the narrow neck and take boats over it into the bay behind.

Beyond Fort Revere he destroyed certain houses that would interfere with the firing. At the far outlying islands called The Graves he posted men with signal rockets. He sent scout boats to lie at sea beyond the fire zone, from Nahant to the spot where the Light-ship was moored in times of peace.[88]

Within forty hours he had doubled the strength of his defense because he had the men. He looked up at a hostile aeroplane, flying well beyond gunshot. They had become almost commonplace objects in Boston’s sky during the past days. “Well, come on!” he said. “You and your ships! We’ll give you a whirl.”

He was awakened at one o’clock that morning. The “whirl” had begun. Ships were standing in toward Nahant Bay in the north and off Cohasset in the south. Fifteen minutes afterward the people of Boston and Charlestown and Brookline, of Quincy and Weymouth, Hingham and Lynn, were brought out of their beds by explosions that shook the houses. They came from the sea, northeast and southeast and east. They were not only incessant, but they came two and even three so close together at times that they made a sustained roar as if the very air itself had turned to thunder.

Boston’s Bombardment Begins

Battleships with 15- and 16-inch guns were bombarding Fort Revere and the fort was answering with its 12-inch guns. Armored cruisers were firing on Standish. Armored cruisers and battle cruisers were throwing 12- and 14-inch shells into Deer Island and on Winthrop. Battleships lying north of Nahant in Nahant Bay, and thus invisible to the Boston defenses and not to be reached by searchlights, were bombarding Forts Banks and Heath.[89]

Fort Warren was firing at them, over Boston Light. Fort Andrews loosed its batteries.

There was bombardment from 3-inch guns along the beaches, north and south, where destroyers were attacking the coast stations, under heavy fire in reply from the defenders on the land.

Southeast, on the horizon, there sprang up a dull glow that became greatly red, and grew swiftly to pulsating flame. It was the town of Hull, burning.

The people in South Boston, looking seaward, saw lights appear in the sky over the outer harbor islands. They slipped slowly downward, leaving long trails of stars behind, that hung, burning, in the air as if they had been fixed there.

The falling lights opened, like monster flowers, into glaring, spectrally white flame just before they reached the earth. All the harbor where they fell stood revealed as in a lightning flash; but this flame did not go out like a lightning flash. It burned, steady, inextinguishable, for long minutes.

They were star-bombs that were being dropped on the forts by the great war-fowl, the iron breasted aeroplanes. The white lights glaring below, and the hanging lights in the air that stood like a lighted staff, pointed out the forts to the hooded cannon of their iron sisters out at sea.

Fired at from sea and sky, the forts replied and shook the earth. Faster and faster hurried the fire from the hidden ocean. Five ships were firing their secondary batteries to destroy an out-lying searchlight at a range of 6,000 yards. It was said afterward that at least five hundred projectiles were expended at that one mark alone.[90]

In a great semicircle around Boston Harbor, from Nahant out to sea and curving in again toward Cohasset on the south, lay the flaming, roaring line, firing at the defenses all night long, till the dawn began to whiten.

And behind Boston, inland, the other great armed semicircle was contracting steadily, swiftly.

VII

THE INVESTMENT OF BOSTON

Between these two claws, a prodigal hand has scattered islands. From Deer Island, lying in the north close under Winthrop, to George’s Island in the south, they form a stone wall with gaps that are the channels. Far out, grouped around the portal, the sea is sown with ledges and rocks whose kelp beards stream in an ever-heaving sea. Here are the Brewsters, the Devil’s Back, the Graves, the Roaring Bulls.

Within, there is a glorious harbor great enough for a world’s armada. But the entrance is a Pass of Thermopylæ.

Commanding that pass and all approaches far out to sea with zones of fire whose intersecting circles marked rings of sure destruction, were defenses honestly built. They were ready to receive and withstand that climax of destructiveness which man’s science has embodied in the conical steel projectile fired from the rifled gun.[91]

The navy that invested the harbor entertained no illusions on that score. It had not dared the attempt to force the passages of Narragansett. It would not dare to force the passages of Boston. As at Narragansett, its business was to occupy the defenders and wear them out while the army fell on them and on Boston from the land.[92]