Had Boston town gone under in flame and terror, the very fury of the catastrophe might

have carried men through it with less of despair than this cold conquest. Instead of blows to be struck, or blood to be shed, there was only humiliation—humiliation intensified hourly by the cool, unimpassioned correctness with which the enemy treated the fallen city.

He did not even fill the city with troops. Only four thousand infantry and a regiment of cavalry were sent in to hold all Boston. The rest of the army remained outside, encamped or quartered on the people of the suburbs and the towns of the metropolitan district.

Unconcerned Conquerors

Unconcerned, almost unguarded, the commander and his officers moved about the town. They went in and out of the City Hall with the assurance of superiors. They occupied the two largest hotels. Brookline people reported that the Country Club there had been turned into a brigade headquarters.

Dazed, as if in the bonds of an ugly nightmare that must vanish if they could only awaken, the people of Boston looked at this handful of men who had so easily, so calmly, made themselves utter masters of a metropolitan district of 39 municipalities—13 cities and 26 towns all within fifteen miles of the State House. From the State House this dozen or two dozen quiet, business-like men in uniform ruled with a word or two over 415 square miles with a population of more than a million and a half of people, and a taxable value of more than two and one-half billions of dollars.[112]

In the city so helplessly given over to them, there were, according to the certificate then lying in the City Clerk’s office, 124,000 men liable to enrollment in the State Militia. These were part of those “millions of men” of whom passionate orators had spoken so often—the millions of heroic, strong, intelligent American freemen who would instantly spring to arms at the call of need and sweep the most daring invader back into the sea.[113]

They were heroic. They were strong. They were intelligent. But they were confronted by the cold truth. It stared at them from all their squares, from all their parks, from the approaches to all their bridges. It was the cold truth—in the shape of cannon. Even the grounds of Harvard and of Boston University were occupied by batteries. Sentinels were on watch in Boston’s church towers with machine guns that pointed down into the streets.

Against that machinery of war, courage was as futile as a dream. Strength was as helpless as an infant in a cyclone. Intelligence was naked against the unintelligent steel.

Helpless as Any Village

So this city, one of the richest of the world, next to New York in its imports, with its enormous railroad terminals that drew together the roads of a continent’s commerce, had dropped into the invader’s hand almost for the picking, and lay in his grasp as incapable of resistance as if, instead of being the fourth greatest city of the United States, it had been a seaside village.[114]

There had not been a shot fired after the last shot had sounded from the harbor forts and the American flag had vanished from the harbor sky.

There was nothing to do. Slowly, systematically as it had invested Boston, so the army had taken Boston. There was no commanding point in all the country around it that was not crowned with heavy artillery. There was no road to the city that was not held by troops who demanded passes. Patrols moved constantly through the streets.

Through the whole metropolitan district had been sent a proclamation issued by the local authorities, warning the people that all intercourse between the territories occupied by belligerent armies whether by letter, by travel, or in any other way, had been interdicted and was punishable by fine or imprisonment, or, in cases of serious infraction, by death after summary trial. This proclamation was countersigned by the military commanders of the various districts.[115]

Another proclamation, issued from headquarters in the State House, said:

Clearing the Wharves

Along the water-front an order was given to clear all the big wharves. Owners of vessels berthed there were instructed to have them towed to basins or anchored in the stream. Provided with diagrams of the mine-fields that had been surrendered under the conditions of capitulation, the mine-sweepers cleared the harbor for the entrance of the fleet.

Floating from more than a score of warships and transports, the Coalition’s flags moved toward the city. Cannon saluted them from the forts, and they saluted in reply. Among the stricken thousands on shore there were many who sobbed as they heard the foreign thunders peal around their bay, and saw the foreign flags against their sky, with never a starry banner on all those ancient American waters.

There were foreign ships lying under the forts, unloading spare guns to replace those that were destroyed. All the works were busy with enemy sailors, repairing the defenses to protect conquered Boston against attack from its own navy.

Naval and army transports steamed up to the city, and took possession of the wharves and the Navy Yard basins. Destroyers and small craft moved up the channel to the Mystic River and occupied the naval and marine hospitals. Marines and sailors came ashore in South Boston and established a signal station on Telegraph Hill.

The naval commander seized all Federal property that had anything to do with the conduct of the harbor. He assumed control of the quarantine and pilot service and declared the port open under his supervision.[117]

The News Shut Off

All this, and all else of importance that was happening in their city, the people of Boston could learn only slowly and in fragments, as the news spread from man to man by word of month. The newspapers were under armed guard, like all other important places that touched on public business. Censors sitting at editorial desks permitted only the printing of the most trivial routine news of local happenings that did not touch on the real concerns of the invaded country and city.

The first pages of all the newspapers were reserved by the military government for its announcements. These were headed:

OFFICIAL!
———
ORDERS AND DECISIONS BY THE MILITARY
GOVERNMENT OF MASSACHUSETTS AND
THE CITY OF BOSTON
———

There were so many of them that there was no room for news on the first pages, even had news been permitted.

Within twenty-four hours the city had been set back to its condition in the seventeenth century when Boston’s first newspaper was throttled by a reactionary legislature.[118]

The people of Boston did not know if Connecticut had been conquered. They did not know if New York had fallen. They did not know where their army was or what it was doing. A great battle might be deciding the fate of the entire country, but no whisper reached them.

As in Colonial days, they were reduced to such knowledge as might come from rumor or from information whispered by those who learned something by chance.

It was in this way that nearly everybody in Boston came to know that in the State House there sat a council, dressed in uniform and bearing military rank, but in reality a council of men learned in international and United States law. Surrounded by great rows of books which they had brought with them, these men were the real rulers of the conquered land.[119]

The Commanding General and his field staff might act with summary authority under the rules of war. The Commanding General’s name might be signed to all the scores of orders that issued daily. But this council of military lawyers acted as governors, judges and soldiers at once. Their decisions in all mooted cases, their ingeniously worded orders, were perfecting the enemy’s complete possession.[120]

Stripping Boston of Its Treasure

No American, great or humble, might go a step beyond the prescribed and routine affairs of the day without first learning what their orders were. No man held property, whether it were priceless or beggarly, except by their favor. No man knew at any moment what remaining liberties might not be taken from him at a word from them.[121]

With the impersonal coldness of a judicial machine they went about the work of stripping the city of treasure. In all the departments of the municipality were soldier experts, studying the books. In the Custom House were half a hundred others searching the records of exports and imports. Every financial institution of the city had been ordered to present its accounts in the State House.

During all this time the invader made daily requisitions for the use of the troops or for other military purposes. He demanded for the navy a supply of 10,000 pounds of smoking tobacco, 1,000 pounds of roasted coffee, one ton of rice, 500 pounds of salt, and 50,000 pounds of fresh meat. He made requisition for paint, cable, ropes, hose, and steel for the ships.[122]

There were requisitions for medical supplies, for cloth and for shoes. To the harassed officials, who remonstrated against the hardships that were laid on the city, and pointed to the state of its trade, the reply was that it was one of the richest cities in the world and that the levies were modest. When a deputation of citizens pressed the protest, the council printed its reply in the “official” columns of the newspapers.

“In regard to the requisitions made by the occupying army,” said this statement, “attention is called to the fact that the United States Supreme Court in the case New Orleans versus Steamship Company, 20 Wall, 394, decided that the military governing authority ‘may do anything to strengthen itself and to weaken the enemy,’ and that the Court further stated that ‘there is no limit to the powers that may be exerted in such cases save those which are found in the laws and usages of war.’ ”[123]

The Old Spirit

Despite the cannon that glowered in all the streets, Boston’s fury at this ironic rejoinder nearly broke through all restraint. In the old city that had the famous Tea Party among its prized achievements, the spirit of that past age awoke again, and spread, almost without concerted thought or intention. Wherever men could meet they formed in groups to ease their minds by free speech, if they could do nothing else. In several quarters of the city there were incipient riots, suppressed by the police only just in time to avoid bloody interference by the soldiers.

“We must curb this town,” said the Commanding General to the military council in the State House. “It is not one to remain cowed for long, without repressive measures.”

The council nodded. Next morning’s newspapers had on their first pages an announcement that made many readers rub their eyes and stare incredulously at the printed page, for on it was such a proclamation as might have been read in Boston town in the reign of Charles I. It was headed:

SEDITION LAW

1. Every person resident in the territory occupied by
the power exercising sovereignty by right of conquest, who
shall utter seditious words or speeches, or write, publish or
circulate scurrilous libels against the governing authority,
or who shall conceal such practices that come to his knowledge,
shall be punished summarily and severely.

2. Every person who joins a secret society or attends a
secret meeting for the purpose of advocating sedition or
rebellion shall be punished summarily and severely.[124]

Again the citizens’ committee protested. Boston lawyers represented to the military council that American citizens could not be held guilty of sedition or rebellion if they adhered to their country.

Citizens of No Country

“The inhabitants of conquered territory,” answered the council, “are citizens of no country. They are under the jurisdiction of the occupying army; but they are not even entitled to the privileges of citizens of the country which controls that army.”[125]

“But mere conquest does not entitle you to treat them as rebels,” urged the committee. “They are within their rights to preserve their allegiance, so long as they do not violate the rules of war by opposing you with arms.”

One of the officers smiled. He opened a book. “Once more I must respectfully refer you to your own court decisions,” he said, and read from a United States Supreme Court verdict: “ ‘Conquest is a valid title while the victor maintains exclusive territory of the conquered country.’ ”[126]

“There is nothing that we can do,” the committee reported to the people. It was the refrain that sounded in all the United States just then. To the wild projects for desperate defense that were being broached every day in the city of New York, to the frenzied demands that the volunteers in the western camps be rushed into the field, to the curses directed at the American army because it refused to fight, the same answer formulated itself because there was no other. Always, from all quarters, to all demands and imprecations, the only answer that was possible was: “There is nothing that we can do!”

The city multitudes surrendered wearily to the situation; but there were men whom the helpless reply drove frantic.

There were hundreds of these men in New York, Brooklyn, Jersey City, Newark, and all the towns eastward from there into Connecticut. They were militiamen who had not been able to join their organizations when they went to the front, or whose organizations had been merely paper ones. There were members of sportsmen’s clubs, accustomed to the use of heavy-caliber fire-arms and to the trail, and there were many men who were moved simply by the recklessness of courage.[127]

During the days while there drifted through the United States the broken, incomplete but ever-growing story of New England’s uprising and its fearful suppression, these men had begun to assemble in Connecticut’s country between New Haven and Hartford, urged by no settled plan but moving to that district simply because it was the last American front between New York and the invading army.

The Foe’s Slow Advance

The enemy was moving westward slowly. He had to hold out a mighty screen northwestward against the American army that now lay beyond the Berkshire Hills, holding the land between western Connecticut and Albany. That army, intact and out of his reach, was a constant, acute danger. It endangered his communications, it endangered his base, it endangered his divisions that occupied Boston. It forced him to advance only in continual readiness for battle on flanks and rear-lines.

During the slow approach the men who had gathered between New Haven and Hartford began to form some sort of an organization. Almost it evolved itself.

The enemy pushing forward along the north, took Springfield with cavalry and artillery. The undefended city surrendered without a blow.

From New Haven and Hartford, to the factory cities of Wallingford and Meriden, Middletown and New Britain, along all the factory-lined valleys, there passed a word that gathered workers from shops and idle men from streets. All one long day, and all one evening, they moved toward the two cities. They seemed aimless enough; but there were leaders who put themselves at their head secretly in the night.

Suddenly they were angry, determined, united bodies of men. Suddenly, like a suddenly awakened wind, they stormed the great arms factories of the two towns.

They came with guns and pistols. They came with crowbars and picks. They came with stones, and with nothing except their bare hands. They hauled their dead aside and withered under the fire of the guards, and burst through and took the works.

In Hartford they seized a whole train-load of rapid-firers and machine guns that had been loaded for the American army. In New Haven they took almost four thousand sporting rifles.

The riot fever spread to Bridgeport. The mob arose and seized the cartridge factories.

The Mad Adventure

It was a mad thing, springing less from purpose than from the insanity that invasion had laid on men’s minds. It could have but one mad end. Yet this army of madmen was moved and molded by a touch of the American ability to “do things”—that very ability on which the people might, indeed, have depended with perfect assurance, if only they had not depended on it wholly.

America did, truly, have men who would fight. They were here; and they were to fight such a fight as would be remembered many a long day. America had the men to lead, too. Though they knew that this was a hopeless thing, they “took hold.”

They took hold of men armed with magnificent rifles, but of a score of different patterns for different kinds of sport, and demanding a score of different shapes and calibers of cartridges. They took hold of infantry militia fragments whose companies had had only two or three assemblies a year for target practice with average attendances of only 11 or 12 men. They improvised scout detachments of volunteers with bicycles and motors.[128]

Young doctors took hold with nothing but emergency kits, without ambulances, without litters, without even helpers who would know how to find a wound or apply a first aid bandage.

The army of madmen went forward to the Connecticut River to hold the western bank from Hartford to Middletown.

They did not know how to dig trenches.

They dug ditches. They did not know how to make defenses for their machine guns. They piled trees that would skewer them with splinters under shell fire, or heaped up rocks that would fly into fragments and kill like shrapnel.

They were all of three thousand men. They were the kind of men whom America has expected always in times of peace to call to its defense. They were callous-handed workers in metal and wood and leather; bleached workers from woolen mills and cotton spindles; ‘longshoremen from the harbor cities of the Sound; professional men resolute with the fervor of the time; road-makers and teamsters and shoemakers; hunters, yachtsmen, and football players.

What Americans Could Have Done

That day along the Connecticut River they showed what America’s men could have done had they learned how to do it in advance and had they been armed for the work.

They lay behind their pitiable defenses, with their motley weapons, commanded by men who did not know war. They bore the shock of machine gun assaults from advance patrols. They bore the shock of cavalry charges from scouting detachments.

At Middletown they were attacked in force by heavy cavalry that crossed under cover of gun-fire and outflanked them, and charged in mass. They sent the charge back, broken, with many empty saddles.

They lay under the fire of a 3-inch gun at Cromwell for an hour, and endured, and died—but they denied the river crossing to a battalion.

For two long hours they held the river along their whole line. It seemed to them that they were fighting a great battle. Surely their dead testified to it, and the hot fire that beat on them testified to it, and across the river, or floating down with the stream, were many enemy dead to testify to it.

They cheered and shouted to each other hoarsely that they were winning. They watched, with ever-growing savage lust, for more assailants.

In the headquarters of the advancing army there was received this report from the brigade commander: “Two or three thousand raw but determined Americans disputing passage of Connecticut River with our advance guards. They have machine guns, no artillery. Am sending field guns forward. Shall have passage clear in an hour.”

“Use ample force,” answered the commander. “These Americans!” he said to his aid. “They aren’t to be underestimated. A little more preparation—”

“And we wouldn’t be here!” laughed the aid.

Thirty Minutes Later

Thirty minutes afterward, from points wholly invisible to the Americans, there burst the shattering thunder of field-artillery. Explosive shells flew over and into the trenches. Shrapnel screamed at them, and burst like sentient things right in their faces, to drive rattling bullets in all directions.[129]

Their machine guns were useless. There was nothing in sight at which to fire. The men lay face down, clutching dirt, choking with fumes and smoke, stunned by the blasting things that burrowed into their earth-works and blew them apart and tore living bodies to pieces.

At Rocky Hill a militia company of artillery tried to move its gun into better shelter. The plow-horses that had been seized to drag it, wild with terror, became entangled in the traces and fell. Cutting them away, the men wheeled the cannon into position by hand. But their armory never had been fitted for sub-caliber practice, as it never had been fitted for mounted instruction. None of the men had been qualified as first class or even as second class gunners. They fired, and their shots went wild, serving only to betray their situation to the enemy. They did not know how to place themselves for protection from indirect fire. So they died.[130]

A troop of militia cavalry, trying to move forward near Hartford, was cut off by an advance patrol of enemy cavalry that had crossed the river to outflank the defenders from the north. The Americans charged. But they were mounted on horses never used before for cavalry work. The enemy riders were men trained to swordsmanship. The American troop had averaged only 13 men in mounted drill in a whole year, because they had possessed neither horses nor armory.[131]

The green brutes reared at the sight of weapons. They pitched into each other as the enemy cavalry dashed at them, and added their iron hoofs to the mêlée. For one brief moment eyes stared into eyes, and it was hack and thrust. Then the enemy riders were through them, and whirled like a gale and swept through them again, and killed and killed.

The Massacre of the Connecticut River

“Annihilated,” reported the scout cavalry a little later, when its squadrons came up. “Our loss one dead, three slightly wounded.”

Annihilated! Yes, gentlemen of Congress, sitting in Washington at that moment and passing resolutions and appropriations, and uttering fine sentiments about millions for defense and not one cent for tribute! There were ugly things there on the Connecticut River shore that answered you more loudly in their eternal silence than if they had spoken with a thousand angry tongues.

That day’s battle that filled the fields of Connecticut with dead men’s bones to be plowed up in many a year afterward, went down in American history as the massacre of the Connecticut River. A massacre it was—an American massacre, carefully prepared by elaborate carelessness through many a year before.

Less than a thousand men, it was said afterward, escaped from the massacre. They crawled away down gullies or swam down the river, and hid under weeds and panted, and tied up their wounds with rags from their ragged garments. They were never able to tell what had occurred. They knew only that they had thought there was victory—and then, in front of them, and on their flanks, and behind them, there had come flames as if a hot line of blast furnaces had opened to blow in their very faces, wherever they turned.

“We have taught them their lesson!” said the hostile commander. “We shall have no more trouble.”

It was true. Western Connecticut was broken under the invader’s rod as Eastern Massachusetts had been broken. That night the army occupied Hartford, Meriden, New Britain, and New Haven, though not before the arms factories had been blown up, to welcome the soldiers with flaming ruins.

The next morning cavalry detachments began cautiously to scout into the Berkshire Hills, to feel for the American outposts.

IX

THE CAPTURE OF NEW YORK CITY

All the knowledge that had gone to the public about the utter unreadiness of the freshly enlisted volunteers to take the firing line; all the information that had been given to the people about the condition of their army; all the proofs that the foe had given with blood and fire of his immense superiority—all these were as nothing. That the army, if it had fought now, must be destroyed, was as nothing. The cry was that the army must fight!

Trusted leaders pointed in vain to the history of the United States to prove that whenever its raw forces had hurried into battle in obedience to popular demand, the result had been only to hurry disaster. In vain they pointed to the Civil War and the hideous death-tolls paid by both sides without military advantage to either.

Men would not listen. They would not reason. They hated those who remained cool enough to reason. It was the human equation that, at some time or another, defies all the combination of man’s intelligence.

The President Goes to the Army

No administration, however determined, could have ignored it. Secretly, a special train was made ready in Washington. Secretly, in the night, the President of the United States with his advisers and staff boarded it and were taken northward.

No dispatches went ahead of it, except railroad orders to clear tracks. After passing Baltimore, it went by way of Harrisburg and Wilkesbarre, avoiding Philadelphia and the city of New York. Through the sad, black iron and coal country of Pennsylvania it passed to the New York State line without a welcome anywhere.

“We might be fugitives,” said the President, looking out with sleepless eyes.

At Jefferson Junction an armored train with machine guns and a 3-inch rifle slid in ahead of them from a siding where it had been waiting. An officer entered the President’s train and requested that all shades be kept down. Thus, furtively, the Nation’s ruler entered Albany.

Army Headquarters had been a target, like the White House, for messages that had shaken those to whom they were addressed. More than once the Commanding General had felt that it was more than human men could bear. More than once, in council, officers, infuriated by the veiled accusations of cowardice in the dispatches, had spoken in favor of giving the army the fatal order to go into action.

What the Commander Faced

The President, when he looked at the General’s deeply lined features, knew that the old soldier had more to gain from a battle, however disastrous, than from life. “If he does not interpose between the invader and New York City,” thought the Chief Magistrate, “he will live only to see his name blasted. There will be a thousand tacticians in future years who will assert that he was a blunderer, if not a traitor.”

“The country demands a battle! I know!” The soldier laid before the President a sheaf of papers. “Some reports, sir, bearing on the matter.”

The first sheet was a report from brigade headquarters. “Twenty batteries of 5.1 inch artillery moved westward through New Haven last night,” it said. “Our spy reports that these guns appear to be of the type that is known to have a range of seven miles, far outranging our field guns. Accompanied by heavy convoys of shrapnel and explosive shell.”[132]

“They are bringing up heavier guns still,” said the General, selecting another report. “Between New London and Saybrook Junction flat cars were seen with 11.02 inch howitzers, which, we presume, must be the type that throws a 760-pound projectile. We have nothing near that type in our artillery to oppose them. As they have a range of 12,000 yards, they can be placed wherever it may please the enemy, and we might as well bombard them with roman candles as with our guns.”[133]

Men Disabled Before Battle

The President, without replying, picked up a third report. It was from a major of the Medical Corps, and ran:

“A considerable proportion of militia infantry still suffer severely from blistered feet after only a few miles of march over rough country. More men are being disabled from ill-fitting shoes and unsuitable socks (thread and cotton) than from all other causes combined. Habit of prophylactic care of the feet almost wholly lacking. Few regimental or infirmary supplies include foot-powder.”[134]

“If you take men from their office chairs or from seats by the side of machines in shops,” growled one of the staff, “you can’t expect them to hike the same day. Men who insist on living near trolley cars, which is a great American habit, must expect to get sore feet after walking three miles. In a fifty mile march, sir, this army in its present condition will lose fifteen per cent. of its militia strength from straggling and falling out.”[135]

“But they have improved very greatly, have they not?” asked the President.

“Some of them,” answered the General, “notably the New York, Massachusetts and Pennsylvania troops, are excellent and can go into battle with the regulars at any time. But—” he turned to an artillery officer. “Will you tell the President about yesterday’s field artillery practice?”

What Untrained Batteries Did

“We sent five untrained batteries to an indicated position,” said the officer. “They had practiced only about half a dozen times in the last year, and then they had merely drilled in the motions of handling their pieces, as their armories were equipped neither for mounted drill or sub-caliber practice. When they reached the positions that they were to hold, they had lost the locations of their own side, and within half an hour they were blazing into cover occupied by their own infantry. If they had been using shell instead of blanks—whew!”[136]

“We are only just getting several organizations to learn how to deploy as skirmishers from close order,” said the Commander. “You know how vital that is under fire. Their company commanders appear to have had no previous experience at it, and the corporals let their squads get out of hand hopelessly. There have been some sad mix-ups. The result in battle would have been sickening.”[137]

“But I tell you,” said the President, “the country is wild! The people know that you have the whole of a magnificent railroad system from here to New York at your disposal. They know that the invading army must have been spread out tremendously to hold all the territory that it occupies. They cannot understand why you should not be able to engage the force that is advancing on New York.”

What the Public Did Not Know

The General walked to the wall map. “The enemy is thinned out. Yes!” He laid his finger on the chart. “But to meet him, we must move due south 140 miles down the Hudson Valley, with the river on one side of us and the Berkshire and Litchfield Hills of Massachusetts and Connecticut on the other. We cannot leave men behind us to protect that length of line and hold open our road for us if we have to retreat. When General Sherman marched to Atlanta, he left 115,000 men behind him to guard his 300 mile line back through Chattanooga to Nashville. We have less than fifty thousand men in our whole army, even if we scrape together all the very latest green arrivals.

“The moment we leave our base,” continued the Commander, “the enemy headquarters will know it. They will instantly begin a big shifting of their New England forces. They will push them across into New York State behind us, and we’ll be trapped.”

“You think that they can concentrate swiftly enough?” asked the Secretary of War.

The soldier pulled a paper out of the pile, and read: “Observer at Providence reports that hostile forces entrained cavalry, field and heavy artillery and ammunition columns at regular rate of two hours for full military train. Time for loading siege material, 3½ hours.”[138]

Officers Had Never Handled Men

He tossed the papers aside. “When did any of our officers ever have to handle thirty thousand men?” he asked. “How many of them ever handled as many as ten thousand? Last week, two regiments were left without food for two meals on a practice march because their commissary failed to supply travel rations. Day before yesterday seven boxes of provisions were found lying in a company street without any one to claim them. Those were militia; but our own officers equally lack experience in handling such a big contract as a whole army.[139]

“Do you know what it means to see that an infantry division gets its material? Do you know what we’ve got to send into battle with it? It means an ammunition train of 165 4-mule wagons, and more than 700 mules and horses. Then there are the other supply trains, the pack trains and the engineer trains—135 more wagons and 600 animals. There are ninety ambulances and wagons with their animals. And this is without counting the horses for the cavalry and the signal corps! I tell you, Mr. President, if we unload that mess in the face of an enemy like the one down there,” he pointed southeastward, “it will never get back here!”[140]

“And if you stay here! Won’t you be attacked?” asked a member of the President’s party.

“I think not.” The General turned to the chart again. “See here! He’s got a great big territory to hold already. When he has New York City and Harbor to control also, I think he’ll be too well occupied to attack us until he brings reënforcements across. At any rate, he can’t come at us, except from the direction of New York City up the narrow river valley, or from the direction of Massachusetts through the Berkshire Hills. We can make the banks of the Hudson a difficult place for him. And the longer we can hold on here, the longer the ordnance works at Watervliet can continue to turn out the heavy guns that we need so sorely. Watervliet, Mr. President, in my eyes, is the most precious thing we’ve got to guard just now.”[141]

“Stay!” Says the President

The President arose and walked to the window. For a quarter of an hour he looked out over the rolling country to the East where the soft blue curves of the hills were cloud-like against the April sky. Then he returned. “Stay where you are,” he said, “as long as you can, or think wise. New York will have to fall. Good-by. We’ll go back to Washington and do our best. Good luck to you, and to your Berkshire Hills.”

“They are good American hills,” said the General, smiling for the first time. “They are giving our men the only protection they’ve had against aeroplanes since this thing began.”

The spreading, crowding groves that crowned them and made them famous for their loveliness, now made the multi-folded Hills a welcome cover for the harassed American troops. They reduced to a minimum the effectiveness of scouting from the air, and increased to a maximum extent the efficiency of cavalry and motor troops that knew the country. Among their laureled slopes and in their vales and intervales, was good territory for artillery defense.

The rich men whose pleasure grounds they are gave the army their motors, their horses and themselves. Quick-witted and keen, aware of every foot of the ravines and roads and by-roads, they helped the picked men who had been selected by the commanders to guard and hold the “escapes” through the Hills.

Americans Hold the Wall

At the southern end, on the open summit of Mount Everett that old settlers prefer to call “The Dome,” whence the sight can command the sweep of the Housatonic Valley through the Hills, all the approaches from Massachusetts in the eastward, the Litchfield Hills south in Connecticut, and the basin of the Hudson River to the west, a signal corps had erected its wireless and its heliograph. At their feet, on the lower slopes, hidden in the great wild laurel that is most beautiful there, was artillery.

There were guns at Great Barrington. At Stockbridge gleaming batteries guarded the road from Hartford, which once had been the stage coach road between Boston and Albany.

Limbers and guns jolted past the great houses and estates of Lenox and vanished in the cover on both sides, to be posted on the hilly ground that commanded the Housatonic Valley. More guns passed under the elms of high Pittsfield. Motors and cavalry and cannon held North Adams and Williamstown, where Williams College stood almost deserted because students and professors had volunteered to act as sentinels and patrols.

On the old trail that had been the trail of the Mohawk Indians of New York when they went on the war-path against Massachusetts, men in olive drab were scouting and lying in cover with machine guns.

On the green hills behind Bennington, Vermont, where Yankee breastworks had been thrown up in the Revolution, there were more batteries. Here outposts and patrols guarded the road leading to Lake George, the last gateway to the territory held by the American forces in New York State. North of this were Vermont’s Green Mountains—barriers indomitable as of old when Ethan Allen, wroth at Congress, threatened to retire into those fastnesses and “wage eternal warfare against Hell, the Devil and Human Nature in general.”

Impassable by Rail

The long barrier thus running northward from Connecticut like a wall separating New England and New York, would check any except a powerful, well-supported force, advancing with the determination to break through. Long before such an army could make its way, the Americans could either front the enemy in battle, or retire safely beyond his reach.

The invaders could not break through the wall by rail. The railroad line that led from Greenfield, Massachusetts, to Troy and Albany, had in it a famous link that was vital to its operation. This link was the celebrated Hoosac Tunnel, bored for 4¾ miles through Hoosac Mountain. It was now a solid mass of blasted and piled rock that could not be cleared away in the time demanded by any military operation.

In the south, on the Long Island Sound coast of Connecticut, were other ruins almost as big and as costly. They were the wreckage of Bridgeport’s big cartridge factories, blown up as the hostile patrols entered the outskirts of the town.

It was the last source of ammunition and arms supply in New England. With it there were lost, too, three submarines that were on the stocks in the harbor ship yards, and the works that had been manufacturing naval sea-planes and military tractors for the army’s flying scouts.

The aerial motor works of Hyde Park in Massachusetts, the Marblehead factory that made gun-carrying convertible land and marine flying machines, and the Norwich factory for tractor biplanes and hydro-monoplanes had been captured almost in the beginning.[142]

New England’s Conquest Complete

As the army entered Bridgeport, another column advancing parallel with it captured the great manufacturing city of Waterbury in the North. With these two cities, the invader’s conquest of New England was complete. Excepting only Portland in Maine, he now possessed every city of more than 30,000 population. He possessed every source of manufacture. He held every port on the northern shore of Long Island Sound. He held the three great harbors of New England. In addition to the vessels building in Bridgeport, he possessed Fore River, with a battleship and two destroyers on the ways; Quincy, with eight submarines in course of construction, and the Portsmouth Navy Yard with one.[143]

The division that had taken Waterbury turned southerly to the coast after it passed through that town, to join the division that had taken Bridgeport and was pressing westward.

An hour later the American army, apprised by its spies, began to block the rock cuts on all the New York Central systems leading northward out of New York City.

When New York heard this news, it knew that it had been abandoned.

In that moment of despair, the population would have done what every loosely knit, heterogeneous multitude does almost spontaneously in the face of catastrophe. It would have grown into mobs to riot against itself. If the huge population had been organized, if it had possessed a single will, nothing could have prevented it and nothing could have withstood it. But facing the overwhelming numbers were a few thousand men who were moved by a single will and who were firmly welded together for its accomplishment.

The Power of Organized Discipline

They were the police. Whatever their faults were, they possessed the one thing that all the city and all the United States lacked. It was Organized Discipline. In the face of millions unorganized and undisciplined, the 11,000 policemen of the city, armed with no visible weapons except clubs, maintained the peace. They scarcely needed the assistance of the ten thousand men who had been enlisted hastily as volunteer militia and deputy sheriffs, and who patroled the streets with clubs and riot guns.[144]

Their work was facilitated by the fact that for many days past there had been a great disarmament in the city. Under the autocratic latitude of martial law, all suspected individuals had been searched wherever they were met. Houses had been visited. Warned by the riots in Connecticut, the authorities had stripped every sporting goods shop and every pawnbroker’s establishment of weapons, and stored them under heavy guard in the armories.

It had been a necessary precaution. During the days that came after the enemy forces had begun to land, factory after factory and industry after industry had stopped. Now the greater part of the city was dead. Seventeen thousand longshoremen and stevedores loitered in the water-front streets, with ten thousand sailors of all nationalities, whose ships were tied up. Fifty thousand unskilled laborers wandered around town with nothing to do. Altogether it was estimated that on this day there were 200,000 people in New York whose occupations had been lost, and fully as many again who were working on half time.[145]

The Wholly Helpless Metropolis

The leaders of commerce and finance, the most resourceful of the city’s business men, were utterly unable to suggest anything. The Chamber of Commerce, that had met many crises and evolved practical plans of action, could suggest nothing now.

The banks were practically closed. The United States Treasury Department already had declared that the center of the Second Federal Reserve District would be considered as temporarily merged with the Third District in Philadelphia.

The fire insurance companies were refusing all new business, and had called attention to the fact that existing policies on every kind of property provided that they were not liable for loss “caused directly or indirectly by invasion, insurrection, riot, civil war or commotion, or military or usurped power.”

There were thousands of other contracts and agreements that would lapse automatically the moment the first hostile soldier set foot in the city. Men had laughed for a generation at the mediæval expression in many printed legal forms that provided that the signers were not responsible for anything that might occur under “the acts of any foreign Prince or Potentate.” Now, suddenly, these mediæval words were alive.

The mails were piled high in the Post Office and in every substation. The whole United States was striving to settle urgent affairs with the city, and the city was trying as desperately to settle with the United States. It was impossible to handle the mass. It remained in bags for days, untouched, while the postal forces, heavily increased from near-by cities, struggled with the accumulations of days before.

The long distance telephone systems were so crowded that connections could be obtained only by asking for them many hours in advance. Telegraph dispatches were twenty-four hours old before they could be forwarded, and steadily their increasing accumulation was leaving the armies of swift operators farther behind.

Days of Frantic Perplexity

During the days of frantic perplexity there had been talk of dismantling the factories and shipping their machineries to the interior. But when the owners of the city’s 26,000 manufacturing establishments faced the problem, they realized that it could not be done. They were not like the government that could afford to pull plants apart and move them at more expense than would be involved in building new ones.[146]

They were as helpless as their 500,000 employees. To leave their city meant for owners and workers alike to go away bare-handed and pauperized. There was nothing to do except to stay.

All these manufactories and industries of the city had labored so furiously in the last weeks to produce merchandise and ship it that at last the railroads were unable to handle the rush of freight. Every yard was piled high with goods destined for the interior that could not be loaded. All the sidings were clogged. There were lines of freight trains with not a gap between them stretching from the Hudson River straight across the New Jersey meadows and on into the yards and sidings of New Jersey towns miles from New York.

No freight was coming in. For three days everything had been side-tracked far away from the city, in order to clear the tracks for provisions. The authorities, with the Citizens’ Committee, unable to guess what the enemy might do, had decided that all efforts must be subservient to the effort to stock the town with food.

Already the city had taken over the entire business of distributing food-stuffs. Nothing could be sold except in quantities and at prices fixed by ordinance.

The Edge of Famine

The city’s people often had been told by their statisticians that they always were within a few days of famine. Now they realized what it meant. The congested tracks had cut down their coal supply. All interurban transportation had to be reduced to save power. Somewhere in the narrow valleys leading from Lake Champlain on crowded rails were the enormous rolls of paper needed to feed the city’s presses. The morning newspapers had to be cut down to four pages of small size. There was no sporting news in the papers, no foreign news and no financial news.

Within the short time that had elapsed since the occupation of New England’s mill cities, the city had used up a great part of its stocks of textiles. There was shortage of coffee, of spices, of all the stuffs that ordinarily came in by sea.

Hostile cruisers and destroyers patrolled all the Atlantic coast, taking the precaution merely to stay out of range of the harbor defenses. They captured every vessel, large or small, that