Chapter X: The Price That Had to Be Paid 315 (2)

On a dreadnaught in the van of the convoying fleet, stood the Admiral of the armada. He was speaking with the ship’s Captain, as they paced up and down the bridge. Everywhere enormously long polished black cannon thrust their supple bodies out of turrets. Like the peering heads of serpents, the guns of the secondary batteries looked out from bow to stern. Everywhere stood officers and men at quarters. Without a moment’s pause signals ran up and down, wimpling out their gaudy messages, and everlastingly the wireless sounded its stuttering staccato. Yet there was a placid, strangely peaceful quiet over the whole gray, tall, bristling machine. Except for its appearance, it might have been a pleasure yacht.

“It’s a lovely shore,” the Admiral was saying. “Some beautiful estates and charming people. I was delightfully entertained within five miles of where we shall land. It seems a rough return for hospitality. But one does for one’s country what one would not do--hello!”

The dreadnaught’s circling destroyers were coming at the ship headlong. The Captain leaped to the rail. Before he got there, the ship’s port battery crashed. A signalman pointed at the water fifty yards off. Something like a staring, hooded eye had looked from the sea for a moment.

It was the last thing the signalman saw on earth. The dreadnaught shuddered. While its guns were still firing, it lifted with a jerk as a man would lift if caught by an upward swing under the jaw. A great, queerly muffled explosion shook it. For perhaps a minute it tore along under the impetus of its own speed, but it did not move smoothly. It jolted, like a cart going over a rough road. Then it began to topple. Over and over it leaned, slowly, fast, faster. There was not an outcry. Short calls of command there were from officers, but not a sound from the men.

It was very still now. The wireless had ceased, the engines were shut off, and there was only the roar of steam.

The dreadnaught’s crew was clinging, like men clinging to a steep cliff, holding fast to everything that would give foot-hold or hand-grip on the inclined deck. A signal climbed along the toppling mast. Then, with a thunder of breaking metal, with fire-hose, ammunition cases, instruments, ship’s furniture all volleying into the sea, the ship fell full on her side and went down.

_A Maneuver to Escape Undersea Attack_

In a hissing, breaking sea that instantly was gray with ashes and multi-colored with oil, swam eight hundred men. None came near them. The dreadnaught’s last signal had been the order to keep off: and the big fleet was weaving in and out at top speed, in a maneuver long since perfected, to escape other attacks from the invisible things.

Far astern raved the guns again. This time the alert destroyers had not missed their aim. A periscope disappeared. Presently, slowly, little spreading disks of oil swam on the surface, and united, and more floated upward and spread.

Not for a moment had the fleet fallen into disorder. Even while the destroyers were picking up what survivors they could find, another dreadnaught hoisted its commander’s flag as Admiral, in place of the one who lay under the bright green water. A speed cone went up: and warships and convoy steamed full speed ahead.

Half an hour later the periscopes of two submarines, outdistanced, bobbed up far behind the fleet. Their gray shapes arose, streaming. The manholes opened and heads came out, blinking into the sunlight and drawing in great breaths of fresh air. They followed the ships toward the coast.

One of them hoisted a wireless apparatus, and began to call. It was a weak call, that had to be repeated again and again. Then Montauk Point heard, over a temporary apparatus, and received, and began to send on to New York; and the bulletins told that submarine M-9 had sunk the Admiral’s flag-ship, that submarine G-3 had sunk a destroyer, and that submarine O-1 had been lost.

“Victory! Victory! VICTORY!” ran the news. They knew that it was not victory, those great, anxious crowds that stopped all traffic that day in all the continent of North America. But for a while they were thrilled, and they cheered, and forgot the slow, implacable grip of irresistible power that was closing in on their eastern sea-coast, not to be stayed, not even to be halted.

_The Bombardment of the Coast_

The day passed, and the dusk came in. A pleasant evening it was, warm enough to tempt people to stay out-of-doors. Even in the trembling sea-cities there was all the wonted life of such a season. The rich had fled; but the others remained. There was nothing else for them to do. A few months before, had any of them been asked what they would do in case of an invasion, they would have painted a picture of the millions fleeing from their cities with what possessions they could lug. Thus it had been in Europe, as they had read. Thus it would be in America.

But it was not so. There they were, watching and waiting, and clinging to the only hold they knew. And in this soft dusk, there they loitered in their countless miles of streets, and talked, and argued, and prophesied, just as they had done always. And everywhere in the miles fronted by little houses and tenements and tall apartments the children were ushering in the spring by playing ring-around-rosy. Everywhere their thin, clear young voices made the old accustomed music of the towns.

EXTRA! EXTRA!

In the soft dusk, on the Rhode Island and Massachusetts coast there was falling red Hell and ruin.

Out of the tranquil, empty sea it had come. Out there, far out, in the pearl and gray, there had been flashes. There had been roars and whistles and bellows in the high, still air, coming, coming! And the shells had plunged down, everywhere, unending. Streams of iron, streams of fire, streams of screaming, bursting things: things that struck the land and spun into it like beasts biting, and burst, blasting away forests and houses and men in crimson whirlwind: things that plunged into towns and ricocheted, and pulled down walls and towers: things that darted at power plants and darkened the world: and things that burst into towns with fierce fire and set the world a-light.

It was not news that came through the spring night. To the men at the receiving ends of wires it was as if there were coming to them one wild din of terror. Here were telephone messages that broke off in the middle and were never to be resumed on this earth. Here were telegraph dispatches that stopped suddenly and left the wire dead, its far end dangling where a shell had torn down the poles. From hill tops far inland came raving words of burning towns glaring red in the country below. From somewhere unknown, from somebody unknown, came one word over a telephone that instantly went out of commission. It was: “God.”

In the cabin of the new flag-ship sat the new Admiral. The ship was shaking with the explosions from its secondary batteries, but the cabin was orderly and sedate. A shaded light was shining on a chart.

“Another hour of this,” said the Admiral, “and I think the coast will be nicely cleared for the landing.” He selected a cigar from its box, and lit it carefully.

III

THE LANDING

The first American soil on which the invader set foot was not on the mainland. It was a steep-edged, wind-blown bit of New England territory that swims like a ship far out on the Atlantic in the great misty ocean gate between painted Gay Head on Martha’s Vineyard and the brown-handed lighthouse of Montauk Point, Long Island.

Unimportant to the world, but famous in American history and legend is this Block Island or Manisees, as the Indians called it, meaning the Isle of God. Here, ever since American liberty was born, there have clung generations of sea-faring, storm-fighting New England men, proud to call themselves Rhode Islanders, though the State to which they belong is so far away that they can only just see its coast.

Block Island’s men and women stood on Mehegan Bluff and Beacon Hill and Clay Head, watching their sky fill with fighting tops and enemy flags, and their sea oppressed by enemy craft. Among those who stood there that day were descendants of men who had fought at sea in every American war. Some were there who could boast that their ancestors had crept into Long Island Sound in little sloops, and even in rowing boats, to harry tall King’s ships.[22]

Strong-hearted, like their forefathers, were these men. They looked out on their beset horizon and doubled their sun-burned hands into fists, longing to get among the foe with ship to ship, gun to gun, and the battle-flag of America shining.

This was no tame population, to be terrified like a driven herd. Smacksmen were these, accustomed to looking unafraid into the black snarl of storm. Swordfishermen were here who went daily, without a second thought, to fight the lithe spearsman of the sea in his own element.

_The First Invader_

A cruiser rushed at their island. Heavy with turreted guns and broadside batteries, tall with laced iron mast-towers and wide funnels and ponderous cranes, swarthy-gray over all like a Vulcan’s smithy, the enormous thing stopped half a mile out with the guns of the secondary batteries pointing at the land. From under her quarter, around bow and stern, swept destroyers with cocked funnels spitting smoke and with ready, alert men at the lean little guns.

They moved straight for the little harbor, in a long line. On the bridge of the foremost, an officer waved a hand at the crowd of fishermen on the shore, pointed to his guns, and, with a backward motion, to the cruiser.

“Aye! We take the hint, damn ye!” growled an old man. “He means,” he turned to the rest, “that we’d better not make a fuss! Drop that!” He turned sharply to a younger man, who had just joined the group. He had a shot-gun, half concealed under his coat.

“Are we going to take it laying down?” demanded the armed man.

The old man pushed him backward with both hands. “You fool! That thing out there could blow us off the island, men, women and

children, as if we was dead maple-leaves afore a southeastern gale!”

The destroyers had stopped. The crews swung their guns toward the shore.

From the cruiser dropped six ships’ boats, full of blue-jackets. They swung past the destroyers, beached, and formed in a line. There was a click of breech-bolts shot home--so quick that it was as but one sound.

A Lieutenant advanced his men with the swinging navy trot. He pointed to men in the little throng, selecting six of the older ones. “We take the island,” he said in precise English. “Fall in! We hold you responsible for the good order of the rest of your people. There must be no attempt at resistance.”

While he spoke, another detachment of the landing party had been busy among the huddle of boats in the harbor. Some were being made up into a tow. Others were being scuttled at their moorings. A third detachment was knocking holes into the smaller craft hauled up on shore.[23]

_The First American to Fall_

Three sailors were just driving boat-hooks through the bottom of an up-turned cat-boat, when a tall young fisherman leaped at them with an oaken tiller-handle, and struck one down.

The other two closed on him, but let go again almost instantly at the sound of a sharp order. They tore themselves away and jumped aside.

There was another order, in the same sharp voice. Instantly, while the fisherman still stood, staring, with his weapon in the motion of striking, a blast of fire spat at him from six carbines. His head went up, exposing his broad brown throat. He thrust his hands before him, all the fingers out-spread. With his eyes wide open, he tottered and pitched face down.

Another order, and the sailors wheeled, covering the islanders.

“Dan!” screamed a girl in the crowd. “Hush! Don’t look!” An older woman caught her around the neck and pressed the girl’s face to her breast.

“He brought it on himself!” said the Lieutenant to the fishermen. “Take warning! That is war!” He turned, and walked to the beach.

The dead man lay where he had fallen. The bluejackets, lowering their carbines, came to rest beyond him, facing the Block Islanders impassively.

None of these had said a word. Save for the outcry of the girl and the woman’s “Hush!” there had been utter silence, as if the discharge of the weapons had swept away speech. Slowly clenching and unclenching their hands, the big, weather-beaten, strong men stared at the corpse that lay huddled so awkwardly before them.

One of the women touched a white-haired, white-bearded islander on the arm. “Won’t they let us have him!” She turned her eyes toward the dead man. “It don’t seem hardly right--to let him lay there.”

The old man looked at her as if waking from a trance. He passed his rough hand over his brow. With his slow, wide fisherman’s stride, he stepped forward. The sailors instantly brought their weapons up.

The old man pointed dumbly to the corpse. In reply, a sailor indicated the Lieutenant with a gesture.

The fisherman walked to the Lieutenant. “I wanted to ask you--” he began, but a signalman interrupted him, pointing at his head. The Block Islander looked at him, bewildered. Impatiently, the sailor pointed again, and the islander understood.

Hesitatingly, reluctantly, he took off his hat. Crushing its brim with the grip of helpless anger, he faced the officer.

“I wanted to know--sir--if mebbe we couldn’t--” he indicated the corpse.

“Yes!” answered the officer, shortly. “You can have him!” With a change in his voice, he added: “I am sorry. Very sorry. Yes! You may take him away.”

_Block Island as a Naval Base For the Enemy_

So fell brave Block Island. It had greeted the sunrise with the stars and stripes hauled defiantly in the face of the invader. The setting sun shone on the flag of the enemy. Its wireless was being operated by uniformed men. Its telephone and telegraph communications with the mainland were torn out. Its little harbors were being used by destroyers and small craft as if they had been foreign naval bases forever.

So, too, had fallen the islands of Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard with their stouthearted, passionately American population. They had yielded, not to ignoble fear, but to the irresistible mechanics of war.

The people of Block Island, watching destroyers steaming slowly toward the New England coast with strings of their fishing boats in tow, noted a curious thing. Every boat was laden with fish-nets. The enemy had gathered every seine, every pound-net. He had lifted long fyke-nets from the sea, and had dragged the enormous hauling-seines from their drying-reels.

Block Island wondered what a fighting navy meant to do with fish-nets. Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard wondered, too; for they, also, had been stripped of their gear.

Following the long tows with their heaped brown freight, six cruisers moved toward the coast, each guarded by destroyers whose men watched the sea for a periscope, or for the whitened, broken water that would indicate the presence of a submarine.[24]

They moved fast, until they were within three miles of land. Then they opened fire.

Steaming rapidly up and down, ship behind ship, they loosed all their broad-side batteries, starboard and port in turn, simultaneously. So fierce was the blast that the water shook. All the surface of the sea between the ships and the land quivered. Fantastic vibration-ripples shot all around, like cracks on a shattered steel plate.

The blast killed the wind, and made an infernal little gale of its own around each ship, that spun in hot ascending columns. Surface-swimming fish were struck dead and floated in schools on the water, miles away. Even the bottom-haunting creatures felt the shock and scurried into the sand and mud.[25]

This was only the blast from the lips of the guns. It was only pressure. It was only the released energy that drove conical steel masses forward. They sped with a violence that would leave the swiftest locomotive behind in the wink of an eye. Like locomotives smashing into an obstacle, the projectiles hit the land.

That impact alone was annihilation. Having struck, the projectiles exploded.

The chart under the shaded light in the Admiral’s cabin had a semi-circle marked on it--a semi-circle that made a great segment into the land. As if it were in the electric arc, the country in that zone of fire melted. Houses vanished into stone-dust and plaster-dust even as the screaming thing that had done it struck houses a mile beyond and threw them on each other. Streets became pits with sloping sides that burned. Trees rocked, roaring as in a gale, and were tossed high, and fell, and twisted in flame. The land shriveled.

_A Vast Confusion of Facts and Rumors_

As the shells fell on New England’s coast, so the news fell on the United States. It sped as a vast confusion of facts and rumors, bewildered tales of terror, inventions born of crazed brains, dispatches that told only half a story, and messages that told none at all and yet, in their very incoherence, told more than intelligible words could have done.

The newspapers were tested that night, and the steady, intangible discipline of the great organization held true. Never a linotype in all the cities had to wait for its copy. The word went to the presses to “let her go.” Extras followed extras.

But the news sped ahead of the extras. It sped, and spread, and grew, and became monstrous.

The enemy had forced the harbor defenses of Boston! So ran the rushing rumor in New York and Philadelphia. Long before trains could carry papers there, people in far-off country districts heard it.

The State House was in ruins! Portsmouth and Boston Navy Yards had fallen!

New York, ran the stories through Boston and all New England, was invested at both approaches! Fort Totten had been blown up! The enemy ships had the range of the city, and already the sky-scrapers were toppling into Broadway!

The government was fleeing from Washington! An army had landed on the Delaware coast!

Even those who had the newspapers before them, and knew that none of these things was true, were shaken when the tales that had sped ahead, came back like the back-wash of a wild sea. Many hundreds that night ran with the newspapers in their hands and helped to spread, and make more fantastic, the fantastic falsehoods that had been born miles away.

But the newspaper organization worked steadily. Bit by bit the medley took tangible form. From the watchful, self-controlled chain of light-house and life-saving stations, revenue marine and other coast guard services; from the steady, unimaginative army and navy; from the alert, unshaken harbor-defenses, bit by bit the story of the night began to come in orderly sequence.

_The Sea Vitals of the Commercial United States_

The enemy fleet was biting into the sea-vitals of the commercial United States, the southern coast of New England between Cape Cod and Long Island Sound whose possession is the key to the manufacturing and industrial life of the East.

Battle-ships lying off the mouth of Buzzards Bay were dropping shells into the harbor and into the shores. One ship had ventured close into the land, approaching within the zone of fire from Fort Rodman, and had dropped shells near New Bedford. Hidden by intervening hills, it had escaped return fire, and was now lying just out of range, dropping an occasional 15-inch projectile toward the defenses.[26]

Other ships were firing into Narragansett Bay. They, too, were firing at immensely long range, to avoid return fire from the defenses.

Montauk Point’s wireless transmitted a dispatch that three vessels were standing in there and lowering boats. Then the apparatus fell silent.

Point Judith’s wireless had ceased speaking soon after dusk. Its last dispatch was that shells were falling near it. An hour later its operators reported from Narrangansett Pier that the tower had been destroyed.

Watch Hill and Westerly, on Rhode Island’s southwestern border, said a message from near-by Stonington, were burning, and were being wrecked by heavy shells. Fort Wright telegraphed that this was fire from two battle-ships standing just outside of range from the fort’s mortars and rifles, and throwing shells from 15-inch guns.[27]

But these great guns were being used only at intervals. Though their bite could rend towns, they destroyed themselves as they wreaked destruction. The acid-fumes from their monster powder-charges ate out their scientifically rifled cores. They had to be spared.

The real attack came from the heavy cruisers, standing close in and working 4, 5, and 8-inch guns. For every shot that the battle-ships’ mammoths fired, the cruisers fired a hundred. It was not a bombardment. It was a driving flail of whirling, smashing, exploding metal that whipped the coast between Watch Hill and Point Judith.

To the ear it was din, vast, insane. In reality, it was an operation of war, conducted as precisely and methodically as if it were a quiet laboratory experiment. The wireless controlled every shot from every gun on every ship. From the small things on slim tripods to the wide-mouthed heavy calibers spitting from hooded turrets, not one spoke without orders.

_Sweeping the Floor Clean for the Enemy Army_

To the trained artillerists, listening in the Narragansett and Long Island Sound defenses, it was plain as English words. That crash, as if a steel side had been blown out of a ship, was the four-inch broadside, all loosed at once. Now it would be fifteen seconds, and another crash, farther east, would tell of the next ship’s 4-inch discharge. And the heavier, fuller, air-shaking roar that came in between was from 5-inch guns, while the broken, slower, coughing bellow, that overwhelmed all the rest and echoed from every echo-making prominence inland, was the voice of an 8-inch rifle, speaking once every five minutes.

Now the flocks of shells went high to reach far to their farthest range into the land. Now they went low to sweep through the cover near shore. Sometimes the steel things drove, as if in sudden uncontrollable fury, at one given spot. Again, they spread out into a dreadful cone that danced along a five-mile stretch like a dancing whirl-wind.

The fire slackened, and died away, and fell silent, and burst out again as if a horde of devils had only held their breaths to scream anew. Up and down it moved, now in, now out, although long ago the shells had whirled away everything that could be destroyed. There was nothing living in there now. The very beasts of the woods, the birds in their nests, were dead.

To the survivors who had escaped from the first red blast, the thing seemed only a deed of insane wickedness. What had they done, they asked each other with sobbing breaths, to bring a steel navy at them? What could a great, powerful enemy gain by this murder of peaceful, unarmed country folk? What danger could there lie to him, they gasped as they fled through the dark, or lay face down to the earth and gripped at grass, in tiny houses and gardens and little sea-shore hamlets?

It was wicked murder. “Wicked murder!” said the wires, telling their tale to their fellow-citizens far away.

The men who were working the ships’ guns were from little villages, from pretty sea-shore hamlets like these themselves. They were not thinking of the habitations which were being blasted away. It was an operation of war. This was the chosen time, and this the chosen place, for the landing of the army that waited in the gloom of the sea for them to make the shore safe for it.

With their brooms of steel and fire, they simply were sweeping clear the floor on which that army was to set its foot.

Far in shore of the flame-torn cruisers, safe from any land-fire under the parabolas of the naval projectiles as if they were under a bombproof arch, certain little vessels had toiled up and down from the beginning. Slowly, for they dragged between them long wire cables that hung down to the sea-bottom, they moved back and forth along the beach, fishing.

The fish they were trying to catch were spherical and conical steel fish that bore little protuberances on their tops like the sprouting horns of a yearling kid.

A touch as soft as the touch of a lover’s hand could drive those little horns inward, to awaken a slumbering little devil of fulminate of mercury, whose sleep is so light that a mere tap will break it. And the fulminate’s explosion would detonate three hundred pounds of gun-cotton.

The submarine mine says to the big ships: “I am Death!” And they cannot answer it.

_Guns That Were Being Made Too Late_

But there is an answer to the mine. It is the mine-sweeper that drags for them. The men on these mine-sweepers dedicate themselves to the tomb. Some must inevitably perish. They will find a mine with their keels instead of their groping drags; or they will grapple one too close; or their wire cable will clutch two mines and swing them together, so that the little horns touch--

But, if the mine-sweepers are permitted to work on, the mines may kill, and kill, and kill, yet in the end they will be gathered in.

There is an absolute answer to the mine-sweepers. It is to hammer them with rapid fire from the shore. These little vessels, dragging laboriously, present targets that scarcely move. No artillerist can miss them.

But again there is an answer to the mine-protecting guns. It is long-range fire from the ships that lie safely outside of the mine-fields.

There is only one answer to that. It is for defenders on land to plant huge guns far inland that can reach the ships and beat them back that they dare not come close enough to reach the lesser shore artillery nearer the sea.

This formula of shore-defense is a formula so simple that a mathematician, given the conditions, can work it out with simple arithmetic though he never had seen a cannon in his life.

Guns, guns, and again guns--and an army to protect them! This was the only possible reply to the fleet that was pounding the coast. The United States had not enough sufficiently powerful mobile coast guns and siege guns. It had not enough artillerists to fight what guns there were. And it had not enough ammunition to provide them with food.[28]

In Bethlehem, Pennsylvania; up the Hudson, in smoky Watervliet; in Hartford and Bridgeport and New Haven, and a dozen other towns, with machinery hastily assembled, and workmen hastily learning, they were trying, now, to make projectiles enough, and guns enough. They were trying to make enough powder, down in Delaware and New Jersey.

In the encampment of the United States army at that moment trains were delivering guns--guns made in record time, magnificent testimony to American efficiency under stress. But the guns were coming in one by one--to meet an enemy who was beating at the gates and could not be stopped except with hundreds.

_The Enemy on the Mainland!_

Even then the flag-ship off the coast was sputtering a code into the night. It was a long code, but its meaning was short. It meant: “Now!”

The mine-sweepers hauled their gear and came out. Fourteen had gone in. Those that came out were nine.

Before they had well begun to move, the beach was white with ships’ boats, and nine hundred bluejackets and marines set foot on the mainland of the United States.[29]

With sharpened knives in their sheaths, and loaded carbines, and bandoleers filled with cartridges, and entrenching tools and provisions, each man of that first force presented the highest attainable unit-efficiency for war.

The boats were scarcely off the beach, to return to the ships, before eight hundred of these units were trotting through the up-land, throwing out advance parties, and making hasty trenches from which, in a moment, there looked the greyhound muzzles of machine-guns.

On the shore, the strand-party was sinking sand-anchors and rigging derricks. Others were setting together the five and one-half foot sections of jointed hollow masts for the wireless. When the boats beached again, with more men, two 40-foot masts reached into the night, and hand-power generators were making the antennæ pulse with their mysterious life.

Launches came in now, dragging wide, flat-bottom pontoons and swinging them on to shore and speeding back for more. Men snatched at them, and held them in the surf, and ran their mooring up the beach, while others carried out kedges and boat-anchors from all sides to make them lie steady in the groundswell.

The beach shone white as day, all at once. The destroyers had steamed in, and were giving their men aid with their search-lights.

In swung more pontoons. Broadside to broadside, kedged and anchored out, they were moored out into the sea, at half a dozen parts of the beach. Laid far enough apart that they should not touch, however hard the swell might strive to grind them together, they formed floating piers, reaching beyond the farthest outer line of surf. From pontoon to pontoon ran gang-planks, lashed fast.

Three hours had passed. Three times the ships’ boats had made the trip between warships and shore--thirty naval service cutters, each carrying thirty men. Twenty-seven hundred sailors, marines and soldiers were holding the Rhode Island coast.[30]

From the trenches of the advance party a wireless spoke to the cruiser bearing the senior officer. “Motor scouts reported in front, on road, three thousand yards in. Will fire rocket indicating direction.”

The rocket burst. For a minute it made all that part of the black country stand out as under lightning. “Crash!” said the ship. Over the bluejackets swept the shells, and burst.

“Crash!” said another ship.

“Apparently effective,” said the wireless again. “Shall send patrols forward.” And again it spoke, in half an hour: “Enemy driven back. Our patrols hold road. Barb wire entanglements completed. Scouts in. Report land clear, except for enemy cavalry in force inland out of range.”

_The Transports_

“Now!” said the cruiser’s wireless, speaking once more into the sea.

Silent, formless, black, four vast ships, long and twice as tall as the cruisers, came slowly in among them.

These were the transports, sealed that not a thread of light should shine from them to betray them to the thing that all the fleet dreaded more than anything else--the under-water lance of a submarine’s torpedo.

Under water the submarine is always blind, even when the brightest light of the noon-day sun shines vertically into the ocean. It can see only with its periscope eye above the surface.

At night the periscope cannot see. Then the submarine ceases to be useful as a submarine. It can act still; but only on the surface, like any other torpedo boat.

Two score destroyers, each of thirty knots, each armed with from four to ten 3-inch guns and rapid-firers, circled around the transports. Twice as swift as the surface-speed of the swiftest submarine, armed overwhelmingly, they could defy surface attack.[31]

They hemmed the darkened troop-ships round with a great circle of search-lights, all thrown outward, that served the double purpose of illuminating the ocean for miles, and of blinding any who tried to approach. No human eye looking into that glare could have seen the transports, even if the night had not shrouded them.

Still, these liners with their tens of thousands of men, were too precious to be protected only by this bright vigilance. From each transport there projected long steel booms, eleven to a side. These held out a half-ton net of steel grommets. Stretched fore and aft as taut as steam-capstans could haul it, this shirt of

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

Armored, with the bright colors of the enemy on their under-bodies, the aeroplanes from the enemy fleet flew low. What few anti-aircraft guns the United States possessed were with the army. Around the peaceful American cities were no encircling fortifications, no batteries, no military works that might conceal marksmen. The air-men knew that there was nothing to fear.

They skimmed close to the State House on Boston’s Beacon Hill. They flew over the tall municipal building of New York and dipped toward the City Hall. They appeared over Providence and Fall River, over Brockton, over Bridgeport and New Haven. They passed over every one of the factory-cities of New Jersey that crowd to be near New York’s harbor.

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

“Our armies have landed,” said the proclamation. “We shall advance
on your cities at once. Any attempt to defend them will mean their
destruction. Civilians are warned against making any demonstration,
whether with arms or otherwise. Infractions of this Rule of War
will be punished by summary execution. Houses from which hostile
acts are committed will be destroyed. Towns whose civilian
population resists will be destroyed. Take warning!”

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.”