Chapter X: The Price That Had to Be Paid 315 (6)

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

ventured to leave a port, and sent it into Narragansett Bay or Buzzards Bay as a prize.

So thoroughly had New York’s sea-gate been locked, that it had trouble even to dispose of its garbage, because tugboat captains feared to venture far enough to sea to dump it.

Wherever men turned, whatever they tried to do, it was as if there lay a great, dead hand on the city.

_Closing in on New York_

The only activity that remained in full progress, apparently, was the activity of the news bulletin-boards. The newspapers had erected them everywhere, in all the squares. Far into the night they were served.

Almost continually since the Battle of the Connecticut they had been announcing the names of New England places successively taken by the approaching army. Now, suddenly, their news shifted. A bulletin went up dated from Eaton’s Neck, Long Island. “Large fleet of steamers,” it said, “crossing Long Island Sound from direction of New Haven, apparently bound for this shore.”

“Two passenger steamers of New Haven Line,” said the next bulletin, “five large freighters, eight lighters. Making for coast east of Oyster Bay.”

From Oyster Bay came a dispatch: “Fifteen vessels putting into Cold Spring Harbor, with large number of troops. It is believed that these are forces convoyed over the Sound in vessels captured at New Haven, to move against New York through Long Island.”

“Village of Cold Spring occupied. Troops approaching Oyster Bay,” was the news that grew in great letters on the boards an hour later. Nothing more came from either of these two points. Evidently the enemy had cut communications at once.

_Along the Connecticut Shore_

News began to arrive now from the Connecticut shore. The advancing forces, having joined west of Bridgeport, were moving in mass along the contracted coastal plain of southwestern Connecticut. Troop trains, preceded by armored pilot engines, rolled in long procession along the whole system of the New York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad, all the tracks of which had been repaired by civilians impressed to do the work. On all the many tracks there was traffic in only one direction,--westward, toward New York. The trains, moving in echelon, went forward steadily as clock work.

Along the magnificent motor road that was the old Boston Post Road, cavalry and motor patrols and detachments advancing in the same direction, seized town after town.

They occupied Fairfield, where Paul Revere stopped over night on his way to report to Washington. They entered with swords clanking and imperious motor horns croaking into old Saugatuck, where the Colonials had fought General Tryon when he landed to burn Danbury. They took Norwalk and South Norwalk. They quartered men in the estates of Darien.

They swept on through rich Stamford, whose inhabitants are Connecticut people by residence and New Yorkers by occupation. They took Greenwich.

_The Invaders of Long Island_

From Roslyn, Long Island, came word that all the invading vessels that could find room at the Cold Spring wharves were unloading material. The character of the derricks that had been rigged, said the report, indicated that extremely heavy guns were being handled.

A bulletin that went up immediately afterward announced that the army was crossing the State line from Connecticut into New York, and that advance patrols already were passing through the New York State town of Port Chester.

The enemy was now only twenty-five miles from New York City. This, and the actual entrance into State territory, caused a senseless, headlong fright. It spread even into the councils of the Citizens’ Committee and city officials in the City Hall. Men jumped to their feet and exclaimed that the bridges over the Harlem must be dynamited at once. Others proposed to demolish the great suspension bridges by cutting away the suspending rods and letting the roadways fall into the East River, that the Long Island invader might be kept from crossing.

It was only the final flare-up of nerve-rasped, helplessly cornered men. The least intelligent people in the streets could perceive that nothing except cannons, and cannons again, could stop this invader who came with a war-machine that made war a matter of systematic business. As Boston had learned it, so New York was learning it. There could not be even the barren relief of desperate, futile activity. The city, richer than many a kingdom, more populous than any State in the Union except three, was as utterly unable to ward off its doom as a trapped animal. Trapped by its own wealth, it could only wait for the hunter to take it.

If any men adhered to the belief that the city might gain anything by destroying its approaches, a telephone message that came through from Port Chester presently was sufficient to convince even the most recklessly daring that it would be madness in the face of the iron will that actuated the enemy. The telephone call was from the corps commander, who asked for the Mayor.

“I have the honor,” he said, “to inform you that the American army, having abandoned the defense of the City of New York and surrounding territory, all military resistance against us has ceased, and we claim occupation. Under the rules of war, your civilian citizens lay themselves open to penalties if they destroy bridges, railways, or other lines of communication. Should such destruction occur, I shall have to exact compensation for any suffering that it may cause to the troops under my command.”

“_Invader Can Do What He Pleases_”

“He is straining the law!” cried one of the Citizens’ Committee who was an authority on international law. “He has not yet occupied the territory contiguous to the city.”

“I think that he has made his occupation good,” said another. “In our own Army’s Rules of Warfare, paragraph 290 expressly states that ‘it is sufficient that the occupying army can, within a reasonable time, send detachments of troops to make its authority felt within the occupied district.’”

“It makes little difference,” interposed the Mayor. “We can’t take him before a Court of Appeals to argue hair-splitting distinctions. He has us, and can do to us what he pleases. He needs only the color of law to go to any extremity. We should be insane to argue with him. The only thing to do is to give renewed and urgent orders that the population must absolutely avoid any act of violence.”

Again the cold logic of inexorable circumstances forced humble submission. Through all the districts north of the Harlem and through Westchester County almost to the line of the enemy patrols, there was sent by every possible method of communication the following warning:

“The invading forces assert occupation of the territory in which you reside. Under this occupation, any act of disorder involving raiding, espionage, damage to railways, war material, bridges, roads, canals, telegraphs or other means of communication is punishable by death as war treason. Communities in which such acts occur may be punished collectively. All persons are warned earnestly to yield full obedience to the occupying military forces and to abstain from all offensive acts.”[147]

_A Matter of Lawyers’ Logic_

Thus for the men of New York war was no matter of glorious resistance or of a splendid death. It was a matter of cold lawyers’ logic with imprisonment or execution as felons the only answer should they try to assert their manhood.

The knowledge held all the territory passive. Men and horses and motors moved into Westchester County with no more opposition than if they were pleasure-seekers moving through friendly country. Guns jolted along the highways with their artillerists sitting at ease. The Westchester hills and valleys echoed no shots, no cries of battle.

In every village and town the American flag fluttered down from the flag-staffs of schools and town halls.

The corps commander that evening established his headquarters in one of the great houses in the famous residence colony of Orienta Point, Mamaroneck. His columns, advancing along the shore, spread out, occupied New Rochelle and Mount Vernon, and encamped for the night in a great line that stretched from the Long Island Sound to the Hudson River, fencing New York City on the north with a wall of men and artillery.

It was a wall of silence. Not a word came through to the city from Yonkers, from Mount Vernon, from Pelham, or from any of the other places already taken.

_The Battle in the Night_

Only the harbor defenses of the city were still speaking to each other. From the forts on Throgs Neck in Westchester County and from Fort Totten on Long Island, the commanders at Forts Hamilton and Wadsworth in the Narrows received requests for more men. Large forces, said the Sound defenses, were closing in rapidly to invest them on land from the rear. It would be an artillery and infantry fight in which the mammoth coast guns could take little part, if any. The end was certain if reënforcements could not be sent through the East River and the Sound.

The commanders of the Narrows were helpless to give aid. The commanders of the Sandy Hook defenses were helpless. All the men, regulars and militia, of the coast artillery who could be obtained, were not enough. Fort Hamilton, being on the Long Island shore itself, dared not denude itself further than it had done. At any moment there might be an attack on it, too. The southern defenses had no choice but to tell the eastern defenses that they must do the best they could.

=A.= _Attack on Ft. Totten._ =B.= _Attack on Ft. Schuyler._ =C and D.= _Course of Troops Capturing New Jersey Manufacturing Cities._ =EE.= _Attack on Sandy Hook Forts._ ]

It was about one o’clock in the morning when the people of northern Long Island, and the inhabitants of the Borough of the Bronx and Westchester County, sprang from their beds in wild alarm. Without warning, as if a hurricane had struck with instant concentrated force, all their windows had crashed. Their walls were shaking, and pictures and plaster falling. The air itself was shaking like a throbbing pulse.

It was like no gun-fire that men ever had imagined. It was not a series of explosions. It was like one explosion, whose crescent violence would not dwindle. The people of far Brooklyn and the people of lower Manhattan heard it. To their ears it was as if all the thunders of a storm-riven Heaven had been loosed to roll incessantly.

_Bands of Flame_

Men on vantage points along the Sound that night saw the attacking lines from end to end plainly as if it were day. So continuous was their fire, that it painted their positions with broad, unwavering bands of flame. It needed not the star bombs and rockets that curved everywhere under the sky to fall glaring into the defenses. It needed not the magnesium lights that floated from parachutes dropped by aeroplanes. On both sides of the Sound the night was a red sea.

Into the mortar pits and gun emplacements of the defenses, like a red surf from that red sea, beat the unending fire. Shrapnel that wailed like the bride of the storm, and flew apart in the air, and flung bullets as if mines had burst inside of the defense! Eleven inch shells that hammered into concrete facing, and split it apart with the irresistible agony of their explosion! Five inch shell and solid projectile! Bombs from the air, and every agency that man had yet devised to wreck and destroy!

As suddenly as it had begun, the fire stopped. The night became utterly still. The rockets ceased curving. But in all the defenses there shone white glares, from search-lights and magnesium flares, illuminating rushing masses of men who clambered over the ruins of guns and mounds, and took the works. There was none left to oppose them.

When the dawn came, the watchers rubbed their eyes. The great defenses lay apparently unharmed. Their mounds and embankments betrayed nothing of the ruin that the night’s battle had worked within. But against the brightening sky there arose a visible sign of what had been done. The flag of the Coalition floated over them and greeted the American sunrise.

Within a few hours after dawn, artillery began to move through Long Island’s boulevards toward Brooklyn. North of the city, the army began marching through the Borough of the Bronx toward the Harlem River. Before noon, guns were posted along the Harlem Heights, on University Heights, at High Bridge, and down past the mouth of the Harlem River. The Long Island Railroad brought guns to the high ground behind Newtown Creek, to the summit of Eastern Parkway, and to the Prospect Park Slope.

_Captured Vessels Enter River_

Through Hell Gate into the East River came a motley fleet--Sound and River steamers captured at New Haven and Bridgeport, wall-sided freighters and lighters, side-wheelers and screw propellers, and a flotilla of motor boats, the pick of the beautiful little navy of pleasure that filled all the Sound harbors.

This fleet anchored in a long line below Blackwell’s Island close under the Manhattan shore.

All the larger vessels had guns on their forward and upper decks. As soon as the craft had swung to the tide, the weapons were pointed at the city.

Then the telephone bell in the City Hall called the Mayor again. The corps commander, speaking from temporary quarters in the University of New York buildings, announced that he wished to send commissioners into the city to treat with the authorities for the terms of capitulation. He desired that the Mayor send an escort to meet them at the Lenox Avenue Bridge over the Harlem.

None of the people in the streets realized that the automobiles that sped down Lenox Avenue a few hours later, through Central Park and down Broadway, were bearing enemy soldiers. The population had become accustomed to men in field uniforms hurrying through the city.

_Demand Surrender of Forts_

Arrived in the City Hall, the commissioners presented a demand signed by the commander, for unconditional surrender of the city. The Mayor and his advisers read it, and turned to the soldiers.

“What does this mean?” asked the Mayor, pointing to a clause that called for the surrender of all fortifications with troops and munitions of war. “We possess no fortifications.”

“It means Forts Hamilton and Wadsworth, on the Narrows,” answered the Chief Commissioner.

“But those are United States property,” said the Mayor. “We have no authority over them.”

“Then I should advise you to consult with the commandant of these places at once,” answered the Commissioner. “Their surrender is an indispensable condition in the terms of capitulation.”

The Mayor reached for the telephone. “Stop all other business, however important,” he said to the operator. “Connect me with the Commandant at Fort Hamilton.”

His conversation with that officer was brief. “He declines absolutely to surrender any part of the defenses or other government property,” he reported.

“Then, sir,” said the officer, rising, “I regret to inform you that we shall shell the city. We are authorized to give you twenty-four hours. Precisely at the end of that time, we shall order the firing to begin. I call your attention to the fact that our artillery, as at present placed, commands the Borough of Manhattan to about 59th Street, and that our guns in Brooklyn command a great part of the most valuable sections of that borough. You will take note, also, that guns on the vessels anchored in the river can sweep both the New York and Brooklyn streets.”

_Claims That City Is Unfortified_

“But,” exclaimed an old Judge who was on the Citizens’ Committee, “we are willing to surrender the city without opposition. As a matter of fact, it lies wide open to your entrance. You cannot possibly mean to bombard an undefended and unfortified town!”

Without hesitation the officer drew a paper from his pocket and presented it. It read: “The City of New York, having Forts Hamilton and Wadsworth not only within its harbor limits, but actually within its municipal limits, is plainly a fortified place under all accepted definitions. Also, while troops occupy these forts the town clearly falls under the definition of a ‘defended place,’ under the clause that ‘a place that is occupied by a military force is a defended place.’”[148]

With a bow he handed the paper to the Mayor.

“We shall bombard the city within twenty-four hours,” he repeated.

The New York men looked at each other. “We are quite helpless, sir,” said the old Judge, then. “We cannot force United States officers to surrender. I propose to my colleagues that a deputation shall go to Washington at once to lay your terms before the President as Commander-in-Chief of the Army and Navy. I assure you that we shall represent to him, most strongly, the advisability of yielding. Will you, for your part, give us more time?”

“I cannot go beyond my orders,” answered the officer. “Twenty-four hours, I fear, is the extreme limit. It will give you ample time, since the matter to be considered is most simple. You might inform His Excellency the President, if you wish, that we have succeeded in reducing and taking Forts Schuyler, Slocum and Totten. We shall proceed to invest Fort Hamilton before to-morrow morning. Surrender will prevent useless loss of life and destruction of property.”

_Government Surrenders Forts_

A special train brought the deputation into Washington before daylight next morning. The New York men went at once to the White House where they were received by the President, who had not been in bed. “You have no doubt that they mean to make good their threat of bombardment?” asked the President, after receiving their report. “Then, gentlemen, there is only one action for this Government to take.” He sighed, and echoed the refrain of all the past days. “There is nothing else that we can do.”

An hour later the wires to New York, cleared by orders from the War Department, carried a dispatch to the commandants at Fort Hamilton and Fort Wadsworth. It ordered them to surrender.

From his headquarters the enemy commander ordered detachments to go down the harbor in boats and occupy the captured defenses. Then he sent his troops forward into the City.

And now the New Yorkers who had expected that their streets would be flooded by a great army, were amazed at the ease and simplicity with which the city fell into military control. Instead of brigades entering the city, there were not even regiments. Troops of cavalry, companies of infantry, single machine-gun detachments, moving separately down separated avenues, with big intervals between them, were all the force that entered.

Some boatloads of men and artillery passed down the river and landed in Brooklyn, some to occupy the Navy Yard and others to reënforce the men who had come in through Long Island; but the army remained outside, holding the northern districts from the Sound to the Hudson, and guarding the Hudson River and Putnam Valleys against surprise attack from the direction of Albany.

_An Easy City to Occupy_

The officers in charge of the men who entered the city asked no questions and required no directions. Unhesitatingly each led his force to the point that he wanted. Within two hours New York was wholly in the hands of the soldiers.

Nobody had thought of it before. Now, all at once, when it was accomplished, it amazed the people of New York to learn how easy it was to control the city’s whole life, civic and commercial.

A battalion of infantry occupied the Grand Central Terminal. Another battalion took the great Pennsylvania terminal with its under-river tunnels to New Jersey and Long Island. Detachments appeared at the Twenty-third Street and Forty-second Street ferries over the Hudson River and by that one seizure controlled all railroad connections with the West from uptown. The occupation of half a dozen other Hudson River railroad ferries down-town, and of the Hudson Terminal Tube System, completed the entire control of all the city’s railroad traffic in every direction.

Equally simple was the control of its communications. Men appeared at the two great telegraph buildings and at the telephone building. Within half an hour they had every trunk line of wires in their hands and could strike the city dumb at will.

Thus less than three thousand men had their fingers on the big town’s spinal nerves, and could paralyze it with a slight pressure.

_Still Easier to Guard_

It was still easier to control the city from a military point of view. The citizens who had expected to see their streets commanded by cannon on limbers, did not at first comprehend why there were hardly any of these to be seen, while machine gun detachments scattered and disappeared as soon as they got well into the town. Only gradually did the citizens discover that their big, sprawling metropolis was being held subject by a very simple utilization of the city’s characteristic feature.

This feature was the sky-scraper. To the eye of the soldier, these high buildings were nothing so much as inviting and magnificent eminences for controlling the street-valleys and their population below.

Four men with a machine gun and abundance of ammunition in one of these stone and steel summits could control more area than half a dozen heavy field gun batteries posted in the streets could command.

These sentinel watchers were as aloof and as sure as fate. They could neither be rushed by a mob nor sniped from concealment. At a word from the telephone in their eyries, they could start death dancing among the pygmy hordes far under them.

From the top of the Woolworth Building two of the little guns pointed down into Broadway. Turned southward, they could sweep the town as far as the Battery. Eastward, they could rain their steel-jacketed bullets into the river front streets and over the two lower bridges that cross the East River. Northward, they had Broadway as far up as Canal Street under their fire.

They were supplemented by a gun on top of the great Municipal Building. It held a good part of the crowded tenement house district of the Lower East Side under its zone of fire, notably the doubtful sections of Cherry Street and other areas known to the police.

_Church Towers as Gun Stations_

On the tall towers of the suspension bridges themselves were other detachments with a gun each. The churches were not forgotten by the soldiers. The graceful steeple of Grace Church, standing at an acute angle of Broadway so that it can be seen from far down town, had been before men’s eyes so long that they had ceased, almost, to note its soft beauty. Now they looked at it with a new and acute perception, for its steeple held a gun that pointed down Broadway, whose southern zone of fire would just about reach to where the northern zone of fire from the Woolworth Building would end.

Trinity, too, had a gun in its tower, pointing down Wall Street. North and south on upper Broadway, guns on the Flatiron Building could reach any important street or any place where dangerous crowds might conceivably form. This eminence controlled both Madison and Union Squares. The tower of Madison Square Garden, near-by, also was armed. From it men could watch and reach any part of the East Side that was out of reach of the detachments in the bridge towers. Uptown New York was governed more easily still. The wide, geometrically regular streets with many open squares, were overlooked by tall apartment buildings and hotels that commanded long sweeps of avenue. As a result, many of the city squares and smaller parts had no artillery in them at all, and others had only half a battery.

The people knew that wherever they might move, they were within the range of cannon that were loaded and ready. Their Citizens’ Committee and their officials worked under guns. Every foot of their Great White Way could be changed into a Way of Death at a moment’s notice. Their women could not shop, their children could not play, except under the menace of weapons.

Small need was there in New York City of the many placards and notices warning the people against disorder. Every man’s eye was on every other man; and had one plotted mischief or rebellion, there would have been a hundred witnesses ready to suppress him, to betray him--anything to prevent those steel devils in the city towers from setting death loose in the streets!

X

THE PRICE THAT HAD TO BE PAID

Not until the City of New York actually was surrendered did the people of the Middle and Far West become startled into a really acute perception of the catastrophe that had fallen on the whole country.

Though they were fiery with patriotism and anger, and though they were giving not only lavishly but extravagantly of their wealth and men, they were free, unconquered and untouched. They had seen no invader. With a suddenly freshened realization of the hugeness of the country, they had attained the conviction that there was little danger that any foe possibly could reach them from the Atlantic.

They were willing to defend the East with all that they had. They were willing to toss to the air all their royal plans for the splendid future that was all but built. They were the real America, and they were willing to ruin themselves and die for America. But--the men of Chicago were a thousand miles from an enemy. Three thousand miles separated the men of the Pacific from the armed enemies in New England.

So their customary life and their business had continued. They continued to work and barter and plan. The loss of the industries of New England had made itself felt at once, but there was an enormous land left. Even the locking of all the Atlantic and Gulf ports with the attendant calamities could not wholly shatter their great web of trade.

_Pacific Remains Open_

Their commerce could go and enter through their own ports unimpeded, for happily in this crisis there was no danger threatening from across the Pacific.

Therefore, though the surrender of Boston had shaken them, it had not terrified them. The great inland country clung to the belief that the army would do something. During the enemy’s slow movement through Connecticut in the advance toward New York, the people of the West remained inspired by that hope, as men in past ages, stricken dumb by a darkened Heaven and a smoking mountain, still clung to the belief that a kindly miracle would interpose to save them, though the earth of their market places was trembling under their feet.

That spiritual self-defense with which men armor themselves against inevitable fates had not given way until the Administration announced the surrender of the City of New York and its two great forts, with the statement:

“The President assumes full responsibility. After a careful
examination of the situation in person, he issued orders, as
Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces of the United States, that
the army in the field should offer no opposition.”

Then the West began to fear with a great fear that its Pacific coast was not safe, after all. It thought, appalled, that an enemy so formidable and successful, confronting opposition so futile, might succeed in breaking the defenses of the Panama Canal as easily as he had broken the defenses of the Atlantic.

_Panama Canal Safe_

But the Panama Canal was being held. The United States fleet, having failed to prevent the hostile landing on the New England coast, had turned at once to defend the one vital spot that it could protect even against superior numbers. That was the Caribbean entrance to the Canal.

It raced there under forced draught. It surprised and destroyed an inferior force of cruisers and battleships that the enemy had stationed there for blockade. Again it was mathematics. The foe, forced to assure himself against attack on his transports off the New England coast, had held all his powerful ships north of the American fleet. The weaker blockaders in the South, facing guns of superior range, ships of superior speed, and superior volume of gun-fire, went down to destruction without even the satisfaction of biting hard as they died.

Now the country that had been sick with humiliation because its navy would not fight, thanked Heaven that the fleet had kept itself intact: that instead of going down in glorious disaster, it had worked out a scientific problem coolly. The big navy, intact to its smallest torpedo boat, was lying fully potent under the strong defenses of Limon Harbor.

The guns of the fortifications protected the ships, and the ships protected the fortifications. Three thousand naval officers and sixty thousand sailors and marines, added to the land forces in the defenses, made a force of highly trained, completely efficient men.[149]

_The Defenses Perfect_

The defenses were perfect. This precious possession was one American possession at least that could be held to the last. Its guns were fully installed. It had ammunition. Its range finding systems and its systems of fire control were complete. Without the navy, it, too, would have been sorely weak in men and would have been open, like America’s continental defenses, to attack from the land. But with the naval forces, it was able to hold out.[150]

The navy was ready to throw men ashore to meet any attempt at landings along the coast. The navy’s torpedo boats and destroyers crept to sea in the night and guarded all weak places. The American submarines, with a safe harbor for a base, worked under ideal submarine conditions. When the hostile navy, freed from the task of protecting its army, at last appeared in force off the Isthmus, it dared not institute anything like a close blockade.

It dared not even venture in to bombard. There were 16-inch guns at Panama. It was an object lesson for the United States. Exactly thus, had there been an army to protect them, the Atlantic coast defenses could have defied any attempt from the sea to force a harbor.

_Hostile Navy Powerless_

The enemy navy, overwhelming as it was, could do nothing except to wait and watch. It cruised up and down, far out in the purple Caribbean. Its only trophies in the South were Porto Rico and the United States Naval station of Guantanamo in Cuba. It had taken the latter by the simple method of steaming in, for this “naval station” was only an unfortified harbor.[151]

The news of Panama’s safety was the first and only good news that had been given to the country since the declaration of war. The relief that it gave was so great that the people received almost with equanimity the news which followed--that word had come from spies of the arrival of more transports in Boston Harbor and Narragansett Bay, bringing forces estimated at figures varying from 50,000 to 100,000 more men.

Soon after this landing had been accomplished, cavalry and light artillery moved northward through Vermont. They seized and occupied in force Bellows Falls and the White River, Wells River and St. Johnsbury Junctions of the Vermont railroads. This cut the last communication of New England with the United States. It gave the invader absolute command of the St. Johnsbury and Lake Champlain Railroad, the Central Vermont, the Maine Central, the Boston and Maine and the Rutland branch railroads. Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont were in his power like the rest of New England. Blockaded from the sea, and cut off from railroad connection with the interior, they were subjugated even without the unfolding of forces that now began through their area.

Here, too, the invaders, despite their grown power, moved slowly, cautiously. They cut districts from each other, and occupied them one by one systematically, making united action by the population impossible even had it been feasible. By the simple method of disorganizing all the accustomed political and governmental affiliations, they turned to their purpose the ever-present lack of coherence between State governments and city governments, township authorities and County authorities. The machinery fell apart; and the enemy dealt with the bits as he chose.

_The Conquest Complete_

The few big cities of the three States could offer no resistance. Within a few days the conquest of all New England was complete. Not a word came out of it to the rest of the United States. The City of New York was equally sealed. Nothing was permitted to pass out of the gagged and fettered town. The messages that stormed at it were delivered to censors who did what they pleased with them, and passed practically none to the persons for whom they had been destined.