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 Another Random Document on
Scribd Without Any Related Topics
 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
 “He steered his craft, awash, from behind Fisher’s Island,
at dawn.”

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.
 “For miles beyond that the enemy’s patrols had occupied
points....”

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.

“They flew over the tall municipal building of New York.”

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.”
So it was in New York, in Philadelphia, in a score of cities between and
around them. Everywhere was the first outburst of fury and unrecking
heroism, and then the sober second thought born not of cowardice but of
cold logic. This north-eastern Atlantic seaboard with its chain of twelve
million city dwellers, was no Holland to drown itself under its own sea in
order to destroy its foe. These cities were no Moscows, to devour
themselves in fire that the enemy might perish with them. This was the
United States of America, and this was the Twentieth Century—and the
men, no less brave, no less patriotic, faced the conditions of their place and
time.
They faced it from Portland, Maine, to the Capes of Virginia. If the army
could not stop the invader, they must fall.
 They formed committees of safety. They wrestled with their top-heavy
municipal machineries to make them answer the sharp need. Under the
stress, all the defects of their political rule stood out uncompromisingly, not
to be denied. Their over-staffed departments were lost in the ingenious
mazes of their own contriving. There was only one answer to the
inextricable, blind confusion. It was martial law.
Volunteers Who Could Not Even Be Shod
But here, too, there was inefficiency—inefficiency that had been
cultivated and tended, like a plant, by politics through the heedless years. In
the armories there were no reserve supplies of weapons or ammunition for
the volunteers who came to offer their services. Although the United States
government had given the States enough money annually for many years
back to equip them to full war-strength; and although the militia nowhere
had maintained even one-half of that strength, there were no reserves of
blankets, of uniforms, of tents, of cots. Doctors who offered their services
found that there was no place for them, because there were no ambulances,
no field hospitals, no surgical instruments, no anæsthetics and no
medicines. There had not been enough for the troops that took the field,
though every company had less men than even its insufficient peace
strength demanded.[44]
The volunteers could not even be shod. Those who were accepted had to
drill in their worthless street shoes, that never could survive the test of
rough roads and mud and water.
Politics! Politics! It stared the appalled citizens in the face wherever they
turned, as it had stared them in the face for a generation—but now they had
to look and see! It was politics that had left their State militias to blunder
along, each by itself, without agreement or settled plan. It was politics that
now had sent their plucky, intelligent, capable young men into the field
insufficiently equipped, trained or organized. It was politics that now left
their cities bare, to be made a sport of.
At the recruiting depots of the regular army it was politics again that
over-bore the recruiting officers with eager, courageous applicants whom
they could not use. What they needed now was men who were ready NOW
—not men who needed six months’ training. These applicants, offering
themselves by thousands, were city-born and city-bred. They were men who
never in all their lives had slept except under a roof; who never had lain in
rain and storm; who had been saved by their city from doing a dozen simple
things that men of the open do for themselves without a second thought.
Not one in a thousand of these volunteers ever had built a fire of sticks,
or pitched a tent or even washed dishes. Not one of five thousand ever had
held a gun in his hands. There were thousands there, and thousands again,
who did not even know what it was to be in the dark—for they had slept all
their lives in the electrically lighted city.
Needed—Not Men But Reserves!
It was not men that the regular army needed. It was reserves! And never
a Congress of all the Congresses that had talked and voted and appropriated
had voted a practical system of army reserves![45]
Of all the men who had been trained by previous army experience, the
War Department could not call on one unless he chose to volunteer. If those
men—invaluable to the country at this moment—offered themselves, they
offered themselves one by one, here and there and everywhere, scattered
through a land of three and a quarter million square miles. Enlisted thus,
they were futile individuals lost in hordes
 “The efficient, prepared, resourceful invader was landing
his army, not only without losing a man, but without getting
a man’s feet wet.”

of raw recruits. Could they have been called together by their government,
they would have formed perfect regiments, ready for instant, efficient,
priceless service.
While the United States, civilian and military, was working hopelessly to
make up in desperate hours for long years of waste, the efficient, prepared,
resourceful invader was landing his army, not only without losing a man,
but without getting a man’s feet wet. So perfect were the dispositions of this
expedition that the commander had been able to order, “Our troops must
land perfectly dry,” and the order was carried out.[46]
Every transport had three broad gangways to a side. Never for a moment
were these gangways bare of equipped men, moving file after file into the
enormous flat-bottomed landing barges. Never for a moment was the sea
without long tows of them, each bearing two hundred men to shore with
their rifles between their knees, ready.[47]
Preparedness Versus Unpreparedness
In the camp of the United States Army at that moment men were
breaking green horses for cavalry and artillery purposes. On the coast, the
enemy’s four-decked horse transports were sending trained mounts into
broad floats with derricks and slings, lowering away with head and tail lines
to prevent struggling, with nose lines to bridles to prevent them from
turning in the air, with men standing by below to put little bags of salt into
each horse’s mouth to quiet it as soon as it touched the floats.[48]
 Nothing had been forgotten, nothing left to be improvised. The horse-
floats had hinged sterns. Backed into the beach, these hinged boards
dropped down and formed gang-planks. Sailors threw collision mats on
them to prevent slipping. It required less than a minute to lower a horse
from the ships to the floats. In less than half a minute each horse was
unloaded from them and set ashore. To empty each float of its cargo of
twenty horses, and to have each craft off the beach and under tow again for
another load, was a matter of less than forty minutes.
Almost as swiftly, at another end of the beach, guns were being landed
from the same type of floats, shoal and wide-beamed, that could be run well
up on shore and could withstand the pounding of the surf. They brought
four light field pieces with their limbers to a load, or two heavy field
artillery pieces. They were landing field howitzers of calibers that the
United States Army did not possess. This artillery has been coming ashore
for hours. It had begun to come before dawn. Still there was more arriving.
Yet the beach never was occupied for a moment. The guns were rushed
inland, the men were rushed inland, the horses were rushed inland. Twelve
hours after the first landing party had prepared the way, Rhode Island was
occupied by 30,000 foot, 3,000 cavalry and 50 batteries of artillery—almost
two full divisions that lay in a great belligerent front snarling with guns—a
perfect, complex, often-assembled, often-tested machine.[49]
This was the time for the American army to strike, before the enemy
could increase his forces and move forward to attack.
But the American army was a complex machine that never had been
assembled before, or tested before. The Regular Army never had been
together with the Organized Militia, and the Organized Militias of the
various States never had seen each other. “An uncoördinated army of
allies,” its Commander had called it, “with all the inherent weakness of
allies, emphasized by the unusual number of allies.”[50]
The Uncoördinated and Unorganized American Army
It was an army of which neither the regulars nor the militia had been
organized into divisions at the time when it should have been done, the only
time when it could have been done—in the long days of peace. Until it was
so organized, it was an army only in numbers. For operation against a
prepared, organized enemy it was not an army but merely a multitude of
units, whose trained and perfect ones would inevitably be sacrificed to the
errors and weaknesses of the imperfect ones.[51]
The division is the true Weapon of War. It alone contains in vitally
correct proportion the various troops that must sustain each other when
cannons and explosives begin that arbitration from which there is no appeal
on earth. It is the division, and the division alone, that possesses all the
limbs and organs—the signal corps and cavalry that are the eyes and ears:
the infantry and engineers and sanitary corps that are the body and feet: and
the artillery that is the smiting fists.[52]
In the City Hall Park in New York, a speaker, lifted above the crowd that
watched the newspaper bulletins, was cursing the army amid savage cheers.
He cursed its Generals and its men because they did not fight. He cursed the
Government.
The crowd listened, and forgot that again and again they had been
warned that this would be if war should ever come.
With the blind wrath of helpless men they could reason only that at this
moment when everything should be done, nothing was being done. They
shouted approval when the frantic orator screamed: “Tell Washington to
order ’em to fight. Fight! Fight! That’s what they’re for!”
The crowds could perceive only that they had an army that did not strike
a blow. They could not know that the American commanders were fighting
a better fight just then by fighting to organize, than if they fought with guns.
They could not know that to these officers, grown gray in the service of
their country, this fight was more heart-breaking than it would have been to
fight in the hot blast of shells.
Regiments of Infantry Without a Single Cannon to Protect Them
To organize an army in the face of the foe is like organizing a fire
department when the streets of a city are already in flames. This is what the
Chiefs of the Army were trying to do—had been doing, day and night,
desperately, ever since the troops had come together. And in Washington, in
the archives of Congress, there were lying sheaves of reports, gathering
dust, that had demanded nothing except the chance to do it in time.
Here were regiments of militia so “organized” by their States that if they
were permitted to go into battle as they were, 170 companies of infantry
would face the enemy without a single cannon to protect them. Of all the
eastern militia cavalry in that camp, only one regiment had a machine gun
company.[53]
Even the regular army was efficient only in those things that could be
maintained and perfected by the steady, personal efforts of officers and
men. In everything that depended on legislation it was lacking. Instead of
150 men to a company of infantry some had only 65. Its troops of cavalry
were not full. It had no siege artillery corps. It was a skeleton army which,
according to optimists, was to be clothed with substance when war arrived.
Now war had come; and to clothe that skeleton with untrained men would
have meant that for every 65 skilled soldiers there would be 85 utterly
useless ones in each company.
Shortage of men was not the only curse that was laid on the army by the
policy of neglect. In the enemy headquarters, two or at the most three orders
were sent to department chiefs for every movement. In the American
headquarters, the staff had to deal with units. Every problem had to be
handled in detail by men who should have been free to direct one great,
comprehensive movement. Every order issued by the Commanding General
demanded intolerable duplication.
American Commanders Who Had Never Commanded
The General had under him commanders of brigade who had
commanded posts that contained only fragments of regiments. Their
brigades, never assembled in any one place, not only did not approximate to
war conditions, but had to be disrupted and divided and re-formed before
the General could dare to offer them in battle. Hardly a brigade commander
had under him troops that he had known and trained and handled himself.
[54]
With exception of those who had been on the Mexican border, when a
part of the small army had been mobilized in a body for the first time, these
men had tried to prepare themselves with the best that Congress would give
them—battalions and companies and single batteries instead of assembled
armies, because the politicians would not let the army come together.
The 49 army posts of the United States, long a subject of derision among
all except those who fattened on them, might well have been symbolized
now in that camp by forty-nine skeletons—a skeleton army waiting to lead
the other skeleton army to death.[55]
 To none was this better known than to the enemy. The invaders’
commander, standing idly with his hands in his pockets, was able to say
confidently: “They’ll not bother us seriously. The only thing they’ll do, the
only thing they can do, is to retreat when we begin to threaten them.”
He held in his grip the sea, the land and the air. In shore lay ships ready
to sweep part of his front with protective fire. On land his advance forces
had seized roads and railroads, his engineers were repairing what had been
destroyed, and his cavalry was guarding all approaches. His air-men,
overwhelmingly numerous, spied on the American army almost with
impunity, and parried with sure aerial thrusts all American attempts to spy
on their own lines.
The aerial guard, steel-breasted, with the wings of speed and talons of
fire, could be broken only by equal numbers, equally terrible. Individual
daring, individual skill, were nothing against this armored brood. Five times
American fliers rose to try it; and five times they were grappled in mid-air
and torn with shot, and dropped to the earth far below. “No more!” said the
General in command.
He sat with his chin in his hand, studying the dispatches that were laid
before him. They were piled high, though twenty operators and half a dozen
aides struggled to eliminate from the torrential confusion the news that
might be deemed most reliable.[56]
The “Fog of War”
There were messages from Washington, messages from coast defenses,
messages from patrols and outposts, from scouts and from company
commanders. There were wild reports of enemy invasion from places so far
inland that it was palpable that they could not be true. There were reports
from places so nearby that they might mean imminent danger.
Excited officials of towns and cities sent long, involved dispatches or
hung for long minutes to telephones to recount interminable tales.
One hundred thousand men had landed, according to spies who had
made their way into Fort Greble in the Narragansett defenses. It was two
hundred thousand, telephoned Providence, transmitting messages from the
coast. The army’s own scouts and spies and patrols, groping in insufficient
numbers and finding a wall of cavalry and foot and machine gun
detachments opposed to them everywhere, sent in estimates that varied all
the way from twenty-five thousand to eighty thousand.
These American advance detachments were striking the enemy outposts
east and west. Near Watch Hill three American motor cycle companies with
machine guns ambushed and cut up two troops of cavalry. American
cavalry drove back a battalion of engineers who had begun work on the
railroad at Kingston. At Niantic two American motor patrols ran into the
fire of a concealed field gun and were destroyed.
From Fort Michie on Gull Island came the news, brought by a Montauk
Point fisherman who had managed to make his way across the Sound in a
small boat, that men had landed on that end of Long Island. They had
destroyed all communication immediately and had seized the railroad
leading to New York; but it was impossible to guess how great this force
was.[57]
Only one certain fact was developed from all the news. It was that the
transports were unloading troops still.
The Enemy Moves
Suddenly, almost simultaneously, the American patrols were driven back
all along the line. On a front that extended quickly, irresistibly, clear across
Washington County, Rhode Island, from east to west, the invader army
expanded. It seized Watch Hill. Kingston was occupied in force. Wickford
Junction was occupied. Narragansett Pier was flooded, all at once, with men
and guns.
With the swiftness of a blow from a fighter’s fist, the invader had struck
and won the entire railroad system of the New York, New Haven and
Hartford Railroad in Rhode Island, and commanded the way to Providence.
The foe had filled his divisions. Forty thousand men were ready for
battle on American soil, with ten thousand in reserve on the coast.
Now the wind turned south-east. Point Judith, Rhode Island’s cape that
coast-wise mariners call The Fog-Hole, began to brew one of its April fogs,
gray and blind and wet.
Its first effect was kind to the Americans. The enemy air-craft, seeing the
vapory bank growing from the sea, fled toward their lines. From all
directions they came in, like gulls fleeing before a storm. They could not
dare to remain in strange territory. All their fine maps, all their ingenious
instruments, would be impotent against it. They came in, and alighted
behind their army.
Freed from them, and masked by the fog, the American scouts went
forward again and groped once more along the foe’s front. In an
MAP TO ILLUSTRATE THE LANDING OF THE
ENEMY FORCES

A. Enemy Transports at Beach. The lines and arrows show

direction of his advance.
B. United States Army, withdrawn to a watching position.

hour field telephones and telegraphs and aerial told the American
commander enough to assure him that the enemy’s force in men was at least
nearly equal to his own. He knew, too, that the invader had brought up
preponderating artillery. Every road, every piece of negotiable country was
held by guns.
The American army held tight. In its front, between it and the foe, there
was not a rail-line, not a bridge. All had been destroyed. Behind it lay a
perfect railroad system, with long trains and giant locomotives under steam,
and all the gathered motor vehicles, ready to speed along perfect roads.
 So far the fog was kind to the defenders. But the invader, too, was quick
to seize its favor.
The Fishermen Who Caught More Than Lobsters
Long before, half a dozen men, dressed like fishermen, had made their
way out of Narragansett Harbor in a small sloop, and had reported at the
enemy headquarters. For a month or more past they had been fishing for
lobsters; but they had caught more than lobsters. Their catch lay on the table
in the Commander’s tent, in the form of charts with soundings and range
lines and distances. They were maps of the mine fields.
As soon as the fog began, these men went aboard a mine-sweeper. It
steamed eastward, followed by the others. The sweepers had more than the
cables and grapples that make a mine-sweeper’s outfit. Set in rows on the
after-deck of each vessel were bulging mines, filled with 300 pounds of
trinitrotol.[58]
The fog became so thick that it was hard to say if it were daylight still, or
night. Night could only make it more black. It could not increase the
obscurity.
In the coast defenses of Long Island Sound and Narragansett Bay every
man was straining eyes and ears and nerves. Every gun company was at its
weapon. Every gun was loaded. Tall projectiles stood ready with the chains
and grapples of the hoists prepared. Men stood waiting in the powder
magazines under the batteries.
Nothing to see or hear at Fort Wright on Fisher’s Island. Nothing at Fort
Michie on Gull Island. Nothing at Fort Terry on Plum Island. On all the
shrouded, swift tide-ways that led into Long Island Sound there was
nothing.
There was nothing in front of the Narragansett defenses that eyes could
see or ears could hear. Nothing—and then, far out, it was as if a sea-monster
had arisen in dying torment, and lashed, and spouted and screamed. Before
the riven column of water could fall, there came muffled, thundering
explosion under water—one, two, three!
The defenses split the fog with fire. Their mine-protecting batteries had
been trained over the fields long since. There was no need for aim. Instantly
they swept the hidden sea with shells that would clear twenty acres of
water.
 Again there was silence and blindness—the unearthly silence of the
Atlantic sea-fog. It lay for half an hour, as if there were no such thing as
war in the world.
Then once more came the roar and the crash, followed by its submarine
echoes. Once more the land-guns raved, firing blind.
Fighting Mines with Mines
The enemy was counter-mining. Instead of sweeping, his vessels were
dropping mines of their own in the fields, and then, backing off to avoid the
fire from the batteries if they could, they exploded them by electric contact,
to blow up the American mines with the shock.
Not all the mine-sweepers escaped mines or guns. But there were vessels
to spare, and lives to spare. All night the counter-mining went on, and all
night the American guns fired into the vapor and the darkness.
The sun arose invisibly. But it climbed, and when it had lifted all its disk
above the rim of sea, it showed through the mist as a pale illumination. It
was “burning off” the fog.
“It will be clear enough in an hour,” said the executive officer of a
battleship under Block Island. The vessel’s wireless began to speak.
On one of the mother-ships men brought out and assembled an armored
biplane. Its two fliers stowed range-finding apparatus, aerial telegraph,
aneroids and charts in it. There were signal flags and light, brightly silvered
balls. Men brought receptacles that contained bombs and adjusted them
carefully in place. The fliers waited, watching the fog.
It lessened. It tore away in rifts. All around, the ships became visible.
Seven battle-ships swung around and put on speed and rushed in echelon
toward the coast. They steered straight for the mouth of Narragansett Bay,
turned just outside of the zone of fire of its defenses, slowed down and
steamed across the mouth.
The bi-plane’s engine burst into life. The machine lifted and followed
them. It flew high over them and into the bay, climbing.
“They’re over it!” said an officer on a ship, looking at the machine
through his glasses.
Locating the Forts For the Enemy Ships
 Far inside of the bay, so high in air that it was little more than a shining
speck, the aeroplane was describing a series of regular, equal circles. All at
once, as if it had been painted in the air with a mammoth brush, a jet-black
descending streak stood out against the sky, and lengthened steadily toward
the earth.
The azimuth and other range-finding instruments at both ends of the
battle-ships caught

“The forward turret of a battleship turned and spoke with a

great voice.”

the angles and ascertained the range to the black smear that still hung in the
air, like grease. The aviator had dropped a smoke-bomb to indicate the fort
below.
The forward turret of a battleship turned, its hooded rifle lifted its
muzzle to an angle of fifteen degrees, and spoke with a great voice.
Eleven miles away a ton of steel rushed from the sky, crashed into the
water of the bay roaring, ricochetted, struck again half a mile beyond, and
again and again. Four times it rebounded, like a pebble, before it
disappeared at last; and each time it filled the air with its clamor, like a
suffering thing.[59]
The ships’ wireless caught a signal from the aeroplane. The shot had
fallen short. The battleship steamed on, and another one in line opened up
the mouth of the harbor and fired.
 From the aeroplane fell a silver ball. It glittered in the brightening sun,
splendid. “Hit!” went the message to the turret; and the crew there
embraced and cheered.
It had hit the outer earth-works of the defenses. It had plunged down
with a shock that stunned men in mortar pits and gun-emplacements far
away—small wonder, for this thing falling from the sky had struck a blow
equal to that of New York’s obelisk plunging into Broadway from the top of
Trinity Church steeple.[60]
“No Effect!”
“No effect!” reported the watchers in the coast defense to the
commandant. Though the impact had shaken the works and the very earth:
though the blast from the explosion of its charge had twisted three-inch iron
bars within the works, and bent the steel doors of casemates, it had done no
harm to the defenses. So well had they been built by the engineers that the
rending explosion left a crater for only a moment. The earth rippled down
and closed it. The steel and concrete facing underneath held true.[61]
The enemy had the range. Ship after ship passed the entrance, delivered
its single shot, proceeded and returned to follow in the circling line. These
were the most modern dreadnaughts, firing from 16-inch guns. Their shells
tore the earth embankments away in tons and flung dirt high in air and sent
it down to bury everything in its way under mounds. But all their fire and
all their havoc was in vain, unless they could hit a gun. And the guns were
protected by steel armor and concrete and earth piled on earth.
To hit a gun was to attempt to hit a bull’s eye only a few feet square at a
range of eleven miles, farther than men can see.
Still the bombardment went on, undeterred. More aeroplanes soared over
the defenses now, far out of reach from shots, and circled and signaled. The
fire grew. The ships were not hesitating now to wear out the rifling of their
guns. They meant to give the defenders no rest.
They were trying for a prize that was worth all the guns in their turrets.
They knew that inside of the works there could not be more than a few
thousand men, if that much. They knew that all the Coast Artillery forces of
the United States combined numbered only 170 companies and that these
170 companies had 27 harbor defense systems to guard. Even if the United
States had stripped its other defenses to the utmost, there could not be a
sufficient force in these that were now being attacked.[62]
Only Enough Ammunition to Last Two Hours
So they poured fire on fire and shot on shot. It was a one-sided duel, for
their great guns outranged the 12-inch guns of the defenses. The men in
there fired only occasionally, when their observers and range-finders and
plotters perceived an opportunity. There was another reason for their slow
fire, besides the inability to reach. Those perfect defenses, those perfect
products of engineering science, those results of millions on millions of
expenditure, contained only enough ammunition for two hours of firing![63]
They waited till the enemy ships should try to force the passage and
come within range, that they might make those two hours two hours of
unspeakable destruction that should glorify their death with the fiery
splendor of bursting ships.
The enemy did not try to force the passage. While they saved their
ammunition, these defenses were fearful gladiators to approach. None could
come within reach of their steel hands and live.
But the gladiators were gladiators fearful only in front. Steel-gauntleted,
armored with steel breast-plates and shin-plates, mightily visored—so they
faced the sea. In the back they were naked.
Fire, and noise, and bursting charges, and explosions that made hot gales
within the works and whirled men like dried leaves! An hour passed. Still
from the sea there came the coughing bellow, that made the air tremble and
rolled inland like summer thunder among hills. Still there fell the screaming
steel from the sky. Another hour! And still it came.
The sun was over-head. Suddenly, into the naked back of the defenses
poured fire and steel that hammered and beat and tore through them. Under
it, through flame and smoke and flying dirt appeared shining rows of
bayonets. With a yelp 10,000 men poured in.[64]
And through the United States, smiting it into the dumbness of despair,
went the news that the great Narragansett defenses had fallen, and that the
enemy fleet was entering the harbor.
 V

NEW ENGLAND’S BATTLE

America had lost Narragansett Bay, with all its defenses, great guns and
government stations, in less than two weeks after the declaration of war!
The generation that faced this disaster had faced many catastrophes
which had seemed great disasters. It had seen States razed by cyclones. It
had seen giant floods. It had seen magnificent cities thrown down by a
shaking earth. Unterrified, it had flung money and men to the stricken
places to make them whole. Destroyed cities rose in beauty almost before
the dust of their fall had ceased to veil the sun.
Money, money, money! Men, men, men! It seemed that no disaster could
be so colossal that the wonderful resources and efficiency of the United
States could not mock at it.
Before the news of Narragansett’s fall was an hour old, the cities of the
United States, including many towns so obscure that few Americans ever
had heard their names, had subscribed enough money to raise and equip an
army twice over and keep it in the field for months. But the country that
was so efficient, so intrepid, so resourceful, was facing a disaster now that it
could not conjure away with all the money and men that ever were.
Money, the magician, was futile now. It could not stamp its golden foot
and make guns and ammunition spring from the empty ground. It could not
send to the army in Connecticut cannon that did not exist or cartridges that
had not been made.[65]
Not Enough American Ammunition for Two Days’ Battle
An order had gone out from the American headquarters that morning—
an ominous warning that, given in battle, would have indicated, surely, the
beginning of the end. It was:
“IT IS OF THE UTMOST IMPORTANCE THAT NO AMMUNITION BE
EXPENDED WITHOUT URGENT NEED. COMPANY COMMANDERS WILL
ENFORCE THIS ORDER RIGOROUSLY.”
 While the futile dollars were being flung to the Government for new
armies, the army that was already in the field was counting its small-arms
and artillery ammunition, knowing that it did not possess enough for two
days’ battle.[66]
From ocean to ocean men with naked hands were crowding to enlist. The
generous Nation that never yet had denied a need when the need was made
apparent, was as generous with its lives as with its dollars. For two and
three blocks around the recruiting stations of regular army and militia the
streets were packed with men. They had come from work and pleasure.
They had come home from far places. They had dropped shovels and
tennis-rackets, pens and picks. They stood shoulder to shoulder, in fine
stuffs and in rags, made equal by one loyal purpose. And they were as futile
as the dollars.
One million men, it was computed afterward, had offered themselves in
America in that one day. But there were no weapons for them. There were
not enough rifles. There were no uniforms. There were no tents. There were
no shoes.
Keen-eyed men of trails and wilderness offered themselves for the signal
corps. There were no signal corps supplies. Telegraphers were there, but all
the field telegraph outfits that the country had were with the army.
Teamsters volunteered, but there was no reserve of army wagons. Men
trained in bridge building and engineering were turned away, because there
was no equipment to fit out sorely needed companies of miners and sappers.
[67]
Cavalry was needed, urgently; and men who could ride tried to enlist.
But there were no mounts for them. Army officers in Texas and New
Mexico and Oklahoma were buying, at unheard-of prices, rough horses
wild from the range, while in Connecticut were regiments of regular cavalry
whose troops were only three-quarters filled with either men or horses.[68]
Money, money, money! Men, men, men! It was too late.
Newport’s Palaces Occupied by Enemy Officers
The bulletins still were displaying the news of the loss of Narragansett’s
defenses when the mine-sweepers of the enemy, unhampered now,
completed their work in the channels of the great harbor and signaled to
their fleet that it was safe to enter.
 The big liners crowded in—ships that hitherto never had entered an
American harbor except New York or Boston. Followed by horse-transports
and vessels laden with artillery, they passed in a gigantic parade past
Newport.
Only destroyers and light-draught gun-boats preceded them. There was
no further need of cruisers with shotted guns to protect them. The enemy
flag was flying over Forts Adam, Wetherill, Greble, Getty, and Philip
Kearney. The American guns which the garrison had not been able to
destroy now looked down the harbor to hold it for the invader against
American attack.
Newport’s villas and palaces were occupied by officers of the invading
army and navy. The avenues and gardens and shores of the rich men’s
pleasure-place were thronged with bluejackets and marines. The famous
power-boats, rich with mahogany and cedar, were brought out of their
opulent housings and launched. Glittering steam yachts were being eased
down the ways, to take the water and go into commission under the foreign
flag.
After the last of the ships had entered, an American sea captain, who had
been crouching in a hiding place on Sakonnet Point at the eastern entrance
to the harbor, clapped his telescope together, arose cautiously, and
straightened out his stiffened old limbs. Taking great care to select by-paths,
he went inland to the village of Little Compton, where he found an
automobile stage that took him to the railroad station at Tiverton.
Thence he telephoned to Fall River, and Fall River sent it on to Boston,
and Boston sent it on to Worcester, whence it went to the army, that an old
seaman had not only counted and identified the transports, but was able to
say approximately which ships had troops aboard and which vessels
probably carried only supplies.
There were liners of more than 40,000 gross tons. There were three ships
of more than 25,000 tonnage. Each of them was a famous liner whose
character was known to its last details. It was a matter of only a few
minutes to figure out that the net tonnage of the troop-laden vessels was
200,400. Under the foreign military allowance of one soldier for each two
net tons of ship capacity, it was indicated with fair accuracy that the force
that had entered the harbor was at least 100,000 men.[69]
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