Part 10

Far away the harbor searchlights played like summer lightning. The sailors moved on in utter darkness, toward the invisible beach. They rowed in, in irregular formation, till they could hear the surf. Then the foremost boats lay still, tossing on the swell, waiting for the others to draw abreast. Formless, vaguely gray in the night, the line made a dash.

They were on the first lifting swell of the long waves that tumble toward the land when a fierce white light tore terribly through the night, and blazed on them, and around them. It held them, intangibly, tightly, like the hand of a ghost.

Orange flashes ripped through it. Little Nahant Beach quaked with explosion. In the white light, as if the tossing boats were spectral pictures in a dissolving view, they melted amid the roar of the shore-guns. Black fragments whirled through the steady glare, and shells chopped the sea where there were bobbing heads and clutching hands.

The light stabbed the night, in and out. It veered to sea with enormous speed. A long, black silhouette with three funnels appeared full in the circle of its artificial day. A funnel vanished, and another. A spout of water lifted alongside from a shell that had fallen short. Another, the next instant, smashed into its side and made it reel. The destroyer turned suddenly and rushed at the land. Its steering gear had been shot away. Almost instantly it straightened out again; but Little Nahant was raving. Little Nahant was flaming without pause. The searchlight held the ship. It staggered, like a stumbling animal, pitched twice, each time a little more wildly, and went down bow first.

“Have repulsed attack on search-light station and observers at this point,” went the word

from Bailey’s Hill on Nahant to the battle commander in Fort Warren. “No losses. Destroyer and five ships’ boats with crews completely eliminated.”

_Attacks Made Everywhere_

They did not have time to cheer at Fort Warren. On Nantasket Beach, as far south as Nahant was north, a landing was being attempted in greater force and with the determined assistance of a destroyer division that was lying close to the beach.

Here there were three hundred men of Massachusetts Volunteer Militia, Coast Artillery, behind barb-wire and sand-bag defenses with two pieces of field artillery and three machine guns. They were being swept by savage fire from the destroyers.

“We can hold the ships’ boats off. Surf high, and landing will be slow,” they reported to the battle commander by field telegraph. “But we must have relief from naval fire, or cannot concentrate efforts on landing parties.”

Their officers sent the exact distance from the beach of the destroyers. In the forts the fire commanders studied their charts, plotted with diagrams of the shore in sections. They calculated the range. A dropping shot from a 6-inch gun fell among the enemy vessels one minute later. The next went over. The third struck a destroyer. Before it disappeared, shells were falling among the division too fast to count. Three guns were firing. They were throwing 12 shells in one minute.[98]

Two destroyers were towed away, crippled. Another escaped from the fire zone but sank at sea.

Undeterred, the boat parties tried to run the surf and rush the defenders. But the sea was heavy, breaking with a sharp over-fall. Unprotected by fire from the sea, unable to work their own machine guns in the rough water, the sailors were pounded in the breakers. The field artillery blew their boats apart. The machine guns slashed them. Rifle fire hammered them.

“Attack beaten off,” reported the militiamen. In the surf there were a few drifting pieces of wood, tossing oars and bodies pitching to and fro as the undertow played with them.

_The “Hussars of the Sea”_

“Destroyer division off this point.” It was a report from Strawberry Hill, south from Fort Revere. Point Allerton’s search-light swung down the beach, the search-light from Strawberry Hill centered on them. The reckless craft, the hussars of the sea, dashed in to a 400 yard range, and, steaming parallel with the beach at full speed, sent in a heavy broadside fire from all their guns. More than three hundred shells were directed against the Strawberry Hill light in those few minutes. They swung, and fled to the sea as the batteries of the fort opened on them.[99]

“Searchlight intact,” reported Strawberry Hill.

“Men have landed on Marblehead Neck, according to reports from Swampscott,” reported Fort Heath. “Three hundred men at least taking road southward.”

“Push forward and occupy Lynn Beach at narrowest part,” telegraphed the battle commander to the force at Nahant. “Will send one hundred reënforcements by boat to Lynn.”

At Nantasket a second attempt at a landing was made. It was defeated, and the boats withdrew. Two suspicious vessels were sighted almost within Hull Bay and were destroyed by fire from a shore battery. A landing party struck at Strawberry Hill. Another, probably the same that had attempted the second landing at Nantasket, tried to haul three boats over into the Weir River.[100]

All were repulsed. There was hot fighting going on near Lynn. It was difficult for the battle commander to judge what its result would be. Once his forces sent to Fort Heath for more men. Later, they telegraphed that they were holding their ground.

The enemy struck again, and again. He made an attempt on Winthrop, and lost two destroyers in the mine fields. The fleet opened heavy fire at short intervals, to mask the attack of the landing parties. But the telegraph and telephone system of the forts sent word everywhere, to all the outlying posts, of the uniform success of the defense, with the result of making their fight constantly more effective.

_The Defenses Hold Out_

The defenses were holding out. When word came at last that the raiders who had landed at Marblehead Neck were retreating to their boats, the end of the night’s fighting had arrived. The fleet called off its boats, and took them aboard.

It was near dawn. Once more, for the last time, the ships ran in, passing the batteries at full speed, and fired from every gun that would bear in the instant of their passing. Every huge turret gun, every broadside battery, opened up at once.

For many miles inland the air trembled and hummed. The hills growled with rolling echoes. Windows in distant places blew inward and walls trembled. But the defenses held.

Ship after ship swung in that fierce circle and passed. It was the climax of the night’s bombardment. When the dawn spread far on the ocean horizon, the defenders saw the enemy fleet lying back against it, far out of the zone of fire.

The sea was bare between them and the forts, except for a rent ruin hanging on the Outer Brewster where a shattered destroyer was aground. Off Cohasset lay another, sprawling on the rocks called The Grampuses, half out of the sea as if it were the torn body of a weird monster that had thrown itself ashore in a dying agony.

“No damage,” said Fort Revere. “No damage, except dismounted searchlight,” said Fort Strong. “One 6-inch gun dismantled,” said Standish. “No damage,” reported Andrews and Banks. In Fort Warren two 3-inch quick firers were destroyed.

“We could hold them off forever,” said the battle commander, “if we were protected from the land.”

_It Was His Last Fight_

The successful fight of his defenses had made it only the more bitter for him. He knew that this was the last fight. He knew that the army that was sweeping northward would take him in the back before night.

He looked at one of his 12-inch rifles. He walked over to it and patted the beautiful thing, so shapely, so graceful that it seemed impossible that it should weigh 35 tons. “If they had just given you that little extra elevation!” he murmured. “Then yonder ships wouldn’t dare lie within 20,000 yards of us.”[101]

But “they” had not given the rifles that little extra elevation. “They” had found time enough and money enough to pay for bridges over muddy creeks, for printing millions of words of oratory, for hundreds of private bills. “They” had been able to find money to pay themselves for constructive recesses of Congress, and mileage for journeys that they had not made. But they had not been able to find money for defense.

Just a little foresight, and Boston, that now was trembling, might be sitting behind that charmed circle of its great guns and laughing at all the navies of the world.

Haggard and pale, Boston’s people looked toward the sea and the dawn. The sullen thunders still rolled out there, but slowly now, and far off. The fleet was using only its heaviest guns, and firing deliberately, though steadily. Having failed to destroy the effectiveness of the defenses, it would content itself with long range fire, simply to wear the defenders out till the army should arrive.

All night long Boston people, moved to unendurable terror by the bombardment, had tried to flee from the city. All night long other crowds had tried to enter it. On all the roads these opposing crowds had met and jostled.

_Opposing Streams of Fugitives_

They warned each other, and tried to turn each other back. Shells were falling into Boston town, said the people who were fleeing from the city. Crazed by fear, they invented the most monstrous tales and believed them.

The in-coming refugees, too, invented tales. They told of soldiers who had appeared in nearby towns, and who were burning and killing. Nothing so well illustrated the effect of terror on the faculty of reason as the fact that always, after this wild interchange of news, the city people continued to press toward the country, fearing soldiers less than the cannon-shots that had rung in their ears all night; and the country people rushed into the city, so panic-driven by what they had heard of the soldiers and their bloody day of vengeance, that they cared nothing for the heavy thunder that was shaking all the air.

Though the roads out of Boston were thus crowded, the fugitives were only a small proportion of the population. Never before had humanity realized how firmly men are chained to their habitat. Here was a city, terribly beset by land and sea with unknown, terrible fate closing steadily around it. Beyond lay the United States where there was complete freedom still, and safety. Yet who could seek it?

There were none who could go, except those temporarily mad with fear, or those so abjectly poor that it mattered nothing to them where they trudged. The workers could not go. They had to cling to the places that they knew, to the scanty foot-hold that was all the more precious to them for its scantiness. The rich could not go. Money had stopped. All that they owned had become suddenly valueless for producing cash; and without cash they could not flee. The merely well-to-do, whose whole life depended on the town, whose whole possessions lay in real estate, in homes, in shops--where could they turn?

_Boston in Hopeless Fear_

They stayed. They even tried, dully, to attend to business, though there was no business. Mail was still coming in and going out, but in a vastly circuitous way, as it had to go around by way of Burlington, and so through Vermont and New Hampshire to its destination. Boston could communicate still by telegraph and telephone with the United States outside of southern and western New England; but this, too, was in an equally circuitous way, and even such service as existed was constantly in danger of being severed.

Motor traffic had almost ceased on the streets. The trolley and train services were cut down to the merest necessity. Gasoline and coal shortage already had begun to make itself felt. Prices had gone up for flour and for meat. The fish wharves held none except empty vessels.

There was an unreasoning fear of the waterfront streets. People shrank from them, and used the side streets, as if the tiny difference of a block or two could save them, should shells begin to fall.

There was a fear, less unreasoning, of tall buildings. Most of the upper stories in high office buildings were deserted, except for daring ones who went in temporarily to look toward the harbor.

A renewed fear of aeroplanes also had seized the city. For days they had passed and repassed, till the people had become almost accustomed to them, since they threw no bombs nor made other demonstrations. Now, with the steady cannonading, the old fear returned. There were wild flights when the whirring roar was heard. More than once, men and women were trampled in those sudden dumb panics. Hypnotized by the impending of a greater tragedy, the citizens scarcely noted these episodes that, in any other time, would have shocked the town.

A rumor went through the streets that the fleet had been driven off. Survivors from Winthrop appeared in the city. They clutched at strangers and told with quivering mouths how the shells had crashed into their town, and how they and theirs in night clothes had fled between falling walls through a night ruddy with fire.

Refugees from Breed’s Island told how the ground was all ploughed by shells falling wild. They told of the water tower, flung far down the hill.

_Cities Destroyed and Taken_

Hull was destroyed utterly. There was nothing left of it. All gay Nantasket had vanished. Between it and Point Allerton the houses along shore were thrown on each other and torn apart or burned.

On the last train to come in from the direction of Brockton were some who had fled from that city. It had been taken by the advancing army in the small hours of the morning. The town authorities, ordered out of bed by soldiers, had been escorted to the enemy commander, who had made them write announcements. Before sunrise all the streets flaunted placards ordering the inhabitants to continue their business. Other placards warned them to deliver up all arms of any description.

Twenty of the most prominent men, said the fugitives, had been seized as hostages.

Every little while now Boston’s communication with some point was being cut. These severed lines told of the advance of the hostile army as eloquently as messages might.

Up and down Washington street moved the multitude, waiting for news. The Old South Meeting House that has looked down on so many dramatic Boston spectacles never had looked on one so tragic as this--on a proud and not timorous city that was waiting impotently to be taken and dealt with.

Had the enemy come quickly, had the army advanced into Boston with a swift rush, it would have been less agonizing for the waiting city than this slow, systematic, machine-like advance like the jaws of a great pincer that were closing down with cruel deliberation.

The armed circle was contracting all the time, but it contracted slowly. Though the enemy’s scouts had assured him long ago that the road was free, he was taking no chances in that hostile land, whose sting he had felt. Far as he might throw out his advance guards, he took care that they should remain in constant touch with the main force and with each other. He moved his divisions in fighting array. He kept an unbroken line of communications.

_Making Good His Possessions_

Wherever the army passed, it made good its possession wholly. It left no village behind it in its march whose means of existence, communication, food supply and machinery of labor and business it had not made entirely its own.

Where there were destroyed places, the invader organized the population to rebuild them. He levied on every community, large and small, for funds. He paid out nothing of his own, except written scrip. At one blow the whole financial system of the conquered country was converted into one great source of tribute.

Suddenly there came a storm of news to the Boston papers. It came from the country to the south of the harbor--from Cohasset and Hingham, Weymouth and Quincy.[102]

Heavy artillery was being unloaded all along the line of the south shore branch of the Old Colony Railroad. Horses and limbers were moving along all the roads to the shore. Soldiers were advancing into all the towns.

Before the Hingham wires were cut, the correspondent in that town reported that enormous guns were being moved through it, on heavy motors.

Quincy telegraphed that troops had hurried through there and seized the 100-foot Great Hill, and also the yacht club house on Hough’s Neck. Then Quincy, too, was cut off.

Scarcely half an hour later the fire from the forts broke out furiously. It was answered, with greater speed and fury, from the shore, where the foe had posted his great guns to enfilade the harbor defenses.

At Fort Revere the commandant cut away concrete emplacements and succeeded in swinging one of his 12-inch guns around to fight the assailants, putting a heavy howitzer near Hingham out of action.

A second plunging shot fell near a gun behind Baker Hill; but the assailants, from howitzer batteries concealed under Turkey and Scituate Hills, concentrated a desperate bombardment on him that drove the Americans from the works.[103]

Firing from heavy caliber weapons at short range, pouring explosives and common shell and shrapnel from every vantage point along all the shore, the hostile army swept the rear of the harbor defenses with such blasts that the mere impact of the solid shells made a din like the pounding of monstrous rivetters’ hammers.[104]

From the sea all the big guns of the ships struck into the chorus. The vessels pressed in as closely as they dared and opened with every cannon that could get the range.

_Boston Completely Isolated_

Boston’s populace, listening to the clamour from the sea, scarcely noted that the bulletins were announcing that all the railroad lines of the Boston and Maine Railroad leading north and northwest to Portsmouth, Haverhill, Lawrence and Lowell had been seized, and that Boston was completely cut off.

Silent policemen appeared all at once followed by men with posters and paste-pails. The crowds saw posters go up on their walls, signed by the Boston Citizens’ Committee.

There was a poster in great red letters warning the inhabitants to deliver any firearms that they possessed in the City Hall within six hours.

“ATTENTION!” said another placard. “In case of military occupation of the city, a single disorderly act may mean the ruin of all. It is the duty of all citizens to offer no resistance, and to report to the authorities any plan toward resistance.”

There was a great stir in the crowd. A cab was pushing its way through Washington Street. Two dishevelled and blood-stained artillerymen, and an equally dishevelled civilian were in it.

While the soldiers went on to the City Hall, the civilian got out and entered a newspaper office. He was a reporter.

The rumor sped from man to man in the crowd before the building and from street to street that news had arrived from the forts. There was a tremendous press into Washington Street, where men and women, crushed together, stared at the building.

The cab hardly had stopped at the City Hall before a bulletin went up.

FORT ANDREWS GARRISON DIES AT ITS POST

IGNORES SUMMONS TO SURRENDER

ONLY THREE MEN ESCAPE FROM RUINS

Ten minutes later the “extras” appeared and were whirled through the town. They passed with the speed almost of the wind; for men passed them from hand to hand. They shouted the news to people looking from windows, in a delirium half of dismay, half of exultation. The newspaper man had brought in such a tale as would live in American history.

_The Newspaper Man’s Story_

He had been writing his story during the night’s bombardments while the mortar pits quaked around him with the eruptions of their steel volcanoes. He told how, in the morning, there had come suddenly from the shore the enfilading fire that caught the works in the back.

The men at the mortars, unable to turn their ordnance against these assailants, continued to fire at the ships, obedient to the instructions from the range-stations, till the blasts from the bursting charges above and around them tore away all the systems of fire control.[105]

One enemy howitzer, trained at the very edge of a pit, threw shot on shot till a group of mortars was buried under the débris that was hurled down from the torn mounds.

The mortars ceased action. The assailant, suspending his bombardment, demanded instant surrender, with the condition that the works must be delivered intact. The remnants of the garrison, black with smoke and grime, wounded and burned, replied by manning such movable artillery as was left. There was only one end to that. It was death. In twenty minutes there were four men left alive in the defenses--two artillerymen, the newspaper man and a noncommissioned officer.

They lay flat under a mound. There was a small boat hidden below the far end of the island. “Get out of this if you can!” said the noncommissioned man, an electrician sergeant. “Hurry! I’ll give you five minutes! Good-by!”

He crawled back into the works. As they rowed away, they saw boats with invaders leaving the mainland for the island. Then there came a lick of flame out of the mortar battery that expanded instantly into a spraying fountain. An enormous detonation nearly blew their boat out of the water. The sergeant had found the firing key and touched off the hidden mine to demolish the defenses.

In the excitement over this news that had broken the dull strain of waiting, the people of Boston scarcely noticed that all at once the firing at sea had stopped.

_Demanding Surrender_

Down the harbor a boat with a flag of truce was lying under Fort Warren. An officer, led blind-folded into the works, presented a summons transmitted from the headquarters of the army. It called on the commander to surrender the entire system of defenses without further damage. It demanded also that a complete diagram of all the mine fields be delivered at once.

“You have four hours,” continued this summons. “At the end of that time, we shall bring our artillery to bear on the city from every quarter. Every five minutes thereafter we shall fire on a given section. You have made a brave and magnificent defense. By surrendering now, you will save your city from unnecessary destruction which you are unable to prevent otherwise.”

“I will reply in half an hour,” said the commander. At the end of that time he sent this answer:

“I shall surrender the defenses on condition that the city be left inviolate: that no troops occupy it: that the civil authorities be left in control: and that no levy be made on the municipality.”

“Absolutely refused,” the hostile commander replied promptly. “Unconditional surrender, or bombardment begins at time stated. If any attempt is made to dismantle works, bombardment will begin at once.”

This was at noon. The hour-hand of the Old South Meeting House clock had not quite touched one, when artillery was passing through Waltham and Newton Centre, and along all the roads crossing the Charles and Neponset Rivers.

There were cavalry and cycle and motor troops on these roads, and trains full of infantry. But always and everywhere was artillery. The sleek guns, pounding along New England’s highways, spoke so wickedly of destructiveness, that they were more terrifying to the population than long columns of heavily armed men.

At Jamaica Plain big howitzers were detrained and taken to the ridge running west by north from the line of the New York and New England railroad. More guns were unloaded in Brookline and posted on the crests from whose tops, 200 feet high, they had all Brookline, all Boston to the bay, and Cambridge and Somerville under their long range fire.[106]