Part 12

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

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

_The Mad Adventure_

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

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

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

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

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

They did not know how to dig trenches.

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

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

_What Americans Could Have Done_

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

_Thirty Minutes Later_

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

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

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

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

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

_The Massacre of the Connecticut River_

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

IX

THE CAPTURE OF NEW YORK CITY

When the news of the Battle of Connecticut went through the United States, there was a temporary end to all patience, to all calculations of prudence. There was an end to everything except blind passion. The United States was not a patient Nation, but no Nation, however patient, could have remained so at such a time. No man, however deeply admired, could have counseled wisdom then. No interests, however great, could have controlled.

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

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

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

_The President Goes to the Army_

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

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

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

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

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

_What the Commander Faced_

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

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

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

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

_Men Disabled Before Battle_

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

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

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

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

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

_What Untrained Batteries Did_

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

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

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

_What the Public Did Not Know_

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

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

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

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

_Officers Had Never Handled Men_

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

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

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

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

_“Stay!” Says the President_

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

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

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

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

_Americans Hold the Wall_

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

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

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

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

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

_Impassable by Rail_

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

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

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

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

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

_New England’s Conquest Complete_

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