Part 13

The division that had taken Waterbury turned southerly to the coast after it passed through that town, to join the division that had taken Bridgeport and was pressing westward.

An hour later the American army, apprised by its spies, began to block the rock cuts on all the New York Central systems leading northward out of New York City.

When New York heard this news, it knew that it had been abandoned.

In that moment of despair, the population would have done what every loosely knit, heterogeneous multitude does almost spontaneously in the face of catastrophe. It would have grown into mobs to riot against itself. If the huge population had been organized, if it had possessed a single will, nothing could have prevented it and nothing could have withstood it. But facing the overwhelming numbers were a few thousand men who were moved by a single will and who were firmly welded together for its accomplishment.

_The Power of Organized Discipline_

They were the police. Whatever their faults were, they possessed the one thing that all the city and all the United States lacked. It was Organized Discipline. In the face of millions unorganized and undisciplined, the 11,000 policemen of the city, armed with no visible weapons except clubs, maintained the peace. They scarcely needed the assistance of the ten thousand men who had been enlisted hastily as volunteer militia and deputy sheriffs, and who patroled the streets with clubs and riot guns.[144]

Their work was facilitated by the fact that for many days past there had been a great disarmament in the city. Under the autocratic latitude of martial law, all suspected individuals had been searched wherever they were met. Houses had been visited. Warned by the riots in Connecticut, the authorities had stripped every sporting goods shop and every pawnbroker’s establishment of weapons, and stored them under heavy guard in the armories.

It had been a necessary precaution. During the days that came after the enemy forces had begun to land, factory after factory and industry after industry had stopped. Now the greater part of the city was dead. Seventeen thousand longshoremen and stevedores loitered in the water-front streets, with ten thousand sailors of all nationalities, whose ships were tied up. Fifty thousand unskilled laborers wandered around town with nothing to do. Altogether it was estimated that on this day there were 200,000 people in New York whose occupations had been lost, and fully as many again who were working on half time.[145]

_The Wholly Helpless Metropolis_

The leaders of commerce and finance, the most resourceful of the city’s business men, were utterly unable to suggest anything. The Chamber of Commerce, that had met many crises and evolved practical plans of action, could suggest nothing now.

The banks were practically closed. The United States Treasury Department already had declared that the center of the Second Federal Reserve District would be considered as temporarily merged with the Third District in Philadelphia.

The fire insurance companies were refusing all new business, and had called attention to the fact that existing policies on every kind of property provided that they were not liable for loss “caused directly or indirectly by invasion, insurrection, riot, civil war or commotion, or military or usurped power.”

There were thousands of other contracts and agreements that would lapse automatically the moment the first hostile soldier set foot in the city. Men had laughed for a generation at the mediæval expression in many printed legal forms that provided that the signers were not responsible for anything that might occur under “the acts of any foreign Prince or Potentate.” Now, suddenly, these mediæval words were alive.

The mails were piled high in the Post Office and in every substation. The whole United States was striving to settle urgent affairs with the city, and the city was trying as desperately to settle with the United States. It was impossible to handle the mass. It remained in bags for days, untouched, while the postal forces, heavily increased from near-by cities, struggled with the accumulations of days before.

The long distance telephone systems were so crowded that connections could be obtained only by asking for them many hours in advance. Telegraph dispatches were twenty-four hours old before they could be forwarded, and steadily their increasing accumulation was leaving the armies of swift operators farther behind.

_Days of Frantic Perplexity_

During the days of frantic perplexity there had been talk of dismantling the factories and shipping their machineries to the interior. But when the owners of the city’s 26,000 manufacturing establishments faced the problem, they realized that it could not be done. They were not like the government that could afford to pull plants apart and move them at more expense than would be involved in building new ones.[146]

They were as helpless as their 500,000 employees. To leave their city meant for owners and workers alike to go away bare-handed and pauperized. There was nothing to do except to stay.

All these manufactories and industries of the city had labored so furiously in the last weeks to produce merchandise and ship it that at last the railroads were unable to handle the rush of freight. Every yard was piled high with goods destined for the interior that could not be loaded. All the sidings were clogged. There were lines of freight trains with not a gap between them stretching from the Hudson River straight across the New Jersey meadows and on into the yards and sidings of New Jersey towns miles from New York.

No freight was coming in. For three days everything had been side-tracked far away from the city, in order to clear the tracks for provisions. The authorities, with the Citizens’ Committee, unable to guess what the enemy might do, had decided that all efforts must be subservient to the effort to stock the town with food.

Already the city had taken over the entire business of distributing food-stuffs. Nothing could be sold except in quantities and at prices fixed by ordinance.

_The Edge of Famine_

The city’s people often had been told by their statisticians that they always were within a few days of famine. Now they realized what it meant. The congested tracks had cut down their coal supply. All interurban transportation had to be reduced to save power. Somewhere in the narrow valleys leading from Lake Champlain on crowded rails were the enormous rolls of paper needed to feed the city’s presses. The morning newspapers had to be cut down to four pages of small size. There was no sporting news in the papers, no foreign news and no financial news.

Within the short time that had elapsed since the occupation of New England’s mill cities, the city had used up a great part of its stocks of textiles. There was shortage of coffee, of spices, of all the stuffs that ordinarily came in by sea.

Hostile cruisers and destroyers patrolled all the Atlantic coast, taking the precaution merely to stay out of range of the harbor defenses. They captured every vessel, large or small, that

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

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

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

_Closing in on New York_

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

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

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

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

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

_Along the Connecticut Shore_

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

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

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

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

_The Invaders of Long Island_

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

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

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

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

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

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

“_Invader Can Do What He Pleases_”

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

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

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

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

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

_A Matter of Lawyers’ Logic_

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

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

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

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

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

_The Battle in the Night_

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

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

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

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

_Bands of Flame_

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

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

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

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

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

_Captured Vessels Enter River_

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

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

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

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

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

_Demand Surrender of Forts_

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

_Claims That City Is Unfortified_

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

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

With a bow he handed the paper to the Mayor.

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