Part 2

But though no man knew where it was, from its unknown place it spoke by wireless to Washington, and through Washington to the Nation.

From “somewhere between the Virginia Capes and the northern end of the Bahama Islands” where it lay, it had sent out its feelers across the sea toward the on-coming foe--swift gray feelers whose tall skeleton fire-control tops were white with watching sailors. And so, presently, between the enemy and the American coast there lay a line of relays to catch the news and pass it on to the Nation and its fleet.

More than a hundred miles of sea, said the news, were covered by the advancing fleet. It was a hundred miles of steel forts; and outside of them, dashing back and forth in ceaseless patrol, were the lighter and faster craft, consisting of destroyers and small, swift cruisers.

The scout cruiser _Birmingham_ had spied ships inside even the inner line. But they were not transports. They were still warships. The troop transports were so far within all the protective cordons that the American scouts, lying far along the horizon, could not even sight their masts.

The enemy fleet scarcely made an attempt to attack the spying vessels. It seemed almost that the enormous mass was too insolently sure of its power to trouble about the scouts.

So, with watching cruisers and destroyers hanging to its sides day and night, the invaders’ armada moved westward as steady as a lifeless, wicked machine. Never varying their distances or relative positions, never falling out of line, never altering their speed of 14 knots, the dreadnaughts and battle-cruisers guarded their precious transports, trusting to their outer cordon to keep off all attacks. And the outer cordon held true.

It did not move slowly, majestically, like the armored line. Incessantly it swept back and forth, and in and out, patrolling the sea to a distance so far from the battle-ships that the American scouts rarely could approach nearer than to sight, from their own tops, the tops of the dreadnaughts.

_The Message From the Kearsarge_

As the enemy covered the sea, so he filled the air. Constantly, all day long, floating and drifting with the soft white clouds far beyond the farthest extent of the cordon, his aeroplanes surveyed the water-world. And all day long, and all night long, the ships’ wireless tore the air.

The American wireless, too, played forth its electric waves of air night and day. From daring scouts to relay-ships, and from relay-ships to hidden fleet and to waiting Nation, went the story out of the far sea. The American millions knew the progress of the coming enemy as if the fleet were an army moving along a populous highway of the land.

The Nation watched the implacable, remorseless advance breathlessly, apprehensively; but behind its apprehension there was hope. “Surely, surely,” men said to each other, “our splendid sailors will get at them!”

Accustomed by its history to expect thrilling deeds of dash and enterprise that should wrest success out of disaster, the United States waited for The Deed.

It came. Out of the far Atlantic came the story. It came from the battle-ship _Kearsarge_ and went to the _Chester_, it was passed on by the _Chester_ and picked up by the _Tacoma_, and the _Tacoma_ tossed it into the air and sent it to the coast.

“Engaged,” said the _Kearsarge_, “have--sunk,” and then there came a break in the message. “Destroyer--light--cruiser--” spoke the wireless again, and stopped. “Armored--cruiser,” spoke the wireless again in half an hour. “Port--beam--disabled--withdrawing--pre-dreadnaught--abaft- -starboard--beam--firing--14,000--yards--dreadnaught--port beam--” Again there came an abrupt check to the wireless.

To the men on the fleet “somewhere off the Virginia Capes,” and to the men in newspaper offices from ocean to ocean, it was as if they were witnessing the fight. Indeed, the presses had some of it printed and on the streets before the battle-ship’s story was done.

“Dreadnaught--” started the wireless again. “17,000--yards--am struck--after--gun--upper--turret--am struck--forward--gun--lower--turret--dismounted--am struck--after--gun--lower--turret--”

The air fell silent. It was the last word from the _Kearsarge_.

_The Inevitable Order to an Inferior Fleet_

“As a man,” said the Admiral that night to the correspondents who pressed him for an interview, “I am glad that the _Kearsarge_ did it. As Admiral, I can only say that her destruction, old though she was, is a heavy loss to us that would not be balanced even if, besides the ships she sank, she had sunk both the dreadnaughts. We have ordered the fleet to keep itself intact.”

“Does that mean that there are to be no raids?”

“It cannot be done,” answered the Admiral. “With sufficient machinery, heroism can do great deeds to-day, as ever. Without the machinery, it can only go down, singing.[11] The enemy transports are within an inmost line of great ships. At the margin of their zone of fire is another armored line of dreadnaughts. And the outer cordon is at the margin of that zone of fire. Thus one of our raiding ships would have to break through at least thirty miles, every inch of it under fire from half a dozen ships. It cannot be done. This enemy fleet could be broken only by brute force. To attack in force with our inferior fleet would mean simply that we should smash ourselves against him as unavailingly as if we smashed ourselves full speed ahead against a rocky coast.”

“But surely at night our ships can dash in!” insisted the public, reluctant to give up romantic hopes. “Wait--and some night you will see!”

Then there came a wireless relayed from the _Conyngham_, biggest and swiftest of the American destroyer divisions. She had circled the whole enemy fleet, flying around it through days and nights at the full speed of her thirty knots. Her message told why there could be no raids at night.

There was no night. All the sea, ran the _Conyngham’s_ tale, was lit like a flaming city. The outer cordon played its search-lights far toward each horizon. It played other lights inward, toward its own battle-ships. And the line of battle-ships in turn, kept mighty searchlights, bow and stern, steadily on their transports.

Each transport had its guard, whose bright surveillance never shifted, never wavered, from dusk to dawn. These sentinel dreadnaughts never turned a search-light to sweep the surrounding sea. They held their transports steadily in the white glare.

There was not an inch of ocean within their lines that was not ablaze. A fragment of driftwood could not have floated into that vivid sea without being detected by a hundred eyes.

_The Invader Off the Coast_

Now the news came fast and faster, as the fleet, and its hovering spies, came nearer.

The _Alabama_, sister-ship to the _Kearsarge_, by haphazard fortune got between two enemy scouts and the main fleet, and accomplished by sudden attack what she never could have accomplished by speed. She sank them within twenty minutes, and returned without injury. It was 13-inch guns against 8-inch, and the story was as it always is. The inferior enemy ships went down like pasteboard, under the fire of the turret guns on the American vessel.

On the same day, almost at the same hour, the scout cruiser _Birmingham_, at the other end of the enemy line, sent report that the destroyer _Bainbridge_, tiniest of the division, had driven her two 18-inch torpedoes home and sunk an armored cruiser that had fallen out of line to repair some unknown injury to its machinery. The _Bainbridge_ did not tell its own story. The little boat and her men were blasted into nothing within ten minutes by a battle-cruiser that had turned to protect her mate.

These disasters, that might have been appalling to a lesser sea-power, left the great navy of the Coalition unshaken. Steadily, imperturbably, it kept on its way.

So there came the day when coasters and small craft sped wildly into the shelter of Boston and New York Harbors, into Long Island Sound and into the Delaware and Chesapeake Bays. They had seen the enemy.

Next morning, in a gray, transparent, peaceful April dawn, watchers on the coast, gazing across the empty, flat Atlantic, to the immense half-circle of the horizon, saw innumerable tiny objects just sticking up above the rim of the sea. Through the glass they seemed to be little perches of skeleton iron built in the deep ocean.

Set at beautifully precise distances apart, they dotted the sharply outlined edge of water and sky, north and south, far beyond vision.

Innocent and quiet they appeared, as they stood there, growing slowly, very slowly, up out of the far sea.

And the roaring presses, spouting forth extra editions east, west, north and south, told the United States of America:

INVADER APPEARS OFF AMERICAN COAST

II

THE COAST BOMBARDED

Never, even in after years, was it determined whence the news of the enemy ships came first. Almost as easily might a land invaded by locusts have decided what eye first saw the coming cloud, or at what precise spot.

“Warship on horizon. Standing in. Slowly.” It came from the keeper of Peaked Hill Bar Life-Saving Station at the far end of Cape Cod’s sweeping sand-arm. From the crest of the Navesink Highlands, standing steep out of the Atlantic at New York’s harbor entrance, men saw ships. On the high place their eyes commanded a view eighteen miles out to sea. At that extreme distance were the tops of fighting craft, lying safely outside of the zone of fire from the big guns in Sandy Hook’s harbor-defenses.

From his lantern 163 feet high the lighthouse keeper of Barnegat on the New Jersey coast, forty miles south of the Navesink, saw tops above his horizon. “Ships standing off here,” came the word from Cape Ann, north of Boston.

Philadelphia heard from Absecon Light and cried to Washington that the enemy was preparing to land on its coast. Boston cried to Washington for ships and men. New York telegraphed and telegraphed again and sent delegations on a special train.

Washington faced the clamor, the appeals half-beseeching and half-furious, with a great stern aspect, new in a Republic wherein the rulers are the servants who must heed public demands. This coming invasion was unprovoked. The Administration needed no party behind it now; for it knew that this was to be a fight for life, and that only the sword could decide. And it had given the sword to the army and navy without conditions.

“It is the least we can do,” the President had said. “Long ago they warned the Nation. The Nation would not give them the tools they needed. Now that there is nothing left except to do their best, they shall be left to do it in their own way.”

So the word went abroad among the politicians: “The army and navy have the bit in their teeth.” And the politicians, once so powerful, went helplessly to the Departments, to ask what they might tell their people.

“Tell them,” said the Admiral, “that there is nothing to say--yet. Here! We are sending out a bulletin.” He passed it over.

_The Sea Strategy an Invader Would Employ_

“The enemy fleet,” said the bulletin, “has expanded its line enormously to threaten many far separated points simultaneously, and thus mask its actual design for landing. Our ships and air scouts, and the army air scouts, are trying to penetrate the screen of cruisers, destroyers and enemy air-craft to find the real fleet with the convoys.”

“But is this not a chance for the navy to attack the scattered enemy ships?” asked one.

“Opportunities may occur,” answered the Admiral. “But the business of our fleet is to keep itself in battle formation.”[12]

The sea-coast cities read the bulletin and held their breath. Through their streets thundered their traffic, as in peace. But the exchanges were closed--had closed half an hour after opening, in panic. Even in that short time, a thousand fortunes had been destroyed: and men passing outside had heard from within a vast noise of cries and shrieks as of animals.

The banks were closing. The streets leading to the railroad stations from the financial centers were clogged by slowly moving but madly crowding automobiles and cabs and trucks. Everything on wheels had been pressed into service. On one open truck, guarded by half a dozen men who showed automatic pistols ostentatiously, were bags of gold. The United States sub-Treasuries were being emptied. Men tore at securities in their safe-deposit vaults and stuffed them into valises, and ran. The treasure of the cities was being sent inland.

In front of the newspaper offices stood the citizens. They stood so closely crowded that there was no passage through those parts of the towns. Their throngs were so great that from their outskirts only those could read the announcements who were armed with field glasses. These fortunate ones told the news as it appeared: and it was repeated to the crowds in the side-streets, who packed the roads from house-edge to edge.

All these great crowds were utterly silent. There was no sound from them, except for the voices of those who passed the news on. A man looking from a high window in a newspaper office suddenly stepped back, with a choking in his throat. “It is--it is,” he said, and choked again, “as if they were waiting for the end of the world.”

_A Strategical Shelling of the Coast_

Incessantly the bulletins spoke. Lighthouses, coast-guards, patrols, harbor defenses, ships, air-scouts wirelessed their reports to Washington, and Washington flung it swiftly through the land.

Nantucket had seen ships. There were ships moving toward the Long Island coast as if to threaten New York. Atlantic City on the southern New Jersey coast, and Rockport in New England sent out warning.

It was a still, warm morning, heavy with the soft, humid air that early spring lays on the cities of the sea. There was no breeze, except for a languorous breathing from the distant

ocean, that stole up the harbors and scarcely moved the air. Suddenly that brooding, heavy air was shaken. One! Two! Three!

Afterward, when men compared the time, they knew that it was heard at the same instant at New York and Boston, and all the stretches of coast between them and beyond. Even in that moment of fear, there were thousands who instinctively looked at their watches and timed it. It was exactly half-past ten when the first shot sounded. Very regularly, almost somnolently, came the far-off shocks through the air. There were half-minute intervals between them, quite exact.

The last boom was heard at eleven. Long before that the bulletins had begun to tell that ships were shelling the coast. Duxbury Beach near Boston was being shelled. Long Branch and Asbury Park were bombarded. Amagansett on Long Island was in flames.

“It has stopped,” said the bulletins, then, “The ships have ceased firing.”

Then there came news from the harbor defenses. Two ships, said Plum Island at the east end of Long Island Sound, had engaged the defenses at long range without effect. A ship had come in east of Coney Island, just outside of the zone of fire from Sandy Hook, reported Fort Hamilton, and dropped shells into Brooklyn’s suburbs.

Now the crowds were silent no longer. Long years afterward, old men told how on that still April morning they were in quiet places on the outskirts of the great cities, and heard from there a great, strange sound as of a vast æolian harp. It was the noise of multitudes, risen.

They stormed their City Halls, roaring for soldiers. They tried to rush their armories, demanding weapons. To Washington flashed the dreaded news of Mobs. “Troops must be sent at once,” said the cities.

The old Chief of Staff, with “the bit in his teeth,” dropped the dispatches on the floor. “Let ’em handle their own mobs,” said he.

_Not Enough Men to Guard Even the Water Supply of New York and Boston_

“Handle your own mobs!” he said again, to The Boss from New York, who appeared with a flaming face.

But The Boss had the bit in his teeth, too. Those dispatches, and long distance telephone messages from close lieutenants, had filled him with a dread that was bigger than the new-born dread of the old soldier. “I’ve broken bigger men than you!” he roared. “A thousand times bigger! Once and for the last time, are you going to send the army to protect us?”

“Once, and for the last time,” said the General, quietly, “no!”

The Boss looked at him. His eyes glared. Then, all at once, he saw that in the General’s face that gave him a big, new, overwhelming knowledge. He saw that the new word “NO” had been born in Washington; and that he and his henceforth would have to admit that it meant “NO.”

It hit him like a club. Something came from his throat that was not a sob, yet strangely like one. “Then what--then--are we going to everlasting smash?”

“Listen,” said the General, gravely calm as in the beginning. He laid his hand on the politician’s shoulder. “We have swept together the stuff that you and your kind gave us in these past years. Up there,” he pointed north, “in Connecticut, our officers have been fighting to make an army of it--of battalions that have no regiments, of divisions that are not divisions, of riflemen who never learned to shoot and of cavalry that never learned to maneuver. But even if all that mess were not a mess--if all these young men were fit to fight in the battle line this moment, there are not enough of them to guard even the water-supply of New York and Boston.”[13]

“Then you won’t put any men into the city?”

“To defend a city from within is an act of desperation, no matter how big one’s army is,” said the General. “The place to defend a city is as far away from it as you can meet the enemy.”

“But the newspapers say that you haven’t men enough to stop him.” The Boss had dismissed all attempt to bluster. “Isn’t there a chance?”

“Not if he comes in the force we expect--and he will be sure to come so.” The General did not endeavor to soften his statement. He spoke sharp and short, “And remember--the cities are not the United States. Our business is to keep the army in the field for the Union, not for New York or Boston or even Washington.

There is a price to be paid--and perhaps the cities must pay it.”

“And you’ll pay the price, too,” muttered the Chief of Staff, looking northward toward New England from his window after the politician had gone. “You’re paying it now, with sweat and nerves; and you’ll pay it in lives.”

_A Militia That Cannot Shoot_

There, in Connecticut, lay the army, looking formidable enough. Radiating in beautiful precision from a central point, were miles of tents separated by geometrically straight rows of company streets. Over all the great space, afoot and horseback, in companies and troops, in squadrons and battalions, moved spruce, agile figures in the trim efficient campaign dress of the American soldier. Glossy, bright flags floated everywhere. The sweet bugles sang.

It would have seemed a very harmonious, solidly welded whole, that army, to any layman who could have had a bird’s eye view of its business-like assembly, its great parks of artillery, its full corrals of mounts, its endless rows of tents and equipage and its enormous trains of transport vehicles and ambulances.

But at one end of that great, orderly, formidable camp were hordes of organized militia firing at targets. With the enemy on the coast, these men were still being broken in to shoot--not to become sharp-shooters, but to qualify merely as second-class marksmen that they might at least learn enough about the use of their rifles to be not entirely useless in battle. Ever since the militia of the coast States had come in, small-arms experts of the army had been clutching greedily at every bit of daylight, to teach 14,000 men how to shoot--14,000 men of an armed force that was offered by the States to be the country’s first line of defense.[14]

Into that camp had marched a month before, with flags flying, bands gallantly playing, weapons gleaming, one whole State’s militia organization of which only 700 men had fired regularly in practice during the whole preceding year. Only 525 of even that small number had qualified as shots, and more than a thousand were carried as utterly unqualified. Of that entire State force, only one man had passed through the regular army qualification course with the rifle, and only twelve had qualified at long range practice.[15]

“Brave?” said the hapless General of Brigade who had them under his hands. “Brave? If we gave ’em the order, they would charge an army with their bare hands, sir--and they might as well.”

He fluttered a sheet of paper in his hard, hairy fist. The sheet showed 25,353 organized militia enrolled as “trained men armed with the rifle.” Of these 15,927 men had qualified sufficiently to be fit for firing in battle. There were a thousand men in that command whose records showed that they had not fired their rifles a single time in a year: and the General had reason to believe that many of these never had used weapons except as instruments of parade.[16]

_State Artillerymen That Have Never Qualified as Gunners._

A mile away, in the artillery encampment, a field artillery battery of regulars from Fort Sill swept their guns at top speed through passages so tight that it seemed impossible for the flying wheels to clear them. Sharply they wheeled and came to position, just as a militia battery arrived.

The militia guns were hauled by horses that their State had hastily hired or bought. The brutes had hauled trucks in a city; and in trying to wheel, one of them straddled the gun. In a moment the gun-team was around and over the guns in a confusion of chains and leather.

“Do you stable your mounts on top of your guns in the milish?” shouted a regular, gleefully. But he and his fellows helped good-naturedly enough.

“We never had horses till now,” growled one of the militiamen, who was stooping to tug at a trace-chain. It made his face fiery red. “State wouldn’t give us any, and we didn’t have stables, anyway, in our armory. So we couldn’t break in any mounts.”

“Nor you couldn’t break yourselves in, chum, I guess,” spoke another regular. “How the devil did you get gunnery practice? Haul your little gun out by hand to the firing ground?”

The militiamen fumbled at the trace again. “Didn’t fire it,” he said, without looking up.

“All right, milish!” shouted the regular. “Shake! You’re game, all right, you boys! Willing, by gum, to face the Hell that you’re going to get, and not a gunner in your battery. Fine leather-headed citizens you must have, back home.”

“They didn’t think much of artillery at home,” grinned the militiaman. “Thought that infantry was all they needed. They sort of thought we just had a little toy to play with.”

“You ain’t going to be lonely, milish,” grunted the regular, sauntering off. “Tie a necktie around your horses and then go over yonder. You’ll find three other batteries from three other States that never had no horses, never had no mounted drills, and never qualified as gunners.”[17]

_Cavalry Without Horses and Undrilled_

A grizzled Colonel of Cavalry rode by. Under his shaggy eye-brows he shot a glance at the helpless battery, and swore. He dated back to Indian times, and they said of him in the army that he knew nothing except cavalry tactics and horses. But he knew them; and he was breaking his old heart over the militia cavalry that had come under his command.