Part 5

With the propellor blocked, the submarine must rise; for only with its propellor thrusting and its horizontal fins set to hold it down, can the submarine stay under. It submerges, not by sinking but by diving with main strength.

Another rather vivid picture flashed into the Lieutenant’s mind. It was not a picture, this time, of a wolf among sheep. It was a picture of a sudden enormous commotion among those quiet net-buoys, as of something struggling down below; and then of a violent surge as the tangled nets were dragged to and fro by a helpless submarine, held fast by the tail.[34]

A breeze arose with the rising sun, and the water roughened. The submarine stopped. It could not meet rough water while it was awash. Although its buoyancy when it was sealed was such that its propellor had to thrust full speed to make it dive, yet with its hatches open two hundred gallons of water, far less than is contained in a single big wave, would send it down like a tin can.[35]

The Commander held on as long as he could, watching the whitening water in the east, and watching the transports.

He saw that at a thousand yards’ distance around them (just what he would have chosen as neat torpedo range), there lay a little fleet of gun-boats, all thrusting out booms with steel nets, that made them look oddly as if they were hooped and wide-skirted. Disposed in an oval, they guarded the transports with a second wall of steel wire.

And overhead, soaring in spirals, never flying far away, and always returning, were three naval planes. The Commander of the M-9 knew that they were waiting and watching for just one thing--the “shadow” of a submerged submarine.[36]

This enemy, plainly, was taking no chances. The fleet had power and time. It bent them to one object--to land its men safely. It would not engage the harbor defenses, and so open itself to the risks of plunging fire and torpedo attack. It would not blockade harbors, and so make itself a chosen mark for such terrors as M-9.

_The Three Harbor Gates to New York and Boston_

Very scientifically, very thoughtfully, had the enemy staked out the vital spot at which he had decided to strike. Here, facing each to each almost like the salients of a fortification, lay three harbor gates to the northeastern United States--Buzzards Bay, gashing deeply into Massachusetts: Narragansett Bay, almost cutting Rhode Island in two: and the eastern entrance to Long Island Sound and the cities of Connecticut.[37]

Open any one of these gates, and it opened the way at one blow to both New York and Boston.

These three sea-salients were greatly armed for defense. In each harbor lay batteries of 12-inch all-steel rifled cannon. Hidden under facings of earth, steel and concrete, they sat on disappearing carriages and pneumatic gun-lifts that would swing them up as if they weighed ounces instead of tons, and instantly plunge them back again into cover after firing.

Deep under earth embankments, squatting in concrete-lined graves, 12-inch mortars, sixteen to a group, stared upward at the patches of sky over their heads, which was all that their men would see while they were firing, however bitter the fight might be.

A single shot from one of the long, graceful rifles might sink a ship, if it were well placed. A single salvo from the mortars, the sixteen firing together, assuredly would. And they could do it. Aimed by mathematics, they were sure to strike the spot.[38]

A score of serving devices in the defenses were slaves to the steel champions. Searchlights in armor waited like men-at-arms to point with a long white finger at their prey. Mine fields and emplacements and cable conduits were there to force the ships to steer where the guns could strike them most surely. Masked by trees and mounds, concealed by every device against betrayal, were range-finders and fire-control stations.

Here sat experts who had studied the most occult questions of arithmetic, geometry, surveying, navigation, and cartography for one purpose--to direct those long guns true. They were provided with exquisite instruments for calculating angles and distances to an inch, though the point to be ascertained were ten nautical miles and more away.

Before them lay charts of the sea-area that they were guarding. Let a ship come within the limit of their apparatus, and in the time required to speak into a telephone the gun-pits miles away down the defense-line would crack with the explosion of tons of smokeless powder.

They were nearly perfect, those works--as engineering works. They were fully armed with the engines to make them malignant to the ultimate fatal degree. The ten-mile area of sea that lay so bright and dimpled that morning might well have been black as the Wings of Death; for a few little motions of the waiting men under the pretty grassy mounds would unfold those pinions.

_The Joint in America’s Armor_

But under the iron visages was weakness. In none of the defenses on this morning when the time had come for their test, were there more than one-half the number of men required to hold them.[39]

They could fight the guns, so long as the action remained a ship-to-fort action; but if the enemy attacked at the rear, from the land, they were not in sufficient force to meet him and throw him back. Attacked from the land, the men of the defenses would have to retire to the inner keep and fight from shelter with rapid-fire guns. And when the defenses thus began to defend themselves, their hour would have struck.[40]

Still, for the time they were deadly. The enemy fleet paid them the supreme tribute of scrupulous respect. Not a vessel ventured after dawn into the deadly circle of their reach. To make sure that no vessel should expose itself by accident, the mine-layers of the enemy fleet were even then moving well outside of the zone of extreme fire, and laying immense steel buoys, painted a vivid scarlet.

These scarlet buoys outlined an area of safety that was shaped somewhat like a pentagon with its apex at Block Island and its base on the Rhode Island coast between Watch Hill and Point Judith.

It was a base marking out five miles of beach that was safe both from the fire of the Long Island Sound defenses and from the shots of the Narragansett defenses.

Here day-light revealed a land occupied in orderly, quiet, perfect military manner. Inland, as far as the naval guns could protect them, lay the men of the advance landing party behind their machine-gun positions. For miles beyond that, east and west, their patrols had cut telegraph and telephone wires, and occupied points that commanded roads by which attacking forces might approach.

On the beach, where the blocks and tackle and hoisting derricks had been rigged in the night, gun-floats were being brought to the beach with cannon and caissons. Under the pull of centrifugal blocks these were hoisted out and dropped in shore on railway tracks that led over the sand to firm ground.

There motor trucks and traction engines, all brought to land during the night, took them and hurried them to positions ready for fight, or to park them ready for moving when the advance should begin.

_Destroying the Railroad of Southern New England_

From vantage points inland, from hills on Fisher’s Island, from such venturesome spies as M-9, went the news to Washington, and so through the land. The crowds in the cities, dense even at that early hour of the morning, read on the bulletin boards:

“Enemy effected a landing during the night on Rhode Island between Narragansett Bay and Long Island Sound. Transports are now close in preparing to put troops ashore. Scouts report four liners aggregating one hundred thousand tons. Army officials estimate that at the usual allowance of two men per ton this means fifty thousand men. More transports waiting under Block Island.”

“Now is the time to strike ’em!” It was not one man in one crowd who said it. In every city where there were crowds there arose these speakers--the excitable, passionate orators who are born of every great crisis and who, in such moments, find willing listeners.

“Now is the time to strike ’em, before they can bring more men ashore! They should have been attacked in the night! What kind of Generals have we got, to let ’em land, instead of throwing ’em back into the sea as fast as they came? Where is our army? Keeping itself safe?”

The army, with ten thousand civilian workers impressed as they were needed, was destroying the railroad of southern New England. It was tearing up the shore line of the New York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad from New Haven to New London and from New London to Providence. It was throwing the rails on flat cars to be whirled away westward and northward. Concrete and stone embankments, steel bridges, and tunnels were sent skyward through the night with dynamite.

All the connecting system from New Haven north to Hartford and from New London north to Worcester was being destroyed. Locomotives and rolling stock that could not be removed were being sent down grades to crash into wreckage, or blown up or set afire. A curious intoxication of destruction was on the population that night. Prosperous, dignified citizens came out with axes or with oil and fire, and helped in the ruin.

In fire and dirt and amid shattering roars of explosion and rumbling of falling trestles they worked on hundreds of miles of iron highway, desperately, frantically, shouting aloud, willing to tear their soft hands and to risk limb and even life, rather than to wait inactive, and listen for news, and dread what was to happen.

They were tearing up their civilization; and they did it with a savage delight, that nothing might be left to the foe.

_The American Army’s Lack of “Eyes”_

In the Army Headquarters, where a single short order had set loose all this saturnalia of destruction, the Commanding General and his staff were busied with something that was of more immediate importance to them. Desperately they were thrusting out for information, and always they were baffled by superior numbers, superior resources.

They had pushed cavalry toward the coast, and it had been driven back by artillery and long-range fire from the ships, whose aim was controlled by aeroplane signals from the sky and wireless from the shore. They had pushed out motor scouts, and the artillery had found them. Always, at every approach, during the night or since daylight, the ships’ fire had swept the roads.

Now, scarcely an hour after sunrise, the army aeroplanes had come back, after only haphazard scouting. They had not been able to fly over the invaded coast. Wherever they tried it, they reported, they were met by enemy planes in superior numbers.

One United States air-man had been driven by four enemy planes into Narragansett Bay where he had been picked up by boats from the Newport Torpedo Station. Two others, borne down by three enemy machines faster than they, and fired at by anti-air-craft guns from an in-lying ship, had barely managed to escape behind the defenses of Fort Wright in the Sound.

The others had been pressed back, inexorably, by the screen of naval planes that swarmed over the coast.[41]

The enemy planes came from the sea. To the marveling eyes in the American defenses, it seemed as if the ocean were spewing them forth. One after another rose from the Atlantic under Block Island.

Three strange vessels lay there. They had funnels set extremely far aft, like certain types of clumsy tramp-ships, but they were big as passenger liners and their lines showed all the efficiency of the naval architect. The great sweep of their decks forward was as bare as the deck of a racing schooner yacht.

A structure on short trestles like a skid-way rose from this deck at the bow, projecting slightly.

It was there that the aeroplanes were being spewed. These were mother-ships.

Torpedo-netted, guarded by destroyers, guarded even by a small semi-rigid dirigible that hovered a thousand feet high over-head, they were sending out spies to search the land.

_Twenty-Five Aeroplanes Against a Swarm_

The two United States fliers, standing by their machines in Fort Wright, looked at the ascending swarm. “No wonder!” said one. “You know how many one of those Nations had at last accounts? Twelve hundred!”[42]

“And we’ve got thirteen in the Army and twelve in the Navy!” His companion laughed. “And Servia had sixty, before the Great War!”

They said no more, but watched in silence. That ascending, continually growing line of flying things was like something that was writing into the sky the word: “Resources!”

Suddenly the American air-men noticed that these new machines were not flying to the coast near them. They were turning off, in regular order. One turned west, to fly over Long Island. The next one turned east, toward Buzzards Bay. They alternated thus till the entire division had separated, and disappeared.

One of the scouts slapped his thigh. “I believe,” said he, “that they are going to show themselves to Boston and New York!”

That was at nine o’clock in the morning. At noon the crowds in the two cities were startled by a distant roar that grew, almost before they had first heard it, into a thundering that shook the air. They stared upward and beheld the first squadron of armed flying machines that America ever had seen.

IV

THE COAST DEFENSES FALL

Armored, with the bright colors of the enemy on their under-bodies, the aeroplanes from the enemy fleet flew low. What few anti-aircraft guns the United States possessed were with the army. Around the peaceful American cities were no encircling fortifications, no batteries, no military works that might conceal marksmen. The air-men knew that there was nothing to fear.

They skimmed close to the State House on Boston’s Beacon Hill. They flew over the tall municipal building of New York and dipped toward the City Hall. They appeared over Providence and Fall River, over Brockton, over Bridgeport and New Haven. They passed over every one of the factory-cities of New Jersey that crowd to be near New York’s harbor.

Where they appeared it was as if they bore some instant charm to turn the world to stone.

All the city noises stopped, dead. All motion stopped. Wheels stopped turning and feet stopped moving and every white face was turned upward. For that long moment of dumb fear, men saw nothing except the wide-winged bodies. They heard nothing except the yelping and droning of the hundred-horse-power motors over them.

Then they fled. Motor-men and drivers bent low, and yelled, and sent their vehicles ahead blindly. The crowds rushed every door-way. They fought for the protection of narrow cornices as if they were bomb-proofs. They squeezed themselves close to the sides of buildings, and clung to smooth iron and granite, and stared upward, waiting for bombs.

Instead of bombs, they saw things raining down gently, lightly--little weighted pennants that circled downward in lovely spirals and dropped on the streets with scarcely a sound.

Into every crowded street, into every open square of half a hundred cities that day, the hostile air-men dropped these pennants.

They were printed. They bore proclamations addressed to the people of America.

THE ENEMY’S PROCLAMATION

“Our armies have landed,” said the proclamation. “We shall advance on your cities at once. Any attempt to defend them will mean their destruction. Civilians are warned against making any demonstration, whether with arms or otherwise. Infractions of this Rule of War will be punished by summary execution. Houses from which hostile acts are committed will be destroyed. Towns whose civilian population resists will be destroyed. Take warning!”

Recovering from their shock of fear, the first impulse of the Americans who read these proclamations was one of rage. Their cities had grown proud in unchallenged greatness. These pennants, slowly raining from their sky, were infuriating insults.

Had the invader appeared in that moment, the people would have torn up the paving blocks to fight him.

In the State House in Boston there were said the words that uttered the emotion of all the cities along the Atlantic coast. In that old, rebellious town, where American liberty had been nurtured in the very presence of an armed foe, there were gathered many eminent citizens, with the officials, the Mayor and the Governor of their State.

One of these officials had a pennant in his hands. “What can we do?” he asked. “If we had all the militia of the State here, we would have less than 6,000 men. If the foe arrives, and lays his guns on the town--gentlemen, they will be guns that fire high explosives and incendiary shells. We have nothing to fight with. If the army cannot check him before he arrives, we must--to save our people’s lives, we must surrender peaceably!”[43]

He turned to a man who bore a family name identified with Boston’s history from the time of its settlement. His ancestors had stood in Faneuil Hall with James Otis when he dedicated it to the cause of liberty.

“_Let Us Destroy It!_”

He took the proclamation, held it for a moment while he looked around the circle, and then crumpled it suddenly, angrily, in his fist. Throwing it to the floor, he set his foot on it.

“I say,” he cried with flashing eyes, “let him destroy it! Better still, let us destroy it! When the enemy approaches, let us send our Boston town up in flame and fragments! Let us leave him not so much as a rivet to pick up for loot!”

There were many men there, of many minds. They had many interests to guard, and many responsibilities to bear. But for a moment he carried them with him. They waved their hands and shouted assent.

It was only for a moment. “If all thought like you!” said one, an old, grave man. “But we have 700,000 people, and they are not soldiers or philosophers. They’re human men. It is laid on us to protect them, at whatever price to our National pride. If humiliation is the price that we must pay for our past carelessness, why, gentlemen, we must pay it, bitter though it is.”

So it was in New York, in Philadelphia, in a score of cities between and around them. Everywhere was the first outburst of fury and unrecking heroism, and then the sober second thought born not of cowardice but of cold logic. This north-eastern Atlantic seaboard with its chain of twelve million city dwellers, was no Holland to drown itself under its own sea in order to destroy its foe. These cities were no Moscows, to devour themselves in fire that the enemy might perish with them. This was the United States of America, and this was the Twentieth Century--and the men, no less brave, no less patriotic, faced the conditions of their place and time.

They faced it from Portland, Maine, to the Capes of Virginia. If the army could not stop the invader, they must fall.

They formed committees of safety. They wrestled with their top-heavy municipal machineries to make them answer the sharp need. Under the stress, all the defects of their political rule stood out uncompromisingly, not to be denied. Their over-staffed departments were lost in the ingenious mazes of their own contriving. There was only one answer to the inextricable, blind confusion. It was martial law.

_Volunteers Who Could Not Even Be Shod_

But here, too, there was inefficiency--inefficiency that had been cultivated and tended, like a plant, by politics through the heedless years. In the armories there were no reserve supplies of weapons or ammunition for the volunteers who came to offer their services. Although the United States government had given the States enough money annually for many years back to equip them to full war-strength; and although the militia nowhere had maintained even one-half of that strength, there were no reserves of blankets, of uniforms, of tents, of cots. Doctors who offered their services found that there was no place for them, because there were no ambulances, no field hospitals, no surgical instruments, no anæsthetics and no medicines. There had not been enough for the troops that took the field, though every company had less men than even its insufficient peace strength demanded.[44]

The volunteers could not even be shod. Those who were accepted had to drill in their worthless street shoes, that never could survive the test of rough roads and mud and water.

Politics! Politics! It stared the appalled citizens in the face wherever they turned, as it had stared them in the face for a generation--but now they had to look and see! It was politics that had left their State militias to blunder along, each by itself, without agreement or settled plan. It was politics that now had sent their plucky, intelligent, capable young men into the field insufficiently equipped, trained or organized. It was politics that now left their cities bare, to be made a sport of.

At the recruiting depots of the regular army it was politics again that over-bore the recruiting officers with eager, courageous applicants whom they could not use. What they needed now was men who were ready NOW--not men who needed six months’ training. These applicants, offering themselves by thousands, were city-born and city-bred. They were men who never in all their lives had slept except under a roof; who never had lain in rain and storm; who had been saved by their city from doing a dozen simple things that men of the open do for themselves without a second thought.

Not one in a thousand of these volunteers ever had built a fire of sticks, or pitched a tent or even washed dishes. Not one of five thousand ever had held a gun in his hands. There were thousands there, and thousands again, who did not even know what it was to be in the dark--for they had slept all their lives in the electrically lighted city.

_Needed--Not Men But Reserves!_

It was not men that the regular army needed. It was reserves! And never a Congress of all the Congresses that had talked and voted and appropriated had voted a practical system of army reserves![45]

Of all the men who had been trained by previous army experience, the War Department could not call on one unless he chose to volunteer. If those men--invaluable to the country at this moment--offered themselves, they offered themselves one by one, here and there and everywhere, scattered through a land of three and a quarter million square miles. Enlisted thus, they were futile individuals lost in hordes

of raw recruits. Could they have been called together by their government, they would have formed perfect regiments, ready for instant, efficient, priceless service.

While the United States, civilian and military, was working hopelessly to make up in desperate hours for long years of waste, the efficient, prepared, resourceful invader was landing his army, not only without losing a man, but without getting a man’s feet wet. So perfect were the dispositions of this expedition that the commander had been able to order, “Our troops must land perfectly dry,” and the order was carried out.[46]

Every transport had three broad gangways to a side. Never for a moment were these gangways bare of equipped men, moving file after file into the enormous flat-bottomed landing barges. Never for a moment was the sea without long tows of them, each bearing two hundred men to shore with their rifles between their knees, ready.[47]

_Preparedness Versus Unpreparedness_