Part 6

In the camp of the United States Army at that moment men were breaking green horses for cavalry and artillery purposes. On the coast, the enemy’s four-decked horse transports were sending trained mounts into broad floats with derricks and slings, lowering away with head and tail lines to prevent struggling, with nose lines to bridles to prevent them from turning in the air, with men standing by below to put little bags of salt into each horse’s mouth to quiet it as soon as it touched the floats.[48]

Nothing had been forgotten, nothing left to be improvised. The horse-floats had hinged sterns. Backed into the beach, these hinged boards dropped down and formed gang-planks. Sailors threw collision mats on them to prevent slipping. It required less than a minute to lower a horse from the ships to the floats. In less than half a minute each horse was unloaded from them and set ashore. To empty each float of its cargo of twenty horses, and to have each craft off the beach and under tow again for another load, was a matter of less than forty minutes.

Almost as swiftly, at another end of the beach, guns were being landed from the same type of floats, shoal and wide-beamed, that could be run well up on shore and could withstand the pounding of the surf. They brought four light field pieces with their limbers to a load, or two heavy field artillery pieces. They were landing field howitzers of calibers that the United States Army did not possess. This artillery has been coming ashore for hours. It had begun to come before dawn. Still there was more arriving.

Yet the beach never was occupied for a moment. The guns were rushed inland, the men were rushed inland, the horses were rushed inland. Twelve hours after the first landing party had prepared the way, Rhode Island was occupied by 30,000 foot, 3,000 cavalry and 50 batteries of artillery--almost two full divisions that lay in a great belligerent front snarling with guns--a perfect, complex, often-assembled, often-tested machine.[49]

This was the time for the American army to strike, before the enemy could increase his forces and move forward to attack.

But the American army was a complex machine that never had been assembled before, or tested before. The Regular Army never had been together with the Organized Militia, and the Organized Militias of the various States never had seen each other. “An uncoördinated army of allies,” its Commander had called it, “with all the inherent weakness of allies, emphasized by the unusual number of allies.”[50]

_The Uncoördinated and Unorganized American Army_

It was an army of which neither the regulars nor the militia had been organized into divisions at the time when it should have been done, the only time when it could have been done--in the long days of peace. Until it was so organized, it was an army only in numbers. For operation against a prepared, organized enemy it was not an army but merely a multitude of units, whose trained and perfect ones would inevitably be sacrificed to the errors and weaknesses of the imperfect ones.[51]

The division is the true Weapon of War. It alone contains in vitally correct proportion the various troops that must sustain each other when cannons and explosives begin that arbitration from which there is no appeal on earth. It is the division, and the division alone, that possesses all the limbs and organs--the signal corps and cavalry that are the eyes and ears: the infantry and engineers and sanitary corps that are the body and feet: and the artillery that is the smiting fists.[52]

In the City Hall Park in New York, a speaker, lifted above the crowd that watched the newspaper bulletins, was cursing the army amid savage cheers. He cursed its Generals and its men because they did not fight. He cursed the Government.

The crowd listened, and forgot that again and again they had been warned that this would be if war should ever come.

With the blind wrath of helpless men they could reason only that at this moment when everything should be done, nothing was being done. They shouted approval when the frantic orator screamed: “Tell Washington to order ’em to fight. Fight! Fight! That’s what they’re for!”

The crowds could perceive only that they had an army that did not strike a blow. They could not know that the American commanders were fighting a better fight just then by fighting to organize, than if they fought with guns. They could not know that to these officers, grown gray in the service of their country, this fight was more heart-breaking than it would have been to fight in the hot blast of shells.

_Regiments of Infantry Without a Single Cannon to Protect Them_

To organize an army in the face of the foe is like organizing a fire department when the streets of a city are already in flames. This is what the Chiefs of the Army were trying to do--had been doing, day and night, desperately, ever since the troops had come together. And in Washington, in the archives of Congress, there were lying sheaves of reports, gathering dust, that had demanded nothing except the chance to do it in time.

Here were regiments of militia so “organized” by their States that if they were permitted to go into battle as they were, 170 companies of infantry would face the enemy without a single cannon to protect them. Of all the eastern militia cavalry in that camp, only one regiment had a machine gun company.[53]

Even the regular army was efficient only in those things that could be maintained and perfected by the steady, personal efforts of officers and men. In everything that depended on legislation it was lacking. Instead of 150 men to a company of infantry some had only 65. Its troops of cavalry were not full. It had no siege artillery corps. It was a skeleton army which, according to optimists, was to be clothed with substance when war arrived. Now war had come; and to clothe that skeleton with untrained men would have meant that for every 65 skilled soldiers there would be 85 utterly useless ones in each company.

Shortage of men was not the only curse that was laid on the army by the policy of neglect. In the enemy headquarters, two or at the most three orders were sent to department chiefs for every movement. In the American headquarters, the staff had to deal with units. Every problem had to be handled in detail by men who should have been free to direct one great, comprehensive movement. Every order issued by the Commanding General demanded intolerable duplication.

_American Commanders Who Had Never Commanded_

The General had under him commanders of brigade who had commanded posts that contained only fragments of regiments. Their brigades, never assembled in any one place, not only did not approximate to war conditions, but had to be disrupted and divided and re-formed before the General could dare to offer them in battle. Hardly a brigade commander had under him troops that he had known and trained and handled himself.[54]

With exception of those who had been on the Mexican border, when a part of the small army had been mobilized in a body for the first time, these men had tried to prepare themselves with the best that Congress would give them--battalions and companies and single batteries instead of assembled armies, because the politicians would not let the army come together.

The 49 army posts of the United States, long a subject of derision among all except those who fattened on them, might well have been symbolized now in that camp by forty-nine skeletons--a skeleton army waiting to lead the other skeleton army to death.[55]

To none was this better known than to the enemy. The invaders’ commander, standing idly with his hands in his pockets, was able to say confidently: “They’ll not bother us seriously. The only thing they’ll do, the only thing they _can_ do, is to retreat when we begin to threaten them.”

He held in his grip the sea, the land and the air. In shore lay ships ready to sweep part of his front with protective fire. On land his advance forces had seized roads and railroads, his engineers were repairing what had been destroyed, and his cavalry was guarding all approaches. His air-men, overwhelmingly numerous, spied on the American army almost with impunity, and parried with sure aerial thrusts all American attempts to spy on their own lines.

The aerial guard, steel-breasted, with the wings of speed and talons of fire, could be broken only by equal numbers, equally terrible. Individual daring, individual skill, were nothing against this armored brood. Five times American fliers rose to try it; and five times they were grappled in mid-air and torn with shot, and dropped to the earth far below. “No more!” said the General in command.

He sat with his chin in his hand, studying the dispatches that were laid before him. They were piled high, though twenty operators and half a dozen aides struggled to eliminate from the torrential confusion the news that might be deemed most reliable.[56]

_The “Fog of War”_

There were messages from Washington, messages from coast defenses, messages from patrols and outposts, from scouts and from company commanders. There were wild reports of enemy invasion from places so far inland that it was palpable that they could not be true. There were reports from places so nearby that they might mean imminent danger.

Excited officials of towns and cities sent long, involved dispatches or hung for long minutes to telephones to recount interminable tales.

One hundred thousand men had landed, according to spies who had made their way into Fort Greble in the Narragansett defenses. It was two hundred thousand, telephoned Providence, transmitting messages from the coast. The army’s own scouts and spies and patrols, groping in insufficient numbers and finding a wall of cavalry and foot and machine gun detachments opposed to them everywhere, sent in estimates that varied all the way from twenty-five thousand to eighty thousand.

These American advance detachments were striking the enemy outposts east and west. Near Watch Hill three American motor cycle companies with machine guns ambushed and cut up two troops of cavalry. American cavalry drove back a battalion of engineers who had begun work on the railroad at Kingston. At Niantic two American motor patrols ran into the fire of a concealed field gun and were destroyed.

From Fort Michie on Gull Island came the news, brought by a Montauk Point fisherman who had managed to make his way across the Sound in a small boat, that men had landed on that end of Long Island. They had destroyed all communication immediately and had seized the railroad leading to New York; but it was impossible to guess how great this force was.[57]

Only one certain fact was developed from all the news. It was that the transports were unloading troops still.

_The Enemy Moves_

Suddenly, almost simultaneously, the American patrols were driven back all along the line. On a front that extended quickly, irresistibly, clear across Washington County, Rhode Island, from east to west, the invader army expanded. It seized Watch Hill. Kingston was occupied in force. Wickford Junction was occupied. Narragansett Pier was flooded, all at once, with men and guns.

With the swiftness of a blow from a fighter’s fist, the invader had struck and won the entire railroad system of the New York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad in Rhode Island, and commanded the way to Providence.

The foe had filled his divisions. Forty thousand men were ready for battle on American soil, with ten thousand in reserve on the coast.

Now the wind turned south-east. Point Judith, Rhode Island’s cape that coast-wise mariners call The Fog-Hole, began to brew one of its April fogs, gray and blind and wet.

Its first effect was kind to the Americans. The enemy air-craft, seeing the vapory bank growing from the sea, fled toward their lines. From all directions they came in, like gulls fleeing before a storm. They could not dare to remain in strange territory. All their fine maps, all their ingenious instruments, would be impotent against it. They came in, and alighted behind their army.

Freed from them, and masked by the fog, the American scouts went forward again and groped once more along the foe’s front. In an

hour field telephones and telegraphs and aerial told the American commander enough to assure him that the enemy’s force in men was at least nearly equal to his own. He knew, too, that the invader had brought up preponderating artillery. Every road, every piece of negotiable country was held by guns.

The American army held tight. In its front, between it and the foe, there was not a rail-line, not a bridge. All had been destroyed. Behind it lay a perfect railroad system, with long trains and giant locomotives under steam, and all the gathered motor vehicles, ready to speed along perfect roads.

So far the fog was kind to the defenders. But the invader, too, was quick to seize its favor.

_The Fishermen Who Caught More Than Lobsters_

Long before, half a dozen men, dressed like fishermen, had made their way out of Narragansett Harbor in a small sloop, and had reported at the enemy headquarters. For a month or more past they had been fishing for lobsters; but they had caught more than lobsters. Their catch lay on the table in the Commander’s tent, in the form of charts with soundings and range lines and distances. They were maps of the mine fields.

As soon as the fog began, these men went aboard a mine-sweeper. It steamed eastward, followed by the others. The sweepers had more than the cables and grapples that make a mine-sweeper’s outfit. Set in rows on the after-deck of each vessel were bulging mines, filled with 300 pounds of trinitrotol.[58]

The fog became so thick that it was hard to say if it were daylight still, or night. Night could only make it more black. It could not increase the obscurity.

In the coast defenses of Long Island Sound and Narragansett Bay every man was straining eyes and ears and nerves. Every gun company was at its weapon. Every gun was loaded. Tall projectiles stood ready with the chains and grapples of the hoists prepared. Men stood waiting in the powder magazines under the batteries.

Nothing to see or hear at Fort Wright on Fisher’s Island. Nothing at Fort Michie on Gull Island. Nothing at Fort Terry on Plum Island. On all the shrouded, swift tide-ways that led into Long Island Sound there was nothing.

There was nothing in front of the Narragansett defenses that eyes could see or ears could hear. Nothing--and then, far out, it was as if a sea-monster had arisen in dying torment, and lashed, and spouted and screamed. Before the riven column of water could fall, there came muffled, thundering explosion under water--one, two, three!

The defenses split the fog with fire. Their mine-protecting batteries had been trained over the fields long since. There was no need for aim. Instantly they swept the hidden sea with shells that would clear twenty acres of water.

Again there was silence and blindness--the unearthly silence of the Atlantic sea-fog. It lay for half an hour, as if there were no such thing as war in the world.

Then once more came the roar and the crash, followed by its submarine echoes. Once more the land-guns raved, firing blind.

_Fighting Mines with Mines_

The enemy was counter-mining. Instead of sweeping, his vessels were dropping mines of their own in the fields, and then, backing off to avoid the fire from the batteries if they could, they exploded them by electric contact, to blow up the American mines with the shock.

Not all the mine-sweepers escaped mines or guns. But there were vessels to spare, and lives to spare. All night the counter-mining went on, and all night the American guns fired into the vapor and the darkness.

The sun arose invisibly. But it climbed, and when it had lifted all its disk above the rim of sea, it showed through the mist as a pale illumination. It was “burning off” the fog.

“It will be clear enough in an hour,” said the executive officer of a battleship under Block Island. The vessel’s wireless began to speak.

On one of the mother-ships men brought out and assembled an armored biplane. Its two fliers stowed range-finding apparatus, aerial telegraph, aneroids and charts in it. There were signal flags and light, brightly silvered balls. Men brought receptacles that contained bombs and adjusted them carefully in place. The fliers waited, watching the fog.

It lessened. It tore away in rifts. All around, the ships became visible.

Seven battle-ships swung around and put on speed and rushed in echelon toward the coast. They steered straight for the mouth of Narragansett Bay, turned just outside of the zone of fire of its defenses, slowed down and steamed across the mouth.

The bi-plane’s engine burst into life. The machine lifted and followed them. It flew high over them and into the bay, climbing.

“They’re over it!” said an officer on a ship, looking at the machine through his glasses.

_Locating the Forts For the Enemy Ships_

Far inside of the bay, so high in air that it was little more than a shining speck, the aeroplane was describing a series of regular, equal circles. All at once, as if it had been painted in the air with a mammoth brush, a jet-black descending streak stood out against the sky, and lengthened steadily toward the earth.

The azimuth and other range-finding instruments at both ends of the battle-ships caught

the angles and ascertained the range to the black smear that still hung in the air, like grease. The aviator had dropped a smoke-bomb to indicate the fort below.

The forward turret of a battleship turned, its hooded rifle lifted its muzzle to an angle of fifteen degrees, and spoke with a great voice.

Eleven miles away a ton of steel rushed from the sky, crashed into the water of the bay roaring, ricochetted, struck again half a mile beyond, and again and again. Four times it rebounded, like a pebble, before it disappeared at last; and each time it filled the air with its clamor, like a suffering thing.[59]

The ships’ wireless caught a signal from the aeroplane. The shot had fallen short. The battleship steamed on, and another one in line opened up the mouth of the harbor and fired.

From the aeroplane fell a silver ball. It glittered in the brightening sun, splendid. “Hit!” went the message to the turret; and the crew there embraced and cheered.

It had hit the outer earth-works of the defenses. It had plunged down with a shock that stunned men in mortar pits and gun-emplacements far away--small wonder, for this thing falling from the sky had struck a blow equal to that of New York’s obelisk plunging into Broadway from the top of Trinity Church steeple.[60]

“_No Effect!_”

“No effect!” reported the watchers in the coast defense to the commandant. Though the impact had shaken the works and the very earth: though the blast from the explosion of its charge had twisted three-inch iron bars within the works, and bent the steel doors of casemates, it had done no harm to the defenses. So well had they been built by the engineers that the rending explosion left a crater for only a moment. The earth rippled down and closed it. The steel and concrete facing underneath held true.[61]

The enemy had the range. Ship after ship passed the entrance, delivered its single shot, proceeded and returned to follow in the circling line. These were the most modern dreadnaughts, firing from 16-inch guns. Their shells tore the earth embankments away in tons and flung dirt high in air and sent it down to bury everything in its way under mounds. But all their fire and all their havoc was in vain, unless they could hit a gun. And the guns were protected by steel armor and concrete and earth piled on earth.

To hit a gun was to attempt to hit a bull’s eye only a few feet square at a range of eleven miles, farther than men can see.

Still the bombardment went on, undeterred. More aeroplanes soared over the defenses now, far out of reach from shots, and circled and signaled. The fire grew. The ships were not hesitating now to wear out the rifling of their guns. They meant to give the defenders no rest.

They were trying for a prize that was worth all the guns in their turrets. They knew that inside of the works there could not be more than a few thousand men, if that much. They knew that all the Coast Artillery forces of the United States combined numbered only 170 companies and that these 170 companies had 27 harbor defense systems to guard. Even if the United States had stripped its other defenses to the utmost, there could not be a sufficient force in these that were now being attacked.[62]

_Only Enough Ammunition to Last Two Hours_

So they poured fire on fire and shot on shot. It was a one-sided duel, for their great guns outranged the 12-inch guns of the defenses. The men in there fired only occasionally, when their observers and range-finders and plotters perceived an opportunity. There was another reason for their slow fire, besides the inability to reach. Those perfect defenses, those perfect products of engineering science, those results of millions on millions of expenditure, contained only enough ammunition for two hours of firing![63]

They waited till the enemy ships should try to force the passage and come within range, that they might make those two hours two hours of unspeakable destruction that should glorify their death with the fiery splendor of bursting ships.

The enemy did not try to force the passage. While they saved their ammunition, these defenses were fearful gladiators to approach. None could come within reach of their steel hands and live.

But the gladiators were gladiators fearful only in front. Steel-gauntleted, armored with steel breast-plates and shin-plates, mightily visored--so they faced the sea. In the back they were naked.

Fire, and noise, and bursting charges, and explosions that made hot gales within the works and whirled men like dried leaves! An hour passed. Still from the sea there came the coughing bellow, that made the air tremble and rolled inland like summer thunder among hills. Still there fell the screaming steel from the sky. Another hour! And still it came.

The sun was over-head. Suddenly, into the naked back of the defenses poured fire and steel that hammered and beat and tore through them. Under it, through flame and smoke and flying dirt appeared shining rows of bayonets. With a yelp 10,000 men poured in.[64]

And through the United States, smiting it into the dumbness of despair, went the news that the great Narragansett defenses had fallen, and that the enemy fleet was entering the harbor.

V

NEW ENGLAND’S BATTLE

America had lost Narragansett Bay, with all its defenses, great guns and government stations, in less than two weeks after the declaration of war!

The generation that faced this disaster had faced many catastrophes which had seemed great disasters. It had seen States razed by cyclones. It had seen giant floods. It had seen magnificent cities thrown down by a shaking earth. Unterrified, it had flung money and men to the stricken places to make them whole. Destroyed cities rose in beauty almost before the dust of their fall had ceased to veil the sun.

Money, money, money! Men, men, men! It seemed that no disaster could be so colossal that the wonderful resources and efficiency of the United States could not mock at it.