Part 8

The army sat tight. It sat tight while New England worked, and Chambers of Commerce and Committees of Safety argued and resolved and argued and could agree on nothing except that the whole thing was a hopeless mess. It sat tight while a hundred millions stared at the mess, and hooted their Congressmen and politicians who wandered around feebly to explain that it was the fault of somebody else.

In Ohio and Indiana the mess was typified. Here in great camps were gathered the organized militia of the western States to be organized, with 300,000 entirely raw volunteers who had everything to learn. These green men were the pick of the country--physically perfect, intelligent, quick to understand. But there was nobody to teach them.

For years the United States had been warned that if the crisis ever should occur, there would not be any officers available for the work of organizing and training recruits. The warning had been whistled down the wind. Congresses that could find ample time to debate about mileage and constructive recesses and pork barrels had never found a time when they could debate this.

Congresses that could always find the money for increased pension rolls never had been able to find the time to lessen the pension rolls of the future by providing trained officers who would protect their soldiers and teach them to stay alive as long as possible instead of rushing to glorious and unnecessary death.[78]

Even as it was, there were not enough officers for the army that was in the field. For training the new men, the Nation had to call on every aged officer in the land, on every otherwise qualified man who was physically unfit for active service, and on foreigners from foreign armies.

_A Land Lacking in War Efficiency_

This army in formation was placed in perfect surroundings. Its health, its sanitation and its water-supply were excellent. It was fed on the best that money could buy. In everything that did not depend on military efficiency, its maintenance was beyond criticism.

Uniforms were being made for it in record time. Mills were producing blankets at a speed never before reached. Wherever Americans could help by the efficient execution of duties that they understood, the result was magnificent.

But in everything that demanded the efficiency of men trained to war, the land was entirely lacking. Everything had to be improvised. There were only a few men who knew anything about pitching tents, camp drainage, and the management of large bodies of men. There were practically no men outside of the army who were capable of managing the work of supplying the great camps with what they needed. As in the Spanish-American War, the utter inadequacy of the Quartermaster’s Department under its civilian appointees had become a scandal within a few weeks, and threatened already to demoralize the entire volunteer body.

Perishable provisions were left in freight cars till they rotted. Requisitions for vitally needed supplies were not made until it was too late. Requisitions for one and the same thing were sent out by half a dozen different officials, leading to inextricable confusion. There was not an hour in the day when quartermaster’s transports did not block roads where they had no business to be, and in situations that in war would have made disaster for a hurrying army.[79]

“Six months to train that mob!” said a retired General, reporting to the President. “Well, Mr. President, let’s hope so. I should say nine months, and not even then unless you can give ’em more officers to teach ’em.”

_The News the Spy Brought_

In Connecticut a spy was reporting to the staff. He was a Captain of Artillery, and he had spent seventy-two hours behind the enemy’s lines.

“They have completed their disembarkation and organization,” he said. “There are at least 150,000 men, as was calculated. They are magnificently organized, with reserves of everything. They have an enormous supply of artillery--at least ten guns to every thousand infantry and cavalry. Their machine gun companies also are extraordinarily large.”[80]

“And what is their disposition?”

“They were still moving men around to our front,” answered the spy. “I should say, General, that you now have, or will have before the end of the day, approximately one hundred thousand men facing you.”

“And the others?”

“Everything indicates that they are planning to move against Boston, while the larger force attacks us, sir. Country people told me that they are holding Taunton now with a strong force. They were moving men through Pawtucket this morning on the Providence railroad line for Boston.”

“Did you see any movement that might menace Worcester immediately?”

“They have already repaired the railroad from Providence to Woonsocket.”

“Then it’s time for us to get out of this. Gentlemen, you all know what to do. Issue your orders at once.”

_The Retreat of the American Army_

Eight hours later the enemy army advanced suddenly. Its southern wing pushed forward, across Rhode Island and entered Connecticut. Its northern wing, advancing more slowly because it had to repair railroads and clear obstructed roads before it, extended itself gradually northward toward Worcester.

The extreme southern line, advancing from Westerly, took Stonington, Groton and the new London Navy Yard, and held the eastern shore of the Thames River. Another force took Norwich and crossed the Thames at that place.

Gradually the line straightened out and formed into the drive that was to sweep the American army before it, or crush it. But the American army, with everything lacking except transport, was not there, either to be swept or crushed. It was retreating swiftly, in perfect order.

As the last wheel rolled out of Springfield, the town shook with the explosions that were wrecking the dismantled arsenal.

Eastward, two divisions of enemy forces, perfectly appointed to act as independent armies, were converging on Boston.

VI

THE RISING OF NEW ENGLAND

New England was filmy red with bursting maple buds. Silver troops of rain floated over the low hills in the dawn, and left April shining. The orderly land lay lovely and serene under the tranquil blessing of the New England spring whose memory draws its sons, soon or late, from all the world’s places to go home.

It was such a morning “promising to become hot” as had lain on Massachusetts in the dawn of April 19, 1775, when men were gathering at Concord and Lexington.

The country was as still as it must have been in that far-off day. The mill-towns were still and smokeless. The machineries were still. There was no cry of plowmen in the fields.

It was a supine New England, hushed, apprehensive and conquered. So, at least, it seemed to the invaders whose patrols, spreading fanwise, were beginning to pierce the country in all directions, pushing forward far in advance of their armies, and finding no opposition.

Through New England the church and town clocks struck: Seven. The land was peaceful as death. The hour passed. The lazy clocks began to strike: Eight.

In a village north of New Bedford stood a little crowd of farmers, gathered around the general store and listening to the sheriff. He was warning them that they must not attempt to resist the invading troops when they came.

“I know that you--and you,” said he, pointing to men as he spoke, “brought arms with you. You’d better give them up to me.”

“And you an American!” growled one of the men. The sheriff did not retort. He was scarcely past middle age; but there was a great, slow patience in his face that made him look old.

He shook his head and said: “It’s only for your own sake.”

_The Modern Paul Revere_

“Look!” cried a farmer. “Who is coming here?”

The man who was coming was a man on a motorcycle. Man and machine were so coated with dust, were speeding so desperately, that even without war in the land one would stare at this flying thing, one would wait with eyes and lips open to learn what startling message it was carrying.

Man, roaring motor, and their brother pillar of dust crashed by. They had disappeared before the breathless watchers realized that the man had waved an arm at them and had screamed: “Soldiers!”

A farmer ran to his wagon and pulled out a rifle from its hiding place under the wagon-seat. “Come on, boys!” he said.

“Listen! Listen!” The sheriff shouldered forward. “Men! Neighbors! Old friends! For God’s sake, listen! You have no right to fight.”

“What?” The sheriff’s young brother, sturdy, handsome, suddenly ferocious, brought his face close to him. “No right to defend our country? Are you crazy, Jim?”

The patient man shook his head again. “It is against the rules of war.”

“Then curse the rules of war!” shouted the younger. “Are you a coward?”

The sheriff reached out and touched his brother’s arm. It was a secret, almost a timid, act. The brother threw off the appealing hand.

“Don’t touch me!” He spoke through set teeth. “If you are a coward and traitor, may you be damned through all eternity! Again! For the last time! Will you fight?”

The sheriff raised his hands, dumbly. The men went to their wagons and returned with arms.

_New England’s Stone Wall_

“To that stone wall yonder!” said one.

He pointed into a field with a rough stone wall dividing its center three or four hundred yards from the road. This man was an old hunter, and the others had followed him often. He took command now as a matter of course.

The sheriff watched them flounder through the plowed field. He stood still, for a minute. Then he hurried to his house, emerged with a gun, and joined the party.

Two miles away a squad of ten cavalrymen cantered over a ridge and examined the country through their field-glasses. They studied the ground foot by foot, almost inch by inch. Satisfied, they trotted toward the village.

Around a turn they came on a little knot of women and children who scurried, screaming, into the ditch. A rider headed off a woman who was carrying a child. He stooped to her from his tall black horse. Laughing, he nodded and said something to her in a foreign language.

Stooping still lower, he snatched the child suddenly and swung it out of the trembling woman’s arm. He lifted it, and danced it up and down.

He fumbled in his saddle-bag and brought out some chocolate which he fed to the baby. Then he handed it back to the mother, roaring again with laughter at her frightened face. The other riders, laughing also, waved their hands at the group and cantered on.

They entered the village, swiftly examined it, riding through gardens and into alleys, assuring themselves that there was nothing there to mask danger for the troops that were behind them. They passed out of the other end and into the road leading past the plowed field with the stone wall.

It was still, and very lonely. There was not a living being in sight throughout all the softly tinted land. On a tree branch that hung over the stone wall, a bluebird began to sing with all the power of its little throat.

It brought a hot choking to the throat of a farmer who was lying behind the stone wall, just under the bird. Its song had welled out just as he was raising his rifle. But his gray Yankee eye sought the sights, his sinewy brown hand gripped the weapon, and he fired.

_The Firing of the First Shot_

He fired, and pumped another cartridge into the breech and fired again, so quickly that his second shot had roared out before a cavalryman who had pitched forward with the first bullet through his side, had quite toppled from his saddle.

All along the stone wall they fired, and pumped their magazines, and fired. They were men who had hunted deer in early autumn cover and learned to send bullets driving after them at hot speed on the jump. The big horses and the big men, broad in the open road, were easy targets. But they were not deer. They were men. More than one of the rifle bullets went wild because the marksman’s horror shook his hand.

In the road lay two men, lashing in the dust. Down the road went a bleeding horse that screamed. It dragged its rider, smashing his face against the ground. In the field was a soldier, trying to balance himself on his saddle, with one hand gripping at his breast while the other reached out grotesquely, as if groping for something to which he might hold.

A farmer behind the wall, unable to endure the sight of the men who were rolling in the road like animals trying to bury their agony, fired at them and made them lie still. “My God!” he said, and cried.

The wounded man fell from the saddle and squatted in a queer hunched posture in the field, his head between his knees. It was the cavalryman who had fed the child.

The others scattered, and charged toward the wall. Instantly, the defenders became cool. Their nerves stopped jumping. These riders, looming big, with swords out and fury in their eyes, ceased to be men. They were killers. The farmers shot as steadily as if they were aiming at deer.

Two riders escaped and galloped headlong down the road back to their forces. The New England men arose from behind the wall, and ran across the fields to gain the shelter of a wood-lot. Before they could reach it, there was a yelling behind them and a dozen troopers were in the fields, following them desperately.

_In the Stone House_

“To the house!” cried the sheriff. He led the way to an old stone house, built in Revolutionary times. The cavalrymen reined up sharply. A glance at the solid little building with window-openings as deep as embrasures, showed them that it was dangerous. They opened out, remaining carefully out of rifle shot, and surrounded the place where they could watch it from all sides. Then one rode back, swiftly.

The watchers sat, easy and careless, as if they had been halted during a peaceful practice march. Half an hour passed. The immobility of the soldiers, their passionless watch, was driving the farmers frantic. More than once the old leader had to growl at a man who wanted to fire, despite the hopeless distance.

If the tension in the house had lasted much longer, some of these men would have rushed out. But there came a great sound from the distance. It might have been thunder, rolling far away. It might have been a river in flood.

“They’re coming!” said the sheriff’s brother. It was hard for him to speak. The defenders were all violently thirsty, and they had not had time to bring water from the well.

They came. Horses, horses, horses! Bayonets, bayonets, bayonets! They came, and passed along the road, and more came on.

They did not turn off to attack the house. They did not even turn their heads to look at it. This infuriated the defenders.

Horses, horses, horses! Bayonets, bayonets, bayonets! If the men in the stone house could have seen other roads, they would have seen each one so filled with silent, steadily moving columns of men.

A little party of men and horses turned off from the column and entered the field. Before it was within the range of the rifles, it wheeled. A shining, glossy little thing pointed at the house. It was field artillery, sleek, beautiful.

The sheriff’s brother, carried away by rage, fired and fired. He emptied his magazine at the distant men.

_The War Machine Rolls On_

Along the highway the column moved steadily, silently. No soldier checked his foot for so much as an instant at the sound of the shots. Bayonets, bayonets, bayonets! The machine moved on.

It moved on, eyes front, while the captain commanding the cannon snapped an order. It moved on, bayonets twinkling out of sight in front, and twinkling past, and twinkling into sight from behind, while the little gun tore the April morning.

The stone house spouted clouds of dust and powdering stone. It dissolved. It became a ruin that stared phantomlike through the cloud, as if it were looking with horribly expanding eyes at the gun.

If the besieged fired in return, the men at the gun did not know it. Their steel beast drowned the farmers’ tiny efforts in roar and flame. They passed as a breath. The cavalrymen cantered to the ruin. A half wall was standing, jagged. The rest was a mound of dirt. Under it lay fourteen men of Massachusetts. The sheriff lay there, with his face more patient than ever, and his arm around his brother.

The little gun and its horses and men joined the horses and men that were moving northward through New England.

Over the field telegraph wire that unreeled behind the advancing force went the report to the enemy headquarters: “Civilians estimated at about a dozen fired from ambush, killing eight cavalry. Took refuge in building. Annihilated.”

It was a perfunctory report telling of a merely perfunctory incident. But the commander-in-chief, sitting at his ease in headquarters in Providence, stopped smoking for a moment. “See that the news does not spread,” said he. “It might raise the country. Reënforce all patrols and warn them.”

_New England Ablaze_

He was a quick man. His officers were quick and his system of communication was quick. But the news sped more quickly still. Over every telephone that was intact, over every telegraph wire that still worked in New England, by bicycle, on horseback, by men running, the story was passed from man to man and village to village.

They were fourteen humble men, unknown beyond their own township, when they crouched behind the stone wall. They were fourteen shining names before the ruins that covered them had ceased smoking. New England, like a blazing forest, was ablaze with wrath and fury.

Vain was it now for cautious men to warn or authorities to command. Men who never in their lives had thought harm to any living thing, dashed out with smoldering eyes to fight. Prudent men, who never in their lives had acted on impulse, now acted without a second’s pause for reflection. Men who had cared all their lives only for their own little affairs, were all drunken now and thought it nothing to fire one shot for their country and die behind a stone wall in the dirt.

In Acushnet an old whaling captain, a prosperous, weighty citizen, emptied his shot gun into a raiding party and was left dead under his forsythias with the golden blossoms from the volley-torn shrubs covering him.

Between Taunton and Pawtucket a militia company of field artillery that had been unable to move its gun because it lacked horses, got it from its hiding place, and with a party of volunteers who had no firearms, fought behind piled bags of cement against enemy cavalry till artillery had to be brought from miles away to destroy them.

South of Woonsocket a band, made up of thirty Massachusetts militia infantry and sixty factory hands from the town, prevented two companies of hostile infantry for almost two hours from crossing the Blackstone River. It was not because they could shoot, or knew how to fight. It was because they meant to stay there till they died. And it was not until they were dead that the invaders succeeded in crossing.

New England women who had spent their lives in homely, simple duties, brought out dippers of water to parched men and cheered them on. They hid fleeing men in barns and stood by, defiant, when pursuing soldiers dragged them out and shot them before their eyes.

_As the Men of Old_

Men took down old muskets that had been over chimney-places for a generation. Their wives and mothers kissed them as they went out to fight.

Grandparents saw their sons and their sons’ sons lie in ambush in ancestral pastures that had not echoed to a ruder sound than the lowing of cows; and they saw them vanish away in red storm, and did not weep.

Dynamite! Dynamite! went the word through Massachusetts and Connecticut. This was something that the unarmed country had, and that it knew how to use. Even the peaceful farmers had it, and were practiced in handling it, from long work in blowing out stumps and rocks. Irish construction gangs, Italian road-makers, workers of every tongue and race from pits and quarries, joined the New England men.

They blew up a sunken road through which artillery was lumbering. They blasted away a steep bank and buried a troop of cavalry. They blew up a mined road in front of infantry and when it retreated, sprang a second mine under the soldiers’ feet that exterminated a battalion.

Railroads and roads were blown up before advancing troops and behind them. Men blew up bridges and prevented their own escape so that the armed forces caught them as in a trap and slaughtered them at leisure. Viaducts and works were dynamited that never could have been of any use to the enemy. It was formless, systemless destruction--but in that very lack of system lay its danger to the enemy forces.

Had all the men in New England who were engaged in this wild fighting been gathered in one body, the trained, disciplined soldiers could have disposed of them in an action so simple that they might scarcely have named it a skirmish. But this was like a forest fire that, stamped out in one spot, breaks into roaring flame in another. As it sweeps from tree tops to tree tops and creeps underground, and flames out in quick fury miles away, so the warfire raved through Massachusetts and Connecticut to be crushed out only in detail with detailed, bitter work through all that long, hot, dusty day.

_Serious to the Enemy_

It was serious. This uprising of an undisciplined population could not defeat, or even damage seriously, the great army. But it could hamper it. It would force a wide scattering of troops to break down the sporadic opposition. It would make a dangerous country--dangerous in front of the advancing soldiers, dangerous in their rear, continually dangerous around them.

In that sense it was more serious than deliberate, military opposition by the American army would have been. Had the enemy commander faced only a defending army, it would have been a quiet, technical matter of advance guards against advance guards. These pawns in the old game of war would have thrust each other back here, receded before each other there, fighting only when it was forced on them, and so, gradually, properly, they would have cleared the board that the great game might be played.

This incoherent uprising was disorganizing all his tactics. From the western army that had set out to sweep through Connecticut, came

word that everywhere patrols had been attacked. Men in a swift power boat on the Thames River above New London had succeeded in three places in firing on scouting parties with a Hotchkiss rifle, apparently taken from a yacht.

The line north of Norwich along the same river reported four men killed from ambush. At Willimantic there had been firing from mill buildings, which had been destroyed for punishment.

The Commander of the brigade that was advancing on Worcester in Massachusetts from Connecticut had halted his advance, and was asking headquarters if the extent of the disorder were great enough to imperil his communications.

The eastern division, moving on Boston, reported that the patrols had been ordered in from the line North Middleboro--East Middleboro--Plymouth. “Our men can move only in considerable force,” reported the Commander. “Small parties are constantly in danger of being assassinated. The population appears to be in a frenzy. Seven cavalry at Nemasket, engaged in foraging for their horses, were burned alive in a barn. We have fired the town. It is still burning. Have shot ten citizens.”

“My men are getting out of hand,” telegraphed the Commander of a brigade moving toward Mansfield. “Stern reprisals required at once.”

“_Let Them Have It!_”

“Let them have it!” said the Commander-in-Chief.