Part 9

“Instant retaliation!” said the field telegraph to the armies. “Order all brigade commanders to execute disorderly civilians in most public and exemplary manner possible. Attach placard to bodies proclaiming why punishment was incurred. Divisional commanders are empowered in their discretion to order partial or total destruction of offending cities.”

The commanders transmitted the orders to their regimental commanders, and these to the officers of their battalions and companies. “Crush all disorder with utmost severity,” they said. What it meant was: “Kill, burn and destroy!” It meant: “Set fury against fury!” It meant: “Let your men go!”

It meant what a war of soldiers against battling civilians in a conquered country always has meant. Both sides had seen their dead. Both sides were maddened. Now the men with arms, restrained no longer by cold discipline, broke loose.

Then New England saw such deeds as that quiet landscape never had framed since the days of its old Indian wars, and perhaps not even then. It saw housewives hanging from budding apple-trees, with placards pinned to their breasts saying that they had helped to murder soldiers. It saw New England people, who, twenty-four hours earlier would not have killed a chicken without a pang of pity, surround solitary soldiers and do them to death with their bare hands, while they begged for mercy. It saw unarmed citizens seized on the roads and hustled to walls and shot while they were screaming for somebody in authority, that they might prove their innocence.

The authorities of a score of towns were hanged in their town squares because troops had been fired on. In many a park that never had seen anything more formidable than children at their play, hung dead men in a row--the executed hostages who paid for the acts of men whom they had not known. A thousand men and women of Connecticut and Massachusetts, it was reported later, were shot or hanged in that one afternoon.

_New England’s Funeral Curtain_

And over the two States, rising slowly and spreading until the sunny sky was darkened, there hung, like a funeral curtain over the place of death, the black smoke of burning villages and towns.

When that April day ended, and the night came down, there was no place in eastern Connecticut, in all the seventy miles north and south from New London to Worcester where men could not see the fire of burning towns or houses. In Massachusetts from New Bedford to Taunton, and from Taunton north to Brockton, there were fires. All the sky around Providence was red with it. The smoke drifted over Boston and the strangling odor filled its streets.

All night the country burned. All night wounded fugitives lay hidden, gritting their teeth, or, forced by intolerable anguish, crawled out and surrendered. All night long the troops swept through town after town, wreaking vengeance.

It was finished in the morning. “The country is pacified,” were the reports that went to headquarters. There were no gatherings of citizens anywhere within the province of the army’s operations. They were forbidden. There were no arms left in the hands of civilians. Houses in which weapons were found had been destroyed. Men who had been found with them in their possession were shot. Men with explosives were shot. In all New England that morning, every man had to be ready, for his life, to hold out his open hands whenever he met a soldier, and submit to search.

_The Machine Shakes Down_

Through the two armies ran the orders to restore stiff discipline. The soldiers came to leash and the big machine shook down. The patrols went out grimly, with a new meaning in their peering, scrutinizing frowns. They found a terrorized country, through which they moved unhampered.

“Worcester Occupied” was the early news that went through the United States. “Heavy Cavalry Body Enters Unopposed.”

“Motor Raiders at Fitchburg,” was the next report. It was followed by news of raiders east of Worcester.

Bit by bit the enemy was cutting Boston and all Eastern New England off from the rest of the United States.

East of Providence the advance guard of the army that was threatening Boston reached the line from Attleboro through Bridgewater and Silver Lake to Kingston, thus extending across that part of Massachusetts all the way to Plymouth Bay.[81]

Taunton, according to rumors that reached Boston, was being made the point for a heavy concentration of men and rolling stock.

Washington received news of an enormous unfolding of cavalry. The reports came from East Brookfield, half way between Worcester and Springfield in southern Massachusetts; from Willimantic in Central Connecticut, and from New London on the Long Island Sound shore in the south. Every road across the whole State north and south was held by horsemen who were pressing steadily westward, converting all means of communication to the army’s use and cutting off the population completely from the outside and even from communicating with each other.[82]

From Attleboro there was a sudden thrust along the railroad line Taunton to Mansfield. From this point the enemy moved rapidly along the railroad line to Framingham. In two hours he had in his possession six important junctions of the railroad systems that connect Boston with the rest of New England and with the United States.

_Encircling Boston_

The enemy was making good a great line that extended in a semi-circle from the west of Boston to the coast south of it.

His grip on Rhode Island had not relaxed. That whole State was in his hands. There was not a village left in it that was not dominated by his troops. Men were quartered in every house. Officers were quartered in every hotel, every mansion. The town halls and churches were occupied. In places where there were not sufficient stable accommodations, the horses were placed in the churches.

There were proud homes there, in “little Rhode Island,” where crossed swords over the old-fashioned mantel-pieces bore witnesses to ancestors who had fought on land and sea in the Wars of the Revolution and of 1812. Foreign soldiers sat under them, and spread out maps of the State on the floors while they debated over the best use to make of roads and houses and towns.

Town and village authorities received orders, not from officers, but from common soldiers, or, at the most, from sergeants or corporals. Only in the most important places did commissioned officers trouble to consult with the officials. Mostly, they limited themselves to sending their requisitions and instructions in curtly written notes.

So it was everywhere throughout the conquered country. Wherever the invader set foot, all old law ceased instantly and new law began. The bulletin boards in town halls, court rooms and post offices were covered, within half an hour after the irruption of soldiery, by placards that were headed, each and every one, with the words: “An Order.”

The people were ordered not to be out of doors after nine at night. They were ordered to bring in an accounting of all horse forage, all food-stuffs and all accommodation they had in their premises for men and animals. They were ordered to bring in all rolling stock for inspection. They were ordered to leave their lights burning behind lowered shades.

_Under Foreign Rule_

Their officials were ordered to report daily to the army for instructions. Their judges were ordered to make reports of their cases. There was no duty of the day to which a citizen could turn without feeling the invader’s hand upon him. There was no road on which he could move without being challenged by a sentry. There was no woman who dared venture on the street, for fear of offense which her men could not dare to resent, or for the worse fear of the fate that would be theirs if they did.

So, like a great fan opening out from Providence the armies expanded over the conquered country, and each spoke expanded again. The divisions unfolded their brigades, the brigades their regiments, the regiments their battalions, the battalions their companies, and the companies their detachments, reaching everywhere and everywhere keeping in touch with the main body through the marvelous network of intelligence that grew into being behind the soldiers.[83]

It was as if a vast octopus had crawled from the sea at Narragansett Bay. With its body clinging there, fast to its ocean base, it sent its tentacles into every crevice of the land, and gripped tight.

“It is plain now what he is doing,” said the Chief of Staff to the President in Washington. “He is keeping a powerful retaining force in Rhode Island, absolutely assuring his base and holding the gate open for reënforcements. Westward he is throwing masses of cavalry--probably most of the cavalry that he has--to clear the way for his infantry and artillery to march along the coast to New York. Northward those cavalry masses are screening him against any attempt by our army either to fall on his forces in Connecticut, or to move around north of him and attack the rear of his divisions that are marching on Boston. It isn’t tactics. It’s simple, commonsense use of numerical superiority.”[84]

_Making a Fight for Boston_

The President played with a pile of dispatches. They were from Boston and New York. “You say that those companies of coast artillery from the south got through!”

“I had a message from the Commander of the Artillery District of Boston,” he said. “The six companies arrived at Fort Banks yesterday morning. They had to go around by way of Lake Champlain and Vermont, but they got through. That will at least give the men some relief if there should be a sustained action.”[85]

“You are sure it was not a mistake to--sacrifice them?” asked the President.

The General shrugged his shoulders. “There are some things that one simply must do,” he said. “We had to give New York and Boston something. We absolutely must make some sort of a fight for them.”

The Commander of the harbor defenses of Boston was not concerning himself about the occult reasons that had inspired the reënforcements. He had been praying for men, for he needed half a dozen men wherever he had one. He needed them for the searchlights, he needed men that he might establish defenses to the land approaches, he needed men for protection of base lines and cable stations. There were scout boats to be manned, and outlying islands to be posted with lookouts to guard against approach of ships in fog or darkness.

Now that he had them, he waited for no orders and asked for no instructions. He loaded quartermasters’ boats with detachments and rushed them to the waterfront of Boston and Chelsea where he knew of things he wanted. They returned with two tons of explosives and miscellaneous ordnance material that had been seized from merchants. He seized barb wire. From electric light plants and power works he obtained, by the same simple method, some forty miles of lead-covered cable for his mine-fields, and from ships in the harbor he took half a dozen searchlights.[86]

_To Hold the Defenses_

Before night, too, he had men entrenched behind entanglements with machine guns on the narrow neck of land that leads to Nahant’s broad cliff promontory on the north of Boston Harbor, to protect position finding stations there and a great 60-inch searchlight.

Southward at Point Allerton, on the long cape that juts toward Boston Harbor from Nantasket Beach, to defend the stations and searchlights and approaches of Fort Revere with its mighty batteries, he placed a strong force with ample artillery.[87]

This was the point where he feared a landing most. He built an armored train, seizing the material from the town of Hull, and armed it with quick-firers that it might be sent to threatened places.

Outposts were sent as far as Nantasket, for fear the enemy should try to land there or cross the narrow neck and take boats over it into the bay behind.

Beyond Fort Revere he destroyed certain houses that would interfere with the firing. At the far outlying islands called The Graves he posted men with signal rockets. He sent scout boats to lie at sea beyond the fire zone, from Nahant to the spot where the Light-ship was moored in times of peace.[88]

Within forty hours he had doubled the strength of his defense because he had the men. He looked up at a hostile aeroplane, flying well beyond gunshot. They had become almost commonplace objects in Boston’s sky during the past days. “Well, come on!” he said. “You and your ships! We’ll give you a whirl.”

He was awakened at one o’clock that morning. The “whirl” had begun. Ships were standing in toward Nahant Bay in the north and off Cohasset in the south. Fifteen minutes afterward the people of Boston and Charlestown and Brookline, of Quincy and Weymouth, Hingham and Lynn, were brought out of their beds by explosions that shook the houses. They came from the sea, northeast and southeast and east. They were not only incessant, but they came two and even three so close together at times that they made a sustained roar as if the very air itself had turned to thunder.

_Boston’s Bombardment Begins_

Battleships with 15- and 16-inch guns were bombarding Fort Revere and the fort was answering with its 12-inch guns. Armored cruisers were firing on Standish. Armored cruisers and battle cruisers were throwing 12- and 14-inch shells into Deer Island and on Winthrop. Battleships lying north of Nahant in Nahant Bay, and thus invisible to the Boston defenses and not to be reached by searchlights, were bombarding Forts Banks and Heath.[89]

Fort Warren was firing at them, over Boston Light. Fort Andrews loosed its batteries.

There was bombardment from 3-inch guns along the beaches, north and south, where destroyers were attacking the coast stations, under heavy fire in reply from the defenders on the land.

Southeast, on the horizon, there sprang up a dull glow that became greatly red, and grew swiftly to pulsating flame. It was the town of Hull, burning.

The people in South Boston, looking seaward, saw lights appear in the sky over the outer harbor islands. They slipped slowly downward, leaving long trails of stars behind, that hung, burning, in the air as if they had been fixed there.

The falling lights opened, like monster flowers, into glaring, spectrally white flame just before they reached the earth. All the harbor where they fell stood revealed as in a lightning flash; but this flame did not go out like a lightning flash. It burned, steady, inextinguishable, for long minutes.

They were star-bombs that were being dropped on the forts by the great war-fowl, the iron breasted aeroplanes. The white lights glaring below, and the hanging lights in the air that stood like a lighted staff, pointed out the forts to the hooded cannon of their iron sisters out at sea.

Fired at from sea and sky, the forts replied and shook the earth. Faster and faster hurried the fire from the hidden ocean. Five ships were firing their secondary batteries to destroy an out-lying searchlight at a range of 6,000 yards. It was said afterward that at least five hundred projectiles were expended at that one mark alone.[90]

In a great semicircle around Boston Harbor, from Nahant out to sea and curving in again toward Cohasset on the south, lay the flaming, roaring line, firing at the defenses all night long, till the dawn began to whiten.

And behind Boston, inland, the other great armed semicircle was contracting steadily, swiftly.

VII

THE INVESTMENT OF BOSTON

Boston Harbor should have been impregnable to attack from the sea. Had Nature been a modern army engineer, she could not have constructed an oceanic gate more perfectly designed for modern defense against modern ships.

One might picture Boston as being protected by two great claws that curve seaward and wait there on guard, pointing toward each other. The northern claw would be Winthrop peninsula with its beach and summer cottages. The southern one would be the long, narrow arm of land that has famous Nantasket Beach on it, and ends northward at Point Allerton.

Between these two claws, a prodigal hand has scattered islands. From Deer Island, lying in the north close under Winthrop, to George’s Island in the south, they form a stone wall with gaps that are the channels. Far out, grouped around the portal, the sea is sown with ledges and rocks whose kelp beards stream in an ever-heaving sea. Here are the Brewsters, the Devil’s Back, the Graves, the Roaring Bulls.

Within, there is a glorious harbor great enough for a world’s armada. But the entrance is a Pass of Thermopylæ.

Commanding that pass and all approaches far out to sea with zones of fire whose intersecting circles marked rings of sure destruction, were defenses honestly built. They were ready to receive and withstand that climax of destructiveness which man’s science has embodied in the conical steel projectile fired from the rifled gun.[91]

The navy that invested the harbor entertained no illusions on that score. It had not dared the attempt to force the passages of Narragansett. It would not dare to force the passages of Boston. As at Narragansett, its business was to occupy the defenders and wear them out while the army fell on them and on Boston from the land.[92]

_The Deadly Blind Man’s Buff_

The ships entered a shrouded, black sea where there was not a light to warn of reef or shoal. Lightless themselves, they groped with deep-sea leads and sounding machines till they assured themselves of safe positions where they might have sea-room to swing around in great closed circles at high speed.

These circles would cut deeply into the circles of the fire zones of the defenses. At close range the vessels, invisible to the forts, could send a furious volley into them, and rush past before the guns could find them, to return on their circle and fire from some other point. It was the penalty that darkness lays on land defenses. But it penalized the ships, also.[93]

They would have to fire without sighting their mark. They dared not betray themselves to the waiting guns on land by throwing their search-lights on the defenses, while the defenses could sweep the sea incessantly, for their searchlights were disposed along miles of coast, far aloof from the batteries.

If the search-lights were effective, the ships should have to flee to the farthest limit of the coast guns’ range. At that distance they, in turn, could not deliver an effective bombardment of the land so long as it was dark. So, then, all the ferocious game of war centered for the time on the search-lights. The death-laden ships, the death-laden guns on land, had to wait till it was learned what the lights would do.[94]

The enemy knew that the American defenses had only about one-half the search-light installation that was needed. The hostile sailors had not been forced to depend on spies for this information. It was in American reports that had been made to Congress session after session.[95]

They had prepared for their game of blind man’s buff by long consultations over charts. Every ship’s officer was provided with minute instructions for every contingency that human wit could forecast in the headlong game of chess that is played with cannon.

_Defenders Stand Prepared_

The defenders were ready, too. In the human chain that began with the battle commander, and reached from him through links of district commanders to fire commanders and battery commanders, each man had his orders for any one of a hundred things that might occur, however quickly it might come.

They knew what batteries to fire and when, at the extreme fire zone, at the intermediate zone, and at the third fire zone which commanded the mine fields. They had before them, worked out to the ultimate detail, the order of fire if the enemy ships should come in column, in double column, or in scattered formation. Far down the beaches, north and south, they had every range plotted, that the great guns might be turned on landing parties if the secondary shore defenses should fail to hold them.[96]

The ships struck simultaneously all along the line of defenses. They fired close in north and south, and from battleships out at sea. A plunging fire went over Nahant and across into Winthrop. The speeding ships missed the defenses and their bursting shells wrecked the town instead. As its flames reddened the sky, the flames of Hull, at Point Allerton on the end of the southern peninsula, made a red reply.

The quick search-lights caught the ships. Again and again the white light-shafts fell on veering, speeding vessels and made them hurry to get away before the fire-control of the defenses could cover them.

Still they returned. Each time they approached at a new point in the hope of developing a defect in the light-system. Each time they fired all the metal that they could throw in the one instant before the beams fell on them.

There were few hits made by these running ships; but they could afford to waste ammunition, since their continual attack forced the defenders to use their own insufficient supply.

_A Game of Wits_

While half-naked men in ships’ turrets and half-naked men at coast guns and in mortar pits were toiling to wreak brute destruction, a game of wits was being played just as busily. This game was played, not on the huge armored ships, not in the formidable engine-batteries of the forts, but in places miles away from either.

They were insignificant little places from the point of view of war--summer settlements on friendly beaches, harmless little coves, pleasant shores beset with the fantastic hotels and fantastic towers of American pleasure-places. In the summer days of peace, probably not one in any thousand of the happy crowds that played and laughed there ever imagined that these serene, careless places could have any importance some day in battle.

That night they were playing a part that was full of danger to the venturesome ships. The American engineers had established portable search-lights there, and made base stations and range-finding points of them. Every one of these insignificant out-lying points was endowing the guns in the distant defenses with an added deadliness of accuracy.

The modern rifled gun is fired not by sight but by mathematics. The position of its target is found not by guess but by triangulation. Far away, on either side of land batteries are observers. The straight line from one to the other is the base line. As soon as they sight a ship, each turns his instruments on it and gets the angle from his end of the base line. The ship to be fired at is at the apex of the triangle thus obtained.

The men at the guns get this position by telephone instantly. They know to a foot what their weapons’ elevation must be with a given charge of powder and a given weight of projectile to reach that distant spot. They set their mammoth piece, elevate it above the parapet on its lift, fire it and bring it back into concealment again.

To bombard these base-stations from the sea was nearly futile. The shells that could sweep a fore-shore and make it untenable for an army might never find these few scattered, concealed men or these scattered, hidden, tiny stations. A whole fleet might rave at them for hours, and in vain. There was only one sure, quick way to cripple them.[97]

_The Secret Attack on the Shore_

Far northward, miles outside of Boston Harbor, beyond the system of the harbor defenses, two ships stood into Nahant Bay, until they were within a line drawn from Fishing Point south of Swampscott to Spouting Horn on Nahant. Here, in 7 fathoms of water, they stopped and lowered their boats.

Manned by crack bluejackets, whose oars were wrapped with cloth that they should not make a sound in the rowlocks, the cutters moved toward the beach at Little Nahant.