Читать книгу The Invasion of America - J. W. Muller - Страница 6

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“Washington, D. C., March 20.—The President, as Commander-in-Chief of the Army and Navy, has ordered a grand joint maneuver of the fleet, the regular army and the Organized Militia (National Guard) of Divisions 5, 6, 7, and 8, comprising New England, New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia and West Virginia.”

No comment from official circles accompanied this dispatch when it was printed in the newspapers. None was needed. Ever since the Great Coalition had been formed, America had faced the probability of war.

In the White House there was a conference of the Cabinet, attended by the Chief of Staff of the United States Army and the Admiral who was President of the General Board of the Navy.

“The regular troops are moving,” reported the Chief of Staff. “Every last man of ’em is on the way east.” He laughed grimly. “I take no credit for it. The trains of the country can do it without changing a schedule. Do you know, gentlemen, that even the smaller roads often handle an excursion crowd as big as this whole army of ours?”[2]

The Secretary of War shrugged his shoulders. “Despite all the talk of recent years, despite all our official reports, I doubt if the people realize it.”

“Make them!” said the President. “Drive it home to them, before war is brought to our coasts.” He turned to the two chiefs of staff. “Give the newspapers a statement about the ‘maneuvers’ that will give the public the cold truth.”

“The fleet,” said the Admiral to the newspaper correspondents an hour later, “is assumed to be an enemy fleet too powerful for opposition. It will attempt to land at least 100,000 fighting forces somewhere on the Atlantic Coast. It is conceded that an actual enemy planning invasion would not come with less than that number. It is conceded also that a sufficiently powerful fleet can transport that number, and more, safely across the ocean. The Navy, further, concedes the landing.”[3]

What Our Harbor Defenses Cannot Prevent

“But our coast defenses, Admiral!” spoke the correspondent of a Boston newspaper. “We’ve been told that those affairs with their monster 12-inch rifled steel cannon and their 12-inch mortar batteries, and mines and things, are as powerful as any in the world, and can stand off any fleet!”

“They are not coast defenses, sir,” answered the Chief of Staff. “They are harbor defenses. They can stop warships from entering our great harbors. They cannot prevent an enemy from landing on the coast out of their range. And on the Atlantic Coast of the United States there are hundreds of miles of utterly undefended beach where any number of men can land as easily as if they were trippers landing for a picnic. All those miles of shore, and all the country behind them, lie as open to invasion,” he held out his hand, “as this.”

“Then what’s the use of them?”

“They furnish a protected harbor within which our own navy could take refuge if defeated or scattered,” said the Admiral. “They make our protected cities absolutely secure against a purely naval attack. No navy could readily pass the defenses, and probably none would venture so close as even to bombard them seriously. Certainly no fleet could bombard the cities behind them.

“Therefore,” he continued, “if an enemy wishes to bring war to us, he must land an army of invasion. Our harbor defenses force him to do that; but—having forced him to bring the army, their function ceases. They cannot prevent him from landing it. We have to do that with OUR army.”

“And could you stop him, or is that a military secret?” asked one of the party. He did it tentatively. He had been a war correspondent with foreign armies, and he did not expect a reply.

31,000 Men—Our Actual Mobile Army

“My dear boy,” answered the Chief of Staff promptly, “there probably isn’t a General Staff in the world that doesn’t know all about us, to the last shoe on the last army mule. We’ve got 88,000 men in the regular army, officers and privates.[4] Of these, you may count out 19,000. They are non-combatants—cooks, hospital staffs, teamsters, armorers, blacksmiths, and all the other odds and ends that an army must have, but can’t use for fighting. Now, cut out another 21,000 men. Those are fighting men, but they’re not here. They’re in Panama, Hawaii, the Philippines, China and Alaska—and we wish that we had about three times as many there, especially in Panama. How much does that leave? Forty-eight thousand? Very well. That’s what we’ve got here at home. But you’ll please count out another 17,000. They’re in the Coast Artillery, and have to man the harbor defenses of which we’ve been talking. Now you’ve got our mobile army—the actual force that we can put into the field and move around. Thirty-one thousand men.”

“A pretty straight tip,” agreed the Washington correspondents when they left the War Department. And as a straight tip they passed it on to their readers. So the Nation read the next morning how their army was being made ready. They read how four companies of one infantry regiment were gathered from Fort Lawton in Washington and another four companies from Fort Missoula in Montana. They read how still four other companies of the same regiment were at Madison Barracks in New York State.[5]

Their fifth Cavalry regiment, they learned, was being assembled like a picture puzzle by sending to Fort Myer, Virginia, for four troops of it, to Fort Sheridan, Illinois, for four more troops and a machine-gun platoon, and to Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, for the remaining four troops needed to form a full regiment.

There was field artillery whose component units were scattered, guns, horses and men, from the Vermont line to the Rio Grande. There were signal troops in Alaska, Texas, the Philippines and Panama.

This was no such mobilization as that giant mobilization in Europe when a continent had stood still for days and nights while the soldiers moved to their appointed places. So far scattered was the American army, so small were its units, that only a few civilians here and there could have noticed that troops were being moved at all.

More than one un-military citizen, looking over his newspaper that morning, cursed the politics that had maintained the absurd, worthless, wasteful army posts, and cursed himself for having paid no heed in the years when thoughtful men had called on him and his fellows to demand a change.

More than one citizen, when he left his house to go to his accustomed work, looked up at the sky and wondered, with a sinking heart, how soon it would seem black with war.

A Dreadnaught For Every Effective American Ship

It was a peaceful, soft sky, with baby clouds sleeping on its bland, blue arch. It radiated a tranquil warmth of coming spring; and under it the Atlantic Ocean lay equally peaceful, equally soft, equally tranquil.

Yet even as the people of America were taking up the day’s work, under that soft, tranquil sea a message was darting through the encrusted cables that swept away all peace.

Before noon, from sea to sea and from lakes to gulf, from the valley of the Hudson to the sierras of the Rockies, from Jupiter Inlet to the Philippines, ran the silent alarm of the telegraph that the Great Coalition had declared War!

Forty-eight hours later the combined battle-fleet of the four Nations put to sea with its army transports, bound for the American coast.[6]

The United States learned of its departure before its rear-guard had well cleared the land. The news did not come from American spies. It came from the Coalition itself.

War, the Chameleon, as Clausewitz called it, was presenting a new aspect of its unexpected phases. Not a cable had been cut following the declaration of war; and now the submarine cables and the wireless began to bring official news from the enemy—news addressed not to the American government, but to the American people.

It was news that told of an invulnerable fleet carrying more than a thousand rifled cannon of the largest caliber ever borne by ships in all the world. It told of enough battleships alone (and named them) to match the Republic’s fleet with a dreadnaught for every effective American ship of any kind.[7]

“Clever!” said the Secretary of State to the President. “It is Terrorism.”

“Don’t you think that you’d better reconsider your idea of letting this go through?” asked the Secretary of War. “It’s pretty dangerous stuff.”

“It’s the Nation’s War,” answered the President. “Will it demoralize our people to know the truth, even under the guise of terrorism? Do you know in whose hands I’m going to leave that question?”

“I can’t guess,” said the Secretary.

“In the hands of the newspapers,” replied the President.

The newspapers did not require to be told that the purpose of this novel news service from the enemy was Terrorism.

They answered Terrorism by Printing The News.

The Battle That Was Decided Years Before

Then the sea-coast cities began to call to Washington. By telegraph and telephone they demanded protection. It was a chorus from Maine to Georgia. Into the White House thronged the Congressmen.

“Defend us! Defend our people! Defend our towns!” said they.[8]

“We cannot do it!” said the Chief of Staff. “No wit of man can guess at what point of many hundred miles the enemy will strike. He may land on the New Jersey coast to take Philadelphia. He may land on Long Island to march at New York. He may strike at Boston. He may land between Boston and New York, on the Rhode Island or Massachusetts coasts, and keep us guessing whether he’ll turn west to New York or east to Boston. He may even strike for both at once, from there.”

“Then why not put men into each place to protect it?” demanded a Congressman. “Are these great cities to be left wide open?”

“You know how many regulars we’ve got. Do you know how many effective men we’ve pulled together by calling out those eastern divisions of organized militia? Their enrolled strength is 50,000 men. Their actual active strength as shown by attendance figures has been only about 30 per cent. of that; but we were lucky.[9] This danger has brought out all, probably, that were able to come. Still, there are less than 30,000 men; and not quite half of those have had good field training. We need them. We need them so badly that we’re putting them all in the first line. But it’s a little bit like—well, it’s murder.”

“Then you mean to say—!” The Congressman was aghast.

“I mean to say,” answered the Chief of Staff, with a set face, “that the army is going to take what it has, and do its best. But it’s going to do it in its own way. No enemy will dream of landing an invading army unless it is decisively, over-poweringly superior to our own. Now, Congressman, the only way for an inferior army to accomplish anything is to refuse battle until the chances are as favorable as they can be made. The inferior force must retire before a superior. It must force the invader to follow till he is weakened by steadily lengthening lines of communications. His difficulties of food-and ammunition-transport grow. He becomes involved in strange terrain. Last but not least, he gets more and more deeply into a land filled with a hostile population. But if we must defend a specific place at all hazards, then we must stand and give battle—well, it will be only one battle.”

“You mean—?”

“I mean that such a battle is decided already. It was decided years ago—when the country refused to prepare.”

“Good God, man!” The Congressman wiped his forehead with a trembling, fat hand. “I can’t go back and tell my people that.”

“You’d better not,” said the General, grimly.

No Men to Defend the Harbor Works

The unhappy man, and other unhappy men like him, went back to their constituencies knowing that now no campaign oratory would serve. Soften the news they must, and would; but they were the bearers of ill tidings, and they knew what comes to these.

The stricken cities heard. From all the great coast with its piled gold and silver, there arose a cry. Men shook their fists and cursed the machinery of politics that had worked through the blind years to hinder, to deceive and to waste. The Pork Barrel ceased all at once to be the great American joke.

“Throw men into our harbor defenses!” cried the cities of the coast. “Hold them! Hold them!”

“We have seventeen thousand trained regulars and 5,000 militia more or less experienced to handle these complex giants,” answered the Army, implacably. “There are 1,184 guns and mortars to handle. It leaves no men to defend the works. To throw the mobile army or any part of it into the defenses for mere protection is only to lock them up. The mobile army must defend the defenses from outside. If it cannot do it, they fall.”[10]

“Where is the mobile army?” cried the cities. “Send it here!” clamored each city.

There was no reply. Somewhere behind the Atlantic Coast lay the mobile army, silent.

The cities stared to sea. They listened for sounds from the sea. That serving ocean that had made them rich and great, had become suddenly terrible, a secret place where there brooded wrath. Every day great multitudes, stirred by helpless, vague impulse, moved toward the waterfronts and gazed down the harbors. Every rumble of blasts or heavy vehicle, every sudden great noise, startled the cities into a quick: “Listen! Cannons!”

The News the Fleet Sent Back

“Where is the fleet?” The question ran from Maine to Florida, till it, too, became one great clamor, storming at the White House. Again there was no answer.

Days before, the American fleet had steamed out of the eastern end of Long Island Sound. The tall, gray dreadnaughts and armored cruisers, each with its circling, savage brood of destroyers; light cruisers, torpedo boats,

“Days before, the American fleet had steamed out of Long Island Sound.”

sea-going submarines, hospital ships, auxiliaries and colliers, one by one they had passed into the open sea and vanished.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Message From the Kearsarge

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Inevitable Order to an Inferior Fleet

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Invader Off the Coast

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

INVADER APPEARS OFF AMERICAN COAST