Читать книгу The Invasion of America - J. W. Muller - Страница 9

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The first American soil on which the invader set foot was not on the mainland. It was a steep-edged, wind-blown bit of New England territory that swims like a ship far out on the Atlantic in the great misty ocean gate between painted Gay Head on Martha’s Vineyard and the brown-handed lighthouse of Montauk Point, Long Island.

Unimportant to the world, but famous in American history and legend is this Block Island or Manisees, as the Indians called it, meaning the Isle of God. Here, ever since American liberty was born, there have clung generations of sea-faring, storm-fighting New England men, proud to call themselves Rhode Islanders, though the State to which they belong is so far away that they can only just see its coast.

Block Island’s men and women stood on Mehegan Bluff and Beacon Hill and Clay Head, watching their sky fill with fighting tops and enemy flags, and their sea oppressed by enemy craft. Among those who stood there that day were descendants of men who had fought at sea in every American war. Some were there who could boast that their ancestors had crept into Long Island Sound in little sloops, and even in rowing boats, to harry tall King’s ships.[22]

Strong-hearted, like their forefathers, were these men. They looked out on their beset horizon and doubled their sun-burned hands into fists, longing to get among the foe with ship to ship, gun to gun, and the battle-flag of America shining.

This was no tame population, to be terrified like a driven herd. Smacksmen were these, accustomed to looking unafraid into the black snarl of storm. Swordfishermen were here who went daily, without a second thought, to fight the lithe spearsman of the sea in his own element.

The First Invader

A cruiser rushed at their island. Heavy with turreted guns and broadside batteries, tall with laced iron mast-towers and wide funnels and ponderous cranes, swarthy-gray over all like a Vulcan’s smithy, the enormous thing stopped half a mile out with the guns of the secondary batteries pointing at the land. From under her quarter, around bow and stern, swept destroyers with cocked funnels spitting smoke and with ready, alert men at the lean little guns.

They moved straight for the little harbor, in a long line. On the bridge of the foremost, an officer waved a hand at the crowd of fishermen on the shore, pointed to his guns, and, with a backward motion, to the cruiser.

“Aye! We take the hint, damn ye!” growled an old man. “He means,” he turned to the rest, “that we’d better not make a fuss! Drop that!” He turned sharply to a younger man, who had just joined the group. He had a shot-gun, half concealed under his coat.

“Are we going to take it laying down?” demanded the armed man.

The old man pushed him backward with both hands. “You fool! That thing out there could blow us off the island, men, women and

“Destroyers moved straight for the harbor in a long line.”

children, as if we was dead maple-leaves afore a southeastern gale!”

The destroyers had stopped. The crews swung their guns toward the shore.

From the cruiser dropped six ships’ boats, full of blue-jackets. They swung past the destroyers, beached, and formed in a line. There was a click of breech-bolts shot home—so quick that it was as but one sound.

A Lieutenant advanced his men with the swinging navy trot. He pointed to men in the little throng, selecting six of the older ones. “We take the island,” he said in precise English. “Fall in! We hold you responsible for the good order of the rest of your people. There must be no attempt at resistance.”

While he spoke, another detachment of the landing party had been busy among the huddle of boats in the harbor. Some were being made up into a tow. Others were being scuttled at their moorings. A third detachment was knocking holes into the smaller craft hauled up on shore.[23]

The First American to Fall

Three sailors were just driving boat-hooks through the bottom of an up-turned cat-boat, when a tall young fisherman leaped at them with an oaken tiller-handle, and struck one down.

The other two closed on him, but let go again almost instantly at the sound of a sharp order. They tore themselves away and jumped aside.

There was another order, in the same sharp voice. Instantly, while the fisherman still stood, staring, with his weapon in the motion of striking, a blast of fire spat at him from six carbines. His head went up, exposing his broad brown throat. He thrust his hands before him, all the fingers out-spread. With his eyes wide open, he tottered and pitched face down.

Another order, and the sailors wheeled, covering the islanders.

“Dan!” screamed a girl in the crowd. “Hush! Don’t look!” An older woman caught her around the neck and pressed the girl’s face to her breast.

“He brought it on himself!” said the Lieutenant to the fishermen. “Take warning! That is war!” He turned, and walked to the beach.

The dead man lay where he had fallen. The bluejackets, lowering their carbines, came to rest beyond him, facing the Block Islanders impassively.

None of these had said a word. Save for the outcry of the girl and the woman’s “Hush!” there had been utter silence, as if the discharge of the weapons had swept away speech. Slowly clenching and unclenching their hands, the big, weather-beaten, strong men stared at the corpse that lay huddled so awkwardly before them.

One of the women touched a white-haired, white-bearded islander on the arm. “Won’t they let us have him!” She turned her eyes toward the dead man. “It don’t seem hardly right—to let him lay there.”

The old man looked at her as if waking from a trance. He passed his rough hand over his brow. With his slow, wide fisherman’s stride, he stepped forward. The sailors instantly brought their weapons up.

The old man pointed dumbly to the corpse. In reply, a sailor indicated the Lieutenant with a gesture.

The fisherman walked to the Lieutenant. “I wanted to ask you—” he began, but a signalman interrupted him, pointing at his head. The Block Islander looked at him, bewildered. Impatiently, the sailor pointed again, and the islander understood.

Hesitatingly, reluctantly, he took off his hat. Crushing its brim with the grip of helpless anger, he faced the officer.

“I wanted to know—sir—if mebbe we couldn’t—” he indicated the corpse.

“Yes!” answered the officer, shortly. “You can have him!” With a change in his voice, he added: “I am sorry. Very sorry. Yes! You may take him away.”

Block Island as a Naval Base For the Enemy

So fell brave Block Island. It had greeted the sunrise with the stars and stripes hauled defiantly in the face of the invader. The setting sun shone on the flag of the enemy. Its wireless was being operated by uniformed men. Its telephone and telegraph communications with the mainland were torn out. Its little harbors were being used by destroyers and small craft as if they had been foreign naval bases forever.

So, too, had fallen the islands of Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard with their stouthearted, passionately American population. They had yielded, not to ignoble fear, but to the irresistible mechanics of war.

The people of Block Island, watching destroyers steaming slowly toward the New England coast with strings of their fishing boats in tow, noted a curious thing. Every boat was laden with fish-nets. The enemy had gathered every seine, every pound-net. He had lifted long fyke-nets from the sea, and had dragged the enormous hauling-seines from their drying-reels.

Block Island wondered what a fighting navy meant to do with fish-nets. Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard wondered, too; for they, also, had been stripped of their gear.

Following the long tows with their heaped brown freight, six cruisers moved toward the coast, each guarded by destroyers whose men watched the sea for a periscope, or for the whitened, broken water that would indicate the presence of a submarine.[24]

They moved fast, until they were within three miles of land. Then they opened fire.

Steaming rapidly up and down, ship behind ship, they loosed all their broad-side batteries, starboard and port in turn, simultaneously. So fierce was the blast that the water shook. All the surface of the sea between the ships and the land quivered. Fantastic vibration-ripples shot all around, like cracks on a shattered steel plate.

The blast killed the wind, and made an infernal little gale of its own around each ship, that spun in hot ascending columns. Surface-swimming fish were struck dead and floated in schools on the water, miles away. Even the bottom-haunting creatures felt the shock and scurried into the sand and mud.[25]

This was only the blast from the lips of the guns. It was only pressure. It was only the released energy that drove conical steel masses forward. They sped with a violence that would leave the swiftest locomotive behind in the wink of an eye. Like locomotives smashing into an obstacle, the projectiles hit the land.

That impact alone was annihilation. Having struck, the projectiles exploded.

The chart under the shaded light in the Admiral’s cabin had a semi-circle marked on it—a semi-circle that made a great segment into the land. As if it were in the electric arc, the country in that zone of fire melted. Houses vanished into stone-dust and plaster-dust even as the screaming thing that had done it struck houses a mile beyond and threw them on each other. Streets became pits with sloping sides that burned. Trees rocked, roaring as in a gale, and were tossed high, and fell, and twisted in flame. The land shriveled.

A Vast Confusion of Facts and Rumors

As the shells fell on New England’s coast, so the news fell on the United States. It sped as a vast confusion of facts and rumors, bewildered tales of terror, inventions born of crazed brains, dispatches that told only half a story, and messages that told none at all and yet, in their very incoherence, told more than intelligible words could have done.

The newspapers were tested that night, and the steady, intangible discipline of the great organization held true. Never a linotype in all the cities had to wait for its copy. The word went to the presses to “let her go.” Extras followed extras.

But the news sped ahead of the extras. It sped, and spread, and grew, and became monstrous.

The enemy had forced the harbor defenses of Boston! So ran the rushing rumor in New York and Philadelphia. Long before trains could carry papers there, people in far-off country districts heard it.

The State House was in ruins! Portsmouth and Boston Navy Yards had fallen!

New York, ran the stories through Boston and all New England, was invested at both approaches! Fort Totten had been blown up! The enemy ships had the range of the city, and already the sky-scrapers were toppling into Broadway!

The government was fleeing from Washington! An army had landed on the Delaware coast!

Even those who had the newspapers before them, and knew that none of these things was true, were shaken when the tales that had sped ahead, came back like the back-wash of a wild sea. Many hundreds that night ran with the newspapers in their hands and helped to spread, and make more fantastic, the fantastic falsehoods that had been born miles away.

But the newspaper organization worked steadily. Bit by bit the medley took tangible form. From the watchful, self-controlled chain of light-house and life-saving stations, revenue marine and other coast guard services; from the steady, unimaginative army and navy; from the alert, unshaken harbor-defenses, bit by bit the story of the night began to come in orderly sequence.

The Sea Vitals of the Commercial United States

The enemy fleet was biting into the sea-vitals of the commercial United States, the southern coast of New England between Cape Cod and Long Island Sound whose possession is the key to the manufacturing and industrial life of the East.

Battle-ships lying off the mouth of Buzzards Bay were dropping shells into the harbor and into the shores. One ship had ventured close into the land, approaching within the zone of fire from Fort Rodman, and had dropped shells near New Bedford. Hidden by intervening hills, it had escaped return fire, and was now lying just out of range, dropping an occasional 15-inch projectile toward the defenses.[26]

Other ships were firing into Narragansett Bay. They, too, were firing at immensely long range, to avoid return fire from the defenses.

Montauk Point’s wireless transmitted a dispatch that three vessels were standing in there and lowering boats. Then the apparatus fell silent.

Point Judith’s wireless had ceased speaking soon after dusk. Its last dispatch was that shells were falling near it. An hour later its operators reported from Narrangansett Pier that the tower had been destroyed.

Watch Hill and Westerly, on Rhode Island’s southwestern border, said a message from near-by Stonington, were burning, and were being wrecked by heavy shells. Fort Wright telegraphed that this was fire from two battle-ships standing just outside of range from the fort’s mortars and rifles, and throwing shells from 15-inch guns.[27]

But these great guns were being used only at intervals. Though their bite could rend towns, they destroyed themselves as they wreaked destruction. The acid-fumes from their monster powder-charges ate out their scientifically rifled cores. They had to be spared.

The real attack came from the heavy cruisers, standing close in and working 4, 5, and 8-inch guns. For every shot that the battle-ships’ mammoths fired, the cruisers fired a hundred. It was not a bombardment. It was a driving flail of whirling, smashing, exploding metal that whipped the coast between Watch Hill and Point Judith.

To the ear it was din, vast, insane. In reality, it was an operation of war, conducted as precisely and methodically as if it were a quiet laboratory experiment. The wireless controlled every shot from every gun on every ship. From the small things on slim tripods to the wide-mouthed heavy calibers spitting from hooded turrets, not one spoke without orders.

Sweeping the Floor Clean for the Enemy Army

To the trained artillerists, listening in the Narragansett and Long Island Sound defenses, it was plain as English words. That crash, as if a steel side had been blown out of a ship, was the four-inch broadside, all loosed at once. Now it would be fifteen seconds, and another crash, farther east, would tell of the next ship’s 4-inch discharge. And the heavier, fuller, air-shaking roar that came in between was from 5-inch guns, while the broken, slower, coughing bellow, that overwhelmed all the rest and echoed from every echo-making prominence inland, was the voice of an 8-inch rifle, speaking once every five minutes.

Now the flocks of shells went high to reach far to their farthest range into the land. Now they went low to sweep through the cover near shore. Sometimes the steel things drove, as if in sudden uncontrollable fury, at one given spot. Again, they spread out into a dreadful cone that danced along a five-mile stretch like a dancing whirl-wind.

The fire slackened, and died away, and fell silent, and burst out again as if a horde of devils had only held their breaths to scream anew. Up and down it moved, now in, now out, although long ago the shells had whirled away everything that could be destroyed. There was nothing living in there now. The very beasts of the woods, the birds in their nests, were dead.

To the survivors who had escaped from the first red blast, the thing seemed only a deed of insane wickedness. What had they done, they asked each other with sobbing breaths, to bring a steel navy at them? What could a great, powerful enemy gain by this murder of peaceful, unarmed country folk? What danger could there lie to him, they gasped as they fled through the dark, or lay face down to the earth and gripped at grass, in tiny houses and gardens and little sea-shore hamlets?

It was wicked murder. “Wicked murder!” said the wires, telling their tale to their fellow-citizens far away.

The men who were working the ships’ guns were from little villages, from pretty sea-shore hamlets like these themselves. They were not thinking of the habitations which were being blasted away. It was an operation of war. This was the chosen time, and this the chosen place, for the landing of the army that waited in the gloom of the sea for them to make the shore safe for it.

With their brooms of steel and fire, they simply were sweeping clear the floor on which that army was to set its foot.

Far in shore of the flame-torn cruisers, safe from any land-fire under the parabolas of the naval projectiles as if they were under a bombproof arch, certain little vessels had toiled up and down from the beginning. Slowly, for they dragged between them long wire cables that hung down to the sea-bottom, they moved back and forth along the beach, fishing.

The fish they were trying to catch were spherical and conical steel fish that bore little protuberances on their tops like the sprouting horns of a yearling kid.

A touch as soft as the touch of a lover’s hand could drive those little horns inward, to awaken a slumbering little devil of fulminate of mercury, whose sleep is so light that a mere tap will break it. And the fulminate’s explosion would detonate three hundred pounds of gun-cotton.

The submarine mine says to the big ships: “I am Death!” And they cannot answer it.

Guns That Were Being Made Too Late

But there is an answer to the mine. It is the mine-sweeper that drags for them. The men on these mine-sweepers dedicate themselves to the tomb. Some must inevitably perish. They will find a mine with their keels instead of their groping drags; or they will grapple one too close; or their wire cable will clutch two mines and swing them together, so that the little horns touch—

But, if the mine-sweepers are permitted to work on, the mines may kill, and kill, and kill, yet in the end they will be gathered in.

There is an absolute answer to the mine-sweepers. It is to hammer them with rapid fire from the shore. These little vessels, dragging laboriously, present targets that scarcely move. No artillerist can miss them.

But again there is an answer to the mine-protecting guns. It is long-range fire from the ships that lie safely outside of the mine-fields.

There is only one answer to that. It is for defenders on land to plant huge guns far inland that can reach the ships and beat them back that they dare not come close enough to reach the lesser shore artillery nearer the sea.

This formula of shore-defense is a formula so simple that a mathematician, given the conditions, can work it out with simple arithmetic though he never had seen a cannon in his life.

Guns, guns, and again guns—and an army to protect them! This was the only possible reply to the fleet that was pounding the coast. The United States had not enough sufficiently powerful mobile coast guns and siege guns. It had not enough artillerists to fight what guns there were. And it had not enough ammunition to provide them with food.[28]

In Bethlehem, Pennsylvania; up the Hudson, in smoky Watervliet; in Hartford and Bridgeport and New Haven, and a dozen other towns, with machinery hastily assembled, and workmen hastily learning, they were trying, now, to make projectiles enough, and guns enough. They were trying to make enough powder, down in Delaware and New Jersey.

In the encampment of the United States army at that moment trains were delivering guns—guns made in record time, magnificent testimony to American efficiency under stress. But the guns were coming in one by one—to meet an enemy who was beating at the gates and could not be stopped except with hundreds.

The Enemy on the Mainland!

Even then the flag-ship off the coast was sputtering a code into the night. It was a long code, but its meaning was short. It meant: “Now!”

The mine-sweepers hauled their gear and came out. Fourteen had gone in. Those that came out were nine.

Before they had well begun to move, the beach was white with ships’ boats, and nine hundred bluejackets and marines set foot on the mainland of the United States.[29]

With sharpened knives in their sheaths, and loaded carbines, and bandoleers filled with cartridges, and entrenching tools and provisions, each man of that first force presented the highest attainable unit-efficiency for war.

The boats were scarcely off the beach, to return to the ships, before eight hundred of these units were trotting through the up-land, throwing out advance parties, and making hasty trenches from which, in a moment, there looked the greyhound muzzles of machine-guns.

On the shore, the strand-party was sinking sand-anchors and rigging derricks. Others were setting together the five and one-half foot sections of jointed hollow masts for the wireless. When the boats beached again, with more men, two 40-foot masts reached into the night, and hand-power generators were making the antennæ pulse with their mysterious life.

Launches came in now, dragging wide, flat-bottom pontoons and swinging them on to shore and speeding back for more. Men snatched at them, and held them in the surf, and ran their mooring up the beach, while others carried out kedges and boat-anchors from all sides to make them lie steady in the groundswell.

The beach shone white as day, all at once. The destroyers had steamed in, and were giving their men aid with their search-lights.

In swung more pontoons. Broadside to broadside, kedged and anchored out, they were moored out into the sea, at half a dozen parts of the beach. Laid far enough apart that they should not touch, however hard the swell might strive to grind them together, they formed floating piers, reaching beyond the farthest outer line of surf. From pontoon to pontoon ran gang-planks, lashed fast.

Three hours had passed. Three times the ships’ boats had made the trip between warships and shore—thirty naval service cutters, each carrying thirty men. Twenty-seven hundred sailors, marines and soldiers were holding the Rhode Island coast.[30]

From the trenches of the advance party a wireless spoke to the cruiser bearing the senior officer. “Motor scouts reported in front, on road, three thousand yards in. Will fire rocket indicating direction.”

The rocket burst. For a minute it made all that part of the black country stand out as under lightning. “Crash!” said the ship. Over the bluejackets swept the shells, and burst.

“Crash!” said another ship.

“Apparently effective,” said the wireless again. “Shall send patrols forward.” And again it spoke, in half an hour: “Enemy driven back. Our patrols hold road. Barb wire entanglements completed. Scouts in. Report land clear, except for enemy cavalry in force inland out of range.”

The Transports

“Now!” said the cruiser’s wireless, speaking once more into the sea.

Silent, formless, black, four vast ships, long and twice as tall as the cruisers, came slowly in among them.

These were the transports, sealed that not a thread of light should shine from them to betray them to the thing that all the fleet dreaded more than anything else—the under-water lance of a submarine’s torpedo.

Under water the submarine is always blind, even when the brightest light of the noon-day sun shines vertically into the ocean. It can see only with its periscope eye above the surface.

At night the periscope cannot see. Then the submarine ceases to be useful as a submarine. It can act still; but only on the surface, like any other torpedo boat.

Two score destroyers, each of thirty knots, each armed with from four to ten 3-inch guns and rapid-firers, circled around the transports. Twice as swift as the surface-speed of the swiftest submarine, armed overwhelmingly, they could defy surface attack.[31]

They hemmed the darkened troop-ships round with a great circle of search-lights, all thrown outward, that served the double purpose of illuminating the ocean for miles, and of blinding any who tried to approach. No human eye looking into that glare could have seen the transports, even if the night had not shrouded them.

Still, these liners with their tens of thousands of men, were too precious to be protected only by this bright vigilance. From each transport there projected long steel booms, eleven to a side. These held out a half-ton net of steel grommets. Stretched fore and aft as taut as steam-capstans could haul it, this shirt of