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]