“It has stopped,” said the bulletins, then, “The ships have ceased firing.”
Then there came news from the harbor defenses. Two ships, said Plum Island at the east end of Long Island Sound, had engaged the defenses at long range without effect. A ship had come in east of Coney Island, just outside of the zone of fire from Sandy Hook, reported Fort Hamilton, and dropped shells into Brooklyn’s suburbs.
Now the crowds were silent no longer. Long years afterward, old men told how on that still April morning they were in quiet places on the outskirts of the great cities, and heard from there a great, strange sound as of a vast æolian harp. It was the noise of multitudes, risen.
They stormed their City Halls, roaring for soldiers. They tried to rush their armories, demanding weapons. To Washington flashed the dreaded news of Mobs. “Troops must be sent at once,” said the cities.
The old Chief of Staff, with “the bit in his teeth,” dropped the dispatches on the floor. “Let ’em handle their own mobs,” said he.
_Not Enough Men to Guard Even the Water Supply of New York and Boston_
“Handle your own mobs!” he said again, to The Boss from New York, who appeared with a flaming face.
But The Boss had the bit in his teeth, too. Those dispatches, and long distance telephone messages from close lieutenants, had filled him with a dread that was bigger than the new-born dread of the old soldier. “I’ve broken bigger men than you!” he roared. “A thousand times bigger! Once and for the last time, are you going to send the army to protect us?”
“Once, and for the last time,” said the General, quietly, “no!”
The Boss looked at him. His eyes glared. Then, all at once, he saw that in the General’s face that gave him a big, new, overwhelming knowledge. He saw that the new word “NO” had been born in Washington; and that he and his henceforth would have to admit that it meant “NO.”
It hit him like a club. Something came from his throat that was not a sob, yet strangely like one. “Then what--then--are we going to everlasting smash?”
“Listen,” said the General, gravely calm as in the beginning. He laid his hand on the politician’s shoulder. “We have swept together the stuff that you and your kind gave us in these past years. Up there,” he pointed north, “in Connecticut, our officers have been fighting to make an army of it--of battalions that have no regiments, of divisions that are not divisions, of riflemen who never learned to shoot and of cavalry that never learned to maneuver. But even if all that mess were not a mess--if all these young men were fit to fight in the battle line this moment, there are not enough of them to guard even the water-supply of New York and Boston.”[13]