Railroads and roads were blown up before advancing troops and behind them. Men blew up bridges and prevented their own escape so that the armed forces caught them as in a trap and slaughtered them at leisure. Viaducts and works were dynamited that never could have been of any use to the enemy. It was formless, systemless destruction--but in that very lack of system lay its danger to the enemy forces.
Had all the men in New England who were engaged in this wild fighting been gathered in one body, the trained, disciplined soldiers could have disposed of them in an action so simple that they might scarcely have named it a skirmish. But this was like a forest fire that, stamped out in one spot, breaks into roaring flame in another. As it sweeps from tree tops to tree tops and creeps underground, and flames out in quick fury miles away, so the warfire raved through Massachusetts and Connecticut to be crushed out only in detail with detailed, bitter work through all that long, hot, dusty day.
It was serious. This uprising of an undisciplined population could not defeat, or even damage seriously, the great army. But it could hamper it. It would force a wide scattering of troops to break down the sporadic opposition. It would make a dangerous country--dangerous in front of the advancing soldiers, dangerous in their rear, continually dangerous around them.
In that sense it was more serious than deliberate, military opposition by the American army would have been. Had the enemy commander faced only a defending army, it would have been a quiet, technical matter of advance guards against advance guards. These pawns in the old game of war would have thrust each other back here, receded before each other there, fighting only when it was forced on them, and so, gradually, properly, they would have cleared the board that the great game might be played.
This incoherent uprising was disorganizing all his tactics. From the western army that had set out to sweep through Connecticut, came
[Illustration: “There had been firing from mill-buildings, which had been destroyed for punishment.”]
word that everywhere patrols had been attacked. Men in a swift power boat on the Thames River above New London had succeeded in three places in firing on scouting parties with a Hotchkiss rifle, apparently taken from a yacht.