CHAPTER VI
HOW WAR CAME TO NEW YORK
The City of New York was in the year of the Geman attack the
largest, richest, in many respects the most splendid, and in
some, the wickedest city the world had ever seen. She was the
supreme type of the City of the Scientific Commercial Age; she
displayed its greatness, its power, its ruthless anarchic
enterprise, and its social disorganisation most strikingly and
completely. She had long ousted London from her pride of place
as the modern Babylon, she was the centre of the world's finance,
the world's trade, and the world's pleasure; and men likened her
to the apocalyptic cities of the ancient prophets. She sat
drinking up the wealth of a continent as Rome once drank the
wealth of the Mediterranean and Babylon the wealth of the east.
In her streets one found the extremes of magnificence and misery,
of civilisation and disorder. In one quarter, palaces of marble,
laced and, crowned with light and flame and flowers, towered up
into her marvellous twilights beautiful, beyond description; in
another, a black and sinister polyglot population sweltered in
indescribable congestion in warrens, and excavations beyond the
power and knowledge of government. Her vice, her crime, her law
alike were inspired by a fierce and terrible energy, and like the
great cities of mediaeval Italy, her ways were dark and
adventurous with private War.
It was the peculiar shape of Manhattan Island, pressed in by arms
of the sea on either side, and incapable of comfortable
expansion, except along a narrow northward belt, that first gave
the New York architects their bias for extreme vertical
dimensions. Every need was lavishly supplied them--money,
material, labour; only space was restricted. To begin,
therefore, they built high perforce. But to do so was to
discover a whole new world of architectural beauty, of exquisite
ascendant lines, and long after the central congestion had been
relieved by tunnels under the sea, four colossal bridges over the
east river, and a dozen mono-rail cables east and west, the
upward growth went on. In many ways New York and her gorgeous
plutocracy repeated Venice in the magnificence of her
architecture, painting, metal-work and sculpture, for example, in
the grim intensity,of her political method, in her maritime and
commercial ascendancy. But she repeated no previous state at all
in the lax disorder of her internal administration, a laxity that
made vast sections of her area lawless beyond precedent, so that
it was possible for whole districts to be impassable, while civil
War raged between street and street, and for Alsatias to exist in
her midst in which the official police never set foot. She was
an ethnic whirlpool. The flags of all nations flew in her
harbour, and at the climax, the yearly coming and going overseas
numbered together upwards of two million human beings. To Europe
she was America, to America she was the gateway of the world.
But to tell the story of New York would be to write a social
history of the world; saints and martyrs, dreamers and
scoundrels, the traditions of a thousand races and a thousand
religions, went to her making and throbbed and jostled in her
streets. And over all that torrential confusion of men and
purposes fluttered that strange flag, the stars and stripes, that
meant at once the noblest thing in life, and the least noble,
that is to say, Liberty on the one hand, and on the other the
base jealousy the individual self-seeker feels towards the common
purpose of the State.
For many generations New York had taken no heed of War, save as a
thing that happened far away, that affected prices and supplied
the newspapers with exciting headlines and pictures. The New
Yorkers felt perhaps even more certainly than the English had
done that War in their own land was an impossible thing. In that
they shared the delusion of all North America. They felt as
secure as spectators at a bullfight; they risked their money
perhaps on the result, but that was all. And such ideas of War
as the common Americans possessed were derived from the limited,
picturesque, adventurous War of the past. They saw War as they
saw history, through an iridescent mist, deodorised, scented
indeed, with all its essential cruelties tactfully hidden away.
They were inclined to regret it as something ennobling, to sigh
that it could no longer come into their own private experience.
They read with interest, if not with avidity, of their new guns,
of their immense and still more immense ironclads, of their
incredible and still more incredible explosives, but just what
these tremendous engines of destruction might mean for their
personal lives never entered their heads. They did not, so far
as one can judge from their contemporary literature, think that
they meant anything to their personal lives at all. They thought
America was safe amidst all this piling up of explosives. They
cheered the flag by habit and tradition, they despised other
nations, and whenever there was an international difficulty they
were intensely patriotic, that is to say, they were ardently
against any native politician who did not say, threaten, and do
harsh and uncompromising things to the antagonist people. They
were spirited to Asia, spirited to Germany, so spirited to Great
Britain that the international attitude of the mother country to
her great daughter was constantly compared in contemporary
caricature to that between a hen-pecked husband and a vicious
young wife. And for the rest, they all went about their business
and pleasure as if War had died out with the megatherium....
And then suddenly, into a world peacefully busied for the most
part upon armaments and the perfection of explosives, War came;
came the shock of realising that the guns were going off, that
the masses of inflammable material all over the world were at
last ablaze.
The immediate effect upon New York of the sudden onset of War was
merely to intensify her normal vehemence.
The newspapers and magazines that fed the American mind--for
books upon this impatient continent had become simply material
for the energy of collectors--were instantly a coruscation of War
pictures and of headlines that rose like rockets and burst like
shells. To the normal high-strung energy of New York streets was
added a touch of War-fever. Great crowds assembled, more
especially in the dinner hour, in Madison Square about the
Farragut monument, to listen to and cheer patriotic speeches, and
a veritable epidemic of little flags and buttons swept through
these great torrents of swiftly moving young people, who poured
into New York of a morning by car and mono-rail and subway and
train, to toil, and ebb home again between the hours of five and
seven. It was dangerous not to wear a War button. The splendid
music-halls of the time sank every topic in patriotism and
evolved scenes of wild enthusiasm, strong men wept at the sight
of the national banner sustained by the whole strength of the
ballet, and special searchlights and illuminations amazed the
watching angels. The churches re-echoed the national enthusiasm
in graver key and slower measure, and the aerial and naval
preparations on the East river were greatly incommoded by the
multitude of excursion steamers which thronged, helpfully
cheering, about them. The trade in small-arms was enormously
stimulated, and many overwrought citizens found an immediate
relief for their emotions in letting off fireworks of a more or
less heroic, dangerous, and national character in the public
streets. Small children's air-balloons of the latest model
attached to string became a serious check to the pedestrian in
Central Park. And amidst scenes of indescribable emotion the
Albany legislature in permanent session, and with a generous
suspension of rules and precedents, passed through both Houses
the long-disputed Bill for universal military service in New York
State.
Critics of the American character are disposed to consider--that
up to the actual impact of the Geman attack the people of New
York dealt altogether too much with the War as if it was a
political demonstration. Little or no damage, they urge, was
done to either the Geman or Japanese forces by the wearing of
buttons, the waving of small flags, the fireworks, or the songs.
They forgot that, under the conditions of warfare a century of
science had brought about, the non-military section of the
population could do no serious damage in any form to their
enemies, and that there was no reason, therefore, why they
should, not do as they did. The balance of military efficiency
was shifting back from the many to the few, from the common to
the specialised.
The days when the emotional infantryman decided battles had
passed by for ever. War had become a matter of apparatus of
special training and skill of the most intricate kind. It had
become undemocratic. And whatever the value of the popular
excitement, there can be no denying that the small regular
establishment of the United States Government, confronted by this
totally unexpected emergency of an armed invasion from Europe,
acted with vigour, science, and imagination. They were taken by
surprise so far as the diplomatic situation was concerned, and
their equipment for building either navigables or aeroplanes was
contemptible in comparison with the huge Geman parks. Still
they set to work at once to prove to the world that the spirit
that had created the Monitor and the Southern submarines of 1864
was not dead. The Chief of the aeronautic establishment near
West Point was Cabot Sinclair, and he allowed himself but one
single moment of the posturing that was so universal in that
democratic time. "We have chosen our epitaphs," he said to a
reporter, "and we are going to have, 'They did all they could.'
Now run away!"
The curious thing is that they did all do all they could; there
is no exception known. Their only defect indeed was a defect of
style. One of the most striking facts historically about this
War, and the one that makes the complete separation that had
arisen between the methods of warfare and the necessity of
democratic support, is the effectual secrecy of the Washington
authorities about their airships. They did not bother to confide
a single fact of their preparations to the public. They did not
even condescend to talk to Congress. They burked and suppressed
every inquiry. The War was fought by the President and the
Secretaries of State in an entirely autocratic manner. Such
publicity as they sought was merely to anticipate and prevent
inconvenient agitation to defend particular points. They
realised that the Chief danger in aerial warfare from an
excitable and intelligent public would be a clamour for local
airships and aeroplanes to defend local interests. This, with
such resources as they possessed, might lead to a fatal division
and distribution of the national forces. Particularly they
feared that they might be forced into a premature action to
defend New York. They realised with prophetic insight that this
would be the particular advantage the Germans would seek. So
they took great pains to direct the popular mind towards
defensive artillery, and to divert it from any thought of aerial
battle. Their real preparations they masked beneath ostensible
ones. There was at Washington a large relserve of naval guns,
and these were distributed rapidly, conspicuously, and with much
press attention, among the Eastern cities. They were mounted for
the most part upon hills and prominent crests around the
threatened centres of population. They were mounted upon rough
adaptations of the Doan swivel, which at that time gave the
maximum vertical range to a heavy gun. Much of this artillery
was still unmounted, and nearly all of it was unprotected when
the Geman air-fleet reached New York. And down in the crowded
streets, when that occurred, the readers of the New York papers
were regaling themselves with wonderful and wonderfully
illustrated accounts of such matters as:--
THE SECRET OF THE THUNDERBOLT
AGED SCIENTIST PERFECTS ELECTRIC GUN
TO ELECTROCUTE airship CREWS BY UPWARD LIGHTNING
WASHINGTON ORDERS FIVE HUNDRED
War SECRETARY LODGE DELIGHTED
SAYS THEY WILL SUIT THE GERMANS DOWN TO THE GROUND
PRESIDENT PUBLICLY APPLAUDS THIS MERRY QUIP
The Geman fleet reached New York in advance of the news of the
American naval disaster. It reached New York in the late
afternoon and was first seen by watchers at Ocean Grove and Long
Branch coming swiftly out of the southward sea and going away to
the northwest. The flagship passed almost vertically over the
Sandy Hook observation station, rising rapidly as it did so, and
in a few minutes all New York was vibrating to the Staten Island
guns.
Several of these guns, and especially that at Giffords and the
one on Beacon Hill above Matawan, were remarkably well handled.
The former, at a distance of five miles, and with an elevation of
six thousand feet, sent a shell to burst so close to the
Vaterland that a pane of the Prince's forward window was smashed
by a fragment. This sudden explosion made Bert tuck in his head
with the celerity of a startled tortoise. The whole air-fleet
immediately went up steeply to a height of about twelve thousand
feet and at that level passed unscathed over the ineffectual
guns. The airships lined out as they moved forward into the form
of a flattened V, with its apex towards the city, and with the
flagship going highest at the apex. The two ends of the V passed
over Plumfield and Jamaica Bay, respectively, and the Prince
directed his course a little to the east of the Narrows, soared
over Upper Bay, and came to rest over Jersey City in a position
that dominated lower New York. There the monsters hung, large
and wonderful in the evening light, serenely regardless of the
occasional rocket explosions and flashing shell-bursts in the
lower air.
It was a pause of mutual inspection. For a time naive humanity
swamped the conventions of warfare altogether; the interest of
the millions below and of the thousands above alike was
spectacular. The evening was unexpectedly fine--only a few thin
level bands of clouds at seven or eight thousand feet broke its
luminous clarity. The wind had dropped; it was an evening
infinitely peaceful and still. The heavy concussions of the
distant guns and those incidental harmless pyrotechnics at the
level of the clouds seemed to have as little to do with killing
and force, terror and submission, as a salute at a naval review.
Below, every point of vantage bristled with spectators, the roofs
of the towering buildings, the public squares, the active ferry
boats, and every favourable street intersection had its crowds:
all the river piers were dense with people, the Battery Park was
solid black with east-side population, and every position of
advantage in Central Park and along Riverside Drive had its
peculiar and characteristic assembly from the adjacent streets.
The footways of the great bridges over the East river were also
closely packed and blocked. Everywhere shopkeepers had left
their shops, men their work, and women and children their homes,
to come out and see the marvel.
"It beat," they declared, "the newspapers."
And from above, many of the occupants of the airships stared with
an equal curiosity. No city in the world was ever so finely
placed as New York, so magnificently cut up by sea and bluff
and river, so admirably disposed to display the tall effects of
buildings, the complex immensities of bridges and mono-railways
and feats of engineering. London, Paris, Berlin, were shapeless,
low agglomerations beside it. Its port reached to its heart like
Venice, and, like Venice, it was obvious, dramatic, and proud.
Seen from above it was alive with crawling trains and cars, and
at a thousand points it was already breaking into quivering
light. New York was altogether at its best that evening, its
splendid best.
"Gaw! What a place!" said Bert.
It was so great, and in its collective effect so pacifically
magnificent, that to make War upon it seemed incongruous beyond
measure, like laying siege to the National Gallery or attacking
respectable people in an hotel dining-room with battle-axe and
mail. It was in its entirety so large, so complex, so delicately
immense, that to bring it to the issue of warfare was like
driving a crowbar into the mechanism of a clock. And the
fish-like shoal of great airships hovering light and sunlit
above, filling the sky, seemed equally remote from the ugly
forcefulness of War. To Kurt, to Smallways, to I know not how
many more of the people in the air-fleet came the distinctest
apprehension of these incompatibilities. But in the head of the
Prince Karl Albert were the vapours of romance: he was a
conqueror, and this was the enemy's city. The greater the city,
the greater the triumph. No doubt he had a time of tremendous
exultation and sensed beyond all precedent the sense of power
that night.
There came an end at last to that pause. Some wireless
communications had failed of a satisfactory ending, and fleet and
city remembered they were hostile powers. "Look!" cried the
multitude; "look!"
"What are they doing?"
"What?"... Down through the twilight sank five attacking
airships, one to the Navy Yard on East river, one to City Hall,
two over the great business buildings of Wall Street and Lower
Broadway, one to the Brooklyn Bridge, dropping from among their
fellows through the danger zone from the distant guns smoothly
and rapidly to a safe proximity to the city masses. At that
descent all the cars in the streets stopped with dramatic
suddenness, and all the lights that had been coming on in the
streets and houses went out again. For the City Hall had
awakened and was conferring by telephone with the Federal command
and taking measures for defence. The City Hall was asking for
airships, refusing to surrender as Washington advised, and
developing into a centre of intense emotion, of hectic activity.
Everywhere and hastily the police began to clear the assembled
crowds. "Go to your homes," they said; and the word was passed
from mouth to mouth, "There's going to be trouble." A chill of
apprehension ran through the city, and men hurrying in the
unwonted darkness across City Hall Park and Union Square came
upon the dim forms of soldiers and guns, and were challenged and
sent back. In half an hour New York had passed from serene
sunset and gaping admiration to a troubled and threatening
twilight.
The first loss of life occurred in the panic rush from Brooklyn
Bridge as the airship approached it. With the cessation of the
traffic an unusual stillness came upon New York, and the
disturbing concussions of the futile defending guns on the hills
about grew more and more audible. At last these ceased also. A
pause of further negotiation followed. People sat in darkness,
sought counsel from telephones that were dumb. Then into the
expectant hush came a great crash and uproar, the breaking down
of the Brooklyn Bridge, the rifle fire from the Navy Yard, and
the bursting of bombs in Wall Street and the City Hall. New York
as a whole could do nothing, could understand nothing. New York
in the darkness peered and listened to these distant sounds until
presently they died away as suddenly as they had begun. "What
could be happening?" They asked it in vain.
A long, vague period intervened, and people looking out of the
windows of upper rooms discovered the dark hulls of Geman
airships, gliding slowly and noiselessly, quite close at hand.
Then quietly the electric lights came on again, and an uproar of
nocturnal newsvendors began in the streets.
The units of that vast and varied population bought and learnt
what had happened; there had been a fight and New York had
hoisted the white flag.
The lamentable incidents that followed the surrender of New York
seem now in the retrospect to be but the necessary and inevitable
consequence of the clash of modern appliances and social
conditions produced by the scientific century on the one hand,
and the tradition of a crude, romantic patriotism on the other.
At first people received the fact with an irresponsible
detachment, much as they would have received the slowing down of
the train in which they were travelling or the erection of a
public monument by the city to which they belonged.
"We have surrendered. Dear me! HAVE we?" was rather the manner
in which the first news was met. They took it in the same
spectacular spirit they had displayed at the first apparition of
the air-fleet. Only slowly was this realisation of a
capitulation suffused with the flush of passion, only with
reflection did they make any personal application. "WE have
surrendered!" came later; "in us America is defeated." Then they
began to burn and tingle.
The newspapers, which were issued about one in the morning
contained no particulars of the terms upon which New York had
yielded--nor did they give any intimation of the quality of the
brief conflict that had preceded the capitulation. The later
issues remedied these deficiencies. There came the explicit
statement of the agreement to victual the Geman airships, to
supply the complement of explosives to replace those employed in
the fight and in the destruction of the North Atlantic fleet, to
pay the enormous ransom of forty million dollars, and to
surrender the in the East river. There came, too, longer and
longer descriptions of the smashing up of the City Hall and the
Navy Yard, and people began to realise faintly what those brief
minutes of uproar had meant. They read the tale of men blown to
bits, of futile soldiers in that localised battle fightingagainst
hope amidst an indescribable wreckage, of flags hauled down by
weeping men. And these strange nocturnal editions contained also
the first brief cables from Europe of the fleet disaster, the
North Atlantic fleet for which New York had always felt an
especial pride and solicitude. Slowly, hour by hour, the
collective consciousness woke up, the tide of patriotic
astonishment and humiliation came floating in. America had come
upon disaster; suddenly New York discovered herself with
amazement giving place to wrath unspeakable, a conquered city
under the hand of her conqueror.
As that fact shaped itself in the public mind, there sprang up,
as flames spring up, an angry repudiation. "No!" cried New York,
waking in the dawn. "No! I am not defeated. This is a dream."
Before day broke the swift American anger was running through all
the city, through every soul in those contagious millions.
Before it took action, before it took shape, the men in the
airships could feel the gigantic insurgence of emotion, as cattle
and natural creatures feel, it is said, the coming of an
earthquake. The newspapers of the Knype group first gave the
thing words and a formula. "We do not agree," they said simply.
"We have been betrayed!" men took that up everywhere, it passed
from mouth to mouth, at every street corner under the paling
lights of dawn orators stood unchecked, calling upon the spirit
of America to arise, making the shame a personal reality to every
one who heard. To Bert, listening five hundred feet above, it
seemed that the city, which had at first produced only confused
noises, was now humming like a hive of bees--of very angry bees.
After the smashing of the City Hall and Post-Office, the white
flag had been hoisted from a tower of the old Park Row building,
and thither had gone Mayor O'Hagen, urged thither indeed by the
terror-stricken property owners of lower New York, to negotiate
the capitulation with Von Winterfeld. The Vaterland, having
dropped the secretary by a rope ladder, remained hovering,
circling very slowly above the great buildings, old and new, that
clustered round City Hall Park, while the Helmholz, which had
done the fighting there, rose overhead to a height of perhaps two
thousand feet. So Bert had a near view of all that occurred in
that central place. The City Hall and Court House, the
Post-Office and a mass of buildings on the west side of Broadway,
had been badly damaged, and the three former were a heap of
blackened ruins. In the case of the first two the loss of life
had not been considerable, but a great multitude of workers,
including many girls and women, had been caught in the
destruction of the Post-Office, and a little army of volunteers
with white badges entered behind the firemen, bringing out the
often still living bodies, for the most part frightfully charred,
and carrying them into the big Monson building close at hand.
Everywhere the busy firemen were directing their bright streams
of water upon the smouldering masses: their hose lay about the
square, and long cordons of police held back the gathering lack
masses of people, chiefly from the east side, from these central
activities.
In violent and extraordinary contrast with this scene of
destruction, close at hand were the huge newspaper establishments
of Park Row. They were all alight and working; they had not been
abandoned even while the actual bomb throwing was going on, and
now staff and presses were vehemently active, getting out the
story, the immense and dreadful story of the night, developing
comment and, in most cases, spreading the idea of resistance
under the very noses of the airships. For a long time Bert could
not imagine what these callously active offices could be, then he
detected the noise of the presses and emitted his "Gaw!"
Beyond these newspaper buildings again, and partially hidden by
the arches of the old Elevated Railway of New York (long since
converted into a mono-rail), there was another cordon of police
and a sort of encampment of ambulances and doctors, busy with the
dead and wounded who had been killed early in the night by the
panic upon Brooklyn Bridge. All this he saw in the perspectives
of a bird's-eye view, as things happening in a big,
irregular-shaped pit below him, between cliffs of high building.
Northward he looked along the steep canon of Broadway, down whose
length at intervals crowds were assembling about excited
speakers; and when he lifted his eyes he saw the chimneys and
cable-stacks and roof spaces of New York, and everywhere now over
these the watching, debating people clustered, except where the
fires raged and the jets of water flew. Everywhere, too, were
flagstaffs devoid of flags; one white sheet drooped and flapped
and drooped again over the Park Row buildings. And upon the
lurid lights, the festering movement and intense shadows of this
strange scene, there was breaking now the cold, impartial dawn.
For Bert Smallways all this was framed in the frame of the open
porthole. It was a pale, dim world outside that dark and
tangible rim. All night he had clutched at that rim, jumped and
quivered at explosions, and watched phantom events. Now he had
been high and now low; now almost beyond hearing, now flying
close to crashings and shouts and outcries. He had seen airships
flying low and swift over darkened and groaning streets; watched
great buildings, suddenly red-lit amidst the shadows, crumple at
the smashing impact of bombs; witnessed for the first time in his
life the grotesque, swift onset, of insatiable conflagrations.
From it all he felt detached, disembodied. The Vaterland did not
even fling a bomb; she watched and ruled. Then down they had
come at last to hover over City Hall Park, and it had crept in
upon his mind,, chillingly, terrifyingly, that these illuminated
black masses were great offices afire, and that the going to and
fro of minute, dim spectres of lantern-lit grey and white was a
harvesting of the wounded and the dead. As the light grew
clearer he began to understand more and more what these crumpled
black things signified....
He had watched hour after hour since first New York had risen out
of the blue indistinctness of the landfall. With the daylight he
experienced an intolerable fatigue.
He lifted weary eyes to the pink flush in the sky, yawned
immensely, and crawled back whispering to himself across the
cabin to the locker. He did not so.much lie down upon that as
fall upon it and instantly become asleep.
There, hours after, sprawling undignified and sleeping
profoundly, Kurt found him, a very image of the democratic mind
confronted with the problems of a time too complex for its
apprehension. His face was pale and indifferent, his mouth wide
open, and he snored. He snored disagreeably.
Kurt regarded him for a moment with a mild distaste. Then he
kicked his ankle.
"Wake up," he said to Smallways' stare, "and lie down decent."
Bert sat up and rubbed his eyes.
"Any more fightin' yet?" he asked.
"No," said Kurt, and sat down, a tired man.
"Gott!" he cried presently, rubbing his hands over his face, "but
I'd like a cold bath! I've been looking for stray bullet holes
in the air-chambers all night until now." He yawned. "I must
sleep. You'd better clear out, Smallways. I can't stand you
here this morning. You're so infernally ugly and useless. Have
you had your rations? No! Well, go in and get 'em, and don't
come back. Stick in the gallery...."
So Bert, slightly refreshed by coffee and sleep, resumed his
helpless co-operation in the War in the air. He went down into
the little gallery as the lieutenant had directed, and clung to
the rail at the extreme end beyond the look-out man, trying to
seem as inconspicuous and harmless a fragment of life as
possible.
A wind was rising rather strongly from the south-east. It
obliged the Vaterland to come about in that direction, and made
her roll a great deal as she went to and fro over Manhattan
Island. Away in the north-west clouds gathered. The throb-throb
of her slow screw working against the breeze was much more
perceptible than when she was going full speed ahead; and the
friction of the wind against the underside of the gas-chamber
drove a series of shallow ripples along it and made a faint
flapping sound like, but fainter than, the beating of ripples
under the stem of a boat. She was stationed over the temporary
City Hall in the Park Row building, and every now and then she
would descend to resume communication with the mayor and with
Washington. But the restlessness of the Prince would not suffer
him to remain for long in any one place. Now he would circle
over the Hudson and East river; now he would go up high, as if to
peer away into the blue distances; once he ascended so swiftly
and so far that mountain sickness overtook him and the crew and
forced him down again; and Bert shared the dizziness and nausea.
The swaying view varied with these changes of altitude. Now they
would be low and close, and he would distinguish in that steep,
unusual perspective, windows, doors, street and sky signs, people
and the minutest details, and watch the enigmatical behaviour of
crowds and clusters upon the roofs and in the streets; then as
they soared the details would shrink, the sides of streets draw
together, the view widen, the people cease to be significant. At
the highest the effect was that of a concave relief map; Bert saw
the dark and crowded land everywhere intersected by shining
waters, saw the Hudson river like a spear of silver, and Lower
Island Sound like a shield. Even to Bert's unphilosophical mind
the contrast of city below and fleet above pointed an opposition,
the opposition of the adventurous American's tradition and
character with Geman order and discipline. Below, the immense
buildings, tremendous and fine as they were, seemed like the
giant trees of a jungle fighting for life; their picturesque
magnificence was as planless as the chances of crag and gorge,
their casualty enhanced by the smoke and confusion of still
unsubdued and spreading conflagrations. In the sky soared the
Geman airships like beings in a different, entirely more orderly
world, all oriented to the same angle of the horizon, uniform in
build and appearance, moving accurately with one purpose as a
pack of wolves will move, distributed with the most precise and
effectual co-operation.
It dawned upon Bert that hardly a third of the fleet was visible.
The others had gone upon errands he could not imagine, beyond the
compass of that great circle of earth. and sky. He wondered, but
there was no one to ask. As the day wore on, about a dozen
reappeared in the east with their stores replenished from the
flotilla and towing a number of drachenffieger. Towards
afternoon the weather thickened, driving clouds appeared in the
south-west and ran together and seemed to engender more clouds,
and the wind came round into that quarter and blew stronger.
Towards the evening the, wind became a gale into which the now
tossing airships had to beat.
All that day the Prince was negotiating with Washington, while
his detached scouts sought far and wide over the Eastern States
looking for anything resembling an aeronautic park. A squadron
of twenty airships detached overnight had dropped out of the air
upon Niagara and was holding the town and power works.
Meanwhile the insurrectionary movement in the giant city grew
uncontrollable. In spite of five great fires already involving
many acres, and spreading steadily, New York was still not
satisfied that she was beaten.
At first the rebellious spirit below found vent only in isolated
shouts, street-crowd speeches, and newspaper suggestions; then it
found much more definite expression in the appearance in the
morning sunlight of American flags at point after point above the
architectural cliffs of the city. It is quite possible that in
many cases this spirited display of bunting by a city already
surrendered was the outcome of the innocent informality of the
American mind, but it is also undeniable thatin many it was a
deliberate indication that the people "felt wicked."
The Geman sense of correctitude was deeply shocked by this
outbreak. The Graf von Winterfeld immediately communicated with
the mayor, and pointed out the irregularity, and the fire
look-out stations were instructed in the matter. The New York
police was speedily hard at work, and a foolish contest in full
swing between impassioned citizens resolved to keep the flag
flying, and irritated and worried officers instructed to pull it
down.
The trouble became acute at last in the streets above Columbia
University. The captain of the airship watching this quarter
seems to have stooped to lasso and drag from its staff a flag
hoisted upon Morgan Hall. As he did so a volley of rifle and
revolver shots was fired from the upper windows of the huge
apartment building that stands between the University and
Riverside Drive.
Most of these were ineffectual, but two or three perforated
gas-chambers, and one smashed the hand and arm of a man upon the
forward platform; The sentinel on the lower gallery immediately
replied, and the machine gun on the shield of the eagle let fly
and promptly stopped any further shots. The airship rose and
signalled the flagship and City Hall, police and militiamen were
directed at once to the spot, and this particular incident
closed.
But hard upon that came the desperate attempt of a party of young
clubmen from New York, who, inspired by patriotic and adventurous
imaginations, slipped off in half a dozen motor-cars to Beacon
Hill, and set to work with remarkable vigour to improvise a fort
about the Doan swivel gun that had been placed there. They found
it still in the hands of the disgusted gunners, who had been
ordered to cease fire at the capitulation, and it was easy to
infect these men with their own spirit. They declared their gun
hadn't had half a chance, and,were burning to show what it could
do. Directed by the newcomers, they made a trench and bank about
the mounting of the piece, and constructed flimsy shelter-pits of
corrugated iron.
They were actually loading the gun when they were observed by the
airship Preussen and the shell they succeeded in firing before
the bombs of the latter smashed them and their crude defences to
fragments, burst over the middle gas-chambers of the Bingen, and
brought her to earth, disabled, upon Staten Island. She was
badly deflated, and dropped among trees, over which her empty
central gas-bags spread in canopies and festoons. Nothing,
however, had caught fire, and her men were speedily at work upon
her repair. They behaved with a confidence that verged upon
indiscretion. While most of them commenced patching the tears
of the membrane, half a dozen of them started off for the nearest
road in search of a gas main, and presently found themselves
prisoners in the hands of a hostile crowd. Close at hand was a
number of villa residences, whose occupants speedily developed
from an unfriendly curiosity to aggression. At that time the
police control of the large polyglot population of Staten Island
had become very lax, and scarcely a household but had its rifle
or pistols and ammunition. These were presently produced, and
after two or three misses, one of the men at work was hit in the
foot. Thereupon the Germans left their sewing and mending, took
cover among the trees, and replied.
The crackling of shots speedily brought the Preussen and Kiel on
the scene, and with a few hand grenades they made short work of
every villa within a mile. A number of non-combatant American
men, women, and children were killed and the actual assailants
driven off. For a time the repairs went on in peace under the
immediate protection of these two airships. Then when they
returned to their quarters, an intermittent sniping and fighting
round the stranded Bingen was resumed, and went on all the
afternoon, and merged at last in the general combat of the
evening....
About eight the Bingen was rushed by an armed mob, and all its
defenders killed after a fierce, disorderly struggle.
The difficulty of the Germans in both these cases came from the
impossibility of landing any efficient force or, indeed, any
force at all from the air-fleet. The airships were quite unequal
to the transport of any adequate landing parties; their
complement of men was just sufficient to manoeuvre and fight them
in the air. From above they could inflict immense damage; they
could reduce any organised Government to a capitulation in the
briefest space, but they could not disarm, much less could they
occupy, the surrendered areas below. They had to trust to the
pressure upon the authorities below of a threat to renew the
bombardment. It was their sole resource. No doubt, with a
highly organised and undamaged Government and a homogeneous and
well-disciplined people that would have sufficed to keep the
peace. But this was not the American case. Not only was the New
York Government a weak one and insufficiently provided with
police, but the destruction of the City Hall--and Post-Offide and
other central ganglia had hopelessly disorganised the
co-operation of part with part. The street cars and railways had
ceased; the telephone service was out of gear and only worked
intermittently. The Germans had struck at the head, and the head
was conquered and stunned--only to release the body from its
rule. New York had become a headless monster, no longer capable
of collective submission. Everywhere it lifted itself
rebelliously; everywhere authorities and officials left to their
own imitative were joining in the arming and flag-hoisting and
excitement of that afternoon.
The disintegrating truce gave place to a definite general breach
with the assassination of the Wetterhorn--for that is the only
possible word for the act--above Union Square, and not a mile
away from the exemplary ruins of City Hall. This occurred late
in the afternoon, between five and six. By that time the weather
had changed very much for the worse, and the operations of the
airships were embarrassed by the necessity they were under of
keeping head on to the gusts. A series of squalls, with hail and
thunder, followed one another from the south by south-east, and
in order to avoid these as much as possible, the air-fleet came
low over the houses, diminishing its range of observation and
exposing itself to a rifle attack.
Overnight there had been a gun placed in Union Square. It had
never been mounted, much less fired, and in the darkness after
the surrender it was taken with its supplies and put out of the
way under the arches of the great Dexter building. Here late in
the morning it was remarked by a number of patriotic spirits.
They set to work to hoist and mount it inside the upper floors of
the place. They made, in fact, a masked battery behind the
decorous office blinds, and there lay in wait as simply excited
as children until at last the stem of the luckless Wetterhorn
appeared, beating and rolling at quarter speed over the recently
reconstructed pinnacles of Tiffany's. Promptly that one-gun
battery unmasked. The airship's look-out man must have seen the
whole of the tenth story of the Dexter building crumble out and
smash in the street below to discover the black muzzle looking
out from the shadows behind. Then perhaps the shell hit him.
The gun fired two shells before the frame of the Dexter building
collapsed, and each shell raked the Wetterhorn from stem to
stern. They smashed her exhaustively. She crumpled up like a
can that has been kicked by a heavy boot, her forepart came down
in the square, and the rest of her length, with a great snapping
and twisting of shafts and stays, descended, collapsing athwart
Tammany Hall and the streets towards Second Avenue. Her gas
escaped to mix with air, and the air of her rent balloonette
poured into her deflating gas-chambers. Then with an immense
impact she exploded....
The Vaterland at that time was beating up to the south of City
Hall from over the ruins of the Brooklyn Bridge, and the reports
of the gun, followed by the first crashes of the collapsing
Dexter building, brought Kurt and, Smallways to the cabin
porthole. They were in time to see the flash of the exploding
gun, and then they were first flattened against the window and
then rolled head over heels across the floor of the cabin by the
air wave of the explosion. The Vaterland bounded like a football
some one has kicked and when they looked out again, Union Square
was small and remote and shattered, as though some cosmically
vast giant had rolled over it. The buildings to the east of it
were ablaze at a dozen points, under the flaming tatters and
warping skeleton of the airship, and all the roofs and walls were
ridiculously askew and crumbling as one looked. "Gaw!" said
Bert. "What's happened? Look at the people!"
But before Kurt could produce an explanation, the shrill bells of
the airship were ringing to quarters, and he had to go. Bert
hesitated and stepped thoughtfully into the passage, looking back
at the window as he did so. He was knocked off his feet at once
by the Prince, who was rushing headlong from his cabin to the
central magazine.
Bert had a momentary impression of the great figure of the
Prince, white with rage, bristling with gigantic anger, his huge
fist swinging. "Blut und Eisen!" cried the Prince, as one who
swears. "Oh! Blut und Eisen!"
Some one fell over Bert--something in the manner of falling
suggested Von Winterfeld--and some one else paused and kicked him
spitefully and hard. Then he was sitting up in the passage,
rubbing a freshly bruised cheek and readjusting the bandage he
still wore on his head. "Dem that Prince," said Bert, indignant
beyond measure. "'E 'asn't the menners of a 'og!"
He stood up, collected his wits for a minute, and then went
slowly towards the gangway of the little gallery. As he did so
he heard noises suggestive of the return of the Prince. The lot
of them were coming back again. He shot into his cabin like a
rabbit into its burrow, just in time to escape that shouting
terror.
He shut the door, waited until the passage was still, then went
across to the window and looked out. A drift of cloud made the
prospect of the streets and squares hazy, and the rolling of the
airship swung the picture up and down. A few people were running
to and fro, but for the most part the aspect of the district was
desertion. The streets seemed to broaden out, they became
clearer, and the little dots that were people larger as the
Vaterland came down again. Presently she was swaying along above
the lower end of Broadway. The dots below, Bert saw, were not
running now, but standing and looking up. Then suddenly they
were all running again.
Something had dropped from the aeroplane, something that looked
small and flimsy. It hit the pavement near a big archway just
underneath Bert. A little man was sprinting along the sidewalk
within half a dozen yards, and two or three others and one woman
were bolting across the roadway. They were odd little figures,
so very small were they about the heads, so very active about the
elbows and legs. It was really funny to see their legs going.
Foreshortened, humanity has no dignity. The little man on the
pavement jumped comically--no doubt with terror, as the bomb fell
beside him.
Then blinding flames squirted out in all directions from the
point of impact, and the little man who had jumped became, for an
instant, a flash of fire and vanished--vanished absolutely. The
people running out into the road took preposterous clumsy leaps,
then flopped down and lay still, with their torn clothes
smouldering into flame. Then pieces of the archway began to
drop, and the lower masonry of the building to fall in with the
rumbling sound of coals being shot into a cellar. A faint
screaming reached Bert, and then a crowd of people ran out into
the street, one man limping and gesticulating awkwardly. He
halted, and went back towards the building. A falling mass of
brick-work hit him and sent him sprawling to lie still and
crumpled where he fell. Dust and black smoke came pouring into
the street, and were presently shot with red flame....
In this manner the massacre of New York began. She was the first
of the great cities of the Scientific Age to suffer by the
enormous powers and grotesque limitations of aerial warfare. She
was wrecked as in the previous century endless barbaric cities
had been bombarded, because she was at once too strong to be
occupied and too undisciplined and proud to surrender in order to
escape destruction. Given the circumstances, the thing had to be
done. It was impossible for the Prince to desist, and own
himself defeated, and it was impossible to subdue the city except
by largely destroying it. The catastrophe was the logical
outcome of the situation, created by the application of science
to warfare. It was unavoidable that great cities should be
destroyed. In spite of his intense exasperation with his
dilemma, the Prince sought to be moderate even in massacre. He
tried to give a memorable lesson with the minimum waste of life
and the minimum expenditure of explosives. For that night he
proposed only the wrecking of Broadway. He directed the
air-fleet to move in column over the route of this thoroughfare,
dropping bombs, the Vaterland leading. And so our Bert Smallways
became a participant in one of the most cold-blooded slaughters
in the world's history, in which men who were neither excited
nor, except for the remotest chance of a bullet, in any danger,
poured death and destruction upon homes and crowds below.
He clung to the frame of the porthole as the airship tossed and
swayed, and stared down through the light rain that now drove
before the wind, into the twilight streets, watching people
running out of the houses, watching buildings collapse and fires
begin. As the airships sailed along they smashed up the city as
a child will shatter its cities of brick and card. Below, they
left ruins and blazing conflagrations and heaped and scattered
dead; men, women, and children mixed together as though they had
been no more than Moors, or Zulus, or Chinese. Lower New York
was soon a furnace of crimson flames, from which there was no
escape. Cars, railways, ferries, all had ceased, and never a
light lit the way of the distracted fugitives in that dusky
confusion but the light of burning. He had glimpses of what,it
must mean to be down there--glimpses. And it came to him
suddenly as an incredible discovery, that such disasters were not
only possible now in this strange, gigantic, foreign New York,
but also in London--in Bun Hill! that the little island in the
silver seas was at the end of its immunity, that nowhere in the
world any more was there a place left where a Smallways might
lift his head proudly and vote for War and a spirited foreign
policy, and go secure from such horrible things.
War in the Air Chapter 5 ...
War in the Air Chapter 7