The Fall of a Nation
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“Up with you now, boy, in this fog bank. Mix with the enemy and take your chances. Stay until the firing is resumed and give me the position of their guns. I must know whether we have reached them with our shells.”
The birdman saluted and swung the taube into the clouds. He circled toward the sea and disappeared in the mists.
It was three o’clock in the afternoon before he landed far in the rear of our lines and made his way by automobile to headquarters.
Hood sprang from his desk and rushed to meet him.
“Well?”
“Got over their lines all right, sir,” the scout answered. “Watched our shells for an hour. Not one of them fell closer than half a mile short of their batteries.”
The General pressed his hand in silence.
“All right. It’s as I thought. You’re a brave boy, my son. You’re marked for promotion for this day’s work.”
There was nothing to be done but move his lines five miles back to the second trenches. They were being pounded into pulp without a chance to strike back.
We had exhausted half our stock of shells without scoring a hit. Our losses in men and guns had been frightful. The tragic feature of the day was the loss of trained artillerymen whose places could not be filled. It takes three years to train the man behind the gun.
By daylight the retreat of five miles had been effected. The ground in front was more favorable here for long range work. From captive balloons the position of the batteries could be located. We hoped that some of them could be reached and put out of action. If so, we would give them a taste of cold steel.
All night the great guns growled in the distance while our shattered lines retreated and reformed in the second intrenchments.
At dawn the vultures signalled the retreat and the green-gray wave of Death rolled forward with incredible swiftness.
By noon their greatest guns, each drawn by fifty magnificent horses, had been brought up and were sweeping into position along the low hills that would form their new battleline.
Our commander made up his mind to pot at least one of those guns. He planted a battery of heavy artillery to sweep the road that curved gracefully over these hills. A clump of trees concealed its presence from the circling scouts.
The moment the huge siege gun swept into view – its fifty horses plunging forward with steady leaps, their sides a lather of white foam – our battery roared a salvo and four shells sang in chorus. The gunners lifted their glasses and watched. Every shell struck within dead range of the long line of plunging horses. A cloud of smoke and dust rose high on the crest of the hill and when it lifted the tangled mass of torn and mangled horses and men blocked the way. A second salvo landed squarely in the wreck and blew the tangled mass into fragments – the glasses could no longer find a moving object.
The vultures circled above the hidden battery, their signals flashed and then from five different points behind the hills the shells began to shriek. In thirty minutes they were silenced and torn to bits. But two men were left alive to reach headquarters with the brave story.
The second battle began in earnest at three o’clock in the afternoon. The pitiful story was repeated. With remorseless accuracy their guns tore our men to pieces. They held their own just half a mile beyond the range of our artillery.
All night our men clung blindly to their position and at the dawn of the third day the enemy’s infantry in solid formation, their bayonets flashing, moved swiftly and silently into line for their first charge.
A hundred machine guns were concentrated to relieve them. They formed at their leisure in plain view of our ragged trenches. Our field artillery got their range and began to pour a storm of shrapnel on their ranks. They closed up the gaps with clock-like precision and moved forward at double quick. Round after round of our artillery failed to stop them. The ranks closed automatically. They were cheering now – the breeze wafted their cries across the little valley that separated them from our trenches:
“For God and Emperor!”
When the ranks in front fell, the mass behind rushed over their bodies and shouted again:
“For God and Emperor!”
Our machine guns were mowing them down as wheat falls beneath the teeth of a hundred singing harvest machines on the prairies of Minnesota.
When the first division had been wiped out the second came rushing over their bodies as if they had been denied their just honors in losing the privilege of dying. The second wave of green reached the earth of our trenches before the last man fell and still a third wave was moving across the valley. Their shouts rang a mighty chorus now in the ears of our crouching men:
“For God and Emperor!”
Our fire was held until the third wave was within a hundred yards. The low words of quick command from charging officers could be distinctly heard as their waving swords flashed in the sunlight.
Vassar watched the thrilling scene with a smile of admiration. He saw their flag now for the first time – a huge scarlet field of silk, in its center an imperial crown wrought in threads of gold.
The Federated Monarchs of Europe had taken the red emblem of the Socialists to proclaim the common cause of royal blood against the mob, and on it set the seal of imperial power.
The cheering, rushing wave rolled within fifty yards and then from every trench poured a sheet of blinding flame. So terrific was the shock, the whole division seemed to drop to their knees at the same moment. Those who had not fallen staggered as if drunk and turned in blind circles as if groping their way in the darkness. In five minutes the last man of the third host had fallen and the slopes of the hill below were piled with the dead, the wounded and dying.
The charges ceased.
The big guns in the distance beyond the hills broke forth again in a savage chorus, continuous and infernal in its incredible power.
Vassar listened with new interest. There was a deep bass voice now in this artillery oratorio that had not been heard before. The monster guns were booming for the first time. The effects of their explosions were appalling. They spoke between the roar of the smaller guns as if the basso were answering the cry of a chorus of superhuman singers. A single shot from one of these guns rang with the volume of a salvo of ordinary artillery. Their shells weighed two thousand pounds – two thousand pounds of dynamite.
Vassar heard one of them coming toward the crest of the hill that was red with heroic blood. It came through the air with the uncanny roar of an express train. The sound rose until the heavens quivered with the howl of a cyclone.
And then came the crash squarely in the center of our trenches! An explosion followed that rocked the earth and sent a great billowing cloud of smoke and dust high over the treetops into the skies. Fragments of the débris were hurled half a mile in every direction. No living thing was left to tell the story within a hundred yards of the spot. A breach had been made in the trenches through which a regiment might have charged as over an open field. For eighteen hours this terrific hail of huge projectiles continued without pause. The dull thunder was incessant and its vibration shook the world in tremors as from an earthquake.
With grim persistence our men still clung to what was left of their trenches until the night of the second day.
Hood sullenly ordered the retreat to his last line of entrenchments resting on Babylon. The discovery of the movement lead to a fierce rear guard action with the pursuing cavalry of the enemy. Their great field searchlights now swept the heavens and flooded every open space with deadly glare.
The attacking cavalry fell into ambush carefully prepared and were annihilated. They didn’t repeat the attack. But our guns had no sooner limbered up and withdrawn from their position when a squadron of the new steel cavalry, guided by the searchlights, charged at full speed seventy miles an hour down the turnpike straight into our retreating infantry. An armored automobile, spitting a storm of lead from its machine guns, plunged headlong into a regiment of volunteers, worn and half-starved and ready to fall for the lack of sleep. The huge wheels rolled over prostrate men like a great juggernaut, hurling others into the fields and dashing them among the limbs of trees.
The monster stopped at last choked by the mangled bodies caught in its machinery. A hundred desperate men swarmed over its sides and in a fierce hand to hand fight captured the car and killed its crew.
Again and again through the night of this terrible retreat these tactics were repeated. Not one of the six machines that charged our lines ever returned to tell the story. Not one that charged failed to pile the dead in heaps along the white shining turnpike.
The Holland house was inside the third line. Vassar hurried forward to beg Virginia to return with the girls and the older people to New York.
They refused to stir.
“What’s the use, sir?” Holland snapped. “We’re as safe here as anywhere. If Hood can’t hold this railroad junction – it’s all over. The wildest reports come in hourly from New York. The looting and outrages surpass belief – ”
“Your house has been raided?” Vassar asked.
“I’ve just heard that every house on both Stuyvesant Square and Gramercy Park has been smashed and wrecked. The soldiers have been looting private dwellings at their leisure – while mobs of thieves and cutthroats join in the sport.”
There was no help for it then.
He whispered a hurried good-bye to Virginia, kissed Zonia and Marya and rushed for his horse.
The first gray streaks of dawn were already tinging the eastern sky. The invading army had followed with amazing rapidity. Whole regiments armed with machine guns had been hurled forward by automobile transports. Hood had destroyed the railroad as he retreated. The advancing hosts didn’t need it. The hardened veterans who marched, with quick swinging gait, smoking their pipes and singing, could make thirty miles a day and be ready for a fight at the end of their march. They meant to rush our trenches today and make quick work of it. They were not going to waste any more big shells which might be needed elsewhere.
The wind was blowing directly in the faces of our men for the first time since the landing had been made. They wondered if the wild stories we had heard of the use of poisonous gases and liquid fire in the great war were true. We had begun to scout these tales as press work of the various governments. The day was destined to bring a rude awakening.
CHAPTER XXXI
THE first day’s battle brought to many a raw recruit the sharp need of military training. Many a man who had never consciously known the meaning of fear waked to find his knees trembling and hung his head in shame at the revelation.
Tommaso had led his squad into the trenches before his bitter hour of self-revelation came. He had caught a glimpse of his wife and boy in a group of panic-stricken refugees and the sight had taken the last ounce of courage out of him. He was going to be killed. He knew it now with awful certainty. What would become of his loved ones? All night in the trenches he brooded over it. When the sun rose he was only waiting for a chance to run in the excitement of battle. He swore he would not leave his wife and child to starve!
Angela carrying the poor little fear-stricken monkey, with the boy tightly gripping his dog Sausage, trying to save his kitten and his mother lugging a huge bundle had penetrated the American lines and found Vassar the day of the opening fight.
The leader had hustled them from the field and they had taken refuge in a cabin behind the trenches. With the first gray dawn, the aeroplanes began to drop shells from the sky. An aerial bomb exploded within twenty feet of the cabin.
Angela leaped to the door, gathered her boy and pets and shouted to her terror-stricken neighbor.
“Come – quick! we will be torn to pieces – we must run – ”
In dumb panic, Mrs. Schultz gathered her own boy convulsively in her arms and refused to stir.
Angela sprang through the door and hurried across the hills. The others crouched in the corner of the cabin and waited.
A black ball again shot downward, crashed through the roof of the cabin, exploded and sent the frail structure leaping into the heavens.
The airmen far up in the sky saw the column of flame and smoke and débris:
“Good – we got ’em that crack!” the driver shouted above the whirr of his motor.
By one of the strange miracles of war Sausage crawled over the dead body of his mother still clinging to the kitten and found his way into the woods without a scratch.
Angela was just staggering to the crest of the ridge when the shell exploded and hurled the cabin into space. A sickening wave of horror swept her soul and she suddenly sank in a heap. In vain poor Sam the monk tried to rouse her. His deep curious monkey eyes swept the smoke-wreathed heavens in terror as again and again he stroked the white still face of his fallen mistress.
For the first time since they had left home on the wild journey the childish smile left the boy’s face. His war picnic had ended in grim tragedy after all. He couldn’t believe it at first and the tears came in spite of his struggle to hold them back. In vain he shook his mother. She lay flat on her back now, her chalk-white face upturned in the sun.
The boy was still crying when he felt the nudge of another arm against his. He lifted his tear-stained face and saw Sausage’s smoke-begrimmed cheeks and the look of dumb anguish in his eyes.
“What’s the matter?” the boy sobbed.
“My mamma’s killed” – was the low answer.
The swarthy face of the little Italian pressed close to the fair German, and their arms stole round each other’s neck.
Angela waking from her faint found them thus and gathered them into her arms.
She was still soothing their fears when Tommaso crawling on hands and knees in mortal terror from the battlefield, suddenly came upon them.
In her surprise and joy over his protection Angela failed to note at first the meaning of his sudden appearance.
“O my Tommaso!” she cried, throwing herself into his arms.
He held her close for a moment and whispered excitedly:
“I come to take you home, my Angela. You will be killed – you must not be here – ”
It was not until he had spoken that the wife caught the note of cowardly terror in his voice. Her arms slipped slowly from his neck.
He hurried to repeat his warning:
“You must go quick, my Angela!”
The wife searched his soul and he turned away. She put her hand on his shoulder and her own eyes filled with tears.
“Come – we must hurry” – Tommaso urged, seizing his gun and starting to rise.
Angela held his hand firmly and pointed to the smoke-covered field below.
“No – no – my man. Your place is there to fight for our bambino and his country – you just forgot for a little while. I know – I understand. I felt my heart melt and my poor knees go down – you go now and fight for us!”
The man trembled and could not meet her eye.
A shell exploded near, hurling the dust and gravel in advance clear above them. A piece of iron buried itself in the earth but three feet away.
Angela cried in terror. The man suddenly stiffened, looked into the face of his boy, rose, seized his rifle, kissed his wife and rushed down the red lane of death to the front.
Angela watched him with pride and terror. He was still in plain view in the little valley below when he met the ragged lines of our retreating men. The color-bearer fell. Tommaso seized the flag and called the men to rally.
Through a hell of bursting shrapnel and machine-gun fire he turned the tide of retreat into a charge – a charge that never faltered until the last man fell on the slippery slopes of blood below the trenches of the enemy.
Tommaso staggered to the breastworks and stood one man against an army cheering and calling his charge to the field of the dead.
The enemy rose in the trenches and cheered the lone figure silhouetted against the darkened heavens until he sank at last exhausted from the loss of blood.
CHAPTER XXXII
OUR observers in a captive balloon had made out before sunrise the massing of machine guns in front. They were still coming on in endless procession of swirling auto-transports that lifted clouds of white dust that swept toward our lines in billows so dense at times the field was obscured.
Hood decided to close in on those guns before they could be assembled and mounted.
With a savage yell a brigade of regulars led the charge, followed by ten thousand picked men. Pressing forward before a dust cloud the regulars penetrated within a hundred yards of the enemy’s lines before they were discovered. The rush with which they crossed the space was resistless. The splutter of pompoms filled the air and half the line went down. The remaining half reached the first crews. Hand to hand now and man to man they fought like demons – bayonets, revolvers, clubs, fists and stones! Friend and foe mingled in a mad holocaust of death. While still they fought, the second line of our charging men reached the spot and joined the fray. Twenty machine guns had been captured and turned on their foes. An ominous quiet behind the scene of this bloody combat followed the first roar of the clash.
The commander of the invaders, seeing that he had lost some guns, instantly drew back his lines and reformed them fan-shaped with each gun bearing on the breach.
A tornado of whistling lead suddenly burst on the mass of our victorious troops. Five hundred machine guns had been concentrated with a speed that was stunning.
Our men dropped in platoons. They swayed and rallied and once more faced the foe for a second charge. Machine guns seemed to rise from the earth. They were fighting five regiments of men all armed with them.
The commander of our charging division tried in vain to rally. In thirty minutes there was nothing to rally. They lay in ghastly moaning heaps while whistling bullets sang their requiem in an endless crackle that came like the popping of straw before the roar of flames in a burning meadow. Whole regiments were literally wiped out with every officer and every man left torn and mangled on the field.
The reserves in the trenches saw the hideous butchery in helpless fury. No moving thing could live within the radius of those guns.
When the last man had fallen, the spluttering pompoms died away and a green billow of smoke began to roll toward our lines. It swept on in a steady, even wave three miles long. The wind was carrying the cloud straight across the trenches in which our men crouched to receive the charge they expected to follow our failure.
The dust clouds had been pouring in their faces all morning. They paid no attention to the changing greenish tints of the new dust bank. The deadly fumes poured over our trenches in silence. The men breathed once and dropped in strangling horror, clutching and tearing at their throats. The guns fell by their sides as their bodies writhed and twisted in mortal agony. The pestilence swept the field scorching and curling every living thing.
Behind it in the shadows stalked a new figure in the history of war – ghouls in shining divers’ helmets with knife and revolver to complete the assassin’s work.
A thousand fiends of hell charging in serried ranks with faces silhouetted by the red glare of the pit could not have made a picture more hideous than these crouching diving machines as they scrambled over the shambles of the trenches and ruthlessly shot the few surviving figures, blindly fighting for air.
Behind those monsters who were proof against the poison fumes advanced the dense masses of infantry.
The way was clear, the backbone of the defense had been broken. Three miles of undefended trenches lay in front. It was the simplest work of routine to give the order to charge and watch them pour through the far-flung hopeless breach, swing to the right and left and roll the broken ranks up in two mighty scrolls of blood and death.
It was done with remorseless, savage brutality. Our men asked no quarter. They got none.
The leader of the charging hosts had orders to exterminate the contemptible little army of civilians that had dared oppose the imperial hosts.
They were setting an example of frightfulness that would make the task of complete conquest easy.
“Kill! Kill! Kill!” shouted the stout bow-legged General in command of the cavalry. “It’s mercy in the long run! Let them know that we mean what we say!”
When our men saw their methods and knew that the end was sure, they sold each life for all it would bring in the shambles. Many a stalwart foe bit the dust and lay cold and still or writhing in mortal agony among the heaps of our dead and wounded before the awful day had ended.
The cries of the wounded were heartrending. A weird, unearthly sound came from the vast field of groaning, wailing, dying, gibbering men. The most hideous scenes of all were enacted by maniacs who laughed the red laugh of death in each other’s faces.
The horizon toward Southampton was black now with the smoke of burning villages. They had set them on fire with deliberate wanton purpose of destructive terror.
Would they burn Babylon in the same way? Would these maddened brutes break into our homes and make the night still more hideous with crimes against women and children?
A wave of horror swept Vassar’s soul as he thought of his nieces and the woman he loved. He crept through the shadows of the woods and hurried toward the Holland home.
CHAPTER XXXIII
THE twilight was deepening on scenes of stark horror in the streets of Babylon when Vassar slipped through the field and along the hedgerows toward the center of the town.
Flames were leaping from a dozen homes along the turnpike. He saw the brutal soldiery enter a pretty lawn, call out the occupants and as they emerged fire in volleys on old men, women and children. They fell across the doorsteps and lay where they fell. A dark figure approached the open door, hurled a quart of gasoline inside, lighted his fire ball, and walked away, his black form outlined in the night against the red glare of hell.
A crowd of panic-stricken women and children with a dozen boys of fourteen rushed down the streets toward the squad of incendiaries. Without a word they raised their rifles and fired until the last figure fell.
A child toddled from the burning home carrying her kitten in one hand and a toy lamb in another. She was sobbing bitterly in one breath, and trying to reassure her kitten in the next.
Vassar heard her as she hurried past on the other side of the hedge.
“Don’t you cry, kitty darling, I won’t let them hurt you.”
Her people were dead. She was hurrying into the night alone. From every street came the shrieks of women dragged to their doom by beasts in uniform.
Vassar set his jaw and crept along the last hedgerow to the gate of the Holland home.
The lights were burning brightly. A sentinel stood at the steps of the porch, his burly figure distinctly outlined against the cluster of electric lights in the low ceiling.
A sentry was on guard at the gate not ten feet away. A battery of artillery rolled past, its steel frames rattling and lumbering.
Vassar saw his chance.
As the last caisson wheeled away beyond the flickering street lamps the guard turned into the hedge out of the wind to light his pipe.
With a tiger spring Vassar leaped on him, gripped his throat, pressed an automatic to his breast and fired.
He took the chance that the passing battery would drown the muffled shot. The sentry crumpled in his arms and he held his breath watching his companion at the house. The steady step showed that he had not heard.
He drew the dying soldier into the shadows inside the lawn and exchanged clothes. He threw the body close under the hedge, seized the rifle and took his place at the gate.
He would side-step the officers, guard the house and make the men who dared attempt to violate it pay for their crime. It was evident that a commander had selected the house for his headquarters for the night. He watched the drunken revelers who passed and wondered what was happening inside.