From New Haven and Hartford, to the factory cities of Wallingford and Meriden, Middletown and New Britain, along all the factory-lined valleys, there passed a word that gathered workers from shops and idle men from streets. All one long day, and all one evening, they moved toward the two cities. They seemed aimless enough; but there were leaders who put themselves at their head secretly in the night.
Suddenly they were angry, determined, united bodies of men. Suddenly, like a suddenly awakened wind, they stormed the great arms factories of the two towns.
They came with guns and pistols. They came with crowbars and picks. They came with stones, and with nothing except their bare hands. They hauled their dead aside and withered under the fire of the guards, and burst through and took the works.
In Hartford they seized a whole train-load of rapid-firers and machine guns that had been loaded for the American army. In New Haven they took almost four thousand sporting rifles.
The riot fever spread to Bridgeport. The mob arose and seized the cartridge factories.
The Mad Adventure
It was a mad thing, springing less from purpose than from the insanity that invasion had laid on men’s minds. It could have but one mad end. Yet this army of madmen was moved and molded by a touch of the American ability to “do things”—that very ability on which the people might, indeed, have depended with perfect assurance, if only they had not depended on it wholly.
America did, truly, have men who would fight. They were here; and they were to fight such a fight as would be remembered many a long day. America had the men to lead, too. Though they knew that this was a hopeless thing, they “took hold.”
They took hold of men armed with magnificent rifles, but of a score of different patterns for different kinds of sport, and demanding a score of different shapes and calibers of cartridges. They took hold of infantry militia fragments whose companies had had only two or three assemblies a year for target practice with average attendances of only 11 or 12 men. They improvised scout detachments of volunteers with bicycles and motors.[128]
Young doctors took hold with nothing but emergency kits, without ambulances, without litters, without even helpers who would know how to find a wound or apply a first aid bandage.