The army of madmen went forward to the Connecticut River to hold the western bank from Hartford to Middletown.
They did not know how to dig trenches.
They dug ditches. They did not know how to make defenses for their machine guns. They piled trees that would skewer them with splinters under shell fire, or heaped up rocks that would fly into fragments and kill like shrapnel.
They were all of three thousand men. They were the kind of men whom America has expected always in times of peace to call to its defense. They were callous-handed workers in metal and wood and leather; bleached workers from woolen mills and cotton spindles; ‘longshoremen from the harbor cities of the Sound; professional men resolute with the fervor of the time; road-makers and teamsters and shoemakers; hunters, yachtsmen, and football players.
What Americans Could Have Done
That day along the Connecticut River they showed what America’s men could have done had they learned how to do it in advance and had they been armed for the work.
They lay behind their pitiable defenses, with their motley weapons, commanded by men who did not know war. They bore the shock of machine gun assaults from advance patrols. They bore the shock of cavalry charges from scouting detachments.
At Middletown they were attacked in force by heavy cavalry that crossed under cover of gun-fire and outflanked them, and charged in mass. They sent the charge back, broken, with many empty saddles.