The rich men whose pleasure grounds they are gave the army their motors, their horses and themselves. Quick-witted and keen, aware of every foot of the ravines and roads and by-roads, they helped the picked men who had been selected by the commanders to guard and hold the “escapes” through the Hills.
Americans Hold the Wall
At the southern end, on the open summit of Mount Everett that old settlers prefer to call “The Dome,” whence the sight can command the sweep of the Housatonic Valley through the Hills, all the approaches from Massachusetts in the eastward, the Litchfield Hills south in Connecticut, and the basin of the Hudson River to the west, a signal corps had erected its wireless and its heliograph. At their feet, on the lower slopes, hidden in the great wild laurel that is most beautiful there, was artillery.
There were guns at Great Barrington. At Stockbridge gleaming batteries guarded the road from Hartford, which once had been the stage coach road between Boston and Albany.
Limbers and guns jolted past the great houses and estates of Lenox and vanished in the cover on both sides, to be posted on the hilly ground that commanded the Housatonic Valley. More guns passed under the elms of high Pittsfield. Motors and cavalry and cannon held North Adams and Williamstown, where Williams College stood almost deserted because students and professors had volunteered to act as sentinels and patrols.
On the old trail that had been the trail of the Mohawk Indians of New York when they went on the war-path against Massachusetts, men in olive drab were scouting and lying in cover with machine guns.
On the green hills behind Bennington, Vermont, where Yankee breastworks had been thrown up in the Revolution, there were more batteries. Here outposts and patrols guarded the road leading to Lake George, the last gateway to the territory held by the American forces in New York State. North of this were Vermont’s Green Mountains—barriers indomitable as of old when Ethan Allen, wroth at Congress, threatened to retire into those fastnesses and “wage eternal warfare against Hell, the Devil and Human Nature in general.”
Impassable by Rail
The long barrier thus running northward from Connecticut like a wall separating New England and New York, would check any except a powerful, well-supported force, advancing with the determination to break through. Long before such an army could make its way, the Americans could either front the enemy in battle, or retire safely beyond his reach.
The invaders could not break through the wall by rail. The railroad line that led from Greenfield, Massachusetts, to Troy and Albany, had in it a famous link that was vital to its operation. This link was the celebrated Hoosac Tunnel, bored for 4¾ miles through Hoosac Mountain. It was now a solid mass of blasted and piled rock that could not be cleared away in the time demanded by any military operation.