It was about one o’clock in the morning when the people of northern Long Island, and the inhabitants of the Borough of the Bronx and Westchester County, sprang from their beds in wild alarm. Without warning, as if a hurricane had struck with instant concentrated force, all their windows had crashed. Their walls were shaking, and pictures and plaster falling. The air itself was shaking like a throbbing pulse.
It was like no gun-fire that men ever had imagined. It was not a series of explosions. It was like one explosion, whose crescent violence would not dwindle. The people of far Brooklyn and the people of lower Manhattan heard it. To their ears it was as if all the thunders of a storm-riven Heaven had been loosed to roll incessantly.
Bands of Flame
Men on vantage points along the Sound that night saw the attacking lines from end to end plainly as if it were day. So continuous was their fire, that it painted their positions with broad, unwavering bands of flame. It needed not the star bombs and rockets that curved everywhere under the sky to fall glaring into the defenses. It needed not the magnesium lights that floated from parachutes dropped by aeroplanes. On both sides of the Sound the night was a red sea.
Into the mortar pits and gun emplacements of the defenses, like a red surf from that red sea, beat the unending fire. Shrapnel that wailed like the bride of the storm, and flew apart in the air, and flung bullets as if mines had burst inside of the defense! Eleven inch shells that hammered into concrete facing, and split it apart with the irresistible agony of their explosion! Five inch shell and solid projectile! Bombs from the air, and every agency that man had yet devised to wreck and destroy!
As suddenly as it had begun, the fire stopped. The night became utterly still. The rockets ceased curving. But in all the defenses there shone white glares, from search-lights and magnesium flares, illuminating rushing masses of men who clambered over the ruins of guns and mounds, and took the works. There was none left to oppose them.
When the dawn came, the watchers rubbed their eyes. The great defenses lay apparently unharmed. Their mounds and embankments betrayed nothing of the ruin that the night’s battle had worked within. But against the brightening sky there arose a visible sign of what had been done. The flag of the Coalition floated over them and greeted the American sunrise.
Within a few hours after dawn, artillery began to move through Long Island’s boulevards toward Brooklyn. North of the city, the army began marching through the Borough of the Bronx toward the Harlem River. Before noon, guns were posted along the Harlem Heights, on University Heights, at High Bridge, and down past the mouth of the Harlem River. The Long Island Railroad brought guns to the high ground behind Newtown Creek, to the summit of Eastern Parkway, and to the Prospect Park Slope.