Steaming rapidly up and down, ship behind ship, they loosed all their broad-side batteries, starboard and port in turn, simultaneously. So fierce was the blast that the water shook. All the surface of the sea between the ships and the land quivered. Fantastic vibration-ripples shot all around, like cracks on a shattered steel plate.
The blast killed the wind, and made an infernal little gale of its own around each ship, that spun in hot ascending columns. Surface-swimming fish were struck dead and floated in schools on the water, miles away. Even the bottom-haunting creatures felt the shock and scurried into the sand and mud.[25]
This was only the blast from the lips of the guns. It was only pressure. It was only the released energy that drove conical steel masses forward. They sped with a violence that would leave the swiftest locomotive behind in the wink of an eye. Like locomotives smashing into an obstacle, the projectiles hit the land.
That impact alone was annihilation. Having struck, the projectiles exploded.
The chart under the shaded light in the Admiral’s cabin had a semi-circle marked on it—a semi-circle that made a great segment into the land. As if it were in the electric arc, the country in that zone of fire melted. Houses vanished into stone-dust and plaster-dust even as the screaming thing that had done it struck houses a mile beyond and threw them on each other. Streets became pits with sloping sides that burned. Trees rocked, roaring as in a gale, and were tossed high, and fell, and twisted in flame. The land shriveled.
A Vast Confusion of Facts and Rumors
As the shells fell on New England’s coast, so the news fell on the United States. It sped as a vast confusion of facts and rumors, bewildered tales of terror, inventions born of crazed brains, dispatches that told only half a story, and messages that told none at all and yet, in their very incoherence, told more than intelligible words could have done.
The newspapers were tested that night, and the steady, intangible discipline of the great organization held true. Never a linotype in all the cities had to wait for its copy. The word went to the presses to “let her go.” Extras followed extras.
But the news sped ahead of the extras. It sped, and spread, and grew, and became monstrous.