But, if the mine-sweepers are permitted to work on, the mines may kill, and kill, and kill, yet in the end they will be gathered in.
There is an absolute answer to the mine-sweepers. It is to hammer them with rapid fire from the shore. These little vessels, dragging laboriously, present targets that scarcely move. No artillerist can miss them.
But again there is an answer to the mine-protecting guns. It is long-range fire from the ships that lie safely outside of the mine-fields.
There is only one answer to that. It is for defenders on land to plant huge guns far inland that can reach the ships and beat them back that they dare not come close enough to reach the lesser shore artillery nearer the sea.
This formula of shore-defense is a formula so simple that a mathematician, given the conditions, can work it out with simple arithmetic though he never had seen a cannon in his life.
Guns, guns, and again guns—and an army to protect them! This was the only possible reply to the fleet that was pounding the coast. The United States had not enough sufficiently powerful mobile coast guns and siege guns. It had not enough artillerists to fight what guns there were. And it had not enough ammunition to provide them with food.[28]
In Bethlehem, Pennsylvania; up the Hudson, in smoky Watervliet; in Hartford and Bridgeport and New Haven, and a dozen other towns, with machinery hastily assembled, and workmen hastily learning, they were trying, now, to make projectiles enough, and guns enough. They were trying to make enough powder, down in Delaware and New Jersey.
In the encampment of the United States army at that moment trains were delivering guns—guns made in record time, magnificent testimony to American efficiency under stress. But the guns were coming in one by one—to meet an enemy who was beating at the gates and could not be stopped except with hundreds.
The Enemy on the Mainland!
Even then the flag-ship off the coast was sputtering a code into the night. It was a long code, but its meaning was short. It meant: “Now!”