The mine-sweepers hauled their gear and came out. Fourteen had gone in. Those that came out were nine.
Before they had well begun to move, the beach was white with ships’ boats, and nine hundred bluejackets and marines set foot on the mainland of the United States.[29]
With sharpened knives in their sheaths, and loaded carbines, and bandoleers filled with cartridges, and entrenching tools and provisions, each man of that first force presented the highest attainable unit-efficiency for war.
The boats were scarcely off the beach, to return to the ships, before eight hundred of these units were trotting through the up-land, throwing out advance parties, and making hasty trenches from which, in a moment, there looked the greyhound muzzles of machine-guns.
On the shore, the strand-party was sinking sand-anchors and rigging derricks. Others were setting together the five and one-half foot sections of jointed hollow masts for the wireless. When the boats beached again, with more men, two 40-foot masts reached into the night, and hand-power generators were making the antennæ pulse with their mysterious life.
Launches came in now, dragging wide, flat-bottom pontoons and swinging them on to shore and speeding back for more. Men snatched at them, and held them in the surf, and ran their mooring up the beach, while others carried out kedges and boat-anchors from all sides to make them lie steady in the groundswell.
The beach shone white as day, all at once. The destroyers had steamed in, and were giving their men aid with their search-lights.
In swung more pontoons. Broadside to broadside, kedged and anchored out, they were moored out into the sea, at half a dozen parts of the beach. Laid far enough apart that they should not touch, however hard the swell might strive to grind them together, they formed floating piers, reaching beyond the farthest outer line of surf. From pontoon to pontoon ran gang-planks, lashed fast.
Three hours had passed. Three times the ships’ boats had made the trip between warships and shore—thirty naval service cutters, each carrying thirty men. Twenty-seven hundred sailors, marines and soldiers were holding the Rhode Island coast.[30]
From the trenches of the advance party a wireless spoke to the cruiser bearing the senior officer. “Motor scouts reported in front, on road, three thousand yards in. Will fire rocket indicating direction.”