Here day-light revealed a land occupied in orderly, quiet, perfect military manner. Inland, as far as the naval guns could protect them, lay the men of the advance landing party behind their machine-gun positions. For miles beyond that, east and west, their patrols had cut telegraph and telephone wires, and occupied points that commanded roads by which attacking forces might approach.
On the beach, where the blocks and tackle and hoisting derricks had been rigged in the night, gun-floats were being brought to the beach with cannon and caissons. Under the pull of centrifugal blocks these were hoisted out and dropped in shore on railway tracks that led over the sand to firm ground.
There motor trucks and traction engines, all brought to land during the night, took them and hurried them to positions ready for fight, or to park them ready for moving when the advance should begin.
Destroying the Railroad of Southern New England
From vantage points inland, from hills on Fisher’s Island, from such venturesome spies as M-9, went the news to Washington, and so through the land. The crowds in the cities, dense even at that early hour of the morning, read on the bulletin boards:
“Enemy effected a landing during the night on Rhode Island between Narragansett Bay and Long Island Sound. Transports are now close in preparing to put troops ashore. Scouts report four liners aggregating one hundred thousand tons. Army officials estimate that at the usual allowance of two men per ton this means fifty thousand men. More transports waiting under Block Island.”
“Now is the time to strike ’em!” It was not one man in one crowd who said it. In every city where there were crowds there arose these speakers—the excitable, passionate orators who are born of every great crisis and who, in such moments, find willing listeners.
“Now is the time to strike ’em, before they can bring more men ashore! They should have been attacked in the night! What kind of Generals have we got, to let ’em land, instead of throwing ’em back into the sea as fast as they came? Where is our army? Keeping itself safe?”