He held in his grip the sea, the land and the air. In shore lay ships ready to sweep part of his front with protective fire. On land his advance forces had seized roads and railroads, his engineers were repairing what had been destroyed, and his cavalry was guarding all approaches. His air-men, overwhelmingly numerous, spied on the American army almost with impunity, and parried with sure aerial thrusts all American attempts to spy on their own lines.
The aerial guard, steel-breasted, with the wings of speed and talons of fire, could be broken only by equal numbers, equally terrible. Individual daring, individual skill, were nothing against this armored brood. Five times American fliers rose to try it; and five times they were grappled in mid-air and torn with shot, and dropped to the earth far below. “No more!” said the General in command.
He sat with his chin in his hand, studying the dispatches that were laid before him. They were piled high, though twenty operators and half a dozen aides struggled to eliminate from the torrential confusion the news that might be deemed most reliable.[56]
The “Fog of War”
There were messages from Washington, messages from coast defenses, messages from patrols and outposts, from scouts and from company commanders. There were wild reports of enemy invasion from places so far inland that it was palpable that they could not be true. There were reports from places so nearby that they might mean imminent danger.
Excited officials of towns and cities sent long, involved dispatches or hung for long minutes to telephones to recount interminable tales.
One hundred thousand men had landed, according to spies who had made their way into Fort Greble in the Narragansett defenses. It was two hundred thousand, telephoned Providence, transmitting messages from the coast. The army’s own scouts and spies and patrols, groping in insufficient numbers and finding a wall of cavalry and foot and machine gun detachments opposed to them everywhere, sent in estimates that varied all the way from twenty-five thousand to eighty thousand.
These American advance detachments were striking the enemy outposts east and west. Near Watch Hill three American motor cycle companies with machine guns ambushed and cut up two troops of cavalry. American cavalry drove back a battalion of engineers who had begun work on the railroad at Kingston. At Niantic two American motor patrols ran into the fire of a concealed field gun and were destroyed.
From Fort Michie on Gull Island came the news, brought by a Montauk Point fisherman who had managed to make his way across the Sound in a small boat, that men had landed on that end of Long Island. They had destroyed all communication immediately and had seized the railroad leading to New York; but it was impossible to guess how great this force was.[57]
Only one certain fact was developed from all the news. It was that the transports were unloading troops still.