South of Woonsocket a band, made up of thirty Massachusetts militia infantry and sixty factory hands from the town, prevented two companies of hostile infantry for almost two hours from crossing the Blackstone River. It was not because they could shoot, or knew how to fight. It was because they meant to stay there till they died. And it was not until they were dead that the invaders succeeded in crossing.
New England women who had spent their lives in homely, simple duties, brought out dippers of water to parched men and cheered them on. They hid fleeing men in barns and stood by, defiant, when pursuing soldiers dragged them out and shot them before their eyes.
As the Men of Old
Men took down old muskets that had been over chimney-places for a generation. Their wives and mothers kissed them as they went out to fight.
Grandparents saw their sons and their sons’ sons lie in ambush in ancestral pastures that had not echoed to a ruder sound than the lowing of cows; and they saw them vanish away in red storm, and did not weep.
Dynamite! Dynamite! went the word through Massachusetts and Connecticut. This was something that the unarmed country had, and that it knew how to use. Even the peaceful farmers had it, and were practiced in handling it, from long work in blowing out stumps and rocks. Irish construction gangs, Italian road-makers, workers of every tongue and race from pits and quarries, joined the New England men.
They blew up a sunken road through which artillery was lumbering. They blasted away a steep bank and buried a troop of cavalry. They blew up a mined road in front of infantry and when it retreated, sprang a second mine under the soldiers’ feet that exterminated a battalion.
Railroads and roads were blown up before advancing troops and behind them. Men blew up bridges and prevented their own escape so that the armed forces caught them as in a trap and slaughtered them at leisure. Viaducts and works were dynamited that never could have been of any use to the enemy. It was formless, systemless destruction—but in that very lack of system lay its danger to the enemy forces.
Had all the men in New England who were engaged in this wild fighting been gathered in one body, the trained, disciplined soldiers could have disposed of them in an action so simple that they might scarcely have named it a skirmish. But this was like a forest fire that, stamped out in one spot, breaks into roaring flame in another. As it sweeps from tree tops to tree tops and creeps underground, and flames out in quick fury miles away, so the warfire raved through Massachusetts and Connecticut to be crushed out only in detail with detailed, bitter work through all that long, hot, dusty day.
Serious to the Enemy