Haggard and pale, Boston’s people looked toward the sea and the dawn. The sullen thunders still rolled out there, but slowly now, and far off. The fleet was using only its heaviest guns, and firing deliberately, though steadily. Having failed to destroy the effectiveness of the defenses, it would content itself with long range fire, simply to wear the defenders out till the army should arrive.
All night long Boston people, moved to unendurable terror by the bombardment, had tried to flee from the city. All night long other crowds had tried to enter it. On all the roads these opposing crowds had met and jostled.
Opposing Streams of Fugitives
They warned each other, and tried to turn each other back. Shells were falling into Boston town, said the people who were fleeing from the city. Crazed by fear, they invented the most monstrous tales and believed them.
The in-coming refugees, too, invented tales. They told of soldiers who had appeared in nearby towns, and who were burning and killing. Nothing so well illustrated the effect of terror on the faculty of reason as the fact that always, after this wild interchange of news, the city people continued to press toward the country, fearing soldiers less than the cannon-shots that had rung in their ears all night; and the country people rushed into the city, so panic-driven by what they had heard of the soldiers and their bloody day of vengeance, that they cared nothing for the heavy thunder that was shaking all the air.
Though the roads out of Boston were thus crowded, the fugitives were only a small proportion of the population. Never before had humanity realized how firmly men are chained to their habitat. Here was a city, terribly beset by land and sea with unknown, terrible fate closing steadily around it. Beyond lay the United States where there was complete freedom still, and safety. Yet who could seek it?
There were none who could go, except those temporarily mad with fear, or those so abjectly poor that it mattered nothing to them where they trudged. The workers could not go. They had to cling to the places that they knew, to the scanty foot-hold that was all the more precious to them for its scantiness. The rich could not go. Money had stopped. All that they owned had become suddenly valueless for producing cash; and without cash they could not flee. The merely well-to-do, whose whole life depended on the town, whose whole possessions lay in real estate, in homes, in shops—where could they turn?
Boston in Hopeless Fear
They stayed. They even tried, dully, to attend to business, though there was no business. Mail was still coming in and going out, but in a vastly circuitous way, as it had to go around by way of Burlington, and so through Vermont and New Hampshire to its destination. Boston could communicate still by telegraph and telephone with the United States outside of southern and western New England; but this, too, was in an equally circuitous way, and even such service as existed was constantly in danger of being severed.
Motor traffic had almost ceased on the streets. The trolley and train services were cut down to the merest necessity. Gasoline and coal shortage already had begun to make itself felt. Prices had gone up for flour and for meat. The fish wharves held none except empty vessels.