Up and down Washington street moved the multitude, waiting for news. The Old South Meeting House that has looked down on so many dramatic Boston spectacles never had looked on one so tragic as this—on a proud and not timorous city that was waiting impotently to be taken and dealt with.
Had the enemy come quickly, had the army advanced into Boston with a swift rush, it would have been less agonizing for the waiting city than this slow, systematic, machine-like advance like the jaws of a great pincer that were closing down with cruel deliberation.
The armed circle was contracting all the time, but it contracted slowly. Though the enemy’s scouts had assured him long ago that the road was free, he was taking no chances in that hostile land, whose sting he had felt. Far as he might throw out his advance guards, he took care that they should remain in constant touch with the main force and with each other. He moved his divisions in fighting array. He kept an unbroken line of communications.
Making Good His Possessions
Wherever the army passed, it made good its possession wholly. It left no village behind it in its march whose means of existence, communication, food supply and machinery of labor and business it had not made entirely its own.
Where there were destroyed places, the invader organized the population to rebuild them. He levied on every community, large and small, for funds. He paid out nothing of his own, except written scrip. At one blow the whole financial system of the conquered country was converted into one great source of tribute.
Suddenly there came a storm of news to the Boston papers. It came from the country to the south of the harbor—from Cohasset and Hingham, Weymouth and Quincy.[102]
Heavy artillery was being unloaded all along the line of the south shore branch of the Old Colony Railroad. Horses and limbers were moving along all the roads to the shore. Soldiers were advancing into all the towns.
Before the Hingham wires were cut, the correspondent in that town reported that enormous guns were being moved through it, on heavy motors.
Quincy telegraphed that troops had hurried through there and seized the 100-foot Great Hill, and also the yacht club house on Hough’s Neck. Then Quincy, too, was cut off.