The only problem which confronted their commander was to hold what he had captured until the arrival of the fleet and transports bearing the first division of the regular army with its mighty guns, aeroplanes and submarines.
Unless this fleet and army should arrive and land within a reasonable time, the overwhelming numbers of the populated centers, the scattered forces of the regular army of the United States and the National Guard, with the volunteers who possessed rifles would present a dangerous problem. The amount of dynamite and other high explosives yet in the hands of the people could not be estimated.
They had yet to reckon with the regular army. The traitors had already found foemen worthy of their steel in the police force of New York. Our little army of ten thousand policemen had given a good account of themselves before the sun had risen on the fatal morning.
A force of five thousand reserves fought for six bloody hours to recapture the Armory of the Seventy-first Regiment at Park Avenue and Thirty-fourth Street. They used their own machine guns with terrible effect on a regiment that had been rushed to assist the garrison inside. This regiment had been annihilated as they emerged from the tunnel of the Fourth Avenue Street car system at Thirty-third Street. The police had received word that they were in the tunnel, placed their machine guns to rake its mouth and when the gray helmets emerged, they were met with a storm of death. Their bodies were piled in a ghastly heap that blocked the way of retreat. But the men inside were invisible. Their machine guns and sharpshooters piled our blue coats in dark heaps over Thirty-fourth Street, Fourth Avenue, Thirty-third Street and Lexington Avenue. At ten o’clock their commander determined to smash the barricade of the main entrance where the doors had been dynamited and take the armory or wipe out his force in the attempt.
In this armory had been stored enough guns for the new National Guard to equip an army large enough to dispute possession of the city with their foes. Behind the cases containing these rifles were piled five hundred machine guns whose value now was beyond estimate.
The Colonel of the regiment quartered inside knew their value even better than his assailant. The fight at the barricades of the door was to the death.
When the firing ceased, there was no bluecoat left to give the order to retreat. Their bodies were piled in a compact mass five feet high.
The police force of the metropolis were not defeated. They were simply annihilated. In pools of blood they had wiped out the jibes and slurs of an unhappy past. Not one who wore the blue surrendered. They had died to a man.
The Brooklyn Navy Yard escaped the fate of the yards at Boston and Portsmouth by a miracle.
The superdreadnought Pennsylvania had not been assigned to the fleet which had just been dispatched through the Panama Canal to the Pacific. She had entered the basin to receive slight repairs. By a curious piece of luck her Captain had refused shore leave to his men to attend the festivities of the Jubilee.