The Bridgeport evening farmer., 1915-06-26


 sufficient force to meet him and throw him back Attacked from the land the men of the defenses would have to retire to the inner keep and fight from shelter with rapid fire guns. And when the defenses thus began to defend themselves their hour would have struck.
 Still, for the time they were deadly. The enemy fleet paid them the supreme tribute of scrupulous respect. Not a vessel ventured after dawn into the deadly circle of their reach. To make sure that no vessel should expose it. self by accident, the ninelayers of the enemy fleet were even then moving well outside of the zone of extreme fire, and laying immense steel buoys, paint ed a vivid scarlet.
 These scarlet buoys outlined an area of safety that was shaped somewhat like a pentagon with it's apex at Block island and its base on the Rhode Island coast between Watch Hill and Point Judith.
 It was a base marking out five miles of beach that was safe both from the fire of the Long Island sound defenses shooting eastward over the water along the Rhode Island shore, and from the shots of the Narragansett defenses h.
 Here daylight revealed a land oc- cupied in orderly, quiet, perfect mill tary manner. Inland, as far as the naval guns could protect them, lay the men of the advance landing party be- hind their machine gun positions. For miles beyond that, east and west their patrols had cut telegraph and tele- phone wires, and occupied points that commanded roads by which attacking forces might approach.
 On the beach, where the blocks and tackle and hoisting derricks had been rigged in the night, gun floats were be- ing brought to the beach with cannon and caissons.
 There notortrucks and traction en- zines, all brought to land during the night, took them and hurried them to positions ready for fight or to park vance should begin.
 Fsom vantage points inland, from hills on Fishers island, from such ven turesome spies as M-9, went the news to Washington and so through theland | The crowds in the cities, dense even at that early hour of the morning, read on the bulletin boards:
 Enemy effected landing during the night on Rhode Island between Narra- gansett bay and Long Island sound. Transports are now close in preparing to put troops ashore. Scouts report four liners, aggregating 100000 tons. Army I officials estimate that at the usual all I lowance of two men per ton this means l 50,0O0 men. More transports waiting under Block Island.''
 Now is the time to strike 'em,'' cried l the men, before they can bring more FT7I,l- attacked in the night! What kind of l generals have we got, to let lem land 1 instead of throwing 'em back into the sea as fast as they come? Where is our army? Keeping itself safer
 The army. with 10000 civilian work CTS impressed as they were needed, l was destroying the railroads of south ern New England. It was tearing up the shore line of the New York, New Haven and Hartford railroad from 1 New Haven to New London and from ] New London to Providence It was 1 throwing the rails on fiat cars to be i whirled away westward and north ward. Concrete and stone embark ments, steel bridges and tunnels were sent sky ward through the night with l dynamite.
 CHAPTER VII.
 The American Arny's Lack of "Eyes." . ~ N the army headquarters, where a
 single short order had set loose
 all this saturnaIia of destruction.
 the commanding general and his staff were busted with something that was of more immediate importance to | them. Desperately they were thrust 1 ing out for information, and always 1 they were baf11ed by superior numbers, superior resources.
 l They had pushed cavalry toward the coast, and it had been driven back by 1 artillery and long range fire from the ships, whose aim was controlled by aeropIane signals from the sky and wireless from the shore. They had pushed out motor scouts and the artil- lery had found them. Always at every l approach during the night or since daylight the ships fire had swept the roads.
 Now, scarcely an hour after sunrise, T the army aeroplanes had come back after only haphazard scouting. They l had not been able to fly over the in- i vaded coast. Wherever they tried it, 1 they reported, they were met by enemy planes in superior numbers.
 | One United States air man had been driven by four enemy planes into Mar ragansett bay. where he had been picked up by boats from the Newport torpedo station. Two others, borne l down by three enemy machines faster 1 than they and fired at by anti-air craft guns from an inIying ship, had barely l managed to escape behind the defenses of Fort Wright in the sound.
 The others had been pressed back inexorably by the screen of naval planes that swarmed over the coast
 The enemy planes came from the I sea. To the marveIing eyes 1n the American defenses it seemed as if the ocean were spewing them forth. One after another rose from the Atlantic under Block island