The Bridgeport evening farmer., 1915-07-09

1 Ice over tL.e te-epnone and telegraph systems was suspended entirely. The 1 fire alarm system was operated under 1 the watchful control of soldiers. In 1 police headquarters sat a colonel of | cavalry, whose countersign was neceS- sary for every order issued by the pc 1 lice commissioner.
 This was stern officer, who held the police force in q hard, masterful hand. The men were accountable more than ever for strict enforcement of all laws, but they were subject also to summary control by every military of fcer. Even guards and pSsts of prt- vate soldiers had some authority over them. There were many daily expert ences and sights in their streets that served to make the people tractab4e, but few things were so powerful as the daily spectacle of their pugnacious police yielding sullen but complete obe- dience.
 ''It is unlawful to disobey orders giv- en by our army This short regula- ton covered a great deal It tied the police and the citizens hand and foot.
 On Sandy Hook, fifteen miles down the harbor from the Battery, there were being demonstrated the tnexora- ble mathematics Of war that had been demonstrated at Naragansett at Bos- ton, at Forts Schuyler and Slocum, in Westchester, and at Fort Totten, on Long Island.
 Fort Hancock, on Sandy Hook, al most invulnerable to ship attack from the sea, was being reduced from the land. The fort commander had dis posed his men in the most formidable positions possible, and they made the narrow sandy neck Of the Hook that led from the mainland to their fortffi- cations a pass that no force, however contemptuous Of death, would attack hastily. Barb wire and great sand mounds, rapid fire guns and big guns behind them, made them no despicable sentinels, but the Americans numbered companies where the enemy numbered batta lions and regiments. The Amer tcan mobile guns numbered pairs where the enemy's artillery was counted by dozens.
 The steel mass of fort that couad protect harbor and city could not pro tect Itself. The motley hot1lla, emerg- ing into Raritan bay, landed its men on the New Jersey shore at Newport, inside of the lower harbor and behind Sandy Hook. The defenses had not been devised or built to withstand at tack from their own bay. The great rifled guns and the steel mortars were ponderous. They were. mounted on complex engines, equally ponderous, whose bases were firmly anchored in concrete and steel. These mammoths were not things that could be swung around to all points of the compass. They were set in their solid beds for the one purpose of fighting things out at sea-
 The commander had succeeded, with desperate labor, by blasting away con crete emplacements and facings, in turning two Of his big guns around to face the land and protect the open back of the fort. But the giant steel guns, with their 1000 pound projec- tiles, that could fight 10000 ton bat tleships, could not fight little two leg ged men. They might, by chance or. fortune, find and destroy one of the siege guns that were attacking them But if they missed a gun and fell merely among soldiers hey would be scarcely more murderohs than a little field gun that fires bursting charges of