Kitabı oku: «The Fall of a Nation», sayfa 9

CHAPTER XXI

THE outcome of the First Parliament of Man was hailed by the professional peace-makers as the sublimest achievement of the ages. A way had been found at last to banish war. The dream of the poet had been fulfilled. They called on all men to beat their guns into plowshares, their swords into pruning-hooks. They proclaimed the end of force, the dawn of the Age of Reason.

Our nation once more demonstrated its love for the orator who preaches smooth things. The Honorable Plato Barker praised the President for his brave stand for the rights and dignity of the Republic in his heroic defense of the Monroe Doctrine.

In the same breath he acclaimed the President of Chile who led the way to the court of reason as a new prophet of humanity. He would not yield one inch in the maintenance of the Monroe Doctrine – no! But it had been demonstrated that such issues could be settled by moral suasion! The next session of the august Parliament of Man, he declared, would ratify the decision of the Pan-American Congress without a dissenting voice.

The long pent energies of our nation drove us forward now at lightning speed. During the last year of the great war our commerce had practically come to dominate the world. Anticipating conditions at its close, Congress passed a new high tariff which closed our ports to the flood of cheap goods Europe was ready to dump on our shores. Every wheel in America was turning, every man at work, wages leaped upward with profits mounting to unheard-of figures. The distress in Europe from the glut of an overstocked market sent us millions of laborers and still our industries clamored for more.

A hundred million Americans went mad with prosperity. Our wealth had already mounted steadily during the war. We were not only the richest nation on earth, there was no rival in sight.

New York ascended her throne as the money center of the world, and wealth beyond the dreams of avarice poured into the coffers of her captains of industry.

The one thing on which we had failed to make relative progress was the development of our national defenses. We had more ships, more guns, more forts, more aircraft and more submarines than ever before, but our relative position in power of defense had dropped to the lowest record in history.

At the beginning of the great war in 1914 our navy stood third on the list in power and efficiency. Only Great Britain and Germany outranked us and Germany’s balance of power was so slight that our advantageous position was deemed sufficient to overcome it.

At the end of the great war we had sunk to sixth place among the nations in power and efficiency of defense.

Great Britain, Germany, France, Russia and Japan outranked us so far that we could not consider ourselves in their class. The armies of each of these powers were so tremendous in their aggregate the mind could not grasp the import of such figures.

In spite of all the losses, Germany’s mobile forces, ready at a moment’s notice, numbered 5,000,000 trained veterans with muscles of steel and equipment unparalleled in the history of warfare. Russia had 9,000,000 men armed and hardened by war, France had 3,000,000, Great Britain 3,000,000, Austria-Hungary 3,000,000, Japan 4,000,000.

The navies of the world had also grown by leaps and bounds in spite of the few ships that had been sunk in the conflict. Great Britain still stood first, Germany next and then France, Russia and Japan. The navies of each of these nations not only outranked us in the number of ships, submarines, hydroplanes and the range of their guns, but the complete and perfect organization of their governing and directing powers more than doubled their fighting efficiency as compared to ours, gun for gun and man for man.

We were still trusting to blind luck. We had no general staff whose business it is to study conditions and create plans of defense. We had no plans for conducting a war of defense at all either on land or sea. Our admirals had warned the Government and the people, under solemn oath before Congress, that it would require five years of superhuman effort properly to equip, man and train to battle efficiency a navy which could meet the ships of either of the five great nations with any hope of success.

And nothing had been done about it.

The energies of a hundred million people were now absorbed, under the guidance of Waldron and his associated groups of propagandists, preparing to celebrate the great Peace Jubilee the week preceding the meeting of the Pan-American Congress called to settle the problem of the Monroe Doctrine.

This celebration was planned on a scale of lavish expenditure, in pageantry, oratory, illuminations, processions, and revelry unheard of in our history. The programmes were identical in New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Pittsburg, Washington, Baltimore, Norfolk, New Orleans, Cleveland, Detroit, St. Louis, Denver, San Francisco, and Los Angeles and a score of smaller cities.

John Vassar refused to accept the invitation of the Mayor of New York to address the mass meeting of naturalized Americans in the Madison Square Garden.

Virginia Holland not only refused to lead the grand Pageant of Peace in its march up Fifth Avenue to the speakers’ stand, but she resigned as president of the Woman’s Federation of Clubs of America, shut herself in her room at their country place on Long Island and refused to be interviewed.

John Vassar read the announcement with joy. The leaven of his ideas had begun to stir the depths of her brilliant mind and pure heart! The defeats of the past were as nothing if they brought her again into his life.

He wrote her a long, tender, passionate appeal that he might see her again.

He posted it at midnight on the opening day of the Jubilee. He had read of her resignation only in the afternoon papers. The managers of the ceremonies had taken for granted her approval and announced that she would lead the pageant of symbolic floats on a snow-white horse as grand marshal.

Vassar waited with impatience for her answer the next day. If the mails were properly handled his letter should have reached her by noon. An immediate answer posted in Babylon at one o’clock might be delivered at Stuyvesant Square by six. He started at every call of the postman’s whistle in vain. He was sure an answer would come in the morning. Nothing came. He put his hand on the telephone once to call her and decided against the possibility of a second bungling of his cause.

Instead he called the post-office and learned that a congestion of mail, owing to the disorganization of the service by the Jubilee, had caused a delay of twenty-four hours in the delivery to points on Long Island.

He waited in vain another day. He walked alone through the crowded streets that night studying the curious contagion of hysteria which had swept the entire city from its moorings of an orderly sane life.

The din of horns and the shouts of boys and girls, crowding and jostling on the densely packed pavements, surpassed the orgies of any New Year’s riot he had ever witnessed. Every dance hall in Greater New York was thronged with merrymakers. The committee in charge of the Jubilee, supplied with unlimited money, had hired every foot of floor space that could be used for dancing and placed it at the disposal of the social organizations of the city. Wine was flowing like water. The police winked at folly. A world’s holiday was on for a week.

Vassar visited Jack’s, Maxim’s, Bustanoby’s, Rector’s, and Churchill’s to watch the orgie at its height. Every seat was filled and surging crowds were waiting their turn at the tables. Hundreds of pretty girls, flushed with wine, were throwing confetti and thrusting feathers into the faces of passing men. The bolder of them were seated on the laps of their sweethearts, shouting the joys of peaceful conquest.

Professional dancers led the revelry with excesses of suggestive step and pose that brought wild rounds of approval from the more reckless observers.

Vassar left the last place at 12:30 with a sense of sickening anger. The fun had only begun. It would not reach the climax before two o’clock. At three the girls who were throwing confetti would be too drunk to sit in their chairs.

He drew a deep breath of fresh air and started up Broadway for a turn in the park.

He paused in front of a vacant cab. The chauffeur tipped his cap.

“Cab, sir? Free for two hours. Take you anywhere you want to go for a song. All mine on the side. Engaged here for the night. They won’t be out till morning. They’ve just set down.”

A sudden impulse seized him to drive past Waldron’s castle and see its illumination. No doubt the place would be a blaze of dazzling electric lights.

He called his order mechanically and stepped into the cab. His mind was not on the glowing lights or pleasure mad crowds. He was dreaming of the woman who had taken him to that house a little more than two years before. Every detail of that ride and interview with Waldron stood out now in his imagination with startling vividness. His mind persisted in picturing the two corseted young men who stepped from the elevator so suddenly. He wondered again what the devil they had been doing there and where they came from – and above all why they were accompanied by Villard.

Before he realized that he had started the river flashed in view from the heights south of Waldron’s castle. He had told the chauffeur to keep off the Drive, stick to Broadway and turn up Fort Washington Avenue which ran through the center of Waldron’s estate.

To his amazement the banker’s house was dark save the light from a single window in the tower that gleamed like the eye of a demon crouching in the shadows of the skies. The tall steel flag staff on the tower had been lengthened to a hundred and fifty feet. Its white line could be distinctly seen against the stars. And from the top of this staff now hung the arm of a wireless station. Waldron had no doubt gone in for wireless experiments as another one of his fads.

Far up in the sky he caught the hum of an aeroplane motor. He leaped from the cab and listened. The sound was unmistakable. He had been on the Congressional committees and witnessed a hundred experiments by the Army Aviation Corps.

“What the devil can that mean at one o’clock at night?” he muttered.

He leaped into the cab, calling to his driver:

“Go back to Times Square and drop me at the Times Building – quick.”

He made up his mind to report this extraordinary discovery to the night editor and try by his wireless plant to get in touch with Waldron’s tower.

The cab was just sweeping down Broadway between two famous restaurants and the orgies inside were at their height. The shouts and songs and drunken calls, the clash of dishes, the pop of champagne corks and twang of music poured through the open windows.

The cab suddenly lurched, and rose into the air, lifted on a floor of asphalt. An explosion shook the earth and ripped the sky with a sword of flame.

The cab crashed downward and lit squarely on the flat roof of a low-pitched building right side up.

Vassar leaped out in time to hear the dull roar of the second explosion.

The first had blown up and blocked the subway and elevated systems. The second had destroyed the power plants of the surface lines.

It had come – the war he had vainly fought to prevent! And he knew with unerring certainty the hand and brain directing the first treacherous assault.

CHAPTER XXII

VASSAR smashed the skylight of the low roof on which he had been hurled, reached the ground floor and kicked his way through a window. The half-drunken crowd of revelers were pouring out of restaurants close by. The electric lights on the four blocks about the gaping hole had been extinguished and only the gas lamps on the side streets threw their dim rays over the smoking cavern.

The merrymakers were still in a jovial mood. What was one explosion more or less? A gas main had merely blown up – that was all. They took advantage of the darkness to kiss their girls and indulge in coarse jests.

A fat Johnny emerging from a restaurant shouted:

“Where was Moses when the light went out?”

A wag who was still able to carry his liquor to the street wailed in maudlin falsetto:

“The question ’fore the house is, ‘Who struck Billy Patterson?’ ”

A series of terrific explosions shook the earth in rapid succession, and the crowd began to scramble back into the banquet halls, or run in mad panic without a plan or purpose.

A company of soldiers in dull brown uniforms with helmets of the pattern of the ancient Romans swung suddenly into Broadway from a vacant building on a darkened side street and rushed northward at double quick.

“In God’s name, what regiment’s that?” Vassar asked half to himself.

A gilded youth with battered hat slouched over his flushed face replied:

“Search me, brother – and what’s more I don’t give a damn – just so they turn on the lights and send me a cab – I’ve just gotter have a cab – I can’t travel without a cab – What t’ell’s the matter anyhow?”

Vassar left him muttering and followed the troops at a brisk trot.

They turned into Sixty-second Street, into Columbus Avenue, and poured through the smashed doors at the Twelfth Regiment Armory – they had been blown open with dynamite.

A sentinel on the corner stopped him.

“Will you tell me what company just entered the Armory?”

The soldier answered in good English with a touch of foreign accent.

“Certainly, mein Herr – Company C, Twelfth Regiment of the Imperial Confederation, at present on garrison duty in the city of New York – ”

“How the devil did you land?”

“We’ve been here for months awaiting orders – ”

He saw the terrible truth in a flash. The secret agent of Imperial Europe had organized a royal army and armed them at his leisure, Villard acting under Waldron’s guidance. The six months’ delay in the meeting of the Pan-American Congress was made for this purpose. They were all trained soldiers. Their officers had landed during the past three months. The Peace Jubilee was the mask for their movements in every great center of population.

At a given signal they had blown in the doors of every armory in Greater New York, disarmed the National Guard and mounted machine guns on their parapets.

In ten minutes machine guns were bristling from the corners of every street leading to the captured armories.

It was a master stroke! There were at least a million aliens, trained soldiers of Northern and Central Europe, living in the United States.

A single master mind could direct this army as one man.

He thanked God that his father and the girls were at Babylon. He had sent them there to avoid the scenes of the Peace Jubilee. He was too cautious now to play into the hands of the enemy.

He made his way to a telephone booth and attempted to call the Mayor’s house.

There was no answer from Central. The telephone system was out of commission.

He hurried to a Western Union office to wire Washington. Every key was silent and the operators were standing in terror-stricken groups discussing the meaning of it all.

He hurried to the Times Building to try and reach the President by wireless and found the plant a wreck.

It was ten o’clock next day before the extent of the night’s horror was known to little groups of leading men who had been lucky enough to escape arrest by the Imperial garrison.

Vassar stood among his friends in the dim back room of Schultz’s store pale and determined, speaking in subdued tone.

Scrap by scrap the appalling situation had been revealed.

A federation of crowned heads of Northern and Central Europe had decided in caucus that the United States of America was the one fly in the ointment of world harmony. They determined to remove it at once, and extend the system of government by divine right not only into South America but North America as well. The great war had impoverished their treasuries. The money had flowed into the vaults of the despised common herd of the United States. They would first indemnify themselves for the losses of the world war out of this exhaustless hoard and then organize the social and industrial chaos of the West into the imperial efficiency of a real civilization.

The result would make them the masters of the Western World for all time. Their system once organized would be invincible. The slaves they had rescued from anarchy would kiss the hand of their conquerors at last.

This was the whispered message a trusted leader had received from an officer half drunk with wine and crazed by the victory they had already achieved for the approaching imperial fleet.

Their business was to arrest and hold as hostages every man of wealth in New York, guard the vaults and banks to prevent the removal of money, garrison and control the cities until the fleet had landed the imperial army.

The completeness with which the uprising of royalist subjects had been executed was appalling. They had taken the trunk lines of every railroad in America. Not a train had arrived in New York from any point south of Newark, New Jersey, and no train from the north had reached the city beyond Tarrytown on the Hudson or South Norwalk on the New York, New Haven and Hartford.

A motor-cycle reached New York from Philadelphia bearing to the Mayor the startling information that the Navy Yard had been captured, the Quaker City’s transportation system paralyzed and that the Mayor had surrendered to the commanding general of a full army corps of twenty thousand foreign soldiers.

An automobile arrived from Boston with the same startling information from the capital of New England. Not only had the Navy Yard at Boston fallen into the hands of the enemy but the Yard at Portsmouth, New Hampshire, as well.

Not a wheel was turning in the great terminal stations of New York. The telephone and telegraph and cable systems were in the hands of the enemy. To make the wreck of the means of communication complete every wireless plant which had not been blown up was in the hands of an officer of the imperial garrison.

It was impossible to communicate by wire, wireless or by mail with Baltimore or Washington, to say nothing of the cities further inland.

Hour by hour the startling items of news crept into the stricken metropolis by automobile and motor-cycle messengers. The motor-cycle had proven the only reliable means of communication. Pickets were now commandeering or destroying every automobile that attempted to pass the main highways. But one had gotten through from Boston. The motor-cycles had taken narrow paths and side-stepped the pickets.

Not only had the great cities and navy yards been betrayed into the hands of a foreign foe mobilized in a night, but every manufactory of arms and ammunition, and every arsenal had been captured with trifling loss of life. The big gun factory at Troy, the stores of ammunition at Dover, New Jersey, the Bethlehem Iron Works, the great factories at Springfield, Bridgeport, Hartford, Ilion, Utica and Syracuse were defenseless and had fallen. In short, with the remorseless movement of fate every instrument for the manufacture of arms and ammunition was in the hands of our foes, locked and barred with bristling machine guns thrusting their noses from every window and every street corner leading to their enclosures.

The thing had been done with a thoroughness and lightning rapidity that stunned the imagination of the men who had dared to think of resistance.

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.

A premonition of disaster through some subtle sixth sense had caused him at the last moment to issue the order for every man to remain on the ship. The sailors had pleaded in vain. They had turned in cursing their superior for a fool and a tyrant.

The explosions which wrecked the doors of the armories and paralyzed the traffic of the city found the Captain of the Pennsylvania awake, pacing her decks, unable to sleep.

When the division of the Imperial Guard assigned to storm the yard rushed it they ran squarely into the guns of the big gray monster, whose searchlights suddenly swept every nook and corner of the inclosure.

In ten minutes from the time they dynamited the gates and rushed the grounds the shells from the Pennsylvania were tearing them to pieces and incidentally reducing the Navy Yard to a junk heap.

When the Yard had been cleared, the Captain landed his marines, searched the ruins and picked up a wounded officer who in sheer bravado, cocksure of ultimate victory, gave him the information he demanded.

“Who the hell are you anyhow?” the Captain asked.

“Lieutenant Colonel Harden of the Sixty-ninth Imperial Guard of the American Colonies – ”

“Colonies, eh?”

The young officer smiled.

“From tonight, the United States of America disappears from the map of the world. It will be divided between the kingdoms comprising the Imperial Federation of Northern Europe. England and France are yet poisoned with your democratic ideas. They have remained neutral, following your illustrious example in the world war. We don’t need them. Our task is so easy it’s a joke. You have my sympathy, Captain. You’re a brave and capable man. You would do honor to the Imperial Navy. You surprised me tonight. I was informed – reliably informed – that you and your men were celebrating the reign of universal peace – ”

“Who is your leader?”

“A great man, sir, known in New York as Charles Waldron. The Emperor in command of the forces of United Europe has been informed already by wireless that America is in his hands. Tomorrow morning this leader’s name will be Prince Karl von Waldron, Governor-General of the Imperial Provinces of North America.”

“So?”

“I advise you, Captain, to make the best terms you can with your new master.”

“Thank you,” was the dry reply.

The Captain dispatched a launch to Governor’s Island reporting to General Hood the remarkable information he had received. His guns had already roused the garrison. The launch met General Hood’s at the mouth of the basin.

The two men clasped hands in silence on the deck of the Pennsylvania.

“The first blow, a thunderbolt from the blue, General – without a declaration – ”

“A blow below the belt too – a slave insurrection is honorable war compared to the treachery that would thus abuse our hospitality!”

They tried the telephones and telegraph stations in vain. A council of war was called and through the grim hours from two A. M. until dawn they sat in solemn session.