America Fallen!/Chapter 10
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THE BOMBARDMENT OF NEW YORK
From his point of vantage, over 700 feet in midair, Kennedy, the attendant on the observation platform of the tower of the Woolworth Building, might have swept his eye over the grandest panoramic view of a great city that it has ever been granted to mortal eye to look upon. But on that particular day, April 2d, and at that particular hour, 9 A.M., he gazed neither east, north, nor west. His face was to the south, and his eye riveted upon a group of dark-gray ships that stretched in two parallel lines across the main ship channel of the Upper Bay, somewhat to the north of Robbin's Reef—the German dreadnoughts!
He had read in the papers of the night before about that absurd demand for five billion dollars, and from the papers, also, he knew that the city had made a counter proposal of one billion. The morning extras had told him that no reply had come from the German Admiral, "who, doubtless, was awaiting instructions from Berlin." He picked up a pair of field glasses (an investment of his which had long ago paid for itself, and was now a steady source of income in tips from country visitors to the tower) and sought out the flagship. Yes, there she was at the head of the first line, with the Admiral's flag flying at the—but what was that flash, keen as the flash of a mirror in the sun! Could it be that—and there came a crash, louder than that of any thunderbolt from heaven, and he was clutching wildly at the railing, as the whole mass of the tower shuddered, and then swayed for a few seconds like a reed shaken by the wind.
MAP SHOWING HOW GUNS OF GERMAN FLEET COVERED THE WHOLE OF MANHATTAN.
Driven by the instinct of flight, he rushed around the platform to the north side, and, looking down, saw that the buildings were obscured by a cloud of bricks, dust, and broken terra cotta, which fell with a prolonged roar, like a fall of Cyclopean hail, upon the roofs and pavement far below. Another crash! Again the tower staggered under the blow!
He jumped for the elevator. Yes, it was intact. A few floors down it stopped. He managed to undo the door, crawled out, and ran down the stairway. Three flights below he stood dumfounded. The stairs ended in space, and through a gaping hole, where the hollow-tile flooring had been blasted entirely away, he saw that the whole of two stories, with their floors, outer walls, and inside partitions, had been blown clear into space, leaving the skeleton of the building—columns, floor beams, and braces—stripped as clean of its brick and terra-cotta walls as it was when the erecting gang had swung it into place, a few years before.
The stairs were gone; the elevator shafts also. There was nothing for him but to return. If he could not go down, he would go up. Odd to relate, fear was giving place to curiosity. He heard the roar of the 12-inch shells, as they hurtled past the tower to fall upon the doomed city, and the observation platform would enable him to watch the stupendous spectacle of its destruction.
He gained the platform just in time to see two shells, in quick succession, pass through the top stories of the towering Equitable Life Building, and blast two gaping holes in the south wall.
The next mark was the beautiful tower that crowned the Municipal Building. The percussion fuses were functioning with deadly precision; nothing wrong with these German shells. Just one hit—and the walls and columns of the tower had been tumbled in a confused mass upon the roof of the main building and into the street below, leaving the twisted steel skeleton stripped as bare as the trees in midwinter.
And now it dawned upon Kennedy that the Germans were shooting up the city upon a predetermined plan, picking out the principal buildings and putting a couple of shots into the upper stories of each. In rapid succession the Singer Tower, the City Investing Building, the Adams Express, and the new Western Union Buildings were struck; and always the gaping holes were blown out hundreds of feet in midair, where the ruin was visible to the surging mass of people that swarmed out, like bees from a hive, into the streets below.
And then the din of the alternating boom of guns and crash of bursting shells ceased as suddenly as it began. Kennedy turned his glasses on the fleet and saw a couple of hydro-aëroplanes lifted by cranes from the deck of an auxiliary ship and placed in the water. They rose as they advanced on the city, over which they flew at an altitude of 1,500 feet. One of them swung off at the Battery and began to fly in a circular path. The other passed on until it reached the Fifty-ninth Street power station of the Subway, above which it began to describe a path of the figure eight. Kennedy turned his glasses upon the fleet. One of the guns in No. 1 turret of the flagship was being slowly elevated until it pointed well into the sky. There was a flash—a long, droning hum—and thirty seconds later he saw the shell burst against a building north of the power station. From the hydro-aëroplane above there was dropped a puff of white smoke. Another flash and this time the shell burst somewhat to the south of the station. There followed two more puffs of smoke from the 'plane. A few minutes later every 12-inch gun on the ship rose to the range and flashed forth its 860-pound shell loaded with deadly explosive. Kennedy heard the salvo go roaring by miles up in the air, and, lo! the walls of the great power station seemed to fall asunder and a huge cloud of smoke and dust rose high in the heavens.
The power station was utterly wrecked, and every train in the Subway from the Bronx to Brooklyn stopped with its terror-stricken passengers in a darkness which could be felt!
Then the aviator sailed northeast and began his fateful maneuvers above the Seventy-sixth Street power station of the Elevated Railways. The same routine followed: two or three ranging shots; the dropping of smoke signals, which were relayed by the 'plane at the Battery to the ship; and, finally, the salvo. In a few minutes every train on the Elevated was out of commission.
North the aviator now sped, until he was hovering like a remorseless fate above the Ninety-first Street power station, which runs the street-railway system of Manhattan. The relay hydro-aëroplane moved up to First Street. In ten minutes' time a salvo had found its mark, and Manhattan was absolutely bereft of all means of transportation.
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That hive of busy workers known as "the downtown district" received its quota of the morning "rush" earlier than usual on April 2d. The optimistic tone assumed by the New York press was reflected among the citizens, who were satisfied that there would be at least a period of negotiations preceding any bombardment, the result of which, it was not doubted, would be a compromise. It was curiosity which filled up the business offices half an hour earlier than usual—and curiosity it was that carried the employees by thousands to the roofs for a look at the Kaiser's dreadnoughts.
But when that first 12-inch shell flashed from the flagship, and went roaring overhead across the skies to burst in the Woolworth Tower, curiosity gave place to fear and fear to panic. From the roof to the floors below the fleeing crowd of clerks and stenographers ran, shouting that the Germans were bombarding the city. Every office floor disgorged its occupants, and a growing crowd rushed for the elevators and filled the stairways. Out of the entrance of every building there surged a human flood, and the waters of this inundation met and swirled in the side streets and turned in increasing volume to Broadway—seeking a means of quick escape by the Subway. In a few minutes the streets were filled from building line to building line with a frantic mob, so tightly jammed that all movement ceased. Then, as shell after shell burst far above, huge masses of masonry came hurtling down upon that hapless mob, killing and wounding the unfortunates where they stood, held fast. And still the terror-stricken pushed their way, with that fatal accumulation of pressure which marks a fleeing mob, out of every office-building entrance; the emerging mass acting with the cumulative effect of a hydraulic ram upon the already compacted mass in the streets. Under that fatal pressure the weak went down, ribs were crushed in, breathing was no longer possible. By the hundred, the people died where they fell.
And up from the streets of the city there rose the prolonged wail of the dying, answered from above by the savage roar of the flying shells, and the swish and clatter of the ever-falling masonry.
There was a slight relief at each Subway entrance, into which the waters of that stricken human flood twisted and gurgled like water through a sink. And further relief was given on the outskirts of the mob, where such of the police as had not been engulfed, attacking from the side streets, unloosened the fringe of the horror, by reminding the terror-stricken that the Elevated and the ferries afforded other avenues of escape.
And then, as the great power stations fell beneath the salvos of the bombardment, and every wheel in New York's vast system of transportation ceased to turn, fear redoubled and frantic horror began again to crush the life out of that hope-abandoned mob.
And just at this very hour, as though the anguish were not complete, the lawless element in the city broke loose in every quarter in a wild orgie of pillage and arson. From many a resort of crime and infamy, the gunman, the safe-cracker, and all the brood that hides from law and order streamed forth to gather in the spoil. The police, aye the whole ten thousand of them, swept off their feet by the wild terror of Manhattan's millions, were unable to co-operate for effective work. Crime had found its millennium. Into the jewelry stores, into the houses of the rich on Fifth Avenue and the West Side, a mob, armed and stopping at no crime of violence, broke its way, gathering into grip and handbag, or thrusting into pocket at each grasp, the ransom of a prince!
The terror of the bombardment swept through the densely populated tenement-house district like the rush of a prairie fire, and at once there arose in a babel of many tongues the universal cry: "To the bridges; to the bridges!" And to the bridges they swept, men, women, and children, Jew, Italian, Greek, and Russian, bearded rabbi and toddling child, in a wild stampede to put the river between themselves and the bursting shells. Eastward to the bridges they surged, half a million strong; the mob becoming denser as it converged on the various approaches.
Overwhelmed by that human flood, vehicular traffic stopped. Roadways and footways, subway tracks and trolley tracks, all were submerged. The Manhattan Bridge, among others, in spite of its width of 120 feet, was packed from rail to rail with the fleeing host, and when the crush was at its worst the inevitable happened. Somewhere a fugitive slipped, a foot passing between the railroad ties of the tracks—someone stayed to help—more stumbled and fell. The crowd behind, infuriated by the delay, made a rush, throwing down others in the van. Soon, there was a mass of struggling, cursing humanity wedged tight from rail to rail, preventing down others in the van. Soon there thousand behind stayed not their rush. The crushing out of life that was happening on lower Broadway was being repeated 150 feet above the East River.
And just then there sailed above the bridge, high in air, a German hydro-aëroplane. The mob saw it and knew the meaning of the dread portent. "God in Heaven, they are going to shell the bridge!" And then the strange thing happened. The crowd stopped its convulsive struggle. Except for the down-trodden and dying, silence fell on that multitude, and, awestruck, they gazed skyward at the harbinger of death and waited for his messengers.
Then they came. A roar as of an express train on the Elevated, and with a blast of air that swept down upon the victims, a 12-inch shell passed over the center of the span.
But before signaling to correct the range, the aviator planed down so as to obtain a closer view of the bridge. With amazement he saw that it was swarming from end to end with a helpless mass of humanity. The purpose of the bombardment was to damage—not destroy; and he realized that if the shells of the Koenig should cut the bridge cables, 50,000 souls would be hurled to their death in the river below!
Hastily he rose and signaled to the Koenig to cease fire.