The Conquest of America Part 5

Through the side streets we s.n.a.t.c.hed hasty impressions of unforgetable scenes. Into the densely populated regions around Grand and Houston Streets the evicted people of Brooklyn had poured. And into the homes of these miserably poor people, where you can walk for blocks without hearing a word in the English tongue, Brooklyn's derelicts had been absorbed by tens of thousands.

Here came men and women from all parts of Manhattan, the rich in their automobiles, the poor on foot, bearing bundles of food and eager to help in the work of humanity. And some, alas, were busy with the sinister business of looting.

Above Fourteenth Street we had glimpses of similar scenes and I learned later that almost every family in Manhattan received some Brooklyn homeless ones into their care. New York--for once--was hospitable.

In Madison Square the people waited in silence as we approached the great white tower from which the Commander of the Army of the East, unmindful of the fate of the Woolworth and the Singer buildings, watched for further moves from the fortified sh.o.r.es of Brooklyn. Not a shout greeted our arrival at the marble entrance facing the square, not even that murmur of expectancy which sweeps over a tense gathering. The people knew the answer of von Hindenburg. They had read it, as had all the world for miles around, in the cataclysm of the plunging towers.

New York must surrender or peris.h.!.+

Scarcely three blocks away, the Committee of Public Safety, numbering one hundred, sat in agitated council at the Madison Square Garden, while enormous crowds, shouting and murmuring, surged outside, where five hundred armed policemen tried vainly to quell the spirit of riot that was in the air. Far into the night the discussion lasted, while overhead in the purple-black sky floated the two _Pa.r.s.evals_, ominous visitors, their search-lights playing over the helpless city that was to feel their wrath on the morrow unless it yielded.

Meantime, on the square platform within the great Moorish building, a hundred leading citizens of Manhattan, including the ablest and the richest and a few of the most radical, spoke their minds, while thousands of men and women, packed in the galleries and the aisles, listened heart-sick for some gleam of comfort.

And there was none.

Among the Committee of Public Safety I recognised J. P. Morgan, Jacob H.

Sehiff, John D. Rockefeller, Charles F. Murphy, Andrew Carnegie, Vincent Astor, Cardinal Farley, Colonel Jacob Ruppert, Nicholas Murray Butler, S.

Stanwood Menken, Paul M. Warburg, John Finley, Mrs. O. H. P. Belmont, James E. Gaffney, Ida Tarbell, Norman Hapgood, William Randolph Hearst, Senator Whitman, Bernard Ridder, Frank A. Munsey, Henry Morgenthau, Elihu Root, Henry L. Stimson, Franklin Q. Brown, John Mitch.e.l.l, John Wanamaker, Dr. Parkhurst, Thomas A. Edison, Colonel George Harvey, Douglas Robinson, John Hays Hammond, Theodore Shonts, William Dean Howells, Alan R. Hawley, Samuel Gompers, August Belmont, Dr. Anna Howard Shaw, the Rev. Percy Stickney Grant, Judge E. H. Gary, Emerson McMillin, Cornelius Vanderbilt, and ex-Mayor Mitchel.

Former President Wilson motored over from Princeton, accompanied by Professor McClellan, and was greeted with cheers. Ex-President Taft was speaking at the time, advocating a dignified appeal to the Hague Tribunal for an adjudication of the matter according to international law. Nearly all of the speakers favoured non-resistance, so far as New York City was concerned. With scarcely a dissenting voice, the great financial and business interests represented here demanded that New York City capitulate immediately.

Whereupon Theodore Roosevelt, who had just entered the Garden with his uniform still smeared with Long Island mud, sprang to his feet and cried out that he would rather see Manhattan Island sunk in the Bay than disgraced by so cowardly a surrender. There was still hope, he declared.

The East River was impa.s.sable for the enemy. All s.h.i.+pping had been withdrawn from Brooklyn sh.o.r.es, and the German fleet dared not enter the Ambrose Channel and the lower bay so long as the Sandy Hook guns held out.

"We are a great nation," Roosevelt shouted, "full of courage and resourcefulness. Let us stand together against these invaders, as our forefathers stood at Lexington and Bunker Hill!"

During the cheers that followed this harangue, my attention was drawn to an agitated group on the platform, the central figure being Bernard Ridder, recognised leader of the large German-American population of New York City that had remained staunchly loyal in the crisis. Presently a clamour from the crowd outside, sharper and fiercer than any that had preceded it, announced some new and unexpected danger close at hand.

White-faced, Mr. Ridder stepped to the edge of the platform and lifted his hand impressively.

"Let me speak," he said. "I must speak in justice to myself and to half a million German-Americans of this city, who are placed in a terrible position by news that I have just received. I wish to say that we are Americans first, not Germans! We are loyal to the city, loyal to this country, and whatever happens here tonight--"

At this moment a tumult of shouts was heard at the Madison Avenue entrance, and above it a shrill purring sound that seemed to strike consternation into an army officer who sat beside me.

"My G.o.d!" he cried. "The machine-guns! The Germans are in the streets!"

CHAPTER VI

VARIOUS UNPLEASANT HAPPENINGS IN MANHATTAN

I shall never forget the horror of that hoa.r.s.e cry:

"The Germans are in the streets!"

What followed was still more terrifying. Somewhere at the back of the Garden, a piercing whistle cut the air--evidently a signal--and suddenly we found ourselves facing a ghastly tragedy, and were made to realise the resistless superiority of a small body of disciplined troops over a disorganised mult.i.tude.

"_Fertig! Los! Hup!_" shouted a loud voice (it was a man with a megaphone) in the first gallery opposite the platform. Every face in that tremendous throng turned at once in the direction of the stranger's voice. And before the immense audience knew what was happening, five hundred German soldiers, armed with pistols and repeating rifles, had sprung to life, alert and formidable, at vantage-points all over the Garden. Two hundred, with weapons ready, guarded the platform and the Committee of Public Safety. And, in little groups of threes and fives, back to back, around the iron columns that rose through the galleries, stood three hundred more with flas.h.i.+ng barrels levelled at the crowds.

I counted fifteen of these dominating groups of soldiers in the northern half of the lower gallery, and it was the same in the southern half and the same on both sides of the upper gallery, which made sixty armed groups in sixty strategic positions. There was nothing for the crowd to do but yield.

"Pa.s.s out, everybody!" screamed the megaphone man. "We fire at the first disorder."

"Out, everybody!" roared the soldiers. "We fire at the first disorder."

As if to emphasise this, an automatic pistol crackled at the far end of the Garden, and frantic crowds pushed for the doors in abject terror.

There was no thought of resistance.

"Use all the exits," yelled the megaphone man; and the order was pa.s.sed on by the soldiers from group to group. And presently there rolled out into the streets and avenues through the thirty great doors and down the six outside stairways that zigzag across the building such streams of white-faced, staggering, fainting humanity as never had been seen on Manhattan Island.

I was driven out with the others (except the Committee of Public Safety), and was happy to find myself with a whole skin in Twenty-sixth Street opposite the Manhattan Club. As I pa.s.sed a group of German soldiers near the door, I observed that they wore grey uniforms. I wondered at this until I saw overcoats at their feet, and realised that they had entered the Garden like spies with the audience of citizens, their uniforms and weapons being concealed under ordinary outer garments, which they had thrown off at the word of command.

We stumbled into the street, and were driven roughly by other German soldiers toward the open s.p.a.ce of Madison Square. We fled over red and slippery pavements, strewn with the bodies of dead and wounded policemen and civilians--the hideous harvest of the machine-guns. At the corner of Madison Avenue and Twenty-fifth Street I saw an immense coal-carrying motor-truck with plates of iron covering its four sides, and through loopholes in the plates I saw murderous muzzles protruding.

It appears that shortly after midnight, at the height of the debate, four of these armoured cars came lumbering toward the Garden from west and east, north and south; and, as they neared the four corners of the immense yellow building, without warning they opened fire upon the police, which meant inevitably upon the crowd also. In each truck were a dozen soldiers and six machine-guns, each one capable of firing six hundred shots a minute. There was no chance for resistance, and within a quarter of an hour the streets surrounding the Garden were a shambles. On Madison Avenue, just in front of the main entrance, I saw bodies lying three deep, many of them hideously mutilated by the explosive effects of these bullets at short range. As I stepped across the curb in front of the S.P.C.A. building, I cried out in horror; for there on the sidewalk lay a young mother--But why describe the horror of that scene?

With difficulty I succeeded in hiring a taxicab and set out to find General Wood or some officer of his staff from whom I might get an understanding of these tragic events. Who were those German soldiers at the Garden? Where did they come from? Were they German-Americans?

It was four o'clock in the morning before I located General Wood at the plaza of the Queensborough Bridge, where he was overseeing the placing of some artillery pieces. He was too busy to talk to me, but from one of his aides I learned that the soldiers at the Madison Square Garden were not German-Americans and were not von Hindenburg's men, but were part of that invisible army of German spies that invariably precedes the invading forces of the Kaiser. Arriving a few hundred at a time for a period of more than three years, 50,000 of these German spies, fully armed and equipped, now held New York at their mercy. More than that, they had in their actual physical possession the men who owned half the wealth of the nation. That New York would capitulate was a foregone conclusion.

After cabling this news, I went back to my hotel, the old Brevoort, for a s.n.a.t.c.h of sleep; and at half-past eight I was out in the streets again. The first thing that caught my eye was a black-lettered proclamation--posted by German spies, no doubt--over Henri's barber shop, and signed by General von Hindenburg, announcing the capitulation of New York City. The inhabitants were informed that they had nothing to fear.

Their lives and property would be protected, and they would find the Germans just and generous in all their dealings. Food and supplies would be paid for at the market price, and citizens would be recompensed for all services rendered. The activities of New York would go on as usual, and there would be no immediate occupation of Manhattan Island by German troops. All orders from the conquering army in Brooklyn must be implicitly obeyed, under penalty of bombardment.

I could scarcely believe my eyes. New York City had capitulated! I asked a man beside me--an agitated citizen in an orange tie--whether this could be true. He said it was--all the morning papers confirmed it. The immense pressure from Wall Street upon Was.h.i.+ngton, owing to the hold-up of multimillionaires, had resulted in orders from the President that the city surrender and that General Wood's forces withdraw to New Jersey.

"What about John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie and J. P. Morgan and the other hostages?" I asked.

"The _Sun_ says they have been taken over to Brooklyn where the German army is, and they've got to raise a billion dollars in gold."

"A billion dollars in gold!"

"Sure; as an indemnity for New York City. You'll notice we could have bought a few defences for that billion," sniffed the angry citizen.

Things moved rapidly after this. All the s.h.i.+pping in waters about the island metropolis, including ferry-boats, launches, pilot-boats, everything that floated, was delivered over to the Germans. The Sandy Hook defences were delivered over, and the rivers and bays were cleared of mines. All motor-cars, supplies of gasolene, firearms, and ammunition in New York City were seized and removed to Brooklyn. The telephone service was taken over by the Germans and operated by them, chiefly for military purposes. The mail service ceased. The newspapers were ordered not to appear--with the exception of the _Staats-Zeitung_, which became the official organ of the invaders and proceeded to publish editions in English as well as German.

"What will happen if we go ahead and get out the paper in spite of your order?" inquired the city editor of the _Evening Journal_ when a youthful Prussian officer informed him that the paper must not appear.

"Oh, you will be shot and William Randolph Hearst will be shot," said the officer pleasantly.

About noon on the day of capitulation, May 25, 1921, a company of German soldiers with two machine guns, two ammunition carts and a line of motor trucks landed at the Battery and marched quietly up Broadway, then turned into Wall Street and stopped outside the banking house of J. P. Morgan & Co. A captain of hussars in brilliant uniform and wearing an eyegla.s.s went inside with eight of his men and explained politely to the manager that the Germans had arranged with J. P. Morgan personally that they were to receive five million dollars a day in gold on account of the indemnity and, as four days' payment, that is twenty million dollars, were now due, the captain would be obliged if the manager would let him have twenty million dollars in gold immediately. Also a match for his cigarette.

The manager, greatly disturbed, a.s.sured the captain that there was not as much money as that in the bank, all the gold in New York having been sent out of the city.

"Ah!" said the officer with a smile. "That will simply put you to the trouble of having it sent back again. You see, we hold the men who own this gold. Besides, I think you can, with an effort, get together this trifling amount."

The manager vowed it was utterly impossible, whereupon the captain motioned to one of his men, who, it turned out, had been for years a trusted employee of J. P. Morgan & Co. and had made himself familiar with every detail of Wall Street affairs. He knew where a reserve store of gold was hidden and the consequence was that half an hour later the German soldiers marched back to the Battery, their motor trucks groaning under the weight of twenty million dollars in double eagles and bullion.