THE General hastened to give orders for the retirement. By noon the next day his battleline stretched from Patchogue through Holtsville to Port Jefferson and a hundred thousand men were wielding pick and shovel with savage determination. There was one thing these men didn’t lack whatever was missing in their equipment. They hadn’t enough guns. They had no uniforms—save on the handful of regulars sprinkled among them. They hadn’t much ammunition. They did have courage. They were there to do and die.

For three days the wind blew a steady gale from the southwest and piled the white foaming breakers high on the sand dunes.

Through the pounding surf the sea lifted our bloated dead until they lay in grim blue heaps on the white sands at low tide. General Hood despatched Vassar to see that they were buried. He piled them in big trenches one on top of the other.

The wind died to a gentle caress as Vassar stood and watched them dumped into unmarked trenches—brave boys whose lives we could have saved with a few paltry millions spent in preparation.

His thoughts were bitter.

Had we been prepared no nation on earth had dared attack us. Our fighting force in men would fill an army of 16,000,000. Our strength in money was greater than Continental Europe combined. We had the men. We had the money. We were just not ready—that was all. We could have whipped combined Europe had we been prepared, and combined Europe, knowing this, would have courted our favor with bows and smiles.

The thin line of the new moon broke through the soft fleece of clouds and the stars came out in countless thousands. The lights were playing far out at sea too, the big searchlights of the scouts and battle cruisers. They flashed on the grave diggers now, held steady for a moment and swung in search of guns. They were not interested in the dead.

Vassar’s heart went out in a throb of pity as he watched the scene—pity for the men whom a mighty nation had murdered for nothing—pity for the well-meaning but foolish men and women whose childish theories of peace had made this stupendous crime possible.

He thought too with the keenest pang of the anguish that would come to the heart of the woman he loved when the magnitude of this betrayal of a nation crushed her soul. Men like Barker and Pike would continue their parrot talk perhaps until Death called them. The heart of Virginia Holland would be crushed by this appalling tragedy. If he could only take her in his arms and whisper his love!

At dawn next morning Vassar stayed to watch from the hills the landing of the armada. They had scorned to waste a shot from their big guns to cover the landing. It was unnecessary. Their airmen had reconnoitered and reported the defending army miles away hastily digging their trenches.

“Good!” the imperial commander replied on receiving this report. “The bigger and longer their trenches, the bigger the battle. What we want is one fight and that settles it.”

Through four days the landing proceeded with marvelous precision, each man at his post. The whole great movement went forward without a hitch with scarcely an accident to mar its almost festive character.

Twenty-five huge transports lay in the offing discharging their thousands of troops from barges and lighters. The men swarmed on the sands like locusts. Nothing had been left to chance. Nothing had been forgotten. They had cavalry in thousands—huge artillery that covered acres. Fifty magnificent horses were hitched to a single gun of the largest type. Their food supplies were apparently exhaustless. Each regiment had its moving kitchens, its laundry wagons, its bakery.

The signal corps were already stringing their wires. A wireless plant had been in communication with the commander on the flagship since the work of landing began.

When the last ship had discharged her cargo, it was known that four full army corps, each with complete equipment of cavalry, artillery and machine guns, had been landed and that this first division of the invading host consisted of not less than one hundred and sixty thousand officers and men—every one of whom spoke good English as well as his native tongue.

The news spread with lightning rapidity through the army of defense and on past their lines into the terror-stricken city. The thousands of half-mad refugees who had fled to the country began now to turn again toward New York. They had slept in the fields and woods for more than a week. Their condition was pitiful and their suffering a source of constant worry to the officers.

On the day that the invaders began their march from the beach to form on the turnpike for their final sweep against the trenches, Hood had massed from all sources two hundred pieces of artillery to defend his trenches against more than five hundred of the enemy. What the range and caliber of these hostile guns might be he could only guess. He knew one thing with painful certainty—whatever their range and caliber might be they were manned by veteran artillerymen who had fought them for years under the hideous conditions of modern war. Not a man in his army had ever been under the fire of modern artillery. That his gunners would give a good account of themselves, however, he had not the slightest doubt.

The rub would come when they began to fall. Trained men to take their places were not to be had. If it should come to cold steel, he could trust the raw volunteers in his trenches to defend their homes against a horde of devils. The trouble was but a handful of his men were equipped with bayonets.

He had just inspected his lines and given his final instructions to his brigade commanders when an extraordinary procession marched into his lines from Brooklyn, headed by the Honorable Plato Barker and the Reverend Dr. A. Cuthbert Pike, still president of the Peace union.

The General refused to see or speak to them. Pike sought Vassar and begged him as an old political associate of Barker’s to secure ten minutes’ interview.

“I assure you, Congressman,” Pike insisted in his nervous fidgety way, &l............