Puslapio vaizdai
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gically of more importance than the unbroken wooded solitudes of northern Maine or New Hampshire.

Our tiny navy, on the other hand, was well trained and waiting. Within an hour of receiving official notice of hostilities. Commodore Rodgers put to sea with his five ships. Even the way in which victories seemed to roll out from this nucleus toward every quarter of the globe is not so mysterious, after all, for as in the case. of the children of Israel at the Red Sea, the forces of nature took sides, and "a strong wind" helped the weaker party.

One glance at the map that shows ocean currents makes this clear. Our frontier was very long. Beginning in the Gulf of Mexico near the mouth of the Mississippi, skipping Florida, which still belonged to Spain, it began again at the southern limit of Georgia, extending from there to the Bay of Fundy, and then westward as far as population existed or hostilities might reach.

The British owned two points from which to attack us: Bermuda and the islands of the Greater and Lesser Antilles gave them a base from which to menace New Orleans and the Southern coast; while Halifax, their main base in the Western Hemisphere, furnished them the point from which to attack our Northern harbors, strike at the fisheries of New England, and provision Quebec, England's principal depot for the Canadian waterways. But all British war-vessels ordered to America, no matter whether their destination was Halifax or the South, were obliged to sail directly toward our shores.

that had managed to survive the Embargo, but it released American merchant ships and their well-trained crews for other work, and they speedily entered the navy or took out letters as privateers and began to prey upon British trade. The English reached our shores in numbers large enough to threaten and burn as far inland as guns could carry, but they were never rich enough in secrets of inlet and harbor to prevent dozens of such vessels slipping out to sea, manned by a class of sailors that Great Britain had already paid the unwelcome compliment of gathering into her own navy to the number of six thousand or more.

So the "fir-built things with a bit of striped bunting at their masthead," as the English press derisively called our ships at the outset, grew under the stimulus of British guns into a very efficient navy that was heard and felt not only on our own Atlantic seaboard, but off the coasts of England, Ireland, and Portugal, the West Indies, the shores of British Guiana, at the easternmost point of Brazil, the Canary Islands, Chile, the Galapagos Islands, even in the Marquesas group in far-off Polynesia-a confusion of hemispheres and continents unaccountable until it is seen how all were bound together not only by patriotism, but by ocean currents and the winds of heaven.

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John Quincy Adams

Our navy's tasks were three: to keep British ships and supplies from reaching Halifax or entering the St. Lawrence; to intercept those bound to the West Indies; and lastly, to harass British commerce wherever found. The declaration of war put an end to the small remnant of trade

As was the case in our war with the Barbary pirates, these encounters might have taken place in the Middle Ages. Steam had indeed been harnessed to move upon the waters, but it had not been adopted for the battles of life. The one steamer on Lake Champlain was speedily remodeled with schooner rigging because its machinery gave endless trouble. The Fulton, prototype of modern ironclads, with its ram and its few heavy guns, was launched only toward the end of the conflict, too late to influence the character of the fighting; and torpedoes, tried and

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found wanting during the Revolution, were frowned upon not only because they failed in their purpose, but because they were a new and "dishonorable" mode of warfare.

Sails were still the motive power, and seamanship was a matter of superlative skill nowhere shown to better advantage than in the three-days' chase that Captain Hull led five British commanders, using every artifice and expedient, venturing into perilously shallow water, kedging and towing when the wind failed him, and escaping at last in a heaven-sent squall of wind and rain. A month later he sought out one of the five and closed with him in the fight between the Constitution and the Guerrière. The battles were for the most part duels of the old sea-rover type, echoes of which reach us across the century in words fast becoming obsolete and actions already consigned to melodrama. The fighting was no child's play. The clash of cutlasses and grappling-irons, the falling of masts and entangling rigging, fierce courage, and a fiercer regard for the gallantry of war, as when the British Captain Dacre sent his ten Americans below so that they need not fight against their countrymen-all these things went into it. A heart-warming amount of courage went

into it, and a heartrending amount of carnage, too. When the Americans from the Wasp boarded the Frolic after forty minutes of fighting in tremendous seas, they found only four men alive, one seaman still at the wheel, and three officers, all wounded. War was indeed hell then as now, but it was a more showy and picturesque hell than the cold-blooded, machinemade, mathematically calculated inferno of twentieth-century battle.

With the same long ancestry of searovers behind them, British and Americans acquitted themselves, man for man, equally well. The difference lay in their training. As a rule the Yankee sailors had practised their calling in varied forms since childhood, and could turn from setting sails to firing guns, from ship's carpentry to hand-to-hand fighting, as occasion demanded. The British, trained to only one kind of sea duty, were less versatile. The greatest difference lay in marksmanship; and in this English gunners were scarcely to blame, since a conservative and economical Government limited the number of shot that could be "wasted" in mere practice, making it so small that it amounted to none at all; while the Americans, with reckless extravagance, were continually aiming and firing their

guns and practising at close range with small arms and single-stick. In the few cases where the preponderance of training and discipline was on the other side, as it was in the fight between our Chesapeake and the British Shannon, whose commander loyally disregarded hampering orders of Government, victory remained with the best gunners.

The Americans fought and captured, and fought again until in turn they were captured. Porter on the Essex, losing his consorts hundreds of miles from a friendly harbor, pushed on rather than turn back, doubled the Horn, broke up the British whaling industry in the Pacific, and lived for a year and a half upon the enemy, capturing all his supplies, even the money with which to pay his officers, before the hour came when the Essex had to strike her flag. In the first six months of such warfare America captured from England as many ships as the latter had lost to the whole world in the previous twenty years. On the Canadian frontier the contest grew into one of ship-building as well as of ship-fighting. The problem there was to get complete control of the inland waterways, and this could be done either by capturing the enemy's vessels or by forcing them into port and keeping them. blockaded. When one side launched a ship, the other tried to outclass her by a larger and better one. The falls of Niagara made it necessary to maintain separate fleets on Lake Ontario and Lake Erie, thus doubling the labor. On Lake Ontario, where this preliminary warfare of planes and saws was carried to the greatest length, Kingston and Sackett's Harbor were the respective headquarters of the British and the Americans. On Lake Erie the Americans were at Erie and the British at Detroit, which had been surrendered by General Hull at the beginning of the war.

All supplies except timber for such contests had to be brought from a great distance. For the British they came from England; for the Americans they were hauled by wagon from towns on the Atlantic coast by way of the Mohawk

Brit

valley, over roads so bad that in effect the source of supply was farther removed than England itself. Crews also had to be provided on both sides, since trees never grew that could be fashioned into sailors. ish tars could indeed be moved from place to place, but Americans could not be ordered to the lakes against their will, since at that time men enlisted in our navy only for duty on particular ships. Population on our side of the Canadian border was sparse, and the service was one of hardship and small pay. Americans who took part in the battles in which these shipbuilding contests ended were therefore a strangely mixed company, coming from a distance, often at great personal sacrifice. It is said that of the 430 men under Perry in the Battle of Lake Erie over one fourth were negroes, and many more belonged to state militia. On his side Barclay had Indian sharp-shooters and British regulars as well as the lake sailors and frontiersmen who made up a large proportion of both fleets.

That these fresh-water sailors fought with as much gallantry as their brothers on the high seas the story of the lake contests fully testifies. Perry, erect in his little cockle-shell of a boat, with his flag floating over him and shot plowing the water on all sides, is a picture that has stirred the blood of American school-boys for the last hundred years; and there were other lake battles as creditable and picturesque, if not so dear to school historians.

On salt water and fresh the sailors acquitted themselves well, and won the stakes for which they played; but rarely has there been greater discrepancy between prophecy and fulfilment than in the land operations of this War of 1812. The Young Republicans boasted that they would carry hostilities into Canada, capture it without an army, and dictate peace at Halifax. They counted upon the sympathy of Tories who had departed from among us during the Revolution and also on help from French-Canadians-vain hopes both. The French-Canadians showed that they felt themselves of an alien race, and loyal subjects of King

His whole experience teaches Constantine that to risk his military reputation would be to endanger his popularity and to court disaster and the loss of his throne; but this is merely the negative side of the picture.

It has frequently been asked why Constantine no longer seems to fear the Bul

It is precisely because he does fear the Bulgar that he has acted as he has. It is no longer Servia and Greece against the Bulgar, but Greece alone against that ancient enemy, and the king believes that the decisive struggle with Czar Ferdinand's people is yet to come. Then let the Bulgars waste themselves in the present struggle, while the Greeks conserve their powers; for with Ferdinand trapped into spending his troops against Servia and the Allies, so much the larger looms the chance of Greek success when the inevitable collision of Greek with Bulgar shall at last This is the positive side of the

come.

picture.

The king's first disagreement with Venizelos rested upon his own and his staff's opinion that not 15,000 or even 40,000 Greek soldiers would be effective at Gallipoli. The Greek staff told the Allies how best to take Constantinople. It should also be remembered that old Greek policy always aimed at an understanding with Turkey till the Ottoman Empire should be ripe to fall into Greek hands as part of a new Byzantine Empire. This policy Venizelos reversed. So, too, the relentless tramp of events has left behind the Gallipoli incident, a milestone marking what might have been.

The circumstances surrounding Venizelos's second resignation, in last October, are of more immediate interest. What the ex-premier has looked east to gain, through taking sides in the war, is not all to which Greece aspires. Epirus remains; there Italy blocks the way.

To discuss the arrangement with Italy, whereby that power has so far neither declared nor made war on Germany, would be pointless here; of interest is the unquestioned fact that Prince von Bülow, German ambassador at the court of Vic

tor Emmanuel, returned to Berlin from Rome last May bearing a summary of the sea powers' agreement with the Italian Government as to the division of the spoils of war.

In late August a gentleman, described variously as a grand duke high in the councils of the Government or merely as a special envoy, but certainly a messenger from the German emperor himself, arrived in Athens. This man saw Constantine and made the privileged communication that only one sovereign makes to another, a communication the king would be in honor bound not to divulge. It has been urged that this gentleman saw not the king, but the queen, and that she told her consort of the communication. That seems beside the point. Unquestionably the full scope of the Italian agreement with the sea powers was declared to the king of the Greeks, with special emphasis on such particulars of it as menaced Greek aspirations. Whether Venizelos has now guessed the nature and content of the privileged communication made to his king in August is a matter for conjecture. Certainly, he has acquiesced in events, seen in the landing in Albania of an Italian expeditionary force not a menace to the German drive to the Bosporus, but a warning to Greece to keep off.

His training has taught Constantine that the German army is the greatest the world has ever seen. When the sea powers asked him to fling his loved Greek soldiers against this invincible machine, when he reflected that the reward Greece had a right to expect for such service had already been promised to Italy, when he looked past the Bulgarian border into the heart of Rumania and saw that eager race mark time and hesitate, when he reflected on the inadequate force the Allies were sending to Serb assistance, the privileged communication also set forth the Teutonic near-Eastern military dispositions at that time being planned, -is it any wonder that all his impulsiveness exploded in "No!" There is a sibilant quality to Constantine's speech that has led those who converse with him in English to say that

ing himself as fiercely impetuous in dealing with mutiny and famine as in striking the foe, gained a notable victory at Horseshoe Bend, and established once for all his character as a general to be obeyed.

After all, only the very edge of the country suffered from the English. We were holding our own, though apparently doing nothing more. In truth, however, experience and careful drill were improving the army. The best men at this imperative, if monotonous, duty was the handsome General Scott, the most showy product of the war. A lawyer by profession, not one of his rather spectacular early experiences was more spectacular than the way he turned soldier, as heroines of ghost-stories turn gray, in a single night. It happened, according to his own account, at Richmond, whither the budding lawyer had gone to attend the Burr trial, looking on it as a fine professional study, and by no means oblivious to the dramatic interest of the crowded court-room. The proclamation issued by President Jefferson after the Leopard's bold attack upon the Chesapeake reached Richmond late one. night and threw the town into a state of excitement. It forbade British war-ships entering American rivers or harbors for water or provisions, and called for volunteers. Scott belonged to no military organization, but the next morning found. him in the ranks of the Petersburg troop of cavalry, fully equipped, "having traveled twenty-five miles in the night, obtained the uniform of a tall, absent trooper, and bought the extra fine charger" upon which he rode. The uncertain course of the Government made him hesitate for some years between law and arms, but there was never any doubt of his real vocation, and the War of 1812 gave him experiences in active service ranging all the way from that of prisoner to successful general, not omitting an excursion into regimental medicine. In this he dealt with a threatened outbreak of cholera, supplanting the efforts of a scared and drunken surgeon by his own heroic, if irregular, methods and literally forced his men to keep well "by command." But

the greatest service he rendered was through persistence in drill and discipline. The Government trusted such matters entirely to Providence, furnishing no textbook or manual to its officers. Scott improvised one from a French work on infantry tactics, formed his officers of all grades into squads, and drilled them mercilessly ten hours a day, weather permitting, and gave attention at the same time to sanitation and other details of camp life, of which his soldiers were as innocent as babes. The value of his work was appreciated, and his became the recognized system of the Government, remaining in use until the Civil War, when new inventions in guns and ammunition made changes necessary.

Matters dragged along with no decisive result until the summer of 1814, when a lull in the fighting on the continent of Europe enabled England to send to this country a larger force than she had hitherto been able to spare. In August the British Admiral Cockburn arrived off the coast of Virginia with twenty-one vessels, bringing with him General Ross and three or four thousand veterans of the Napoleonic wars. Unable to prevent a landing of this force, Commodore Barney of the American squadron disembarked, to make what feeble resistance he could, with the aid of militia, at Bladensburg, a few miles from Washington. He was taken prisoner, and the invading force marched on toward the capital. Such of its inhabitants as could get away fled, taking their most precious and portable valuables with them. The archives of the state department were hastily bundled into linen bags and carted off to Leesburg, thirty-five miles distant; and President Madison and his cabinet disappeared into the Virginia woods. The spectacle was not inspiring, yet it would have done the country no good had these high officials. waited patiently at their desks to be taken into custody.

Of the subsequent burning of Washington, the less said the better for American pride or British glory. Ross of Bladensburg, to use the title conferred on the

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