Now, scarcely an hour after sunrise, the army aeroplanes had come back, after only haphazard scouting. They had not been able to fly over the invaded coast. Wherever they tried it, they reported, they were met by enemy planes in superior numbers.
One United States air-man had been driven by four enemy planes into Narragansett Bay where he had been picked up by boats from the Newport Torpedo Station. Two others, borne down by three enemy machines faster than they, and fired at by anti-air-craft guns from an in-lying ship, had barely managed to escape behind the defenses of Fort Wright in the Sound.
The others had been pressed back, inexorably, by the screen of naval planes that swarmed over the coast.[41]
The enemy planes came from the sea. To the marveling eyes in the American defenses, it seemed as if the ocean were spewing them forth. One after another rose from the Atlantic under Block Island.
Three strange vessels lay there. They had funnels set extremely far aft, like certain types of clumsy tramp-ships, but they were big as passenger liners and their lines showed all the efficiency of the naval architect. The great sweep of their decks forward was as bare as the deck of a racing schooner yacht.
A structure on short trestles like a skid-way rose from this deck at the bow, projecting slightly.
It was there that the aeroplanes were being spewed. These were mother-ships.
Torpedo-netted, guarded by destroyers, guarded even by a small semi-rigid dirigible that hovered a thousand feet high over-head, they were sending out spies to search the land.
The two United States fliers, standing by their machines in Fort Wright, looked at the ascending swarm. “No wonder!” said one. “You know how many one of those Nations had at last accounts? Twelve hundred!”[42]
“And we’ve got thirteen in the Army and twelve in the Navy!” His companion laughed. “And Servia had sixty, before the Great War!”
They said no more, but watched in silence. That ascending, continually growing line of flying things was like something that was writing into the sky the word: “Resources!”
Suddenly the American air-men noticed that these new machines were not flying to the coast near them. They were turning off, in regular order. One turned west, to fly over Long Island. The next one turned east, toward Buzzards Bay. They alternated thus till the entire division had separated, and disappeared.