So the invaders’ march through New England continued. It is a pitiful story. What could Connecticut and Massachusetts do? With all their wealth and intelligence, with all their mechanical ingenuity, with all their pride and patriotism, what could they do, totally unprepared, more helpless than Belgium, against the most efficient army in Europe? Three times, between Hartford and Springfield, unorganised bands of Americans, armed with shotguns and rifles, lay in ambush for the advancing enemy and fired upon them. These men declared that they would die before they would stand by tamely and see the homes and fields of New England despoiled by the invader. Whereupon the Germans announced, by means of proclamations showered upon towns and villages from their advance-guard of aeroplanes, that for every German soldier thus killed by Americans in ambush a neighbouring town or village would be burned by fire bombs dropped from the sky. And they carried out this threat to the letter, so that for every act of resistance by the fathers and brothers and sons of New England there resulted only greater suffering and distress for the women and the children. The average man, especially one with a wife and children, is easily cowed when he has no hope; and presently all resistance ceased. What feeble opposition there was in the first week dwindled to almost nothing in the second week and to less than nothing in the third week. Stamford paid two million dollars in gold, Bridgeport five million, New Haven five million, Hartford twenty million, Fall River three million, Springfield five million, Worcester two million, Providence ten million, Newport fifty million. The smaller cities got off with half a million each, and some of the towns paid as little as one hundred thousand dollars. But every community paid something, and the total amount taken from New England, including a hundred million from New Hampshire, a hundred million from Vermont, and a hundred million from Maine, was eight hundred million dollars, about a third of which was in gold. With a battle-front fifty or seventy-five miles long, von Kluck’s forces strolled across this fertile and populous region, living off the land, leaving small holding forces with artillery at every important point, a few hundred or a few thousand, while the main army swept relentlessly and resistlessly on. It was a delightful four weeks’ picnic for von Kluck and his men; and at the end of four weeks everything in New England had fallen before them up to the city of Boston, which had been left for the last. _And the total German losses in killed and wounded were less than twenty!_