With grim persistence our men still clung to what was left of their trenches until the night of the second day. Hood sullenly ordered the retreat to his last line of entrenchments resting on Babylon. The discovery of the movement lead to a fierce rear guard action with the pursuing cavalry of the enemy. Their great field searchlights now swept the heavens and flooded every open space with deadly glare. The attacking cavalry fell into ambush carefully prepared and were annihilated. They didn’t repeat the attack. But our guns had no sooner limbered up and withdrawn from their position when a squadron of the new steel cavalry, guided by the searchlights, charged at full speed seventy miles an hour down the turnpike straight into our retreating infantry. An armored automobile, spitting a storm of lead from its machine guns, plunged headlong into a regiment of volunteers, worn and half-starved and ready to fall for the lack of sleep. The huge wheels rolled over prostrate men like a great juggernaut, hurling others into the fields and dashing them among the limbs of trees. The monster stopped at last choked by the mangled bodies caught in its machinery. A hundred desperate men swarmed over its sides and in a fierce hand to hand fight captured the car and killed its crew. Again and again through the night of this terrible retreat these tactics were repeated. Not one of the six machines that charged our lines ever returned to tell the story. Not one that charged failed to pile the dead in heaps along the white shining turnpike. The Holland house was inside the third line. Vassar hurried forward to beg Virginia to return with the girls and the older people to New York. They refused to stir. “What’s the use, sir?” Holland snapped. “We’re as safe here as anywhere. If Hood can’t hold this railroad junction--it’s all over. The wildest reports come in hourly from New York. The looting and outrages surpass belief--” “Your house has been raided?” Vassar asked. “I’ve just heard that every house on both Stuyvesant Square and Gramercy Park has been smashed and wrecked. The soldiers have been looting private dwellings at their leisure--while mobs of thieves and cutthroats join in the sport.” There was no help for it then. He whispered a hurried good-bye to Virginia, kissed Zonia and Marya and rushed for his horse. The first gray streaks of dawn were already tinging the eastern sky. The invading army had followed with amazing rapidity. Whole regiments armed with machine guns had been hurled forward by automobile transports. Hood had destroyed the railroad as he retreated. The advancing hosts didn’t need it. The hardened veterans who marched, with quick swinging gait, smoking their pipes and singing, could make thirty miles a day and be ready for a fight at the end of their march. They meant to rush our trenches today and make quick work of it. They were not going to waste any more big shells which might be needed elsewhere.