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.”