Limbers and guns jolted past the great houses and estates of Lenox and vanished in the cover on both sides, to be posted on the hilly ground that commanded the Housatonic Valley. More guns passed under the elms of high Pittsfield. Motors and cavalry and cannon held North Adams and Williamstown, where Williams College stood almost deserted because students and professors had volunteered to act as sentinels and patrols. On the old trail that had been the trail of the Mohawk Indians of New York when they went on the war-path against Massachusetts, men in olive drab were scouting and lying in cover with machine guns. On the green hills behind Bennington, Vermont, where Yankee breastworks had been thrown up in the Revolution, there were more batteries. Here outposts and patrols guarded the road leading to Lake George, the last gateway to the territory held by the American forces in New York State. North of this were Vermont’s Green Mountains--barriers indomitable as of old when Ethan Allen, wroth at Congress, threatened to retire into those fastnesses and “wage eternal warfare against Hell, the Devil and Human Nature in general.” _Impassable by Rail_ The long barrier thus running northward from Connecticut like a wall separating New England and New York, would check any except a powerful, well-supported force, advancing with the determination to break through. Long before such an army could make its way, the Americans could either front the enemy in battle, or retire safely beyond his reach. The invaders could not break through the wall by rail. The railroad line that led from Greenfield, Massachusetts, to Troy and Albany, had in it a famous link that was vital to its operation. This link was the celebrated Hoosac Tunnel, bored for 4¾ miles through Hoosac Mountain. It was now a solid mass of blasted and piled rock that could not be cleared away in the time demanded by any military operation. In the south, on the Long Island Sound coast of Connecticut, were other ruins almost as big and as costly. They were the wreckage of Bridgeport’s big cartridge factories, blown up as the hostile patrols entered the outskirts of the town. It was the last source of ammunition and arms supply in New England. With it there were lost, too, three submarines that were on the stocks in the harbor ship yards, and the works that had been manufacturing naval sea-planes and military tractors for the army’s flying scouts. The aerial motor works of Hyde Park in Massachusetts, the Marblehead factory that made gun-carrying convertible land and marine flying machines, and the Norwich factory for tractor biplanes and hydro-monoplanes had been captured almost in the beginning.[142] _New England’s Conquest Complete_