Only the harbor defenses of the city were still speaking to each other. From the forts on Throgs Neck in Westchester County and from Fort Totten on Long Island, the commanders at Forts Hamilton and Wadsworth in the Narrows received requests for more men. Large forces, said the Sound defenses, were closing in rapidly to invest them on land from the rear. It would be an artillery and infantry fight in which the mammoth coast guns could take little part, if any. The end was certain if reënforcements could not be sent through the East River and the Sound. The commanders of the Narrows were helpless to give aid. The commanders of the Sandy Hook defenses were helpless. All the men, regulars and militia, of the coast artillery who could be obtained, were not enough. Fort Hamilton, being on the Long Island shore itself, dared not denude itself further than it had done. At any moment there might be an attack on it, too. The southern defenses had no choice but to tell the eastern defenses that they must do the best they could. [Illustration: THE ATTACK ON THE NEW YORK DEFENCES =A.= _Attack on Ft. Totten._ =B.= _Attack on Ft. Schuyler._ =C and D.= _Course of Troops Capturing New Jersey Manufacturing Cities._ =EE.= _Attack on Sandy Hook Forts._ ] It was about one o’clock in the morning when the people of northern Long Island, and the inhabitants of the Borough of the Bronx and Westchester County, sprang from their beds in wild alarm. Without warning, as if a hurricane had struck with instant concentrated force, all their windows had crashed. Their walls were shaking, and pictures and plaster falling. The air itself was shaking like a throbbing pulse. It was like no gun-fire that men ever had imagined. It was not a series of explosions. It was like one explosion, whose crescent violence would not dwindle. The people of far Brooklyn and the people of lower Manhattan heard it. To their ears it was as if all the thunders of a storm-riven Heaven had been loosed to roll incessantly. _Bands of Flame_ Men on vantage points along the Sound that night saw the attacking lines from end to end plainly as if it were day. So continuous was their fire, that it painted their positions with broad, unwavering bands of flame. It needed not the star bombs and rockets that curved everywhere under the sky to fall glaring into the defenses. It needed not the magnesium lights that floated from parachutes dropped by aeroplanes. On both sides of the Sound the night was a red sea. Into the mortar pits and gun emplacements of the defenses, like a red surf from that red sea, beat the unending fire. Shrapnel that wailed like the bride of the storm, and flew apart in the air, and flung bullets as if mines had burst inside of the defense! Eleven inch shells that hammered into concrete facing, and split it apart with the irresistible agony of their explosion! Five inch shell and solid projectile! Bombs from the air, and every agency that man had yet devised to wreck and destroy!