Thus less than three thousand men had their fingers on the big town’s spinal nerves, and could paralyze it with a slight pressure. _Still Easier to Guard_ It was still easier to control the city from a military point of view. The citizens who had expected to see their streets commanded by cannon on limbers, did not at first comprehend why there were hardly any of these to be seen, while machine gun detachments scattered and disappeared as soon as they got well into the town. Only gradually did the citizens discover that their big, sprawling metropolis was being held subject by a very simple utilization of the city’s characteristic feature. This feature was the sky-scraper. To the eye of the soldier, these high buildings were nothing so much as inviting and magnificent eminences for controlling the street-valleys and their population below. Four men with a machine gun and abundance of ammunition in one of these stone and steel summits could control more area than half a dozen heavy field gun batteries posted in the streets could command. These sentinel watchers were as aloof and as sure as fate. They could neither be rushed by a mob nor sniped from concealment. At a word from the telephone in their eyries, they could start death dancing among the pygmy hordes far under them. From the top of the Woolworth Building two of the little guns pointed down into Broadway. Turned southward, they could sweep the town as far as the Battery. Eastward, they could rain their steel-jacketed bullets into the river front streets and over the two lower bridges that cross the East River. Northward, they had Broadway as far up as Canal Street under their fire. They were supplemented by a gun on top of the great Municipal Building. It held a good part of the crowded tenement house district of the Lower East Side under its zone of fire, notably the doubtful sections of Cherry Street and other areas known to the police. _Church Towers as Gun Stations_ On the tall towers of the suspension bridges themselves were other detachments with a gun each. The churches were not forgotten by the soldiers. The graceful steeple of Grace Church, standing at an acute angle of Broadway so that it can be seen from far down town, had been before men’s eyes so long that they had ceased, almost, to note its soft beauty. Now they looked at it with a new and acute perception, for its steeple held a gun that pointed down Broadway, whose southern zone of fire would just about reach to where the northern zone of fire from the Woolworth Building would end.