It was impossible to warn the commander at Sandy Hook. Private service over the telephone and telegraph systems was suspended entirely. The fire alarm system was operated under the watchful control of soldiers. In Police Headquarters sat a Colonel of Cavalry whose countersign was necessary for every order issued by the Police Commissioner. This was a stern officer, who held the police force in a hard, masterful hand. The men were accountable more than ever for strict enforcement of all laws, but they were subject also to summary control by every military officer. Even guards and posts of private soldiers had some authority over them. There were many daily experiences and sights in their streets that served to make the people tractable, but few things were so powerful as the daily spectacle of their pugnacious police yielding sullen but complete obedience. “It is unlawful to disobey orders given by our army.” This short regulation covered a great deal. It tied the police and the citizens hand and foot.[157] [Illustration: “The big guns behind them made no despicable sentinels.”] _Taking of Sandy Hook_ On Sandy Hook, fifteen miles down the harbor from the Battery, there were being demonstrated the inexorable mathematics of war that had been demonstrated at Narragansett, at Boston, at Forts Schuyler and Slocum in Westchester, and at Fort Totten in Long Island. Fort Hancock on Sandy Hook, almost invulnerable to ship-attack from the sea, was being reduced from the land. The fort commander had disposed his men in the most formidable positions possible, and they made the narrow sandy neck of the Hook that led from the mainland to their fortifications a pass that no force, however contemptuous of death, would attack hastily. Barb wire and great sand mounds, rapid fire guns and big guns behind them, made them no despicable sentinels. But the Americans numbered companies where the enemy numbered battalions and regiments. The American mobile guns numbered pairs where the enemy’s artillery was counted by dozens. The steel mass of fort that could protect harbor and city could not protect itself. The motley flotilla, emerging into Raritan Bay, landed its men on the New Jersey shore at Keyport inside of the lower harbor, and behind Sandy Hook. The defenses had not been devised or built to withstand attack from their own bay. The great rifled guns and the steel mortars were ponderous. They were mounted on complex engines, equally ponderous, whose bases were firmly anchored in concrete and steel. These mammoths were not things that could be swung around to all points of the compass. They were set in their solid beds for the one purpose of fighting things out at sea. _The Open Back of the Fort_