Launches came in now, dragging wide, flat-bottom pontoons and swinging them on to shore and speeding back for more. Men snatched at them, and held them in the surf, and ran their mooring up the beach, while others carried out kedges and boat-anchors from all sides to make them lie steady in the groundswell. The beach shone white as day, all at once. The destroyers had steamed in, and were giving their men aid with their search-lights. In swung more pontoons. Broadside to broadside, kedged and anchored out, they were moored out into the sea, at half a dozen parts of the beach. Laid far enough apart that they should not touch, however hard the swell might strive to grind them together, they formed floating piers, reaching beyond the farthest outer line of surf. From pontoon to pontoon ran gang-planks, lashed fast. Three hours had passed. Three times the ships’ boats had made the trip between warships and shore--thirty naval service cutters, each carrying thirty men. Twenty-seven hundred sailors, marines and soldiers were holding the Rhode Island coast.[30] From the trenches of the advance party a wireless spoke to the cruiser bearing the senior officer. “Motor scouts reported in front, on road, three thousand yards in. Will fire rocket indicating direction.” The rocket burst. For a minute it made all that part of the black country stand out as under lightning. “Crash!” said the ship. Over the bluejackets swept the shells, and burst. “Crash!” said another ship. “Apparently effective,” said the wireless again. “Shall send patrols forward.” And again it spoke, in half an hour: “Enemy driven back. Our patrols hold road. Barb wire entanglements completed. Scouts in. Report land clear, except for enemy cavalry in force inland out of range.” _The Transports_ “Now!” said the cruiser’s wireless, speaking once more into the sea. Silent, formless, black, four vast ships, long and twice as tall as the cruisers, came slowly in among them. These were the transports, sealed that not a thread of light should shine from them to betray them to the thing that all the fleet dreaded more than anything else--the under-water lance of a submarine’s torpedo. Under water the submarine is always blind, even when the brightest light of the noon-day sun shines vertically into the ocean. It can see only with its periscope eye above the surface. At night the periscope cannot see. Then the submarine ceases to be useful as a submarine. It can act still; but only on the surface, like any other torpedo boat. Two score destroyers, each of thirty knots, each armed with from four to ten 3-inch guns and rapid-firers, circled around the transports. Twice as swift as the surface-speed of the swiftest submarine, armed overwhelmingly, they could defy surface attack.[31]