Where they appeared it was as if they bore some instant charm to turn the world to stone. [Illustration: “They flew over the tall municipal building of New York.”] All the city noises stopped, dead. All motion stopped. Wheels stopped turning and feet stopped moving and every white face was turned upward. For that long moment of dumb fear, men saw nothing except the wide-winged bodies. They heard nothing except the yelping and droning of the hundred-horse-power motors over them. Then they fled. Motor-men and drivers bent low, and yelled, and sent their vehicles ahead blindly. The crowds rushed every door-way. They fought for the protection of narrow cornices as if they were bomb-proofs. They squeezed themselves close to the sides of buildings, and clung to smooth iron and granite, and stared upward, waiting for bombs. Instead of bombs, they saw things raining down gently, lightly--little weighted pennants that circled downward in lovely spirals and dropped on the streets with scarcely a sound. Into every crowded street, into every open square of half a hundred cities that day, the hostile air-men dropped these pennants. They were printed. They bore proclamations addressed to the people of America. THE ENEMY’S PROCLAMATION “Our armies have landed,” said the proclamation. “We shall advance on your cities at once. Any attempt to defend them will mean their destruction. Civilians are warned against making any demonstration, whether with arms or otherwise. Infractions of this Rule of War will be punished by summary execution. Houses from which hostile acts are committed will be destroyed. Towns whose civilian population resists will be destroyed. Take warning!” Recovering from their shock of fear, the first impulse of the Americans who read these proclamations was one of rage. Their cities had grown proud in unchallenged greatness. These pennants, slowly raining from their sky, were infuriating insults. Had the invader appeared in that moment, the people would have torn up the paving blocks to fight him. In the State House in Boston there were said the words that uttered the emotion of all the cities along the Atlantic coast. In that old, rebellious town, where American liberty had been nurtured in the very presence of an armed foe, there were gathered many eminent citizens, with the officials, the Mayor and the Governor of their State. One of these officials had a pennant in his hands. “What can we do?” he asked. “If we had all the militia of the State here, we would have less than 6,000 men. If the foe arrives, and lays his guns on the town--gentlemen, they will be guns that fire high explosives and incendiary shells. We have nothing to fight with. If the army cannot check him before he arrives, we must--to save our people’s lives, we must surrender peaceably!”[43]