Almost as swiftly, at another end of the beach, guns were being landed from the same type of floats, shoal and wide-beamed, that could be run well up on shore and could withstand the pounding of the surf. They brought four light field pieces with their limbers to a load, or two heavy field artillery pieces. They were landing field howitzers of calibers that the United States Army did not possess. This artillery has been coming ashore for hours. It had begun to come before dawn. Still there was more arriving. Yet the beach never was occupied for a moment. The guns were rushed inland, the men were rushed inland, the horses were rushed inland. Twelve hours after the first landing party had prepared the way, Rhode Island was occupied by 30,000 foot, 3,000 cavalry and 50 batteries of artillery--almost two full divisions that lay in a great belligerent front snarling with guns--a perfect, complex, often-assembled, often-tested machine.[49] This was the time for the American army to strike, before the enemy could increase his forces and move forward to attack. But the American army was a complex machine that never had been assembled before, or tested before. The Regular Army never had been together with the Organized Militia, and the Organized Militias of the various States never had seen each other. “An uncoördinated army of allies,” its Commander had called it, “with all the inherent weakness of allies, emphasized by the unusual number of allies.”[50] _The Uncoördinated and Unorganized American Army_ It was an army of which neither the regulars nor the militia had been organized into divisions at the time when it should have been done, the only time when it could have been done--in the long days of peace. Until it was so organized, it was an army only in numbers. For operation against a prepared, organized enemy it was not an army but merely a multitude of units, whose trained and perfect ones would inevitably be sacrificed to the errors and weaknesses of the imperfect ones.[51] The division is the true Weapon of War. It alone contains in vitally correct proportion the various troops that must sustain each other when cannons and explosives begin that arbitration from which there is no appeal on earth. It is the division, and the division alone, that possesses all the limbs and organs--the signal corps and cavalry that are the eyes and ears: the infantry and engineers and sanitary corps that are the body and feet: and the artillery that is the smiting fists.[52] In the City Hall Park in New York, a speaker, lifted above the crowd that watched the newspaper bulletins, was cursing the army amid savage cheers. He cursed its Generals and its men because they did not fight. He cursed the Government. The crowd listened, and forgot that again and again they had been warned that this would be if war should ever come.