One hundred thousand men had landed, according to spies who had made their way into Fort Greble in the Narragansett defenses. It was two hundred thousand, telephoned Providence, transmitting messages from the coast. The army’s own scouts and spies and patrols, groping in insufficient numbers and finding a wall of cavalry and foot and machine gun detachments opposed to them everywhere, sent in estimates that varied all the way from twenty-five thousand to eighty thousand. These American advance detachments were striking the enemy outposts east and west. Near Watch Hill three American motor cycle companies with machine guns ambushed and cut up two troops of cavalry. American cavalry drove back a battalion of engineers who had begun work on the railroad at Kingston. At Niantic two American motor patrols ran into the fire of a concealed field gun and were destroyed. From Fort Michie on Gull Island came the news, brought by a Montauk Point fisherman who had managed to make his way across the Sound in a small boat, that men had landed on that end of Long Island. They had destroyed all communication immediately and had seized the railroad leading to New York; but it was impossible to guess how great this force was.[57] Only one certain fact was developed from all the news. It was that the transports were unloading troops still. _The Enemy Moves_ Suddenly, almost simultaneously, the American patrols were driven back all along the line. On a front that extended quickly, irresistibly, clear across Washington County, Rhode Island, from east to west, the invader army expanded. It seized Watch Hill. Kingston was occupied in force. Wickford Junction was occupied. Narragansett Pier was flooded, all at once, with men and guns. With the swiftness of a blow from a fighter’s fist, the invader had struck and won the entire railroad system of the New York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad in Rhode Island, and commanded the way to Providence. The foe had filled his divisions. Forty thousand men were ready for battle on American soil, with ten thousand in reserve on the coast. Now the wind turned south-east. Point Judith, Rhode Island’s cape that coast-wise mariners call The Fog-Hole, began to brew one of its April fogs, gray and blind and wet. Its first effect was kind to the Americans. The enemy air-craft, seeing the vapory bank growing from the sea, fled toward their lines. From all directions they came in, like gulls fleeing before a storm. They could not dare to remain in strange territory. All their fine maps, all their ingenious instruments, would be impotent against it. They came in, and alighted behind their army. Freed from them, and masked by the fog, the American scouts went forward again and groped once more along the foe’s front. In an [Illustration: MAP TO ILLUSTRATE THE LANDING OF THE ENEMY FORCES =A.= _Enemy Transports at Beach. The lines and arrows show direction of his advance._