The commanders transmitted the orders to their regimental commanders, and these to the officers of their battalions and companies. “Crush all disorder with utmost severity,” they said. What it meant was: “Kill, burn and destroy!” It meant: “Set fury against fury!” It meant: “Let your men go!” It meant what a war of soldiers against battling civilians in a conquered country always has meant. Both sides had seen their dead. Both sides were maddened. Now the men with arms, restrained no longer by cold discipline, broke loose. Then New England saw such deeds as that quiet landscape never had framed since the days of its old Indian wars, and perhaps not even then. It saw housewives hanging from budding apple-trees, with placards pinned to their breasts saying that they had helped to murder soldiers. It saw New England people, who, twenty-four hours earlier would not have killed a chicken without a pang of pity, surround solitary soldiers and do them to death with their bare hands, while they begged for mercy. It saw unarmed citizens seized on the roads and hustled to walls and shot while they were screaming for somebody in authority, that they might prove their innocence. The authorities of a score of towns were hanged in their town squares because troops had been fired on. In many a park that never had seen anything more formidable than children at their play, hung dead men in a row--the executed hostages who paid for the acts of men whom they had not known. A thousand men and women of Connecticut and Massachusetts, it was reported later, were shot or hanged in that one afternoon. _New England’s Funeral Curtain_ And over the two States, rising slowly and spreading until the sunny sky was darkened, there hung, like a funeral curtain over the place of death, the black smoke of burning villages and towns. When that April day ended, and the night came down, there was no place in eastern Connecticut, in all the seventy miles north and south from New London to Worcester where men could not see the fire of burning towns or houses. In Massachusetts from New Bedford to Taunton, and from Taunton north to Brockton, there were fires. All the sky around Providence was red with it. The smoke drifted over Boston and the strangling odor filled its streets. All night the country burned. All night wounded fugitives lay hidden, gritting their teeth, or, forced by intolerable anguish, crawled out and surrendered. All night long the troops swept through town after town, wreaking vengeance.