They knew what batteries to fire and when, at the extreme fire zone, at the intermediate zone, and at the third fire zone which commanded the mine fields. They had before them, worked out to the ultimate detail, the order of fire if the enemy ships should come in column, in double column, or in scattered formation. Far down the beaches, north and south, they had every range plotted, that the great guns might be turned on landing parties if the secondary shore defenses should fail to hold them.[96] The ships struck simultaneously all along the line of defenses. They fired close in north and south, and from battleships out at sea. A plunging fire went over Nahant and across into Winthrop. The speeding ships missed the defenses and their bursting shells wrecked the town instead. As its flames reddened the sky, the flames of Hull, at Point Allerton on the end of the southern peninsula, made a red reply. The quick search-lights caught the ships. Again and again the white light-shafts fell on veering, speeding vessels and made them hurry to get away before the fire-control of the defenses could cover them. Still they returned. Each time they approached at a new point in the hope of developing a defect in the light-system. Each time they fired all the metal that they could throw in the one instant before the beams fell on them. There were few hits made by these running ships; but they could afford to waste ammunition, since their continual attack forced the defenders to use their own insufficient supply. _A Game of Wits_ While half-naked men in ships’ turrets and half-naked men at coast guns and in mortar pits were toiling to wreak brute destruction, a game of wits was being played just as busily. This game was played, not on the huge armored ships, not in the formidable engine-batteries of the forts, but in places miles away from either. [Illustration: “The quick searchlights caught the ships.”] They were insignificant little places from the point of view of war--summer settlements on friendly beaches, harmless little coves, pleasant shores beset with the fantastic hotels and fantastic towers of American pleasure-places. In the summer days of peace, probably not one in any thousand of the happy crowds that played and laughed there ever imagined that these serene, careless places could have any importance some day in battle. That night they were playing a part that was full of danger to the venturesome ships. The American engineers had established portable search-lights there, and made base stations and range-finding points of them. Every one of these insignificant out-lying points was endowing the guns in the distant defenses with an added deadliness of accuracy.