They took hold of men armed with magnificent rifles, but of a score of different patterns for different kinds of sport, and demanding a score of different shapes and calibers of cartridges. They took hold of infantry militia fragments whose companies had had only two or three assemblies a year for target practice with average attendances of only 11 or 12 men. They improvised scout detachments of volunteers with bicycles and motors.[128] Young doctors took hold with nothing but emergency kits, without ambulances, without litters, without even helpers who would know how to find a wound or apply a first aid bandage. The army of madmen went forward to the Connecticut River to hold the western bank from Hartford to Middletown. They did not know how to dig trenches. [Illustration: “The army of madmen went forward to the Connecticut River to hold the western bank.”] They dug ditches. They did not know how to make defenses for their machine guns. They piled trees that would skewer them with splinters under shell fire, or heaped up rocks that would fly into fragments and kill like shrapnel. They were all of three thousand men. They were the kind of men whom America has expected always in times of peace to call to its defense. They were callous-handed workers in metal and wood and leather; bleached workers from woolen mills and cotton spindles; ‘longshoremen from the harbor cities of the Sound; professional men resolute with the fervor of the time; road-makers and teamsters and shoemakers; hunters, yachtsmen, and football players. _What Americans Could Have Done_ That day along the Connecticut River they showed what America’s men could have done had they learned how to do it in advance and had they been armed for the work. They lay behind their pitiable defenses, with their motley weapons, commanded by men who did not know war. They bore the shock of machine gun assaults from advance patrols. They bore the shock of cavalry charges from scouting detachments. At Middletown they were attacked in force by heavy cavalry that crossed under cover of gun-fire and outflanked them, and charged in mass. They sent the charge back, broken, with many empty saddles. They lay under the fire of a 3-inch gun at Cromwell for an hour, and endured, and died--but they denied the river crossing to a battalion. For two long hours they held the river along their whole line. It seemed to them that they were fighting a great battle. Surely their dead testified to it, and the hot fire that beat on them testified to it, and across the river, or floating down with the stream, were many enemy dead to testify to it. They cheered and shouted to each other hoarsely that they were winning. They watched, with ever-growing savage lust, for more assailants.