Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 85.djvu/609

Rh storm, which began during the afternoon, drove three of the transports ashore on Governor's Island. The rain fell in torrents. There was no abatement of the storm on the following morning (March 6), there being a furious gale from the southeast which caused such a surf on the Dorchester shore that "an attempt to land (on the part of the British) must have proved fatal." The Americans continued to fortify in spite of the storm, and when the weather had improved sufficiently for the British to attack, they realized that the American position was too strong. By night of March 6 the evacuation had been decided on. General Washington wrote on March 14: "A very heavy storm of wind and rain frustrated their design." The terrible winter retreat of Napoleon's Grand Army from Moscow furnishes a tragic but wonderfully vivid illustration of the strength of Russia's two invincible generals, January and February, who, if the scene of the present war should be transferred into Russia during the winter, would again be found fighting on the side of the Czar. We may note, in passing, that the French Revolution was precipitated by a severe winter, and that the "Boxer" outbreak in China, in 1900, was brought on by a scarcity of rain in the preceding autumn, leading to famine and destitution, and driving the people to robbery and pillage.

History is full of examples of individual engagements in which weather played an important, if not actually decisive part. Heavy rains, making the roads muddy and the movements of troops and of guns difficult, had a marked effect upon the plans of the commanding officers in the battle of Waterloo (1815), the battle itself being postponed for this reason. In our own civil war the list of weather controls is a long one. Of one of General Grant's campaigns in Virginia it is reported that the country was densely wooded and the ground swampy—the troops waded in mud above their ankles, horses sank to their bellies and wagons threatened to disappear altogether. The men began to feel that if any one in after years should ask them if they had been through Virginia, they could say, "Yes, in a number of places." Dense fog favored the northern forces in the battle of the Wilderness. Deep mud and impassable roads were, at least in part, responsible for General McClellan's delays, which caused so much anxiety and indignation in Washington. During the fighting around Tientsin in 1900 the situation of the allied troops was very critical, when a torrential rainfall compelled the Chinese to retire. Cold and snows have time and time again been potent factors in warfare. In the last Russo-Turkish war thousands of men died of the cold, and the sufferings of the troops at Plevna were terrible. The siege of Sebastopol furnishes another illustration of the sufferings which a severe winter inevitably produces. In the Russo-Japanese war fighting continued in the severe cold of the Manchurian winter. Frozen rivers or lakes may make it very easy for