Notes of a War Correspondent
by Richard Harding Davis · English · Gutenberg #3050 · 324,262 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: Notes of a War Correspondent
Author: Richard Harding Davis
Illustrator: Frederic Remington
Release date: January 1, 2002 [eBook #3050]
Most recently updated: January 18, 2008
Language: English
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/3050
Credits: Transcribed from the 1911 Harper and Brothers edition by David Price
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK NOTES OF A WAR CORRESPONDENT ***
Transcribed from the 1911 Harper and Brothers edition by David Price,
email ccx074@pglaf.org
NOTES OF A WAR CORRESPONDENT
BY
RICHARD HARDING DAVIS
ILLUSTRATED
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
NEW YORK::::::::::::::::::::::::1911
COPYRIGHT, 1897, BY
HARPER & BROTHERS
* * * * *
COPYRIGHT, 1898, 1900, 1910, BY
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
[Picture: At the front in Manchuria]
Contents:
The Cuban-Spanish War
The Death of Rodriguez
The Greek-Turkish War
The Battle of Velestinos
The Spanish-American War
I. The Rough Riders at Guasimas
II. The Battle of San Juan Hill
III. The Taking of Coamo
IV. The Passing of San Juan Hill
The South African War
I. With Buller's Column
II. The Relief of Ladysmith
III. The Night Before the Battle
The Japanese-Russian War
Battles I did not see
A War Correspondent's Kit
THE CUBAN-SPANISH WAR: THE DEATH OF RODRIGUEZ {1}
Adolfo Rodriguez was the only son of a Cuban farmer, who lived nine miles
outside of Santa Clara, beyond the hills that surround that city to the
north.
When the revolution in Cuba broke out young Rodriguez joined the
insurgents, leaving his father and mother and two sisters at the farm.
He was taken, in December of 1896, by a force of the Guardia Civile, the
corps d'elite of the Spanish army, and defended himself when they tried
to capture him, wounding three of them with his machete.
He was tried by a military court for bearing arms against the government,
and sentenced to be shot by a fusillade some morning before sunrise.
Previous to execution he was confined in the military prison of Santa
Clara with thirty other insurgents, all of whom were sentenced to be
shot, one after the other, on mornings following the execution of
Rodriguez.
His execution took place the morning of the 19th of January, 1897, at a
place a half-mile distant from the city, on the great plain that
stretches from the forts out to the hills, beyond which Rodriguez had
lived for nineteen years. At the time of his death he was twenty years
old.
I witnessed his execution, and what follows is an account of the way he
went to his death. The young man's friends could not be present, for it
was impossible for them to show themselves in that crowd and that place
with wisdom or without distress, and I like to think that, although
Rodriguez could not know it, there was one person present when he died
who felt keenly for him, and who was a sympathetic though unwilling
spectator.
There had been a full moon the night preceding the execution, and when
the squad of soldiers marched from town it was still shining brightly
through the mists. It lighted a plain two miles in extent, broken by
ridges and gullies and covered with thick, high grass, and with bunches
of cactus and palmetto. In the hollow of the ridges the mist lay like
broad lakes of water, and on one side of the plain stood the walls of the
old town. On the other rose hills covered with royal palms that showed
white in the moonlight, like hundreds of marble columns. A line of tiny
camp-fires that the sentries had built during the night stretched between
the forts at regular intervals and burned clearly.
But as the light grew stronger and the moonlight faded these were stamped
out, and when the soldiers came in force the moon was a white ball in the
sky, without radiance, the fires had sunk to ashes, and the sun had not
yet risen.
So even when the men were formed into three sides of a hollow square,
they were scarcely able to distinguish one another in the uncertain light
of the morning.
There were about three hundred soldiers in the formation. They belonged
to the volunteers, and they deployed upon the plain with their band in
front playing a jaunty quickstep, while their officers galloped from one
side to the other through the grass, seeking a suitable place for the
execution. Outside the line the band still played merrily.
A few men and boys, who had been dragged out of their beds by the music,
moved about the ridges behind the soldiers, half-clothed, unshaven,
sleepy-eyed, yawning, stretching themselves nervously and shivering in
the cool, damp air of the morning.
Either owing to discipline or on account of the nature of their errand,
or because the men were still but half awake, there was no talking in the
ranks, and the soldiers stood motionless, leaning on their rifles, with
their backs turned to the town, looking out across the plain to the
hills.
The men in the crowd behind them were also grimly silent. They knew that
whatever they might say would be twisted into a word of sympathy for the
condemned man or a protest against the government. So no one spoke; even
the officers gave their orders in gruff whispers, and the men in the
crowd did not mix together, but looked suspiciously at one another and
kept apart.
As the light increased a mass of people came hurrying from the town with
two black figures leading them, and the soldiers drew up at attention,
and part of the double line fell back and left an opening in the square.
With us a condemned man walks only the short distance from his cell to
the scaffold or the electric chair, shielded from sight by the prison
walls, and it often occurs even then that the short journey is too much
for his strength and courage.
But the Spaniards on this morning made the prisoner walk for over a
half-mile across the broken surface of the fields. I expected to find
the man, no matter what his strength at other times might be, stumbling
and faltering on this cruel journey; but as he came nearer I saw that he
led all the others, that the priests on either side of him were taking
two steps to his one, and that they were tripping on their gowns and
stumbling over the hollows in their efforts to keep pace with him as he
walked, erect and soldierly, at a quick step in advance of them.
He had a handsome, gentle face of the peasant type, a light, pointed
beard, great wistful eyes, and a mass of curly black hair. He was
shockingly young for such a sacrifice, and looked more like a Neapolitan
than a Cuban. You could imagine him sitting on the quay at Naples or
Genoa lolling in the sun and showing his white teeth when he laughed.
Around his neck, hanging outside his linen blouse, he wore a new
scapular.
It seems a petty thing to have been pleased with at such a time, but I
confess to have felt a thrill of satisfaction when I saw, as the Cuban
passed me, that he held a cigarette between his lips, not arrogantly nor
with bravado, but with the nonchalance of a man who meets his punishment
fearlessly, and who will let his enemies see that they can kill but
cannot frighten him.
It was very quickly finished, with rough and, but for one frightful
blunder, with merciful swiftness. The crowd fell back when it came to
the square, and the condemned man, the priests, and the firing squad of
six young volunteers passed in and the line closed behind them.
The officer who had held the cord that bound the Cuban's arms behind him
and passed across his breast, let it fall on the grass and drew his
sword, and Rodriguez dropped his cigarette from his lips and bent and
kissed the cross which the priest held up before him.
The elder of the priests moved to one side and prayed rapidly in a loud
whisper, while the other, a younger man, walked behind the firing squad
and covered his face with his hands. They had both spent the last twelve
hours with Rodriguez in the chapel of the prison.
The Cuban walked to where the officer directed him to stand, and turning
his back on the square, faced the hills and the road across them, which
led to his father's farm.
As the officer gave the first command he straightened himself as far as
the cords would allow, and held up his head and fixed his eyes immovably
on the morning light, which had just begun to show above the hills.
He made a picture of such pathetic helplessness, but of such courage and
dignity, that he reminded me on the instant of that statue of Nathan Hale
which stands in the City Hall Park, above the roar of Broadway. The
Cuban's arms were bound, as are those of the statue, and he stood firmly,
with his weight resting on his heels like a soldier on parade, and with
his face held up fearlessly, as is that of the statue. But there was
this difference, that Rodriguez, while probably as willing to give six
lives for his country as was the American rebel, being only a peasant,
did not think to say so, and he will not, in consequence, live in bronze
during the lives of many men, but will be remembered only as one of
thirty Cubans, one of whom was shot at Santa Clara on each succeeding day
at sunrise.
The officer had given the order, the men had raised their pieces, and the
condemned man had heard the clicks of the triggers as they were pulled
back, and he had not moved. And then happened one of the most cruelly
refined, though unintentional, acts of torture that one can very well
imagine. As the officer slowly raised his sword, preparatory to giving
the signal, one of the mounted officers rode up to him and pointed out
silently that, as I had already observed with some satisfaction, the
firing squad were so placed that when they fired they would shoot several
of the soldiers stationed on the extreme end of the square.
Their captain motioned his men to lower their pieces, and then walked
across the grass and laid his hand on the shoulder of the waiting
prisoner.
It is not pleasant to think what that shock must have been. The man had
steeled himself to receive a volley of bullets. He believed that in the
next instant he would be in another world; he had heard the command
given, had heard the click of the Mausers as the locks caught--and then,
at that supreme moment, a human hand had been laid upon his shoulder and
a voice spoke in his ear.
You would expect that any man, snatched back to life in such a fashion
would start and tremble at the reprieve, or would break down altogether,
but this boy turned his head steadily, and followed with his eyes the
direction of the officer's sword, then nodded gravely, and, with his
shoulders squared, took up the new position, straightened his back, and
once more held himself erect.
As an exhibition of self-control this should surely rank above feats of
heroism performed in battle, where there are thousands of comrades to
give inspiration. This man was alone, in sight of the hills he knew,
with only enemies about him, with no source to draw on for strength but
that which lay within himself.
[Picture: The death of Rodriguez]
The officer of the firing squad, mortified by his blunder, hastily
whipped up his sword, the men once more levelled their rifles, the sword
rose, dropped, and the men fired. At the report the Cuban's head snapped
back almost between his shoulders, but his body fell slowly, as though
some one had pushed him gently forward from behind and he had stumbled.
He sank on his side in the wet grass without a struggle or sound, and did
not move again.
It was difficult to believe that he meant to lie there, that it could be
ended so without a word, that the man in the linen suit would not rise to
his feet and continue to walk on over the hills, as he apparently had
started to do, to his home; that there was not a mistake somewhere, or
that at least some one would be sorry or say something or run to pick him
up.
But, fortunately, he did not need help, and the priests returned--the
younger one with the tears running down his face--and donned their
vestments and read a brief requiem for his soul, while the squad stood
uncovered, and the men in hollow square shook their accoutrements into
place, and shifted their pieces and got ready for the order to march, and
the band began again with the same quickstep which the fusillade had
interrupted.
The figure still lay on the grass untouched, and no one seemed to
remember that it had walked there of itself, or noticed that the
cigarette still burned, a tiny ring of living fire, at the place where
the figure had first stood.
The figure was a thing of the past, and the squad shook itself like a
great snake, and then broke into little pieces and started off jauntily,
stumbling in the high grass and striving to keep step to the music.
The officers led it past the figure in the linen suit, and so close to it
that the file closers had to part with the column to avoid treading on
it. Each soldier as he passed turned and looked down on it, some craning
their necks curiously, others giving a careless glance, and some without
any interest at all, as they would have looked at a house by the
roadside, or a hole in the road.
One young soldier caught his foot in a trailing vine, just opposite to
it, and fell. He grew very red when his comrades giggled at him for his
awkwardness. The crowd of sleepy spectators fell in on either side of
the band. They, too, had forgotten it, and the priests put their
vestments back in the bag and wrapped their heavy cloaks about them, and
hurried off after the others.
Every one seemed to have forgotten it except two men, who came slowly
towards it from the town, driving a bullock-cart that bore an unplaned
coffin, each with a cigarette between his lips, and with his throat
wrapped in a shawl to keep out the morning mists.
At that moment the sun, which had shown some promise of its coming in the
glow above the hills, shot up suddenly from behind them in all the
splendor of the tropics, a fierce, red disk of heat, and filled the air
with warmth and light.
The bayonets of the retreating column flashed in it, and at the sight a
rooster in a farm-yard near by crowed vigorously, and a dozen bugles
answered the challenge with the brisk, cheery notes of the reveille, and
from all parts of the city the church bells jangled out the call for
early mass, and the little world of Santa Clara seemed to stretch itself
and to wake to welcome the day just begun.
But as I fell in at the rear of the procession and looked back, the
figure of the young Cuban, who was no longer a part of the world of Santa
Clara, was asleep in the wet grass, with his motionless arms still
tightly bound behind him, with the scapular twisted awry across his face,
and the blood from his breast sinking into the soil he had tried to free.
THE GREEK-TURKISH WAR: THE BATTLE OF VELESTINOS {2}
The Turks had made three attacks on Velestinos on three different days,
and each time had been repulsed. A week later, on the 4th of May, they
came back again, to the number of ten thousand, and brought four
batteries with them, and the fighting continued for two more days. This
was called the second battle of Velestinos. In the afternoon of the 5th
the Crown Prince withdrew from Pharsala to take up a stronger position at
Domokos, and the Greeks under General Smolenski, the military hero of the
campaign, were forced to retreat, and the Turks came in, and, according
to their quaint custom, burned the village and marched on to Volo. John
Bass, the American correspondent, and myself were keeping house in the
village, in the home of the mayor. He had fled from the town, as had
nearly all the villagers; and as we liked the appearance of his house, I
gave Bass a leg up over the wall around his garden, and Bass opened the
gate, and we climbed in through his front window. It was like the
invasion of the home of the Dusantes by Mrs. Lecks and Mrs. Aleshine,
and, like them, we were constantly making discoveries of fresh
treasure-trove. Sometimes it was in the form of a cake of soap or a tin
of coffee, and once it was the mayor's fluted petticoats, which we tried
on, and found very heavy. We could not discover what he did for pockets.
All of these things, and the house itself, were burned to ashes, we were
told, a few hours after we retreated, and we feel less troubled now at
having made such free use of them.
On the morning of the 4th we were awakened by the firing of cannon from a
hill just over our heads, and we met in the middle of the room and
solemnly shook hands. There was to be a battle, and we were the only
correspondents on the spot. As I represented the London _Times_, Bass
was the only representative of an American newspaper who saw this fight
from its beginning to its end.
We found all the hills to the left of the town topped with long lines of
men crouching in little trenches. There were four rows of hills. If you
had measured the distance from one hill-top to the next, they would have
been from one hundred to three hundred yards distant from one another.
In between the hills were gullies, or little valleys, and the beds of
streams that had dried up in the hot sun. These valleys were filled with
high grass that waved about in the breeze and was occasionally torn up
and tossed in the air by a shell. The position of the Greek forces was
very simple. On the top of each hill was a trench two or three feet deep
and some hundred yards long. The earth that had been scooped out to make
the trench was packed on the edge facing the enemy, and on the top of
that some of the men had piled stones, through which they poked their
rifles. When a shell struck the ridge it would sometimes scatter these
stones in among the men, and they did quite as much damage as the shells.
Back of these trenches, and down that side of the hill which was farther
from the enemy, were the reserves, who sprawled at length in the long
grass, and smoked and talked and watched the shells dropping into the
gully at their feet.
The battle, which lasted two days, opened in a sudden and terrific storm
of hail. But the storm passed as quickly as it came, leaving the
trenches running with water, like the gutters of a city street after a
spring shower; and the men soon sopped them up with their overcoats and
blankets, and in half an hour the sun had dried the wet uniforms, and the
field-birds had begun to chirp again, and the grass was warm and
fragrant. The sun was terribly hot. There was no other day during that
entire brief campaign when its glare was so intense or the heat so
suffocating. The men curled up in the trenches, with their heads pressed
against the damp earth, panting and breathing heavily, and the heat-waves
danced and quivered about them, making the plain below flicker like a
picture in a cinematograph.
From time to time an officer would rise and peer down into the great
plain, shading his eyes with his hands, and shout something at them, and
they would turn quickly in the trench and rise on one knee. And at the
shout that followed they would fire four or five rounds rapidly and
evenly, and then, at a sound from the officer's whistle, would drop back
again and pick up the cigarettes they had placed in the grass and begin
leisurely to swab out their rifles with a piece of dirty rag on a
cleaning rod. Down in the plain below there was apparently nothing at
which they could shoot except the great shadows of the clouds drifting
across the vast checker-board of green and yellow fields, and
disappearing finally between the mountain passes beyond. In some places
there were square dark patches that might have been bushes, and nearer to
us than these were long lines of fresh earth, from which steam seemed to
be escaping in little wisps. What impressed us most of what we could see
of the battle then was the remarkable number of cartridges the Greek
soldiers wasted in firing into space, and the fact that they had begun to
fire at such long range that, in order to get the elevation, they had
placed the rifle butt under the armpit instead of against the shoulder.
Their sights were at the top notch. The cartridges reminded one of
corn-cobs jumping out of a corn-sheller, and it was interesting when the
bolts were shot back to see a hundred of them pop up into the air at the
same time, flashing in the sun as though they were glad to have done
their work and to get out again. They rolled by the dozens underfoot,
and twinkled in the grass, and when one shifted his position in the
narrow trench, or stretched his cramped legs, they tinkled musically. It
was like wading in a gutter filled with thimbles.
Then there began a concert which came from just overhead--a concert of
jarring sounds and little whispers. The "shrieking shrapnel," of which
one reads in the description of every battle, did not seem so much like a
shriek as it did like the jarring sound of telegraph wires when some one
strikes the pole from which they hang, and when they came very close the
noise was like the rushing sound that rises between two railroad trains
when they pass each other in opposite directions and at great speed.
After a few hours we learned by observation that when a shell sang
overhead it had already struck somewhere else, which was comforting, and
which was explained, of course, by the fact that the speed of the shell
is so much greater than the rate at which sound travels. The bullets
were much more disturbing; they seemed to be less open in their warfare,
and to steal up and sneak by, leaving no sign, and only to whisper as
they passed. They moved under a cloak of invisibility, and made one feel
as though he were the blind man in a game of blind-man's-buff, where
every one tapped him in passing, leaving him puzzled and ignorant as to
whither they had gone and from what point they would come next. The
bullets sounded like rustling silk, or like humming-birds on a warm
summer's day, or like the wind as it is imitated on the stage of a
theatre. Any one who has stood behind the scenes when a storm is
progressing on the stage, knows the little wheel wound with silk that
brushes against another piece of silk, and which produces the whistling
effect of the wind. At Velestinos, when the firing was very heavy, it
was exactly as though some one were turning one of these silk wheels, and
so rapidly as to make the whistling continuous.
When this concert opened, the officers shouted out new orders, and each
of the men shoved his sight nearer to the barrel, and when he fired
again, rubbed the butt of his gun snugly against his shoulder. The huge
green blotches on the plain had turned blue, and now we could distinguish
that they moved, and that they were moving steadily forward. Then they
would cease to move, and a little later would be hidden behind great
puffs of white smoke, which were followed by a flash of flame; and still
later there would come a dull report. At the same instant something
would hurl itself jarring through the air above our heads, and by turning
on one elbow we could see a sudden upheaval in the sunny landscape behind
us, a spurt of earth and stones like a miniature geyser, which was filled
with broken branches and tufts of grass and pieces of rock. As the
Turkish aim grew better these volcanoes appeared higher up the hill,
creeping nearer and nearer to the rampart of fresh earth on the second
trench until the shells hammered it at last again and again, sweeping it
away and cutting great gashes in it, through which we saw the figures of
men caught up and hurled to one side, and others flinging themselves face
downward as though they were diving into water; and at the same instant
in our own trench the men would gasp as though they had been struck too,
and then becoming conscious of having done this would turn and smile
sheepishly at each other, and crawl closer into the burrows they had made
in the earth.
[Picture: A mountain battery at Velestinos]
From where we sat on the edge of the trench, with our feet among the
cartridges, we could, by leaning forward, look over the piled-up earth
into the plain below, and soon, without any aid from field-glasses, we
saw the blocks of blue break up into groups of men. These men came
across the ploughed fields in long, widely opened lines, walking easily
and leisurely, as though they were playing golf or sowing seed in the
furrows.
The Greek rifles crackled and flashed at the lines, but the men below
came on quite steadily, picking their way over the furrows and appearing
utterly unconscious of the seven thousand rifles that were calling on
them to halt. They were advancing directly toward a little sugar-loaf
hill, on the top of which was a mountain battery perched like a tiara on
a woman's head. It was throwing one shell after another in the very path
of the men below, but the Turks still continued to pick their way across
the field, without showing any regard for the mountain battery. It was
worse than threatening; it seemed almost as though they meant to insult
us. If they had come up on a run they would not have appeared so
contemptuous, for it would have looked then as though they were trying to
escape the Greek fire, or that they were at least interested in what was
going forward. But the steady advance of so many men, each plodding
along by himself, with his head bowed and his gun on his shoulder, was
aggravating.
There was a little village at the foot of the hill. It was so small that
no one had considered it. It was more like a collection of stables
gathered round a residence than a town, and there was a wall completely
encircling it, with a gate in the wall that faced us. Suddenly the doors
of this gate were burst open from the inside, and a man in a fez ran
through them, followed by many more. The first man was waving a sword,
and a peasant in petticoats ran at his side and pointed up with his hand
at our trench. Until that moment the battle had lacked all human
interest; we might have been watching a fight against the stars or the
man in the moon, and, in spite of the noise and clatter of the Greek
rifles, and the ghostlike whispers and the rushing sounds in the air,
there was nothing to remind us of any other battle of which we had heard
or read. But we had seen pictures of officers waving swords, and we knew
that the fez was the sign of the Turk--of the enemy--of the men who were
invading Thessaly, who were at that moment planning to come up a steep
hill on which we happened to be sitting and attack the people on top of
it. And the spectacle at once became comprehensible, and took on the
human interest it had lacked. The men seemed to feel this, for they
sprang up and began cheering and shouting, and fired in an upright
position, and by so doing exposed themselves at full length to the fire
from the men below. The Turks in front of the village ran back into it
again, and those in the fields beyond turned and began to move away, but
in that same plodding, aggravating fashion. They moved so leisurely that
there was a pause in the noise along the line, while the men watched them
to make sure that they were really retreating. And then there was a long
cheer, after which they all sat down, breathing deeply, and wiping the
sweat and dust across their faces, and took long pulls at their canteens.
The different trenches were not all engaged at the same time. They acted
according to the individual judgment of their commanding officer, but
always for the general good. Sometimes the fire of the enemy would be
directed on one particular trench, and it would be impossible for the men
in that trench to rise and reply without haying their heads carried away;
so they would lie hidden, and the men in the trenches flanking them would
act in their behalf, and rake the enemy from the front and from every
side, until the fire on that trench was silenced, or turned upon some
other point. The trenches stretched for over half a mile in a
semicircle, and the little hills over which they ran lay at so many
different angles, and rose to such different heights, that sometimes the
men in one trench fired directly over the heads of their own men. From
many trenches in the first line it was impossible to see any of the Greek
soldiers except those immediately beside you. If you looked back or
beyond on either hand there was nothing to be seen but high hills topped
with fresh earth, and the waving yellow grass, and the glaring blue sky.
General Smolenski directed the Greeks from the plain to the far right of
the town; and his presence there, although none of the men saw nor heard
of him directly throughout the entire day, was more potent for good than
would have been the presence of five thousand other men held in reserve.
He was a mile or two miles away from the trenches, but the fact that he
was there, and that it was Smolenski who was giving the orders, was
enough. Few had ever seen Smolenski, but his name was sufficient; it was
as effective as is Mr. Bowen's name on a Bank of England note. It gave
one a pleasant feeling to know that he was somewhere within call; you
felt there would be no "routs" nor stampedes while he was there. And so
for two days those seven thousand men lay in the trenches, repulsing
attack after attack of the Turkish troops, suffocated with the heat and
chilled with sudden showers, and swept unceasingly by shells and
bullets--partly because they happened to be good men and brave men, but
largely because they knew that somewhere behind them a stout, bull-necked
soldier was sitting on a camp-stool, watching them through a pair of
field-glasses.
Toward mid-day you would see a man leave the trench with a comrade's arm
around him, and start on the long walk to the town where the hospital
corps were waiting for him. These men did not wear their wounds with
either pride or braggadocio, but regarded the wet sleeves and shapeless
arms in a sort of wondering surprise. There was much more of surprise
than of pain in their faces, and they seemed to be puzzling as to what
they had done in the past to deserve such a punishment.
[Picture: Firing from the trenches at Velestinos]
Other men were carried out of the trench and laid on their backs on the
high grass, staring up drunkenly at the glaring sun, and with their limbs
fallen into unfamiliar poses. They lay so still, and they were so
utterly oblivious of the roar and rattle and the anxious energy around
them that one grew rather afraid of them and of their superiority to
their surroundings. The sun beat on them, and the insects in the grass
waving above them buzzed and hummed, or burrowed in the warm moist earth
upon which they lay; over their heads the invisible carriers of death
jarred the air with shrill crescendoes, and near them a comrade sat
hacking with his bayonet at a lump of hard bread. He sprawled
contentedly in the hot sun, with humped shoulders and legs far apart, and
with his cap tipped far over his eyes. Every now and again he would
pause, with a piece of cheese balanced on the end of his knife-blade, and
look at the twisted figures by him on the grass, or he would dodge
involuntarily as a shell swung low above his head, and smile nervously at
the still forms on either side of him that had not moved. Then he
brushed the crumbs from his jacket and took a drink out of his hot
canteen, and looking again at the sleeping figures pressing down the long
grass beside him, crawled back on his hands and knees to the trench and
picked up his waiting rifle.
The dead gave dignity to what the other men were doing, and made it
noble, and, from another point of view, quite senseless. For their dying
had proved nothing. Men who could have been much better spared than
they, were still alive in the trenches, and for no reason but through
mere dumb chance. There was no selection of the unfittest; it seemed to
be ruled by unreasoning luck. A certain number of shells and bullets
passed through a certain area of space, and men of different bulks
blocked that space in different places. If a man happened to be standing
in the line of a bullet he was killed and passed into eternity, leaving a
wife and children, perhaps, to mourn him. "Father died," these children
will say, "doing his duty." As a matter of fact, father died because he
happened to stand up at the wrong moment, or because he turned to ask the
man on his right for a match, instead of leaning toward the left, and he
projected his bulk of two hundred pounds where a bullet, fired by a man
who did not know him and who had not aimed at him, happened to want the
right of way. One of the two had to give it, and as the bullet would
not, the soldier had his heart torn out. The man who sat next to me
happened to stoop to fill his cartridge-box just as the bullet that
wanted the space he had occupied passed over his bent shoulder; and so he
was not killed, but will live for sixty years, perhaps, and will do much
good or much evil. Another man in the same trench sat up to clean his
rifle, and had his arm in the air driving the cleaning rod down the
barrel, when a bullet passed through his lungs, and the gun fell across
his face, with the rod sticking in it, and he pitched forward on his
shoulder quite dead. If he had not cleaned his gun at that moment he
would probably be alive in Athens now, sitting in front of a cafe and
fighting the war over again. Viewed from that point, and leaving out the
fact that God ordered it all, the fortunes of the game of war seemed as
capricious as matching pennies, and as impersonal as the wheel at Monte
Carlo. In it the brave man did not win because he was brave, but because
he was lucky. A fool and a philosopher are equal at a game of dice. And
these men who threw dice with death were interesting to watch, because,
though they gambled for so great a stake, they did so unconcernedly and
without flinching, and without apparently appreciating the seriousness of
the game.
There was a red-headed, freckled peasant boy, in dirty petticoats, who
guided Bass and myself to the trenches. He was one of the few peasants
who had not run away, and as he had driven sheep over every foot of the
hills, he was able to guide the soldiers through those places where they
were best protected from the bullets of the enemy. He did this all day,
and was always, whether coming or going, under a heavy fire; but he
enjoyed that fact, and he seemed to regard the battle only as a
delightful change in the quiet routine of his life, as one of our own
country boys at home would regard the coming of the spring circus or the
burning of a neighbor's barn. He ran dancing ahead of us, pointing to
where a ledge of rock offered a natural shelter, or showing us a steep
gully where the bullets could not fall. When they came very near him he
would jump high in the air, not because he was startled, but out of pure
animal joy in the excitement of it, and he would frown importantly and
shake his red curls at us, as though to say: "I told you to be careful.
Now, you see. Don't let that happen again." We met him many times
during the two days, escorting different companies of soldiers from one
point to another, as though they were visitors to his estate. When a
shell broke, he would pick up a piece and present it to the officer in
charge, as though it were a flower he had plucked from his own garden,
and which he wanted his guest to carry away with him as a souvenir of his
visit. Some one asked the boy if his father and mother knew where he
was, and he replied, with amusement, that they had run away and deserted
him, and that he had remained because he wished to see what a Turkish
army looked like. He was a much more plucky boy than the overrated
Casabianca, who may have stood on the burning deck whence all but him had
fled because he could not swim, and because it was with him a choice of
being either burned or drowned. This boy stuck to the burning deck when
it was possible for him at any time to have walked away and left it
burning. But he stayed on because he was amused, and because he was able
to help the soldiers from the city in safety across his native heath. He
was much the best part of the show, and one of the bravest Greeks on the
field. He will grow up to be something fine, no doubt, and his spirit
will rebel against having to spend his life watching his father's sheep.
He may even win the race from Marathon.
Another Greek who was a most interesting figure to us was a Lieutenant
Ambroise Frantzis. He was in command of the mountain battery on the
flat, round top of the high hill. On account of its height the place
seemed much nearer to the sun than any other part of the world, and the
heat there was three times as fierce as in the trenches below. When you
had climbed to the top of this hill it was like standing on a
roof-garden, or as though you were watching a naval battle from a
fighting top of one of the battleships. The top of the hill was not
unlike an immense circus ring in appearance. The piled-up earth around
its circular edge gave that impression, and the glaring yellow wheat that
was tramped into glaring yellow soil, and the blue ammunition-boxes
scattered about, helped out the illusion. It was an exceedingly busy
place, and the smoke drifted across it continually, hiding us from one
another in a curtain of flying yellow dust, while over our heads the
Turkish shells raced after each other so rapidly that they beat out the
air like the branches of a tree in a storm. On account of its height,
and the glaring heat, and the shells passing, and the Greek guns going
off and then turning somersaults, it was not a place suited for
meditation; but Ambroise Frantzis meditated there as though he were in
his own study. He was a very young man and very shy, and he was too busy
to consider his own safety, or to take time, as the others did, to show
that he was not considering it. Some of the other officers stood up on
the breastworks and called the attention of the men to what they were
doing; but as they did not wish the men to follow their example in this,
it was difficult to see what they expected to gain by their braggadocio.
Frantzis was as unconcerned as an artist painting a big picture in his
studio. The battle plain below him was his canvas, and his nine mountain
guns were his paint brushes. And he painted out Turks and Turkish cannon
with the same concentrated, serious expression of countenance that you
see on the face of an artist when he bites one brush between his lips and
with another wipes out a false line or a touch of the wrong color. You
have seen an artist cock his head on one side, and shut one eye and frown
at his canvas, and then select several brushes and mix different colors
and hit the canvas a bold stroke, and then lean back to note the effect.
Frantzis acted in just that way. He would stand with his legs apart and
his head on one side, pulling meditatively at his pointed beard, and then
taking a closer look through his field-glasses, would select the three
guns he had decided would give him the effect he wanted to produce, and
he would produce that effect. When the shot struck plump in the Turkish
lines, and we could see the earth leap up into the air like geysers of
muddy water, and each gunner would wave his cap and cheer, Frantzis would
only smile uncertainly, and begin again, with the aid of his
field-glasses, to puzzle out fresh combinations.
The battle that had begun in a storm of hail ended on the first day in a
storm of bullets that had been held in reserve by the Turks, and which
let off just after sundown. They came from a natural trench, formed by
the dried-up bed of a stream which lay just below the hill on which the
first Greek trench was situated. There were bushes growing on the bank
of the stream nearest to the Greek lines, and these hid the men who
occupied it. Throughout the day there had been an irritating fire from
this trench from what appeared to be not more than a dozen rifles, but we
could see that it was fed from time to time with many boxes of
ammunition, which were carried to it on the backs of mules from the
Turkish position a half mile farther to the rear. Bass and a corporal
took a great aversion to this little group of Turks, not because there
were too many of them to be disregarded, but because they were so near;
and Bass kept the corporal's services engaged in firing into it, and in
discouraging the ammunition mules when they were being driven in that
direction. Our corporal was a sharp-shooter, and, accordingly, felt his
superiority to his comrades; and he had that cheerful contempt for his
officers that all true Greek soldiers enjoy; and so he never joined in
the volley-firing, but kept his ammunition exclusively for the dozen men
behind the bushes and for the mules. He waged, as it were, a little
battle on his own account. The other men rose as commanded and fired
regular volleys, and sank back again, but he fixed his sights to suit his
own idea of the range, and he rose when he was ready to do so, and fired
whenever he thought best. When his officer, who kept curled up in the
hollow of the trench, commanded him to lie down, he would frown and shake
his head at the interruption, and paid no further attention to the order.
He was as much alone as a hunter on a mountain peak stalking deer, and
whenever he fired at the men in the bushes he would swear softly, and
when he fired at the mules he would chuckle and laugh with delight and
content. The mules had to cross a ploughed field in order to reach the
bushes, and so we were able to mark where his bullets struck, and we
could see them skip across the field, kicking up the dirt as they
advanced, until they stopped the mule altogether, or frightened the man
who was leading it into a disorderly retreat.
It appeared later that instead of there being but twelve men in these
bushes there were six hundred, and that they were hiding there until the
sun set in order to make a final attack on the first trench. They had
probably argued that at sunset the strain of the day's work would have
told on the Greek _morale_, that the men's nerves would be jerking and
their stomachs aching for food, and that they would be ready for darkness
and sleep, and in no condition to repulse a fresh and vigorous attack.
So, just as the sun sank, and the officers were counting the cost in dead
and wounded, and the men were gathering up blankets and overcoats, and
the firing from the Greek lines had almost ceased, there came a fierce
rattle from the trench to the right of us, like a watch-dog barking the
alarm, and the others took it up from all over the hill, and when we
looked down into the plain below to learn what it meant, we saw it blue
with men, who seemed to have sprung from the earth. They were clambering
from the bed of the stream, breaking through the bushes, and forming into
a long line, which, as soon as formed, was at once hidden at regular
intervals by flashes of flame that seemed to leap from one gun-barrel to
the next, as you have seen a current of electricity run along a line of
gas-jets. In the dim twilight these flashes were much more blinding than
they had been in the glare of the sun, and the crash of the artillery
coming on top of the silence was the more fierce and terrible by the
contrast. The Turks were so close on us that the first trench could do
little to help itself, and the men huddled against it while their
comrades on the surrounding hills fought for them, their volleys passing
close above our heads, and meeting the rush of the Turkish bullets on the
way, so that there was now one continuous whistling shriek, like the roar
of the wind through the rigging of a ship in a storm. If a man had
raised his arm above his head his hand would have been torn off. It had
come up so suddenly that it was like two dogs, each springing at the
throat of the other, and in a greater degree it had something of the
sound of two wild animals struggling for life. Volley answered volley as
though with personal hate--one crashing in upon the roll of the other, or
beating it out of recognition with the bursting roar of heavy cannon. At
the same instant all of the Turkish batteries opened with great,
ponderous, booming explosions, and the little mountain guns barked and
snarled and shrieked back at them, and the rifle volleys crackled and
shot out blistering flames, while the air was filled with invisible
express trains that shook and jarred it and crashed into one another,
bursting and shrieking and groaning. It seemed as though you were lying
in a burning forest, with giant tree trunks that had withstood the storms
of centuries crashing and falling around your ears, and sending up great
showers of sparks and flame. This lasted for five minutes or less, and
then the death-grip seemed to relax, the volleys came brokenly, like a
man panting for breath, the bullets ceased to sound with the hiss of
escaping steam, and rustled aimlessly by, and from hill-top to hill-top
the officers' whistles sounded as though a sportsman were calling off his
dogs. The Turks withdrew into the coming night, and the Greeks lay back,
panting and sweating, and stared open-eyed at one another, like men who
had looked for a moment into hell, and had come back to the world again.
The next day was like the first, except that by five o'clock in the
afternoon the Turks appeared on our left flank, crawling across the hills
like an invasion of great ants, and the Greek army that at Velestinos had
made the two best and most dignified stands of the war withdrew upon
Halmyros, and the Turks poured into the village and burned it, leaving
nothing standing save two tall Turkish minarets that many years before,
when Thessaly belonged to the Sultan, the Turks themselves had placed
there.
I--THE ROUGH RIDERS AT GUASIMAS
On the day the American troops landed on the coast of Cuba, the Cubans
informed General Wheeler that the enemy were intrenched at Guasimas,
blocking the way to Santiago. Guasimas is not a village, nor even a
collection of houses; it is the meeting place of two trails which join at
the apex of a V, three miles from the seaport town of Siboney, and
continue merged in a single trail to Santiago. General Wheeler, guided
by the Cubans, reconnoitred this trail on the 23rd of June, and with the
position of the enemy fully explained to him, returned to Siboney and
informed General Young and Colonel Wood that on the following morning he
would attack the Spanish position at Guasimas. It has been stated that
at Guasimas, the Rough Riders were trapped in an ambush, but, as the plan
was discussed while I was present, I know that so far from any ones
running into an ambush, every one of the officers concerned had a full
knowledge of where he would find the enemy, and what he was to do when he
found him.
That night no one slept, for until two o'clock in the morning, troops
were still being disembarked in the surf, and two ships of war had their
searchlights turned on the landing-place, and made Siboney as light as a
ball-room. Back of the searchlights was an ocean white with moonlight,
and on the shore red camp-fires, at which the half-drowned troops were
drying their uniforms, and the Rough Riders, who had just marched in from
Baiquiri, were cooking a late supper, or early breakfast of coffee and
bacon. Below the former home of the Spanish comandante, which General
Wheeler had made his head-quarters, lay the camp of the Rough Riders, and
through it Cuban officers were riding their half-starved ponies, and
scattering the ashes of the camp-fires. Below them was the beach and the
roaring surf, in which a thousand or so naked men were assisting and
impeding the progress shoreward of their comrades, in pontoons and shore
boats, which were being hurled at the beach like sleds down a water
chute.
It was one of the most weird and remarkable scenes of the war, probably
of any war. An army was being landed on an enemy's coast at the dead of
night, but with the same cheers and shrieks and laughter that rise from
the bathers at Coney Island on a hot Sunday. It was a pandemonium of
noises. The men still to be landed from the "prison hulks," as they
called the transports, were singing in chorus, the men already on shore
were dancing naked around the camp-fires on the beach, or shouting with
delight as they plunged into the first bath that had offered in seven
days, and those in the launches as they were pitched head-first at the
soil of Cuba, signalized their arrival by howls of triumph. On either
side rose black overhanging ridges, in the lowland between were white
tents and burning fires, and from the ocean came the blazing, dazzling
eyes of the search-lights shaming the quiet moonlight.
After three hours' troubled sleep in this tumult the Rough Riders left
camp at five in the morning. With the exception of half a dozen officers
they were dismounted, and carried their blanket rolls, haversacks,
ammunition, and carbines. General Young had already started toward
Guasimas the First and Tenth dismounted Cavalry, and according to the
agreement of the night before had taken the eastern trail to our right,
while the Rough Riders climbed the steep ridge above Siboney and started
toward the rendezvous along the trail to the west, which was on high
ground and a half mile to a mile distant from the trail along which
General Young and his regulars were marching. There was a valley between
us, and the bushes were so thick on both sides of our trail that it was
not possible at any time, until we met at Guasimas, to distinguish the
other column.
As soon as the Rough Riders had reached the top of the ridge, not twenty
minutes after they had left camp, which was the first opportunity that
presented itself, Colonel Wood ordered Captain Capron to proceed with his
troop in front of the column as an advance guard, and to choose a "point"
of five men skilled as scouts and trailers. Still in advance of these he
placed two Cuban scouts. The column then continued along the trail in
single file. The Cubans were at a distance of two hundred and fifty
yards; the "point" of five picked men under Sergeant Byrne and
duty-Sergeant Fish followed them at a distance of a hundred yards, and
then came Capron's troop of sixty men strung out in single file. No
flankers were placed for the reason that the dense undergrowth and the
tangle of vines that stretched from the branches of the trees to the
bushes below made it a physical impossibility for man or beast to move
forward except along the single trail.
Colonel Wood rode at the head of the column, followed by two regular army
officers who were members of General Wheeler's staff, a Cuban officer,
and Lieutenant-Colonel Roosevelt. They rode slowly in consideration of
the troopers on foot, who under a cruelly hot sun carried heavy burdens.
To those who did not have to walk, it was not unlike a hunting excursion
in our West; the scenery was beautiful and the view down the valley one
of luxuriant peace. Roosevelt had never been in the tropics and Captain
McCormick and I were talking back at him over our shoulders and at each
other, pointing out unfamiliar trees and birds. Roosevelt thought it
looked like a good deer country, as it once was; it reminded McCormick of
Southern California; it looked to me like the trails in Central America.
We advanced, talking in that fashion and in high spirits, and
congratulating ourselves in being shut of the transport and on breathing
fine mountain air again, and on the fact that we were on horseback. We
agreed it was impossible to appreciate that we were really at war--that
we were in the enemy's country. We had been riding in this pleasant
fashion for an hour and a half with brief halts for rest, when Wood
stopped the head of the column, and rode down the trail to meet Capron,
who was coming back. Wood returned immediately, leading his horse, and
said to Roosevelt:
"Pass the word back to keep silence in the ranks."
The place at which we had halted was where the trail narrowed, and
proceeded sharply downward. There was on one side of it a stout
barbed-wire fence of five strands. By some fortunate accident this fence
had been cut just where the head of the column halted. On the left of
the trail it shut off fields of high grass blocked at every fifty yards
with great barricades of undergrowth and tangled trees and chapparal. On
the other side of the trail there was not a foot of free ground; the
bushes seemed absolutely impenetrable, as indeed they were later found to
be.
When we halted, the men sat down beside the trail and chewed the long
blades of grass, or fanned the air with their hats. They had no
knowledge of the situation such as their leaders possessed, and their
only emotion was one of satisfaction at the chance the halt gave them to
rest and to shift their packs. Wood again walked down the trail with
Capron and disappeared, and one of the officers informed us that the
scouts had seen the outposts of the enemy. It did not seem reasonable
that the Spaniards, who had failed to attack us when we landed at
Baiquiri, would oppose us until they could do so in force, so,
personally, I doubted that there were any Spaniards nearer than Santiago.
But we tied our horses to the wire fence, and Capron's troop knelt with
carbines at the "Ready," peering into the bushes. We must have waited
there, while Wood reconnoitred, for over ten minutes. Then he returned,
and began deploying his troops out at either side of the trail. Capron
he sent on down the trail itself. G Troop was ordered to beat into the
bushes on the right, and K and A were sent over the ridge on which we
stood down into the hollow to connect with General Young's column on the
opposite side of the valley. F and E Troops were deployed in
skirmish-line on the other side of the wire fence. Wood had discovered
the enemy a few hundred yards from where he expected to find him, and so
far from being "surprised," he had time, as I have just described, to get
five of his troops into position before a shot was fired. The firing,
when it came, started suddenly on our right. It sounded so close
that--still believing we were acting on a false alarm, and that there
were no Spaniards ahead of us--I guessed it was Capron's men firing at
random to disclose the enemy's position. I ran after G Troop under
Captain Llewellyn, and found them breaking their way through the bushes
in the direction from which the volleys came. It was like forcing the
walls of a maze. If each trooper had not kept in touch with the man on
either hand he would have been lost in the thicket. At one moment the
underbrush seemed swarming with our men, and the next, except that you
heard the twigs breaking, and heavy breathing or a crash as a vine pulled
some one down, there was not a sign of a human being anywhere. In a few
minutes we broke through into a little open place in front of a dark
curtain of vines, and the men fell on one knee and began returning the
fire that came from it.
The enemy's fire was exceedingly heavy, and his aim was excellent. We
saw nothing of the Spaniards, except a few on the ridge across the
valley. I happened to be the only one present with field glasses, and
when I discovered this force on the ridge, and had made sure, by the
cockades in their sombreros, that they were Spaniards and not Cubans, I
showed them to Roosevelt. He calculated they were five hundred yards
from us, and ordered the men to fire on them at that range. Through the
two hours of fighting that followed, although men were falling all around
us, the Spaniards on the ridge were the only ones that many of us saw.
But the fire against us was not more than eighty yards away, and so hot
that our men could only lie flat in the grass and return it in that
position. It was at this moment that our men believed they were being
attacked by Capron's troop, which they imagined must have swung to the
right, and having lost its bearings and hearing them advancing through
the underbrush, had mistaken them for the enemy. They accordingly ceased
firing and began shouting in order to warn Capron that he was shooting at
his friends. This is the foundation for the statement that the Rough
Riders had fired on each other, which they did not do then or at any
other time. Later we examined the relative position of the trail which
Capron held, and the position of G Troop, and they were at right angles
to one another.
Capron could not possibly have fired into us at any time, unless he had
turned directly around in his tracks and aimed up the very trail he had
just descended. Advancing, he could no more have hit us than he could
have seen us out of the back of his head. When we found many hundred
spent cartridges of the Spaniards a hundred yards in front of G Troop's
position, the question as to who had fired on us was answered.
It was an exceedingly hot corner. The whole troop was gathered in the
little open place blocked by the network of grape-vines and tangled
bushes before it. They could not see twenty feet on three sides of them,
but on the right hand lay the valley, and across it came the sound of
Young's brigade, who were apparently heavily engaged. The enemy's fire
was so close that the men could not hear the word of command, and Captain
Llewellyn and Lieutenant Greenway, unable to get their attention, ran
among them, batting them with their sombreros to make them cease firing.
Lieutenant-Colonel Roosevelt ran up just then, bringing with him
Lieutenant Woodbury Kane and ten troopers from K Troop. Roosevelt lay
down in the grass beside Llewellyn and consulted with him eagerly. Kane
was smiling with the charming content of a perfectly happy man. When
Captain Llewellyn told him his men were not needed, and to rejoin his
troop, he led his detail over the edge of the hill on which we lay. As
he disappeared below the crest he did not stoop to avoid the bullets, but
walked erect, still smiling. Roosevelt pointed out that it was
impossible to advance farther on account of the network of wild
grape-vines that masked the Spaniards from us, and that we must cross the
trail and make to the left. The shouts the men had raised to warn Capron
had established our position to the enemy, and the firing was now
fearfully accurate. Sergeant Russell, who in his day had been a colonel
on a governor's staff, was killed, and the other sergeant was shot
through the wrist. In the space of three minutes nine men were lying on
their backs helpless. Before we got away, every third man was killed, or
wounded. We drew off slowly to the left, dragging the wounded with us.
Owing to the low aim of the enemy, we were forced to move on our knees
and crawl. Even then men were hit. One man near me was shot through the
head. Returning later to locate the body and identify him, I found that
the buzzards had torn off his lips and his eyes. This mutilation by
these hideous birds was, without doubt, what Admiral Sampson mistook for
the work of the Spaniards, when the bodies of the marines at Guantanamo
were found disfigured. K Troop meantime had deployed into the valley
under the fire from the enemy on the ridge. It had been ordered to
establish communication with General Young's column, and while advancing
and firing on the ridge, Captain Jenkins sent the guidon bearer back to
climb the hill and wave his red and white banner where Young's men could
see it. The guidon bearer had once run for Congress on the gold ticket
in Arizona, and, as some one said, was naturally the man who should have
been selected for a forlorn hope. His flag brought him instantly under a
heavy fire, but he continued waving it until the Tenth Cavalry on the
other side of the valley answered, and the two columns were connected by
a skirmish-line composed of K Troop and A, under Captain "Bucky" O'Neill.
G Troop meanwhile had hurried over to the left, and passing through the
opening in the wire fence had spread out into open order. It followed
down after Captain Luna's troop and D and E Troops, which were well
already in advance. Roosevelt ran forward and took command of the
extreme left of this line. Wood was walking up and down along it,
leading his horse, which he thought might be of use in case he had to
move quickly to alter his original formation. His plan, at present, was
to spread out his men so that they would join Young on the right, and on
the left swing around until they flanked the enemy. K and A Troops had
already succeeded in joining hands with Young's column across the valley,
and as they were capable of taking care of themselves, Wood was bending
his efforts to keep his remaining four companies in a straight line and
revolving them around the enemy's "end." It was in no way an easy thing
to do. The men were at times wholly hidden from each other, and from
him; probably at no one time did he see more than two of his troops
together. It was only by the firing that he could tell where his men
lay, and that they were always advancing.
The advances were made in quick, desperate rushes--sometimes the ground
gained was no more than a man covers in sliding for a base. At other
times half a troop would rise and race forward and then burrow deep in
the hot grass and fire. On this side of the line there was an occasional
glimpse of the enemy. But for a great part of the time the men shot at
the places from where the enemy's fire seemed to come, aiming low and
answering in steady volleys. The fire discipline was excellent. The
prophets of evil of the Tampa Bay Hotel had foretold that the cowboys
would shoot as they chose, and, in the field, would act independently of
their officers. As it turned out, the cowboys were the very men who
waited most patiently for the officers to give the word of command. At
all times the movement was without rest, breathless and fierce, like a
cane-rush, or a street fight. After the first three minutes every man
had stripped as though for a wrestling match, throwing off all his
impedimenta but his cartridge-belt and canteen. Even then the sun
handicapped their strength cruelly. The enemy was hidden in the shade of
the jungle, while they, for every thicket they gained, had to fight in
the open, crawling through grass which was as hot as a steam bath, and
with their flesh and clothing torn by thorns and the sword-like blade of
the Spanish "bayonet." The glare of the sun was full in their eyes and
as fierce as a lime-light.
When G Troop passed on across the trail to the left I stopped at the
place where the column had first halted--it had been converted into a
dressing station and the wounded of G Troop were left there in the care
of the hospital stewards. A tall, gaunt young man with a cross on his
arm was just coming back up the trail. His head was bent, and by some
surgeon's trick he was carrying a wounded man much heavier than himself
across his shoulders. As I stepped out of the trail he raised his head,
and smiled and nodded, and left me wondering where I had seen him before,
smiling in the same cheery, confident way and moving in that same
position. I knew it could not have been under the same conditions, and
yet he was certainly associated with another time of excitement and rush
and heat. Then I remembered him. As now he had been covered with blood
and dirt and perspiration, but then he wore a canvas jacket and the man
he carried on his shoulders was trying to hold him back from a
white-washed line. And I recognized the young doctor, with the blood
bathing his breeches, as "Bob" Church, of Princeton. That was only one
of four badly wounded men he carried that day on his shoulders over a
half-mile of trail that stretched from the firing-line back to the
dressing station and under an unceasing fire. {3} As the senior surgeon
was absent he had chief responsibility that day for all the wounded, and
that so few of them died is greatly due to this young man who went down
into the firing-line and pulled them from it, and bore them out of
danger. The comic paragraphers who wrote of the members of the
Knickerbocker Club and the college swells of the Rough Riders and of
their imaginary valets and golf clubs, should, in decency, since the
fight at Guasimas apologize. For the same spirit that once sent these
men down a white-washed field against their opponents' rush line was the
spirit that sent Church, Channing, Devereux, Ronalds, Wrenn, Cash, Bull,
Lamed, Goodrich, Greenway, Dudley Dean, and a dozen others through the
high hot grass at Guasimas, not shouting, as their friends the cowboys
did, but each with his mouth tightly shut, with his eyes on the ball, and
moving in obedience to the captain's signals.
Judging from the sound, our firing-line now seemed to be half a mile in
advance of the place where the head of the column had first halted. This
showed that the Spaniards had been driven back at least three hundred
yards from their original position. It was impossible to see any of our
men in the field, so I ran down the trail with the idea that it would
lead me back to the troop I had left when I had stopped at the dressing
station. The walk down that trail presented one of the most grewsome
pictures of the war. It narrowed as it descended; it was for that reason
the enemy had selected that part of it for the attack, and the vines and
bushes interlaced so closely above it that the sun could not come
through.
The rocks on either side were spattered with blood and the rank grass was
matted with it. Blanket rolls, haversacks, carbines, and canteens had
been abandoned all along its length. It looked as though a retreating
army had fled along it, rather than that one troop had fought its way
through it to the front. Except for the clatter of the land-crabs, those
hideous orchid-colored monsters that haunt the places of the dead, and
the whistling of the bullets in the trees, the place was as silent as a
grave. For the wounded lying along its length were as still as the dead
beside them. The noise of the loose stones rolling under my feet brought
a hospital steward out of the brush, and he called after me:
"Lieutenant Thomas is badly wounded in here, and we can't move him. We
want to carry him out of the sun some place, where there is shade and a
breeze." Thomas was the first lieutenant of Capron's troop. He is a
young man, large and powerfully built. He was shot through the leg just
below the trunk, and I found him lying on a blanket half naked and
covered with blood, and with his leg bound in tourniquets made of twigs
and pocket-handkerchiefs. It gave one a thrill of awe and wonder to see
how these cowboy surgeons, with a stick that one would use to light a
pipe and with the gaudy 'kerchiefs they had taken from their necks, were
holding death at bay. The young officer was in great pain and tossing
and raving wildly. When we gathered up the corners of his blanket and
lifted him, he tried to sit upright, and cried out, "You're taking me to
the front, aren't you? You said you would. They've killed my
captain--do you understand? They've killed Captain Capron. The ---
Mexicans! They've killed my captain."
The troopers assured him they were carrying him to the firing-line, but
he was not satisfied. We stumbled over the stones and vines, bumping his
wounded body against the ground and leaving a black streak in the grass
behind us, but it seemed to hurt us more than it did him, for he sat up
again clutching at us imploringly with his bloody hands.
"For God's sake, take me to the front," he begged. "Do you hear? I
order you; damn you, I order--We must give them hell; do you hear? we
must give them hell. They've killed Capron. They've killed my captain."
The loss of blood at last mercifully silenced him, and when we had
reached the trail he had fainted and I left them kneeling around him,
their grave boyish faces filled with sympathy and concern.
Only fifty feet from him and farther down the trail I passed his captain,
with his body propped against Church's knee and with his head fallen on
the surgeon's shoulder. Capron was always a handsome, soldierly looking
man--some said that he was the most soldierly looking of any of the young
officers in the army--and as I saw him then death had given him a great
dignity and nobleness. He was only twenty-eight years old, the age when
life has just begun, but he rested his head on the surgeon's shoulder
like a man who knew he was already through with it and that, though they
might peck and mend at the body, he had received his final orders. His
breast and shoulders were bare, and as the surgeon cut the tunic from him
the sight of his great chest and the skin, as white as a girl's, and the
black open wound against it made the yellow stripes and the brass
insignia on the tunic, strangely mean and tawdry.
Fifty yards farther on, around a turn in the trail, behind a rock, a boy
was lying with a bullet wound between his eyes. His chest was heaving
with short, hoarse noises which I guessed were due to some muscular
action entirely, and that he was virtually dead. I lifted him and gave
him some water, but it would not pass through his fixed teeth. In the
pocket of his blouse was a New Testament with the name Fielder Dawson,
Mo., scribbled in it in pencil. While I was writing it down for
identification, a boy as young as himself came from behind me down the
trail.
"It is no use," he said; "the surgeon has seen him; he says he is just
the same as dead. He is my bunkie; we only met two weeks ago at San
Antonio; but he and me had got to be such good friends--But there's
nothing I can do now." He threw himself down on the rock beside his
bunkie, who was still breathing with that hoarse inhuman rattle, and I
left them, the one who had been spared looking down helplessly with the
tears creeping across his cheeks.
The firing was quite close now, and the trail was no longer filled with
blanket rolls and haversacks, nor did pitiful, prostrate figures lie in
wait behind each rock. I guessed this must mean that I now was well in
advance of the farthest point to which Capron's troop had moved, and I
was running forward feeling confident that I must be close on our men,
when I saw the body of a sergeant blocking the trail and stretched at
full length across it. Its position was a hundred yards in advance of
that of any of the others--it was apparently the body of the first man
killed. After death the bodies of some men seem to shrink almost
instantly within themselves; they become limp and shapeless, and their
uniforms hang upon them strangely. But this man, who was a giant in
life, remained a giant in death--his very attitude was one of attack; his
fists were clinched, his jaw set, and his eyes, which were still human,
seemed fixed with resolve. He was dead, but he was not defeated. And so
Hamilton Fish died as he had lived--defiantly, running into the very face
of the enemy, standing squarely upright on his legs instead of crouching,
as the others called to him to do, until he fell like a column across the
trail. "God gives," was the motto on the watch I took from his blouse,
and God could not have given him a nobler end; to die, in the fore-front
of the first fight of the war, quickly, painlessly, with a bullet through
the heart, with his regiment behind him, and facing the enemies of his
country.
The line at this time was divided by the trail into two wings. The right
wing, composed of K and A Troops, was advancing through the valley,
returning the fire from the ridge as it did so, and the left wing, which
was much the longer of the two, was swinging around on the enemy's right
flank, with its own right resting on the barbed-wire fence. I borrowed a
carbine from a wounded man, and joined the remnant of L Troop which was
close to the trail.
This troop was then commanded by Second Lieutenant Day, who on account of
his conduct that morning and at the battle of San Juan later, when he was
shot through the arm, was promoted to be captain of L Troop, or, as it
was later officially designated, Capron's troop. He was walking up and
down the line as unconcernedly as though we were at target practice, and
an Irish sergeant, Byrne, was assisting him by keeping up a continuous
flow of comments and criticisms that showed the keenest enjoyment of the
situation. Byrne was the only man I noticed who seemed to regard the
fight as in any way humorous. For at Guasimas, no one had time to be
flippant, or to exhibit any signs of braggadocio. It was for all of
them, from the moment it started, through the hot, exhausting hour and a
half that it lasted, a most serious proposition. The conditions were
exceptional. The men had made a night march the evening before, had been
given but three hours' troubled sleep on the wet sand, and had then been
marched in full equipment uphill and under a cruelly hot sun, directly
into action. And eighty per cent. of them had never before been under
fire. Nor had one man in the regiment ever fired a Krag-Jorgensen
carbine until he fired it at a Spaniard, for their arms had been issued
to them so soon before sailing that they had only drilled with them
without using cartridges. To this handicap was also added the nature of
the ground and the fact that our men could not see their opponents.
Their own men fell or rolled over on every side, shot down by an
invisible enemy, with no one upon whom they could retaliate, with no sign
that the attack might not go on indefinitely. Yet they never once took a
step backward, but advanced grimly, cleaning a bush or thicket of its
occupants before charging it, and securing its cover for themselves, and
answering each volley with one that sounded like an echo of the first.
The men were panting for breath; the sweat ran so readily into their eyes
that they could not see the sights of their guns; their limbs unused to
such exertion after seven days of cramped idleness on the troop-ship,
trembled with weakness and the sun blinded and dazzled them; but time
after time they rose and staggered forward through the high grass, or
beat their way with their carbines against the tangle of vines and
creepers. A mile and a half of territory was gained foot by foot in this
fashion, the three Spanish positions carried in that distance being
marked by the thousands of Mauser cartridges that lay shining and
glittering in the grass and behind the barricades of bushes. But this
distance had not been gained without many losses, for every one in the
regiment was engaged. Even those who, on account of the heat, had
dropped out along the trail, as soon as the sound of the fight reached
them, came limping to the front--and plunged into the firing-line. It
was the only place they could go--there was no other line. With the
exception of Church's dressing station and its wounded there were no
reserves.
Among the first to be wounded was the correspondent, Edward Marshall, of
the New York _Journal_, who was on the firing-line to the left. He was
shot through the body near the spine, and when I saw him he was suffering
the most terrible agonies, and passing through a succession of
convulsions. He nevertheless, in his brief moments of comparative peace,
bore himself with the utmost calm, and was so much a soldier to duty that
he continued writing his account of the fight until the fight itself was
ended. His courage was the admiration of all the troopers, and he was
highly commended by Colonel Wood in the official account of the
engagement.
[Picture: Wounded Rough Riders coming over the hill at Siboney. Head of
column of Second Infantry going to support the Rough Riders, June 24th]
Nothing so well illustrated how desperately each man was needed, and how
little was his desire to withdraw, as the fact that the wounded lay where
they fell until the hospital stewards found them. Their comrades did not
use them as an excuse to go to leave the firing-line. I have watched
other fights, where the men engaged were quite willing to unselfishly
bear the wounded from the zone of danger.
The fight had now lasted an hour, and the line had reached a more open
country, with a slight incline upward toward a wood, on the edge of which
was a ruined house. This house was a former distillery for
_aguardiente_, and was now occupied in force by the enemy.
Lieutenant-Colonel Roosevelt on the far left was moving up his men with
the intention of taking this house on the flank; Wood, who was all over
the line, had the same objective point in his mind. The troop commanders
had a general idea that the distillery was the key to the enemy's
position, and were all working in that direction. It was extremely
difficult for Wood and Roosevelt to communicate with the captains, and
after the first general orders had been given them they relied upon the
latter's intelligence to pull them through. I do not suppose Wood, out
of the five hundred engaged, saw more than thirty of his men at any one
time. When he had passed one troop, except for the noise of its volley
firing, it was immediately lost to him in the brush, and it was so with
the next. Still, so excellent was the intelligence of the officers, and
so ready the spirit of the men, that they kept an almost perfect
alignment, as was shown when the final order came to charge in the open
fields. The advance upon the ruined building was made in stubborn, short
rushes, sometimes in silence, and sometimes firing as we ran. The order
to fire at will was seldom given, the men waiting patiently for the
officers' signal, and then answering in volleys. Some of the men who
were twice Day's age begged him to let them take the enemy's impromptu
fort on the run, but he answered them tolerantly like spoiled children,
and held them down until there was a lull in the enemy's fire, when he
would lead them forward, always taking the advance himself. By the way
they made these rushes, it was easy to tell which men were used to
hunting big game in the West and which were not. The Eastern men broke
at the word, and ran for the cover they were directed to take like men
trying to get out of the rain, and fell panting on their faces, while the
Western trappers and hunters slipped and wriggled through the grass like
Indians; dodging from tree trunk to tree trunk, and from one bush to
another. They fell into line at the same time with the others, but while
doing so they had not once exposed themselves. Some of the escapes were
little short of miraculous. The man on my right, Champneys Marshall, of
Washington, had one bullet pass through his sleeve, and another pass
through his shirt, where it was pulled close to his spine. The holes
where the ball entered and went out again were clearly cut. Another
man's skin was slightly burned by three bullets in three distinct lines,
as though it had been touched for an instant by the lighted end of a
cigar. Greenway was shot through this shirt across the breast, and
Roosevelt was so close to one bullet, when it struck a tree, that it
filled his eyes and ears with tiny splinters. Major Brodie and
Lieutenant Thomas were both wounded within a few feet of Colonel Wood,
and his color-sergeant, Wright, who followed close at his heels, was
clipped three times in the head and neck, and four bullets passed through
the folds of the flag he carried. One trooper, Rowland, of Deming, was
shot through the lower ribs; he was ordered by Roosevelt to fall back to
the dressing station, but there Church told him there was nothing he
could do for him then, and directed him to sit down until he could be
taken to the hospital at Siboney. Rowland sat still for a short time,
and then remarked restlessly, "I don't seem to be doing much good here,"
and picking up his carbine, returned to the firing-line. There Roosevelt
found him.
"I thought I ordered you to the rear," he demanded.
"Yes, sir, you did," Rowland said, "but there didn't seem to be much
doing back there."
After the fight he was sent to Siboney with the rest of the wounded, but
two days later he appeared in camp. He had marched from Siboney, a
distance of six miles, and uphill all the way, carrying his carbine,
canteen, and cartridge-belt.
"I thought you were in hospital," Wood said. "I was," Rowland answered
sheepishly, "but I didn't seem to be doing any good there."
They gave him up as hopeless, and he continued his duties and went into
the fight of the San Juan hills with the hole still through his ribs.
Another cowboy named Heffner, when shot through the body, asked to be
propped up against a tree with his canteen and cartridge-belt beside him,
and the last his troop saw of him he was seated alone grimly firing over
their heads in the direction of the enemy.
Early in the fight I came upon Church attending to a young cowboy, who
was shot through the chest. The entrance to his wound was so small that
Church could not insert enough of the gauze packing to stop the flow of
blood.
"I'm afraid I'll have to make this hole larger," he said to the boy, "or
you'll bleed to death."
"All right," the trooper answered, "I guess you know your business." The
boy stretched out on his back and lay perfectly quiet while Church, with
a pair of curved scissors, cut away the edges of the wound. His patient
neither whimpered nor swore, but stared up at the sun in silence. The
bullets were falling on every side, and the operation was a hasty one,
but the trooper made no comment until Church said, "We'd better get out
of this; can you stand being carried?"
"Do you think you can carry me?" the trooper asked.
"Yes."
"Well," exclaimed the boy admiringly, "you certainly know your business!"
Another of the Rough Riders was brought to the dressing station with a
shattered ankle, and Church, after bandaging it, gave him his choice of
riding down to Siboney on a mule, or of being carried, a day later, on a
litter.
"If you think you can manage to ride the mule with that broken foot," he
said, "you can start at once, but if you wait until to-morrow, when I can
spare the men, you can be carried all the way."
The cowboy preferred to start at once, so six hospital stewards lifted
him and dropped him on the mule, and into a huge Mexican saddle.
He stuck his wounded ankle into one stirrup, and his untouched one into
the other, and gathered up the reins.
"Does it pain you? Can you stand it?" Church asked anxiously. The
cowboy turned and smiled down upon him with amused disdain.
"Stand _this_?" he cried. "Why, this is just like getting money from
home."
Toward the last, the firing from the enemy sounded less near, and the
bullets passed much higher. Roosevelt, who had picked up a carbine and
was firing to give the direction to the others, determined upon a charge.
Wood, at the other end of the line, decided at the same time upon the
same manoeuvre. It was called "Wood's bluff" afterward, for he had
nothing to back it with; while to the enemy it looked as though his whole
force was but the skirmish-line in advance of a regiment. The Spaniards
naturally could not believe that this thin line which suddenly broke out
of the bushes and from behind trees and came cheering out into the hot
sunlight was the entire fighting force against it. They supposed the
regiment was coming close on its heels, and as Spanish troops hate being
rushed as a cat hates water, they fired a few parting volleys and broke
and ran. The cheering had the same invigorating effect on our own side
as a cold shower; it was what first told half the men where the other
half were, and it made every individual man feel better. As we knew it
was only a bluff, the first cheer was wavering, but the sound of our own
voices was so comforting that the second cheer was a howl of triumph.
As it was, the Spaniards thought the Rough Riders had already disregarded
all the rules of war.
"When we fired a volley," one of the prisoners said later, "instead of
falling back they came forward. That is not the way to fight, to come
closer at every volley." And so, when instead of retreating on each
volley, the Rough Riders rushed at them, cheering and filling the hot air
with wild cowboy yells, the dismayed enemy retreated upon Santiago, where
he announced he had been attacked by the entire American army.
One of the residents of Santiago asked one of the soldiers if those
Americans fought well.
"_Well_!" he replied, "they tried to catch us with their hands!"
I have not attempted to give any account of General Young's fight on our
right, which was equally desperate, and, owing to the courage of the
colored troops of the Tenth in storming a ridge, equally worthy of
praise. But it has seemed better not to try and tell of anything I did
not see, but to limit myself to the work of the Rough Riders, to whom,
after all, the victory was due, as it was owing to Colonel Wood's charge,
which took the Spaniards in flank, that General Wheeler and General Young
were able to advance, their own stubborn attack in front having failed to
dislodge the enemy from his rifle-pits.
According to the statement of the enemy, who had every reason not to
exaggerate the size of his own force, 4,000 Spaniards were engaged in
this action. The Rough Riders numbered 534, and General Young's force
numbered 464. The American troops accordingly attacked a force over four
times their own number intrenched behind rifle-pits and bushes in a
mountain pass. In spite of the smokeless powder used by the Spaniards,
which hid their position, the Rough Riders routed them out of it, and
drove them back from three different barricades until they made their
last stand in the ruined distillery, whence they finally drove them by
assault. The eager spirit in which this was accomplished is best
described in the Spanish soldier's answer to the inquiring civilian,
"They tried to catch us with their hands." The Rough Riders should adopt
it as their motto.
II--THE BATTLE OF SAN JUAN HILL
After the Guasimas fight on June 24, the army was advanced along the
single trail which leads from Siboney on the coast to Santiago. Two
streams of excellent water run parallel with this trail for short
distances, and some eight miles from the coast crossed it in two places.
Our outposts were stationed at the first of these fords, the Cuban
outposts a mile and a half farther on at the ford nearer Santiago, where
the stream made a sharp turn at a place called El Poso. Another mile and
a half of trail extended from El Poso to the trenches of San Juan. The
reader should remember El Poso, as it marked an important starting-point
against San Juan on the eventful first of July.
For six days the army was encamped on either side of the trail for three
miles back from the outposts. The regimental camps touched each other,
and all day long the pack-trains carrying the day's rations passed up and
down between them. The trail was a sunken wagon road, where it was
possible, in a few places, for two wagons to pass at one time, but the
greater distances were so narrow that there was but just room for a
wagon, or a loaded mule-train, to make its way. The banks of the trail
were three or four feet high, and when it rained it was converted into a
huge gutter, with sides of mud, and with a liquid mud a foot deep between
them. The camps were pitched along the trail as near the parallel stream
as possible, and in the occasional places where there was rich, high
grass. At night the men slept in dog tents, open at the front and back,
and during the day spent their time under the shade of trees along the
trail, or on the banks of the stream. Sentries were placed at every few
feet along these streams to guard them from any possible pollution. For
six days the army rested in this way, for as an army moves and acts only
on its belly, and as the belly of this army was three miles long, it
could advance but slowly.
This week of rest, after the cramped life of the troop-ship, was not
ungrateful, although the rations were scarce and there was no tobacco,
which was as necessary to the health of the men as their food.
During this week of waiting, the chief excitement was to walk out a mile
and a half beyond the outposts to the hill of El Poso, and look across
the basin that lay in the great valley which leads to Santiago. The left
of the valley was the hills which hide the sea. The right of the valley
was the hills in which nestle the village of El Caney. Below El Poso, in
the basin, the dense green forest stretched a mile and a half to the
hills of San Juan. These hills looked so quiet and sunny and well kept
that they reminded one of a New England orchard. There was a blue
bungalow on a hill to the right, a red bungalow higher up on the right,
and in the centre the block-house of San Juan, which looked like a
Chinese pagoda. Three-quarters of a mile behind them, with a dip
between, were the long white walls of the hospital and barracks of
Santiago, wearing thirteen Red Cross flags, and, as was pointed out to
the foreign attaches later, two six-inch guns a hundred yards in advance
of the Red Cross flags.
It was so quiet, so fair, and so prosperous looking that it breathed of
peace. It seemed as though one might, without accident, walk in and take
dinner at the Venus Restaurant, or loll on the benches in the Plaza, or
rock in one of the great bent-wood chairs around the patio of the Don
Carlos Club.
But, on the 27th of June, a long, yellow pit opened in the hill-side of
San Juan, and in it we could see straw sombreros rising and bobbing up
and down, and under the shade of the block-house, blue-coated Spaniards
strolling leisurely about or riding forth on little white ponies to
scamper over the hills. Officers of every regiment, _attaches_ of
foreign countries, correspondents, and staff officers daily reported the
fact that the rifle-pits were growing in length and in number, and that
in plain sight from the hill of El Poso the enemy was intrenching himself
at San Juan, and at the little village of El Caney to the right, where he
was marching through the streets. But no artillery was sent to El Poso
hill to drop a shell among the busy men at work among the trenches, or to
interrupt the street parades in El Caney. For four days before the
American soldiers captured the same rifle-pits at El Caney and San Juan,
with a loss of two thousand men, they watched these men diligently
preparing for their coming, and wondered why there was no order to
embarrass or to end these preparations.
On the afternoon of June 30, Captain Mills rode up to the tent of Colonel
Wood, and told him that on account of illness, General Wheeler and
General Young had relinquished their commands, and that General Sumner
would take charge of the Cavalry Division; that he, Colonel Wood, would
take command of General Young's brigade, and Colonel Carroll, of General
Sumner's brigade.
"You will break camp and move forward at four o'clock," he said. It was
then three o'clock, and apparently the order to move forward at four had
been given to each regiment at nearly the same time, for they all struck
their tents and stepped down into the trail together. It was as though
fifteen regiments were encamped along the sidewalks of Fifth Avenue and
were all ordered at the same moment to move into it and march downtown.
If Fifth Avenue were ten feet wide, one can imagine the confusion.
General Chaffee was at General Lawton's head-quarters, and they stood
apart whispering together about the march they were to take to El Caney.
Just over their heads the balloon was ascending for the first time and
its great glistening bulk hung just above the tree tops, and the men in
different regiments, picking their way along the trail, gazed up at it
open-mouthed. The head-quarters camp was crowded. After a week of
inaction the army, at a moment's notice, was moving forward, and every
one had ridden in haste to learn why.
There were _attaches_, in strange uniforms, self-important Cuban
generals, officers from the flagship _New York_, and an army of
photographers. At the side of the camp, double lines of soldiers passed
slowly along the two paths of the muddy road, while, between them, aides
dashed up and down, splashing them with dirty water, and shouting, "You
will come up at once, sir." "You will not attempt to enter the trail
yet, sir." "General Sumner's compliments, and why are you not in your
place?"
Twelve thousand men, with their eyes fixed on a balloon, and treading on
each other's heels in three inches of mud, move slowly, and after three
hours, it seemed as though every man in the United States was under arms
and stumbling and slipping down that trail. The lines passed until the
moon rose. They seemed endless, interminable; there were cavalry mounted
and dismounted, artillery with cracking whips and cursing drivers, Rough
Riders in brown, and regulars, both black and white, in blue. Midnight
came, and they were still stumbling and slipping forward.
General Sumner's head-quarters tent was pitched to the right of El Poso
hill. Below us lay the basin a mile and a half in length, and a mile and
a half wide, from which a white mist was rising. Near us, drowned under
the mist, seven thousand men were sleeping, and, farther to the right,
General Chaffee's five thousand were lying under the bushes along the
trails to El Caney, waiting to march on it and eat it up before
breakfast.
The place hardly needs a map to explain it. The trails were like a
pitchfork, with its prongs touching the hills of San Juan. The long
handle of the pitchfork was the trail over which we had just come, the
joining of the handle and the prongs were El Poso. El Caney lay half-way
along the right prong, the left one was the trail down which, in the
morning, the troops were to be hurled upon San Juan. It was as yet an
utterly undiscovered country. Three miles away, across the basin of
mist, we could see the street lamps of Santiago shining over the San Juan
hills. Above us, the tropical moon hung white and clear in the dark
purple sky, pierced with millions of white stars. As we turned in, there
was just a little something in the air which made saying "good-night" a
gentle farce, for no one went to sleep immediately, but lay looking up at
the stars, and after a long silence, and much restless turning on the
blanket which we shared together, the second lieutenant said: "So, if
anything happens to me, to-morrow, you'll see she gets them, won't you?"
Before the moon rose again, every sixth man who had slept in the mist
that night was either killed or wounded; but the second lieutenant was
sitting on the edge of a Spanish rifle-pit, dirty, sweaty, and weak for
food, but victorious, and the unknown she did not get them.
El Caney had not yet thrown off her blanket of mist before Capron's
battery opened on it from a ridge two miles in the rear. The plan for
the day was that El Caney should fall in an hour. The plan for the day
is interesting chiefly because it is so different from what happened.
According to the plan the army was to advance in two divisions along the
two trails. Incidentally, General Lawton's division was to pick up El
Caney, and when El Caney was eliminated, his division was to continue
forward and join hands on the right with the divisions of General Sumner
and General Kent. The army was then to rest for that night in the woods,
half a mile from San Juan.
On the following morning it was to attack San Juan on the two flanks,
under cover of artillery. The objection to this plan, which did not
apparently suggest itself to General Shafter, was that an army of twelve
thousand men, sleeping within five hundred yards of the enemy's
rifle-pits, might not unreasonably be expected to pass a bad night. As
we discovered the next day, not only the five hundred yards, but the
whole basin was covered by the fire from the rifle-pits. Even by
daylight, when it was possible to seek some slight shelter, the army
could not remain in the woods, but according to the plan it was expected
to bivouac for the night in those woods, and in the morning to manoeuvre
and deploy and march through them to the two flanks of San Juan. How the
enemy was to be hypnotized while this was going forward it is difficult
to understand.
According to this programme, Capron's battery opened on El Caney and
Grimes's battery opened on the pagoda-like block-house of San Juan. The
range from El Poso was exactly 2,400 yards, and the firing, as was
discovered later, was not very effective. The battery used black powder,
and, as a result, after each explosion the curtain of smoke hung over the
gun for fully a minute before the gunners could see the San Juan
trenches, which was chiefly important because for a full minute it gave a
mark to the enemy. The hill on which the battery stood was like a
sugar-loaf. Behind it was the farm-house of El Poso, the only building
in sight within a radius of a mile, and in it were Cuban soldiers and
other non-combatants. The Rough Riders had been ordered to halt in the
yard of the farm-house and the artillery horses were drawn up in it,
under the lee of the hill. The First and Tenth dismounted Cavalry were
encamped a hundred yards from the battery along the ridge. They might as
sensibly have been ordered to paint the rings in a target while a company
was firing at the bull's-eye. To our first twenty shots the enemy made
no reply; when they did it was impossible, owing to their using smokeless
powder, to locate their guns. Their third shell fell in among the Cubans
in the block-house and among the Rough Riders and the men of the First
and Tenth Cavalry, killing some and wounding many. These casualties were
utterly unnecessary and were due to the stupidity of whoever placed the
men within fifty yards of guns in action.
[Picture: Grime's battery at El Poso. The third Spanish shell fell in
among the Cubans in the block-house and among the Rough Riders]
A quarter of an hour after the firing began from El Poso one of General
Shafter's aides directed General Sumner to advance with his division down
the Santiago trail, and to halt at the edge of the woods.
"What am I to do then?" asked General Sumner.
"You are to await further orders," the aide answered.
As a matter of fact and history this was probably the last order General
Sumner received from General Shafter, until the troops of his division
had taken the San Juan hills, as it became impossible to get word to
General Shafter, the trail leading to his head-quarters tent, three miles
in the rear, being blocked by the soldiers of the First and Tenth
dismounted Cavalry, and later, by Lawton's division. General Sumner led
the Sixth, Third, and Ninth Cavalry and the Rough Riders down the trail,
with instructions for the First and Tenth to follow. The trail, virgin
as yet from the foot of an American soldier, was as wide as its narrowest
part, which was some ten feet across. At places it was as wide as
Broadway, but only for such short distances that it was necessary for the
men to advance in column, in double file. A maze of underbrush and trees
on either side was all but impenetrable, and when the officers and men
had once assembled into the basin, they could only guess as to what lay
before them, or on either flank. At the end of a mile the country became
more open, and General Sumner saw the Spaniards intrenched a half-mile
away on the sloping hills. A stream, called the San Juan River, ran
across the trail at this point, and another stream crossed it again two
hundred yards farther on. The troops were halted at this first stream,
some crossing it, and others deploying in single file to the right. Some
were on the banks of the stream, others at the edge of the woods in the
bushes. Others lay in the high grass which was so high that it stopped
the wind, and so hot that it almost choked and suffocated those who lay
in it.
The enemy saw the advance and began firing with pitiless accuracy into
the jammed and crowded trail and along the whole border of the woods.
There was not a single yard of ground for a mile to the rear which was
not inside the zone of fire. Our men were ordered not to return the fire
but to lie still and wait for further orders. Some of them could see the
rifle-pits of the enemy quite clearly and the men in them, but many saw
nothing but the bushes under which they lay, and the high grass which
seemed to burn when they pressed against it. It was during this period
of waiting that the greater number of our men were killed. For one hour
they lay on their rifles staring at the waving green stuff around them,
while the bullets drove past incessantly, with savage insistence, cutting
the grass again and again in hundreds of fresh places. Men in line
sprang from the ground and sank back again with a groan, or rolled to one
side clinging silently to an arm or shoulder. Behind the lines hospital
stewards passed continually, drawing the wounded back to the streams,
where they laid them in long rows, their feet touching the water's edge
and their bodies supported by the muddy bank. Up and down the lines, and
through the fords of the streams, mounted aides drove their horses at a
gallop, as conspicuous a target as the steeple on a church, and one after
another paid the price of his position and fell from his horse wounded or
dead. Captain Mills fell as he was giving an order, shot through the
forehead behind both eyes; Captain O'Neill, of the Rough Riders, as he
said, "There is no Spanish bullet made that can kill me." Steel, Swift,
Henry, each of them was shot out of his saddle.
Hidden in the trees above the streams, and above the trail,
sharp-shooters and guerillas added a fresh terror to the wounded. There
was no hiding from them. Their bullets came from every side. Their
invisible smoke helped to keep their hiding-places secret, and in the
incessant shriek of shrapnel and the spit of the Mausers, it was
difficult to locate the reports of their rifles. They spared neither the
wounded nor recognized the Red Cross; they killed the surgeons and the
stewards carrying the litters, and killed the wounded men on the litters.
A guerilla in a tree above us shot one of the Rough Riders in the breast
while I was helping him carry Captain Morton Henry to the
dressing-station, the ball passing down through him, and a second shot,
from the same tree, barely missed Henry as he lay on the ground where we
had dropped him. He was already twice wounded and so covered with blood
that no one could have mistaken his condition. The surgeons at work
along the stream dressed the wounds with one eye cast aloft at the trees.
It was not the Mauser bullets they feared, though they passed
continuously, but too high to do their patients further harm, but the
bullets of the sharp-shooters which struck fairly in among them,
splashing in the water and scattering the pebbles. The sounds of the two
bullets were as different as is the sharp pop of a soda-water bottle from
the buzzing of an angry wasp.
For a time it seemed as though every second man was either killed or
wounded; one came upon them lying behind the bush, under which they had
crawled with some strange idea that it would protect them, or crouched
under the bank of the stream, or lying on their stomachs and lapping up
the water with the eagerness of thirsty dogs. As to their suffering, the
wounded were magnificently silent, they neither complained nor groaned
nor cursed.
"I've got a punctured tire," was their grim answer to inquiries. White
men and colored men, veterans and recruits and volunteers, each lay
waiting for the battle to begin or to end so that he might be carried
away to safety, for the wounded were in as great danger after they were
hit as though they were in the firing line, but none questioned nor
complained.
I came across Lieutenant Roberts, of the Tenth Cavalry, lying under the
roots of a tree beside the stream with three of his colored troopers
stretched around him. He was shot through the intestines, and each of
the three men with him was shot in the arm or leg. They had been
overlooked or forgotten, and we stumbled upon them only by the accident
of losing our way. They had no knowledge as to how the battle was going
or where their comrades were or where the enemy was. At any moment, for
all they knew, the Spaniards might break through the bushes about them.
It was a most lonely picture, the young lieutenant, half naked, and wet
with his own blood, sitting upright beside the empty stream, and his
three followers crouching at his feet like three faithful watch-dogs,
each wearing his red badge of courage, with his black skin tanned to a
haggard gray, and with his eyes fixed patiently on the white lips of his
officer. When the white soldiers with me offered to carry him back to
the dressing-station, the negroes resented it stiffly. "If the
Lieutenant had been able to move, we would have carried him away long
ago," said the sergeant, quite overlooking the fact that his arm was
shattered.
"Oh, don't bother the surgeons about me," Roberts added, cheerfully.
"They must be very busy. I can wait."
As yet, with all these killed and wounded, we had accomplished
nothing--except to obey orders--which was to await further orders. The
observation balloon hastened the end. It came blundering down the trail,
and stopped the advance of the First and Tenth Cavalry, and was sent up
directly over the heads of our men to observe what should have been
observed a week before by scouts and reconnoitring parties. A balloon,
two miles to the rear, and high enough in the air to be out of range of
the enemy's fire may some day prove itself to be of use and value. But a
balloon on the advance line, and only fifty feet above the tops of the
trees, was merely an invitation to the enemy to kill everything beneath
it. And the enemy responded to the invitation. A Spaniard might
question if he could hit a man, or a number of men, hidden in the bushes,
but had no doubt at all as to his ability to hit a mammoth glistening
ball only six hundred yards distant, and so all the trenches fired at it
at once, and the men of the First and Tenth, packed together directly
behind it, received the full force of the bullets. The men lying
directly below it received the shrapnel which was timed to hit it, and
which at last, fortunately, did hit it. This was endured for an hour, an
hour of such hell of fire and heat, that the heat in itself, had there
been no bullets, would have been remembered for its cruelty. Men gasped
on their backs, like fishes in the bottom of a boat, their heads burning
inside and out, their limbs too heavy to move. They had been rushed here
and rushed there wet with sweat and wet with fording the streams, under a
sun that would have made moving a fan an effort, and they lay prostrate,
gasping at the hot air, with faces aflame, and their tongues sticking
out, and their eyes rolling. All through this the volleys from the
rifle-pits sputtered and rattled, and the bullets sang continuously like
the wind through the rigging in a gale, shrapnel whined and broke, and
still no order came from General Shafter.
Captain Howse, of General Sumner's staff, rode down the trail to learn
what had delayed the First and Tenth, and was hailed by Colonel Derby,
who was just descending from the shattered balloon.
"I saw men up there on those hills," Colonel Derby shouted; "they are
firing at our troops." That was part of the information contributed by
the balloon. Captain Howse's reply is lost to history.
General Kent's division, which, according to the plan, was to have been
held in reserve, had been rushed up in the rear of the First and Tenth,
and the Tenth had deployed in skirmish order to the right. The trail was
now completely blocked by Kent's division. Lawton's division, which was
to have re-enforced on the right, had not appeared, but incessant firing
from the direction of El Caney showed that he and Chaffee were fighting
mightily. The situation was desperate. Our troops could not retreat, as
the trail for two miles behind them was wedged with men. They could not
remain where they were, for they were being shot to pieces. There was
only one thing they could do--go forward and take the San Juan hills by
assault. It was as desperate as the situation itself. To charge
earthworks held by men with modern rifles, and using modern artillery,
until after the earthworks have been shaken by artillery, and to attack
them in advance and not in the flanks, are both impossible military
propositions. But this campaign had not been conducted according to
military rules, and a series of military blunders had brought seven
thousand American soldiers into a chute of death from which there was no
escape except by taking the enemy who held it by the throat and driving
him out and beating him down. So the generals of divisions and brigades
stepped back and relinquished their command to the regimental officers
and the enlisted men.
"We can do nothing more," they virtually said. "There is the enemy."
Colonel Roosevelt, on horseback, broke from the woods behind the line of
the Ninth, and finding its men lying in his way, shouted: "If you don't
wish to go forward, let my men pass." The junior officers of the Ninth,
with their negroes, instantly sprang into line with the Rough Riders, and
charged at the blue block-house on the right.
I speak of Roosevelt first because, with General Hawkins, who led Kent's
division, notably the Sixth and Sixteenth Regulars, he was, without
doubt, the most conspicuous figure in the charge. General Hawkins, with
hair as white as snow, and yet far in advance of men thirty years his
junior, was so noble a sight that you felt inclined to pray for his
safety; on the other hand, Roosevelt, mounted high on horseback, and
charging the rifle-pits at a gallop and quite alone, made you feel that
you would like to cheer. He wore on his sombrero a blue polka-dot
handkerchief, a la Havelock, which, as he advanced, floated out straight
behind his head, like a guidon. Afterward, the men of his regiment who
followed this flag, adopted a polka-dot handkerchief as the badge of the
Rough Riders. These two officers were notably conspicuous in the charge,
but no one can claim that any two men, or any one man, was more brave or
more daring, or showed greater courage in that slow, stubborn advance,
than did any of the others. Some one asked one of the officers if he had
any difficulty in making his men follow him. "No," he answered, "I had
some difficulty in keeping up with them." As one of the brigade generals
said: "San Juan was won by the regimental officers and men. We had as
little to do as the referee at a prize-fight who calls 'time.' We called
'time' and they did the fighting."
I have seen many illustrations and pictures of this charge on the San
Juan hills, but none of them seem to show it just as I remember it. In
the picture-papers the men are running uphill swiftly and gallantly, in
regular formation, rank after rank, with flags flying, their eyes aflame,
and their hair streaming, their bayonets fixed, in long, brilliant lines,
an invincible, overpowering weight of numbers. Instead of which I think
the thing which impressed one the most, when our men started from cover,
was that they were so few. It seemed as if some one had made an awful
and terrible mistake. One's instinct was to call to them to come back.
You felt that some one had blundered and that these few men were blindly
following out some madman's mad order. It was not heroic then, it seemed
merely absurdly pathetic. The pity of it, the folly of such a sacrifice
was what held you.
They had no glittering bayonets, they were not massed in regular array.
There were a few men in advance, bunched together, and creeping up a
steep, sunny hill, the tops of which roared and flashed with flame. The
men held their guns pressed across their chests and stepped heavily as
they climbed. Behind these first few, spreading out like a fan, were
single lines of men, slipping and scrambling in the smooth grass, moving
forward with difficulty, as though they were wading waist high through
water, moving slowly, carefully, with strenuous effort. It was much more
wonderful than any swinging charge could have been. They walked to greet
death at every step, many of them, as they advanced, sinking suddenly or
pitching forward and disappearing in the high grass, but the others waded
on, stubbornly, forming a thin blue line that kept creeping higher and
higher up the hill. It was as inevitable as the rising tide. It was a
miracle of self-sacrifice, a triumph of bull-dog courage, which one
watched breathless with wonder. The fire of the Spanish riflemen, who
still stuck bravely to their posts, doubled and trebled in fierceness,
the crests of the hills crackled and burst in amazed roars, and rippled
with waves of tiny flame. But the blue line crept steadily up and on,
and then, near the top, the broken fragments gathered together with a
sudden burst of speed, the Spaniards appeared for a moment outlined
against the sky and poised for instant flight, fired a last volley, and
fled before the swift-moving wave that leaped and sprang after them.
The men of the Ninth and the Rough Riders rushed to the block-house
together, the men of the Sixth, of the Third, of the Tenth Cavalry, of
the Sixth and Sixteenth Infantry, fell on their faces along the crest of
the hills beyond, and opened upon the vanishing enemy. They drove the
yellow silk flags of the cavalry and the flag of their country into the
soft earth of the trenches, and then sank down and looked back at the
road they had climbed and swung their hats in the air. And from far
overhead, from these few figures perched on the Spanish rifle-pits, with
their flags planted among the empty cartridges of the enemy, and
overlooking the walls of Santiago, came, faintly, the sound of a tired,
broken cheer.
III--THE TAKING OF COAMO
This is the inside story of the surrender, during the Spanish War, of the
town of Coamo. It is written by the man to whom the town surrendered.
Immediately after the surrender this same man became Military Governor of
Coamo. He held office for fully twenty minutes.
Before beginning this story the reader must forget all he may happen to
know of this particular triumph of the Porto Rican Expedition. He must
forget that the taking of Coamo has always been credited to Major-General
James H. Wilson, who on that occasion commanded Captain Anderson's
Battery, the Sixteenth Pennsylvania, Troop C of Brooklyn, and under
General Ernst, the Second and Third Wisconsin Volunteers. He must forget
that in the records of the War Department all the praise, and it is of
the highest, for this victory is bestowed upon General Wilson and his
four thousand soldiers. Even the writer of this, when he cabled an
account of the event to his paper, gave, with every one else, the entire
credit to General Wilson. And ever since his conscience has upbraided
him. His only claim for tolerance as a war correspondent has been that
he always has stuck to the facts, and now he feels that in the sacred
cause of history his friendship and admiration for General Wilson, that
veteran of the Civil, Philippine, and Chinese Wars, must no longer stand
in the way of his duty as an accurate reporter. He no longer can tell a
lie. He must at last own up that he himself captured Coamo.
[Picture: Officers watching the artillery play on Coamo. Drawn by F. C.
Yohn from a photograph by the Author]
On the morning of the 9th of August, 1898, the Sixteenth Pennsylvania
Volunteers arrived on the outskirts of that town. In order to get there
they had spent the night in crawling over mountain trails and scrambling
through streams and ravines. It was General Wilson's plan that by this
flanking night march the Sixteenth Pennsylvania would reach the road
leading from Coamo to San Juan in time to cut off the retreat of the
Spanish garrison, when General Wilson, with the main body, attacked it
from the opposite side.
At seven o'clock in the morning General Wilson began the frontal attack
by turning loose the artillery on a block-house, which threatened his
approach, and by advancing the Wisconsin Volunteers. The cavalry he sent
to the right to capture Los Banos. At eight o'clock, from where the main
body rested, two miles from Coamo, we could hear the Sixteenth
Pennsylvania open its attack and instantly become hotly engaged. The
enemy returned the fire fiercely, and the firing from both sides at once
became so severe that it was evident the Pennsylvania Volunteers either
would take the town without the main body, or that they would greatly
need its assistance. The artillery was accordingly advanced one thousand
yards and the infantry was hurried forward. The Second Wisconsin
approached Coamo along the main road from Ponce, the Third Wisconsin
through fields of grass to the right of the road, until the two regiments
met at the ford by which the Banos road crosses the Coamo River. But
before they met, from a position near the artillery, I had watched
through my glasses the Second Wisconsin with General Ernst at its head
advancing along the main road, and as, when I saw them, they were near
the river, I guessed they would continue across the bridge and that they
soon would be in the town.
As the firing from the Sixteenth still continued, it seemed obvious that
General Ernst would be the first general officer to enter Coamo, and to
receive its surrender. I had never seen five thousand people surrender
to one man, and it seemed that, if I were to witness that ceremony, my
best plan was to abandon the artillery and, as quickly as possible,
pursue the Second Wisconsin. I did not want to share the spectacle of
the surrender with my brother correspondents, so I tried to steal away
from the three who were present. They were Thomas F. Millard, Walstein
Root of the _Sun_, and Horace Thompson. By dodging through a coffee
_central_ I came out a half mile from them and in advance of the Third
Wisconsin. There I encountered two "boy officers," Captain John C.
Breckenridge and Lieutenant Fred. S. Titus, who had temporarily abandoned
their thankless duties in the Commissariat Department in order to seek
death or glory in the skirmish-line. They wanted to know where I was
going, and when I explained, they declared that when Coamo surrendered
they also were going to be among those present.
So we slipped away from the main body and rode off as an independent
organization. But from the bald ridge, where the artillery was still
hammering the town, the three correspondents and Captain Alfred Paget,
Her Majesty's naval attache, observed our attempt to steal a march on
General Wilson's forces, and pursued us and soon overtook us.
We now were seven, or to be exact, eight, for with Mr. Millard was
"Jimmy," who in times of peace sells papers in Herald Square, and in
times of war carries Mr. Millard's copy to the press post. We were much
nearer the ford than the bridge, so we waded the "drift" and started on a
gallop along the mile of military road that lay between us and Coamo.
The firing from the Sixteenth Pennsylvania had slackened, but as we
advanced it became sharper, more insistent, and seemed to urge us to
greater speed. Across the road were dug rough rifle-pits which had the
look of having been but that moment abandoned. What had been intended
for the breakfast of the enemy was burning in pots over tiny fires,
little heaps of cartridges lay in readiness upon the edges of each pit,
and an arm-chair, in which a sentry had kept a comfortable lookout, lay
sprawling in the middle of the road. The huts that faced it were empty.
The only living things we saw were the chickens and pigs in the
kitchen-gardens. On either hand was every evidence of hasty and
panic-stricken flight. We rejoiced at these evidences of the fact that
the Wisconsin Volunteers had swept all before them. Our rejoicings were
not entirely unselfish. It was so quiet ahead that some one suggested
the town had already surrendered. But that would have been too bitter a
disappointment, and as the firing from the further side of Coamo still
continued, we refused to believe it, and whipped the ponies into greater
haste. We were now only a quarter of a mile distant from the built-up
portion of Coamo, where the road turned sharply into the main street of
the town.
Captain Paget, who in the absence of the British military attache on
account of sickness, accompanied the army as a guest of General Wilson,
gave way to thoughts of etiquette.
"Will General Wilson think I should have waited for him?" he shouted.
The words were jolted out of him as he rose in the saddle. The noise of
the ponies' hoofs made conversation difficult. I shouted back that the
presence of General Ernst in the town made it quite proper for a foreign
attache to enter it.
"It must have surrendered by now," I shouted. "It's been half an hour
since Ernst crossed the bridge."
At these innocent words, all my companions tugged violently at their
bridles and shouted "Whoa!"
"Crossed the bridge?" they yelled. "There is no bridge! The bridge is
blown up! If he hasn't crossed by the ford, he isn't in the town!"
Then, in my turn, I shouted "Whoa!"
But by now the Porto Rican ponies had decided that this was the race of
their lives, and each had made up his mind that, Mexican bit or no
Mexican bit, until he had carried his rider first into the town of Coamo,
he would not be halted. As I tugged helplessly at my Mexican bit, I saw
how I had made my mistake. The volunteers, on finding the bridge
destroyed, instead of marching upon Coamo had turned to the ford, the
same ford which we had crossed half an hour before they reached it. They
now were behind us. Instead of a town which had surrendered to a
thousand American soldiers, we, seven unarmed men and Jimmy, were being
swept into a hostile city as fast as the enemy's ponies could take us
there.
Breckenridge and Titus hastily put the blame upon me.
"If we get into trouble with the General for this," they shouted, "it
will be your fault. You told us Ernst was in the town with a thousand
men."
I shouted back that no one regretted the fact that he was not more keenly
than I did myself.
Titus and Breckenridge each glanced at a new, full-dress sword.
"We might as well go in," they shouted, "and take it anyway!" I decided
that Titus and Breckenridge were wasted in the Commissariat Department.
The three correspondents looked more comfortable.
"If you officers go in," they cried, "the General can't blame us," and
they dug their spurs into the ponies.
"Wait!" shouted Her Majesty's representative. "That's all very well for
you chaps, but what protects me if the Admiralty finds out I have led a
charge on a Spanish garrison?"
But Paget's pony refused to consider the feelings of the Lords of the
Admiralty. As successfully Paget might have tried to pull back a
row-boat from the edge of Niagara. And, moreover, Millard, in order that
Jimmy might be the first to reach Ponce with despatches, had mounted him
on the fastest pony in the bunch, and he already was far in the lead.
His sporting instincts, nursed in the pool-rooms of the Tenderloin and at
Guttenburg, had sent him three lengths to the good. It never would do to
have a newsboy tell in New York that he had beaten the correspondents of
the papers he sold in the streets; nor to permit commissioned officers to
take the dust of one who never before had ridden on anything but a cable
car. So we all raced forward and, bunched together, swept into the main
street of Coamo. It was gratefully empty. There were no American
soldiers, but, then, neither were there any Spanish soldiers. Across the
street stretched more rifle-pits and barricades of iron pipes, but in
sight there was neither friend nor foe. On the stones of the deserted
street the galloping hoofs sounded like the advance of a whole regiment
of cavalry. Their clatter gave us a most comfortable feeling. We almost
could imagine the townspeople believing us to be the Rough Riders
themselves and fleeing before us.
And then, the empty street seemed to threaten an ambush. We thought
hastily of sunken mines, of soldiers crouching behind the barriers,
behind the houses at the next corner, of Mausers covering us from the
latticed balconies overhead. Until at last, when the silence had become
alert and menacing, a lonely man dashed into the middle of the street,
hurled a white flag in front of us, and then dived headlong under the
porch of a house. The next instant, as though at a signal, a hundred
citizens, each with a white flag in both hands, ran from cover, waving
their banners, and gasping in weak and terror-shaken tones, "Vivan los
Americanos."
We tried to pull up, but the ponies had not yet settled among themselves
which of us had won, and carried us to the extreme edge of the town,
where a precipice seemed to invite them to stop, and we fell off into the
arms of the Porto Ricans. They brought us wine in tin cans, cigars,
borne in the aprons and mantillas of their women-folk, and demijohns of
native rum. They were abject, trembling, tearful. They made one
instantly forget that the moment before he had been extremely frightened.
One of them spoke to me the few words of Spanish with which I had an
acquaintance. He told me he was the Alcalde, and that he begged to
surrender into my hands the town of Coamo. I led him instantly to one
side. I was afraid that if I did not take him up he would surrender to
Paget or to Jimmy. I bade him conduct me to his official residence. He
did so, and gave me the key to the _cartel_, a staff of office of gold
and ebony, and the flag of the town, which he had hidden behind his
writing-desk. It was a fine Spanish flag with the coat of arms
embroidered in gold. I decided that, with whatever else I might part,
that flag would always be mine, that the chance of my again receiving the
surrender of a town of five thousand people was slender, and that this
token would be wrapped around me in my coffin. I accordingly hid it in
my poncho and strapped it to my saddle. Then I appointed a hotel-keeper,
who spoke a little English, as my official interpreter, and told the
Alcalde that I was now Military Governor, Mayor, and Chief of Police, and
that I wanted the seals of the town. He gave me a rubber stamp with a
coat of arms cut in it, and I wrote myself three letters, which, to
insure their safe arrival, I addressed to three different places, and
stamped them with the rubber seals. In time all three reached me, and I
now have them as documentary proof of the fact that for twenty minutes I
was Military Governor and Mayor of Coamo.
During that brief administration I detailed Titus and Breckenridge to
wigwag the Sixteenth Pennsylvania that we had taken the town, and that it
was now safe for them to enter. In order to compromise Paget they used
his red silk handkerchief. Root I detailed to conciliate the inhabitants
by drinking with every one of them. He tells me he carried out my
instructions to the letter. I also settled one assault and battery case,
and put the chief offender under arrest. At least, I told the official
interpreter to inform him that he was under arrest, but as I had no one
to guard him he grew tired of being under arrest and went off to
celebrate his emancipation from the rule of Spain.
My administration came to an end in twenty minutes, when General Wilson
rode into Coamo at the head of his staff and three thousand men. He wore
a white helmet, and he looked the part of the conquering hero so
satisfactorily that I forgot I was Mayor and ran out into the street to
snap a picture of him. He looked greatly surprised and asked me what I
was doing in his town. The tone in which he spoke caused me to decide
that, after all, I would not keep the flag of Coamo. I pulled it off my
saddle and said: "General, it's too long a story to tell you now, but
here is the flag of the town. It's the first Spanish flag"--and it
was--"that has been captured in Porto Rico."
General Wilson smiled again and accepted the flag. He and about four
thousand other soldiers think it belongs to them. But the truth will
out. Some day the bestowal on the proper persons of a vote of thanks
from Congress, a pension, or any other trifle, like prize-money, will
show the American people to whom that flag really belongs.
I know that in time the glorious deed of the seven heroes of Coamo, or
eight, if you include "Jimmy," will be told in song and story. Some one
else will write the song. This is the story.
IV--THE PASSING OF SAN JUAN HILL
When I was a boy I thought battles were fought in waste places selected
for the purpose. I argued from the fact that when our school nine wished
to play ball it was forced into the suburbs to search for a vacant lot.
I thought opposing armies also marched out of town until they reached
some desolate spot where there were no window panes, and where their
cannon-balls would hurt no one but themselves. Even later, when I saw
battles fought among villages, artillery galloping through a cornfield,
garden walls breached for rifle fire, and farm-houses in flames, it
always seemed as though the generals had elected to fight in such
surroundings through an inexcusable striving after theatrical effect--as
though they wished to furnish the war correspondents with a chance for
descriptive writing. With the horrors of war as horrible as they are
without any aid from these contrasts, their presence always seemed not
only sinful but bad art; as unnecessary as turning a red light on the
dying gladiator.
There are so many places which are scenes set apart for battles--places
that look as though Nature had condemned them for just such sacrifices.
Colenso, with its bare kopjes and great stretch of veldt, is one of
these, and so, also, is Spion Kop, and, in Manchuria, Nan Shan Hill. The
photographs have made all of us familiar with the vast, desolate
approaches to Port Arthur. These are among the waste places of the
earth--barren, deserted, fit meeting grounds only for men whose object in
life for the moment is to kill men. Were you shown over one of these
places, and told, "A battle was fought here," you would answer, "Why, of
course!"
But down in Cuba, outside of Santiago, where the United States army
fought its solitary and modest battle with Spain, you might many times
pass by San Juan Hill and think of it, if you thought of it at all, as
only a pretty site for a bungalow, as a place obviously intended for
orchards and gardens.
On July 1st, twelve years ago, when the American army came upon it out of
the jungle the place wore a partial disguise. It still was an irregular
ridge of smiling, sunny hills with fat, comfortable curves, and in some
places a steep, straight front. But above the steepest, highest front
frowned an aggressive block-house, and on all the slopes and along the
sky-line were rows of yellow trenches, and at the base a cruel cat's
cradle of barbed wire. It was like the face of a pretty woman behind the
bars of a visor. I find that on the day of the fight twelve years ago I
cabled my paper that San Juan Hill reminded the Americans of "a sunny
orchard in New England." That was how it may have looked when the
regulars were climbing up the steep front to capture the block-house, and
when the cavalry and Rough Riders, having taken Kettle Hill, were running
down its opposite slope, past the lake, to take that crest of San Juan
Hill which lies to the right of the block-house. It may then have looked
like a sunny New England orchard, but before night fell the intrenching
tools had lent those sunny slopes "a fierce and terrible aspect." And
after that, hour after hour, and day after day, we saw the hill eaten up
by our trenches, hidden by a vast laundry of shelter tents, and torn
apart by bomb-proofs, their jutting roofs of logs and broken branches
weighed down by earth and stones and looking like the pit mouths to many
mines. That probably is how most of the American army last saw San Juan
Hill, and that probably is how it best remembers it--as a fortified camp.
That was twelve years ago. When I revisited it, San Juan Hill was again
a sunny, smiling farm land, the trenches planted with vegetables, the
roofs of the bomb-proofs fallen in and buried beneath creeping vines, and
the barbed-wire entanglements holding in check only the browsing cattle.
San Juan Hill is not a solitary hill, but the most prominent of a ridge
of hills, with Kettle Hill a quarter of a mile away on the edge of the
jungle and separated from the ridge by a tiny lake. In the local
nomenclature Kettle Hill, which is the name given to it by the Rough
Riders, has always been known as San Juan Hill, with an added name to
distinguish it from the other San Juan Hill of greater renown.
The days we spent on those hills were so rich in incident and interest
and were filled with moments of such excitement, of such pride in one's
fellow-countrymen, of pity for the hurt and dying, of laughter and
good-fellowship, that one supposed he might return after even twenty
years and recognize every detail of the ground. But a shorter time has
made startling and confusing changes. Now a visitor will find that not
until after several different visits, and by walking and riding foot by
foot over the hills, can he make them fall into line as he thinks he once
knew them. Immediately around San Juan Hill itself there has been some
attempt made to preserve the ground as a public park. A barbed-wire
fence, with a gateway, encircles the block-house, which has been
converted into a home for the caretaker of the park, and then, skirting
the road to Santiago to include the tree under which the surrender was
arranged, stretches to the left of the block-house to protect a monument.
This monument was erected by Americans to commemorate the battle. It is
now rapidly falling to pieces, but there still is enough of it intact to
show the pencilled scribblings and autographs of tourists who did not
take part in the battle, but who in this public manner show that they
approve of its results. The public park is less than a quarter of a mile
square. Except for it no other effort has been made either by Cubans or
Americans to designate the lines that once encircled and menaced
Santiago, and Nature, always at her best under a tropical sun, has done
all in her power to disguise and forever obliterate the scene of the
army's one battle. Those features which still remain unchanged are very
few. The Treaty Tree, now surrounded by a tall fence, is one, the
block-house is another. The little lake in which, even when the bullets
were dropping, the men used to bathe and wash their clothes, the big iron
sugar kettle that gave a new name to Kettle Hill, and here and there a
trench hardly deeper than a ploughed furrow, and nearly hidden by growing
plants, are the few landmarks that remain.
Of the camps of Generals Chaffee, Lawton, Bates, Sumner, and Wheeler, of
Colonels Leonard Wood and Theodore Roosevelt, there are but the slightest
traces. The Bloody Bend, as some call it, in the San Juan River, as some
call that stream, seems to have entirely disappeared. At least, it
certainly was not where it should have been, and the place the hotel
guides point out to unsuspecting tourists bears not the slightest
physical resemblance to that ford. In twelve years, during one of which
there has been in Santiago the most severe rainfall in sixty years, the
San Juan stream has carried away its banks and the trees that lined them,
and the trails that should mark where the ford once crossed have so
altered and so many new ones have been added, that the exact location of
the once famous dressing station is now most difficult, if not
impossible, to determine. To establish the sites of the old camping
grounds is but little less difficult. The head-quarters of General
Wheeler are easy to recognize, for the reason that the place selected was
in a hollow, and the most unhealthy spot along the five miles of
intrenchments. It is about thirty yards from where the road turns to
rise over the ridge to Santiago, and all the water from the hill pours
into it as into a rain barrel. It was here that Troop G, Third Cavalry,
under Major Hardee, as it was Wheeler's escort, was forced to bivouac,
and where one-third of its number came down with fever. The camp of
General Sam Sumner was some sixty yards to the right of the head-quarters
of General Wheeler, on the high shoulder of the hill just above the camp
of the engineers, who were on the side of the road opposite. The camps
of Generals Chaffee, Lawton, Hawkins, Ludlow, and the positions and
trenches taken and held by the different regiments under them one can
place only relatively. One reason for this is that before our army
attacked the hills all the underbrush and small trees that might conceal
the advance of our men had been cleared away by the Spaniards, leaving
the hill, except for the high crest, comparatively bare. To-day the
hills are thick with young trees and enormous bushes. The alteration in
the landscape is as marked as is the difference between ground cleared
for golf and the same spot planted with corn and fruit-trees.
Of all the camps, the one that to-day bears the strongest evidences of
its occupation is that of the Rough Riders. A part of the camp of that
regiment, which was situated on the ridge some hundred feet from the
Santiago road, was pitched under a clump of shade trees, and to-day, even
after seven years, the trunks of these trees bear the names and initials
of the men who camped beneath them. {4} These men will remember that
when they took this hill they found that the fortifications beneath the
trees were partly made from the foundations of an adobe house. The red
tiles from its roof still litter the ground. These tiles and the names
cut in the bark of the trees determine absolutely the site of one-half of
the camp, but the other half, where stood Tiffany's quick-firing gun and
Parker's Gatling, has been almost obliterated. The tree under which
Colonel pitched his tent I could not discover, and the trenches in which
he used to sit with his officers and with the officers from the regiments
of the regular army are now levelled to make a kitchen-garden. Sometimes
the ex-President is said to have too generously given office and
promotion to the friends he made in Cuba. These men he met in the
trenches were then not necessarily his friends. To-day they are not
necessarily his friends. They are the men the free life of the
rifle-pits enabled him to know and to understand as the settled relations
of home life and peace would never have permitted. At that time none of
them guessed that the "amateur colonel," to whom they talked freely as to
a comrade, would be their Commander-in-Chief. They did not suspect that
he would become even the next Governor of New York, certainly not that in
a few years he would be the President of the United States. So they
showed themselves to him frankly, unconsciously. They criticised,
argued, disagreed, and he became familiar with the views, character, and
worth of each, and remembered. The seeds planted in those
half-obliterated trenches have borne greater results than ever will the
kitchen-garden.
The kitchen-garden is immediately on the crest of the hill, and near it a
Cuban farmer has built a shack of mud and twigs and cultivated several
acres of land. On Kettle Hill there are three more such shacks, and over
all the hills the new tenants have strung stout barbed-wire fences and
made new trails and reared wooden gateways. It was curious to find how
greatly these modern improvements confused one's recollection of the
landscape, and it was interesting, also, to find how the presence on the
hills of 12,000 men and the excitement of the time magnified distances
and disarranged the landscape.
During the fight I walked along a portion of the Santiago road, and for
many years I always have thought of that walk as extending over immense
distances. It started from the top of San Juan Hill beside the
block-house, where I had climbed to watch our artillery in action. By a
mistake, the artillery had been sent there, and it remained exposed on
the crest only about three minutes. During that brief moment the black
powder it burned drew upon it the fire of every rifle in the Spanish
line. To load his piece, each of our men was forced to crawl to it on
his stomach, rise on one elbow in order to shove in the shell and lock
the breech, and then, still flat on the ground, wriggle below the crest.
In the three minutes three men were wounded and two killed; and the guns
were withdrawn. I also withdrew. I withdrew first. Indeed, all that
happened after the first three seconds of those three minutes is hearsay,
for I was in the Santiago road at the foot of the hill and retreating
briskly. This road also was under a cross-fire, which made it stretch in
either direction to an interminable distance. I remember a government
teamster driving a Studebaker wagon filled with ammunition coming up at a
gallop out of this interminable distance and seeking shelter against the
base of the hill. Seated beside him was a small boy, freckled and
sunburned, a stowaway from one of the transports. He was grandly happy
and excited, and his only fear was that he was not "under fire." From
our coign of safety, with our backs to the hill, the teamster and I
assured him that, on that point, he need feel no morbid doubt. But until
a bullet embedded itself in the blue board of the wagon he was not
convinced. Then with his jack-knife he dug it out and shouted with
pleasure. "I guess the folks will have to believe I was in a battle
now," he said. That coign of safety ceasing to be a coign of safety
caused us to move on in search of another, and I came upon Sergeant
Borrowe blocking the road with his dynamite gun. He and his brother and
three regulars were busily correcting a hitch in its mechanism. An
officer carrying an order along the line halted his sweating horse and
gazed at the strange gun with professional knowledge.
"That must be the dynamite gun I have heard so much about," he shouted.
Borrowe saluted and shouted assent. The officer, greatly interested,
forgot his errand.
"I'd like to see you fire it once," he said eagerly. Borrowe, delighted
at the chance to exhibit his toy to a professional soldier, beamed with
equal eagerness.
"In just a moment, sir," he said; "this shell seems to have jammed a
bit." The officer, for the first time seeing the shell stuck in the
breech, hurriedly gathered up his reins. He seemed to be losing
interest. With elaborate carelessness I began to edge off down the road.
"Wait," Borrowe begged; "we'll have it out in a minute."
Suddenly I heard the officer's voice raised wildly.
"What--what," he gasped, "is that man doing with that axe?"
"He's helping me to get out this shell," said Borrowe.
"Good God!" said the officer. Then he remembered his errand.
Until last year, when I again met young Borrowe gayly disporting himself
at a lawn-tennis tournament at Mattapoisett, I did not know whether his
brother's method of removing dynamite with an axe had been entirely
successful. He said it worked all right.
At the turn of the road I found Colonel Leonard Wood and a group of Rough
Riders, who were busily intrenching. At the same moment Stephen Crane
came up with "Jimmy" Hare, the man who has made the Russian-Japanese War
famous. Crane walked to the crest and stood there as sharply outlined as
a semaphore, observing the enemy's lines, and instantly bringing upon
himself and us the fire of many Mausers. With every one else, Wood was
crouched below the crest and shouted to Crane to lie down. Crane, still
standing, as though to get out of ear-shot, moved away, and Wood again
ordered him to lie down.
"You're drawing the fire on these men," Wood commanded. Although the
heat--it was the 1st of July in the tropics--was terrific, Crane wore a
long India rubber rain-coat and was smoking a pipe. He appeared as cool
as though he were looking down from a box at a theatre. I knew that to
Crane, anything that savored of a pose was hateful, so, as I did not want
to see him killed, I called, "You're not impressing any one by doing
that, Crane." As I hoped he would, he instantly dropped to his knees.
When he crawled over to where we lay, I explained, "I knew that would
fetch you," and he grinned, and said, "Oh, was that it?"
A captain of the cavalry came up to Wood and asked permission to withdraw
his troop from the top of the hill to a trench forty feet below the one
they were in. "They can't possibly live where they are now," he
explained, "and they're doing no good there, for they can't raise their
heads to fire. In that lower trench they would be out of range
themselves and would be able to fire back."
"Yes," said Wood, "but all the other men in the first trench would see
them withdraw, and the moral effect would be bad. They needn't attempt
to return the enemy's fire, but they must not retreat."
The officer looked as though he would like to argue. He was a West Point
graduate and a full-fledged captain in the regular army. To him, Wood,
in spite of his volunteer rank of colonel, which that day, owing to the
illness of General Young, had placed him in command of a brigade, was
still a doctor. But discipline was strong in him, and though he looked
many things, he rose from his knees and grimly saluted. But at that
moment, without waiting for the permission of any one, the men leaped out
of the trench and ran. It looked as though they were going to run all
the way to the sea, and the sight was sickening. But they had no
intention of running to the sea. They ran only to the trench forty feet
farther down and jumped into it, and instantly turning, began pumping
lead at the enemy. Since five that morning Wood had been running about
on his feet, his clothes stuck to him with sweat and the mud and water of
forded streams, and as he rose he limped slightly. "My, but I'm tired!"
he said, in a tone of the most acute surprise, and as though that fact
was the only one that was weighing on his mind. He limped over to the
trench in which the men were now busily firing off their rifles and waved
a riding-crop he carried at the trench they had abandoned. He was
standing as Crane had been standing, in silhouette against the sky-line.
"Come back, boys," we heard him shouting. "The other men can't withdraw,
and so you mustn't. It looks bad. Come on, get out of that!" What made
it more amusing was that, although Wood had, like every one else,
discarded his coat and wore a strange uniform of gray shirt, white
riding-breeches, and a cowboy Stetson, with no insignia of rank, not even
straps pinned to his shirt, still the men instantly accepted his
authority. They looked at him on the crest of the hill, waving his stick
persuasively at the grave-like trench at his feet, and then with a shout
scampered back to it.
[Picture: Rough Riders in the trenches]
[Picture: The same spot as it appears to-day. The figure in the picture
is standing in what remains of the trench]
After that, as I had a bad attack of sciatica and no place to sleep and
nothing to eat, I accepted Crane's offer of a blanket and coffee at his
bivouac near El Poso. On account of the sciatica I was not able to walk
fast, and, although for over a mile of the way the trail was under fire,
Crane and Hare each insisted on giving me an arm, and kept step with my
stumblings. Whenever I protested and refused their sacrifice and pointed
out the risk they were taking they smiled as at the ravings of a naughty
child, and when I lay down in the road and refused to budge unless they
left me, Crane called the attention of Hare to the effect of the setting
sun behind the palm-trees. To the reader all these little things that
one remembers seem very little indeed, but they were vivid at the moment,
and I have always thought of them as stretching over a long extent of
time and territory. Before I revisited San Juan I would have said that
the distance along the road from the point where I left the artillery to
where I joined Wood was three-quarters of a mile. When I paced it later
I found the distance was about seventy-five yards. I do not urge my
stupidity or my extreme terror as a proof that others would be as greatly
confused, but, if only for the sake of the stupid ones, it seems a pity
that the landmarks of San Juan should not be rescued from the jungle, and
a few sign-posts placed upon the hills. It is true that the great
battles of the Civil War and those of the one in Manchuria, where the men
killed and wounded in a day outnumber all those who fought on both sides
at San Juan, make that battle read like a skirmish. But the Spanish War
had its results. At least it made Cuba into a republic, and so enriched
or burdened us with colonies that our republic changed into something
like an empire. But I do not urge that. It will never be because San
Juan changed our foreign policy that people will visit the spot, and will
send from it picture postal cards. The human interest alone will keep
San Juan alive. The men who fought there came from every State in our
country and from every class of our social life. We sent there the best
of our regular army, and with them, cowboys, clerks, bricklayers,
foot-ball players, three future commanders of the greater army that
followed that war, the future Governor of Cuba, future commanders of the
Philippines, the commander of our forces in China, a future President of
the United States. And, whether these men, when they returned to their
homes again, became clerks and millionaires and dentists, or rose to be
presidents and mounted policemen, they all remember very kindly the days
they lay huddled together in the trenches on that hot and glaring
sky-line. And there must be many more besides who hold the place in
memory. There are few in the United States so poor in relatives and
friends who did not in his or her heart send a substitute to Cuba. For
these it seems as though San Juan might be better preserved, not as it
is, for already its aspect is too far changed to wish for that, but as it
was. The efforts already made to keep the place in memory and to honor
the Americans who died there are the public park which I have mentioned,
the monument on San Juan, and one other monument at Guasimas to the
regulars and Rough Riders who were killed there. To these monuments the
Society of Santiago will add four more, which will mark the landing place
of the army at Daiquairi and the fights at Guasimas, El Caney, and San
Juan Hill.
But I believe even more than this might be done to preserve to the place
its proper values. These values are sentimental, historical, and
possibly to the military student, educational. If to-day there were
erected at Daiquairi, Siboney, Guasimas, El Poso, El Caney, and on and
about San Juan a dozen iron or bronze tablets that would tell from where
certain regiments advanced, what posts they held, how many or how few
were the men who held those positions, how near they were to the trenches
of the enemy, and by whom these men were commanded, I am sure the place
would reconstruct itself and would breathe with interest, not only for
the returning volunteer, but for any casual tourist. As it is, the
history of the fight and the reputation of the men who fought is now at
the mercy of the caretaker of the park and the Cuban "guides" from the
hotel. The caretaker speaks only Spanish, and, considering the amount of
misinformation the guides disseminate, it is a pity when they are talking
to Americans, they are not forced to use the same language. When last I
visited it, Carlos Portuondo was the official guardian of San Juan Hill.
He is an aged Cuban, and he fought through the Ten Years' War, but during
the last insurrection and the Spanish-American War he not only was not
near San Juan, but was not even on the Island of Cuba. He is a charming
old person, and so is his aged wife. Their chief concern in life, when I
saw them, was to sell me a pair of breeches made of palm-fibre which
Carlos had worn throughout the entire ten years of battle. The
vicissitudes of those trousers he recited to me in great detail, and he
very properly regarded them as of historic value. But of what happened
at San Juan he knew nothing, and when I asked him why he held his present
post and occupied the Block-House, he said, "To keep the cows out of the
park." When I asked him where the Americans had camped, he pointed
carefully from the back door of the Block-House to the foot of his
kitchen-garden. I assured him that under no stress of terror could the
entire American army have been driven into his back yard, and pointed out
where it had stretched along the ridge of hills for five miles. He
politely but unmistakably showed that he thought I was a liar. From the
Venus Hotel there were two guides, old Casanova and Jean Casanova, his
languid and good-natured son, a youth of sixteen years. Old Casanova,
like most Cubans, is not inclined to give much credit for what they did
in Cuba to the Americans. After all, he says, they came only just as the
Cubans themselves were about to conquer the Spaniards, and by a lucky
chance received the surrender and then claimed all the credit. As other
Cubans told me, "Had the Americans left us alone a few weeks longer, we
would have ended the war." How they were to have taken Havana, and sunk
Cervera's fleet, and why they were not among those present when our men
charged San Juan, I did not inquire. Old Casanova, again like other
Cubans, ranks the fighting qualities of the Spaniard much higher than
those of the American. This is only human. It must be annoying to a
Cuban to remember that after he had for three years fought the Spaniard,
the Yankee in eight weeks received his surrender and began to ship him
home. The way Casanova describes the fight at El Caney is as follows:
"The Americans thought they could capture El Caney in one day, but the
brave General Toral fought so good that it was six days before the
Americans could make the Spaniards surrender." The statement is correct
except as regards the length of time during which the fight lasted. The
Americans did make the mistake of thinking they could eat up El Caney in
an hour and then march through it to San Juan. Owing to the splendid
courage of Toral and his few troops our soldiers, under two of our best
generals, were held in check from seven in the morning until two in the
afternoon. But the difference between seven hours of one day and six
days is considerable. Still, at present at San Juan that is the sort of
information upon which the patriotic and puzzled American tourist is fed.
Young Casanova, the only other authority in Santiago, is not so sure of
his facts as is his father, and is willing to learn. He went with me to
hold my pony while I took the photographs that accompany this article,
and I listened with great interest to his accounts of the battle.
Finally he made a statement that was correct. "How did you happen to get
that right?" I asked.
"Yesterday," he said, "I guided Colonel Hayes here, and while I guided
him he explained it to me."
THE SOUTH AFRICAN WAR
I--WITH BULLER'S COLUMN
"Were you the station-master here before this?" I asked the man in the
straw hat, at Colenso. "I mean before this war?"
"No fear!" snorted the station-master, scornfully. "Why, we didn't know
Colenso was on the line until Buller fought a battle here. That's how it
is with all these way-stations now. Everybody's talking about them. We
never took no notice to them."
And yet the arriving stranger might have been forgiven his point of view
and his start of surprise when he found Chieveley a place of only a half
dozen corrugated zinc huts, and Colenso a scattered gathering of a dozen
shattered houses of battered brick.
Chieveley seemed so insignificant in contrast with its fame to those who
had followed the war on maps and in the newspapers, that one was not sure
he was on the right road until he saw from the car-window the armored
train still lying on the embankment, the graves beside it, and the donga
into which Winston Churchill pulled and carried the wounded.
And as the train bumped and halted before the blue and white enamel sign
that marks Colenso station, the places which have made that spot familiar
and momentous fell into line like the buoys which mark the entrance to a
harbor.
We knew that the high bare ridge to the right must be Fort Wylie, that
the plain on the left was where Colonel Long had lost his artillery, and
three officers gained the Victoria Cross, and that the swift, muddy
stream, in which the iron railroad bridge lay humped and sprawling, was
the Tugela River.
Six hours before, at Frere Station, the station-master had awakened us to
say that Ladysmith would be relieved at any moment. This had but just
come over the wire. It was "official." Indeed, he added, with local
pride, that the village band was still awake and in readiness to
celebrate the imminent event. He found, I fear, an unsympathetic
audience. The train was carrying philanthropic gentlemen in charge of
stores of champagne and marmalade for the besieged city. They did not
want it to be relieved until they were there to substitute _pate de foie
gras_ for horseflesh. And there were officers, too, who wanted a "look
in," and who had been kept waiting at Cape Town for commissions,
gladdening the guests of the Mount Nelson Hotel the while with their new
khaki and gaiters, and there were Tommies who wanted "Relief of
Ladysmith" on the claps of their medals, as they had seen "Relief of
Lucknow" on the medals of the Chelsea pensioners. And there was a
correspondent who had journeyed 15,000 miles to see Ladysmith relieved,
and who was apparently going to miss that sight, after five weeks of
travel, by a margin of five hours.
We all growled "That's good," as we had done for the last two weeks every
time we had heard it was relieved, but our tone was not enthusiastic.
And when the captain of the Natal Carbineers said, "I am afraid the good
news is too premature," we all said, hopefully, we were afraid it was.
We had seen nothing yet that was like real war. That night at
Pietermaritzburg the officers at the hotel were in mess-jackets, the
officers' wives in dinner-gowns. It was like Shepheard's Hotel, at the
top of the season. But only six hours after that dinner, as we looked
out of the car-windows, we saw galloping across the high grass, like men
who had lost their way, and silhouetted black against the red sunrise,
countless horsemen scouting ahead of our train, and guarding it against
the fate of the armored one lying wrecked at Chieveley. The darkness was
still heavy on the land and the only lights were the red eyes of the
armored train creeping in advance of ours, and the red sun, which showed
our silent escort appearing suddenly against the sky-line on a ridge, or
galloping toward us through the dew to order us, with a wave of the hand,
to greater speed. One hour after sunrise the train drew up at Colenso,
and from only a mile away we heard the heavy thud of the naval guns, the
hammering of the Boer "pom-poms," and the Maxims and Colt automatics
spanking the air. We smiled at each other guiltily. We were on time.
It was most evident that Ladysmith had not been relieved.
This was the twelfth day of a battle that Buller's column was waging
against the Boers and their mountain ranges, or "disarranges," as some
one described them, without having gained more than three miles of
hostile territory. He had tried to force his way through them six times,
and had been repulsed six times. And now he was to try it again.
No map, nor photograph, nor written description can give an idea of the
country which lay between Buller and his goal. It was an eruption of
high hills, linked together at every point without order or sequence. In
most countries mountains and hills follow some natural law. The
Cordilleras can be traced from the Amazon River to Guatemala City; they
make the water-shed of two continents; the Great Divide forms the
backbone of the States, but these Natal hills have no lineal descent.
They are illegitimate children of no line, abandoned broadcast over the
country, with no family likeness and no home. They stand alone, or
shoulder to shoulder, or at right angles, or at a tangent, or join hands
across a valley. They never appear the same; some run to a sharp point,
some stretch out, forming a table-land, others are gigantic ant-hills,
others perfect and accurately modelled ramparts. In a ride of half a
mile, every hill completely loses its original aspect and character.
They hide each other, or disguise each other. Each can be enfiladed by
the other, and not one gives up the secret of its strategic value until
its crest has been carried by the bayonet. To add to this confusion, the
river Tugela has selected the hills around Ladysmith as occupying the
country through which it will endeavor to throw off its pursuers. It
darts through them as though striving to escape, it doubles on its
tracks, it sinks out of sight between them, and in the open plain rises
to the dignity of water-falls. It runs uphill, and remains motionless on
an incline, and on the level ground twists and turns so frequently that
when one says he has crossed the Tugela, he means he has crossed it once
at a drift, once at the wrecked railroad bridge, and once over a pontoon.
And then he is not sure that he is not still on the same side from which
he started.
Some of these hills are green, but the greater part are a yellow or dark
red, against which at two hundred yards a man in khaki is
indistinguishable from the rocks around him. Indeed, the khaki is the
English soldier's sole protection. It saves him in spite of himself, for
he apparently cannot learn to advance under cover, and a sky-line is the
one place where he selects to stand erect and stretch his weary limbs. I
have come to within a hundred yards of a hill before I saw that scattered
among its red and yellow bowlders was the better part of a regiment as
closely packed together as the crowd on the bleaching boards at a
base-ball match.
Into this maze and confusion of nature's fortifications Buller's column
has been twisting and turning, marching and countermarching, capturing
one position after another, to find it was enfiladed from many hills, and
abandoning it, only to retake it a week later. The greater part of the
column has abandoned its tents and is bivouacking in the open. It is a
wonderful and impressive sight. At the first view, an army in being,
when it is spread out as it is in the Tugela basin back of the hills,
seems a hopelessly and irrevocably entangled mob.
An army in the field is not regiments of armed men, marching with a gun
on shoulder, or crouching behind trenches. That is the least, even if it
seems the most, important part of it. Before one reaches the firing-line
he must pass villages of men, camps of men, bivouacs of men, who are
feeding, mending, repairing, and burying the men at the "front." It is
these latter that make the mob of gypsies, which is apparently without
head or order or organization. They stretched across the great basin of
the Tugela, like the children of Israel, their camp-fires rising to the
sky at night like the reflection of great search-lights; by day they
swarmed across the plain, like hundreds of moving circus-vans in every
direction, with as little obvious intention as herds of buffalo. But
each had his appointed work, and each was utterly indifferent to the
battle going forward a mile away. Hundreds of teams, of sixteen oxen
each, crawled like great black water-snakes across the drifts, the Kaffir
drivers, naked and black, lashing them with whips as long as lariats,
shrieking, beseeching, and howling, and falling upon the oxen's horns to
drag them into place.
Mules from Spain and Texas, loaded with ammunition, kicked and plunged,
more oxen drew more soberly the great naval guns, which lurched as though
in a heavy sea, throwing the blue-jackets who hung upon the drag-ropes
from one high side of the trail to the other. Across the plain, and
making toward the trail, wagons loaded with fodder, with rations, with
camp equipment, with tents and cooking-stoves, crowded each other as
closely as cable-cars on Broadway. Scattered among them were fixed lines
of tethered horses, rows of dog-tents, camps of Kaffirs, hospital
stations with the Red Cross waving from the nearest and highest tree.
Dripping water-carts with as many spigots as the regiment had companies,
howitzer guns guided by as many ropes as a May-pole, crowded past these
to the trail, or gave way to the ambulances filled with men half dressed
and bound in the zinc-blue bandages that made the color detestable
forever after. Troops of the irregular horse gallop through this
multitude, with a jangling of spurs and sling-belts; and Tommies, in
close order, fight their way among the oxen, or help pull them to one
side as the stretchers pass, each with its burden, each with its blue
bandage stained a dark brownish crimson. It is only when the figure on
the stretcher lies under a blanket that the tumult and push and
sweltering mass comes to a quick pause, while the dead man's comrade
stands at attention, and the officer raises his fingers to his helmet.
Then the mass surges on again, with cracking of whips and shouts and
imprecations, while the yellow dust rises in thick clouds and buries the
picture in a glaring fog. This moving, struggling mass, that fights for
the right of way along the road, is within easy distance of the shells.
Those from their own guns pass over them with a shrill crescendo, those
from the enemy burst among them at rare intervals, or sink impotently in
the soft soil. And a dozen Tommies rush to dig them out as keepsakes.
Up at the front, brown and yellow regiments are lying crouched behind
brown and yellow rocks and stones. As far as you can see, the hills are
sown with them. With a glass you distinguish them against the sky-line
of every hill, for over three miles away. Sometimes the men rise and
fire, and there is a feverish flutter of musketry; sometimes they lie
motionless for hours while the guns make the ways straight.
Any one who has seen Epsom Downs on a Derby day, with its thousands of
vans and tents and lines of horses and moving mobs, can form some idea of
what it is like. But while at the Derby all is interest and excitement,
and every one is pushing and struggling, and the air palpitates with the
intoxication of a great event, the winning of a horse-race--here, where
men are killed every hour and no one of them knows when his turn may
come, the fact that most impresses you is their indifference to it all.
What strikes you most is the bored air of the Tommies, the undivided
interest of the engineers in the construction of a pontoon bridge, the
solicitude of the medical staff over the long lines of wounded, the rage
of the naked Kaffirs at their lumbering steers; the fact that every one
is intent on something--anything--but the battle.
They are wearied with battles. The Tommies stretch themselves in the sun
to dry the wet khaki in which they have lain out in the cold night for
weeks, and yawn at battles. Or, if you climb to the hill where the
officers are seated, you will find men steeped even deeper in boredom.
They are burned a dark red; their brown mustaches look white by contrast,
theirs are the same faces you have met with in Piccadilly, which you see
across the tables of the Savoy restaurant, which gaze depressedly from
the windows of White's and the Bachelors' Club. If they were bored then,
they are unbearably bored now. Below them the men of their regiment lie
crouched amid the bowlders, hardly distinguishable from the brown and
yellow rock. They are sleeping, or dozing, or yawning. A shell passes
over them like the shaking of many telegraph wires, and neither officer
nor Tommy raises his head to watch it strike. They are tired in body and
in mind, with cramped limbs and aching eyes. They have had twelve nights
and twelve days of battle, and it has lost its power to amuse.
When the sergeants call the companies together, they are eager enough.
Anything is better than lying still looking up at the sunny, inscrutable
hills, or down into the plain crawling with black oxen.
Among the group of staff officers some one has lost a cigar-holder. It
has slipped from between his fingers, and, with the vindictiveness of
inanimate things, has slid and jumped under a pile of rocks. The
interest of all around is instantly centred on the lost cigar-holder.
The Tommies begin to roll the rocks away, endangering the limbs of the
men below them, and half the kopje is obliterated. They are as keen as
terriers after a rat. The officers sit above and give advice and
disagree as to where that cigar-holder hid itself. Over their heads, not
twenty feet above, the shells chase each other fiercely. But the
officers have become accustomed to shells; a search for a lost
cigar-holder, which is going on under their very eyes, is of greater
interest. And when at last a Tommy pounces upon it with a laugh of
triumph, the officers look their disappointment, and, with a sigh of
resignation, pick up their field-glasses.
It is all a question of familiarity. On Broadway, if a building is going
up where there is a chance of a loose brick falling on some one's head,
the contractor puts up red signs marked "Danger!" and you dodge over to
the other side. But if you had been in battle for twelve days, as have
the soldiers of Buller's column, passing shells would interest you no
more than do passing cable-cars. After twelve days you would forget that
shells are dangerous even as you forget when crossing Broadway that
cable-cars can kill and mangle.
Up on the highest hill, seated among the highest rocks, are General
Buller and his staff. The hill is all of rocks, sharp, brown rocks, as
clearly cut as foundation-stones. They are thrown about at irregular
angles, and are shaded only by stiff bayonet-like cacti. Above is a blue
glaring sky, into which the top of the kopje seems to reach, and to draw
and concentrate upon itself all of the sun's heat. This little jagged
point of blistering rocks holds the forces that press the button which
sets the struggling mass below, and the thousands of men upon the
surrounding hills, in motion. It is the conning tower of the relief
column, only, unlike a conning tower, it offers no protection, no
seclusion, no peace. To-day, commanding generals, under the new
conditions which this war has developed, do not charge up hills waving
flashing swords. They sit on rocks, and wink out their orders by a
flashing hand-mirror. The swords have been left at the base, or coated
deep with mud, so that they shall not flash, and with this column every
one, under the rank of general, carries a rifle on purpose to disguise
the fact that he is entitled to carry a sword. The kopje is the central
station of the system. From its uncomfortable eminence the commanding
general watches the developments of his attack, and directs it by
heliograph and ragged bits of bunting. A sweating, dirty Tommy turns his
back on a hill a mile away and slaps the air with his signal flag;
another Tommy, with the front visor of his helmet cocked over the back of
his neck, watches an answering bit of bunting through a glass. The bit
of bunting, a mile away, flashes impatiently, once to the right and once
to the left, and the Tommy with the glass says, "They understand, sir,"
and the other Tommy, who has not as yet cast even an interested glance at
the regiment he has ordered into action, folds his flag and curls up
against a hot rock and instantly sleeps.
Stuck on the crest, twenty feet from where General Buller is seated, are
two iron rods, like those in the putting-green of a golf course. They
mark the line of direction which a shell must take, in order to seek out
the enemy. Back of the kopje, where they cannot see the enemy, where
they cannot even see the hill upon which he is intrenched, are the
howitzers. Their duty is to aim at the iron rods, and vary their aim to
either side of them as they are directed to do by an officer on the
crest. Their shells pass a few yards over the heads of the staff, but
the staff has confidence. Those three yards are as safe a margin as a
hundred. Their confidence is that of the lady in spangles at a
music-hall, who permits her husband in buckskin to shoot apples from the
top of her head. From the other direction come the shells of the Boers,
seeking out the hidden howitzers. They pass somewhat higher, crashing
into the base of the kopje, sometimes killing, sometimes digging their
own ignominious graves. The staff regard them with the same
indifference. One of them tears the overcoat upon which Colonel
Stuart-Wortley is seated, another destroys his diary. His men, lying at
his feet among the red rocks, observe this with wide eyes. But he does
not shift his position. His answer is, that his men cannot shift theirs.
On Friday, February 23d, the Inniskillings, Dublins, and Connaughts were
sent out to take a trench, half-way up Railway Hill. The attack was one
of those frontal attacks, which in this war, against the new weapons,
have added so much to the lists of killed and wounded and to the prestige
of the men, while it has, in an inverse ratio, hurt the prestige of the
men by whom the attack was ordered. The result of this attack was
peculiarly disastrous. It was made at night, and as soon as it
developed, the Boers retreated to the trenches on the crest of the hill,
and threw men around the sides to bring a cross-fire to bear on the
Englishmen. In the morning the Inniskillings found they had lost four
hundred men, and ten out of their fifteen officers. The other regiments
lost as heavily. The following Tuesday, which was the anniversary of
Majuba Hill, three brigades, instead of a regiment, were told off to take
this same Railway Hill, or Pieter's, as it was later called, on the
flank, and with it to capture two others. On the same day, nineteen
years before, the English had lost Majuba Hill, and their hope was to
take these three from the Boers for the one they had lost, and open the
way to Bulwana Mountain, which was the last bar that held them back from
Ladysmith.
The first two of the three hills they wanted were shoulder to shoulder,
the third was separated from them by a deep ravine. This last was the
highest, and in order that the attack should be successful, it was
necessary to seize it first. The hills stretched for three miles; they
were about one thousand two hundred yards high.
For three hours a single line of men slipped and stumbled forward along
the muddy bank of the river, and for three hours the artillery crashed,
spluttered, and stabbed at the three hills above them, scattering the
rocks and bursting over and behind the Boer trenches on the crest.
As is their custom, the Boers remained invisible and made no reply. And
though we knew they were there, it seemed inconceivable that anything
human could live under such a bombardment of shot, bullets, and shrapnel.
A hundred yards distant, on our right, the navy guns were firing lyddite
that burst with a thick yellow smoke; on the other side Colt automatics
were put-put-put-ing a stream of bullets; the field-guns and the
howitzers were playing from a hill half a mile behind us, and scattered
among the rocks about us, and for two miles on either hand, the infantry
in reserve were firing off ammunition at any part of the three hills they
happened to dislike!
The roar of the navy's Four-Point-Sevens, their crash, their rush as they
passed, the shrill whine of the shrapnel, the barking of the howitzers,
and the mechanical, regular rattle of the quick-firing Maxims, which
sounded like the clicking of many mowing-machines on a hot summer's day,
tore the air with such hideous noises that one's skull ached from the
concussion, and one could only be heard by shouting. But more impressive
by far than this hot chorus of mighty thunder and petty hammering, was
the roar of the wind which was driven down into the valley beneath, and
which swept up again in enormous waves of sound. It roared like a wild
hurricane at sea. The illusion was so complete, that you expected, by
looking down, to see the Tugela lashing at her banks, tossing the spray
hundreds of feet in air, and battling with her sides of rock. It was
like the roar of Niagara in a gale, and yet when you did look below, not
a leaf was stirring, and the Tugela was slipping forward, flat and
sluggish, and in peace.
The long procession of yellow figures was still advancing along the
bottom of the valley, toward the right, when on the crest of the
farthermost hill fourteen of them appeared suddenly, and ran forward and
sprang into the trenches.
Perched against the blue sky on the highest and most distant of the three
hills, they looked terribly lonely and insufficient, and they ran about,
this way and that, as though they were very much surprised to find
themselves where they were. Then they settled down into the Boer trench,
from our side of it, and began firing, their officer, as his habit is,
standing up behind them. The hill they had taken had evidently been
abandoned to them by the enemy, and the fourteen men in khaki had taken
it by "default." But they disappeared so suddenly into the trench, that
we knew they were not enjoying their new position in peace, and every one
looked below them, to see the arriving reinforcements. They came at
last, to the number of ten, and scampered about just as the others had
done, looking for cover. It seemed as if we could almost hear the
singing of the bullet when one of them dodged, and it was with a distinct
sense of relief, and of freedom from further responsibility, that we saw
the ten disappear also, and become part of the yellow stones about them.
Then a very wonderful movement began to agitate the men upon the two
remaining hills. They began to creep up them as you have seen seaweed
rise with the tide and envelop a rock. They moved in regiments, but each
man was as distinct as is a letter of the alphabet in each word on this
page, black with letters. We began to follow the fortunes of individual
letters. It was a most selfish and cowardly occupation, for you knew you
were in no greater danger than you would be in looking through the
glasses of a mutoscope. The battle unrolled before you like a panorama.
The guns on our side of the valley had ceased, the hurricane in the
depths below had instantly spent itself, and the birds and insects had
again begun to fill our hill with drowsy twitter and song. But on the
other, half the men were wrapping the base of the hill in khaki, which
rose higher and higher, growing looser and less tightly wrapt as it spun
upward. Halfway to the crest there was a broad open space of green
grass, and above that a yellow bank of earth, which supported the track
of the railroad. This green space spurted with tiny geysers of yellow
dust. Where the bullets came from or who sent them we could not see.
But the loose ends of the bandage of khaki were stretching across this
green space and the yellow spurts of dust rose all around them. The men
crossed this fire zone warily, looking to one side or the other, as the
bullets struck the earth heavily, like drops of rain before a shower.
The men had their heads and shoulders bent as though they thought a roof
was about to fall on them; some ran from rock to rock, seeking cover
properly; others scampered toward the safe vantage-ground behind the
railroad embankment; others advanced leisurely, like men playing golf.
The silence, after the hurricane of sounds, was painful; we could not
hear even the Boer rifles. The men moved like figures in a dream,
without firing a shot. They seemed each to be acting on his own account,
without unison or organization. As I have said, you ceased considering
the scattered whole, and became intent on the adventures of individuals.
These fell so suddenly, that you waited with great anxiety to learn
whether they had dropped to dodge a bullet or whether one had found them.
The men came at last from every side, and from out of every ridge and
dried-up waterway. Open spaces which had been green a moment before were
suddenly dyed yellow with them. Where a company had been clinging to the
railroad embankment, there stood one regiment holding it, and another
sweeping over it. Heights that had seemed the goal, became the
resting-place of the stretcher-bearers, until at last no part of the hill
remained unpopulated, save a high bulging rampart of unprotected and open
ground. And then, suddenly, coming from the earth itself, apparently,
one man ran across this open space and leaped on top of the trench which
crowned the hill. He was fully fifteen yards in advance of all the rest,
entirely unsupported, and alone. And he had evidently planned it so, for
he took off his helmet and waved it, and stuck it on his rifle and waved
it again, and then suddenly clapped it on his head and threw his gun to
his shoulder. He stood so, pointing down into the trench, and it seemed
as though we could hear him calling upon the Boers behind it to
surrender.
A few minutes later the last of the three hills was mounted by the West
Yorks, who were mistaken by their own artillery for Boers, and fired upon
both by the Boers and by their own shrapnel and lyddite. Four men were
wounded, and, to save themselves, a line of them stood up at full length
on the trench and cheered and waved at the artillery until it had ceased
to play upon them. The Boers continued to fire upon them with rifles for
over two hours. But it was only a demonstration to cover the retreat of
the greater number, and at daybreak the hills were in complete and
peaceful possession of the English.
These hills were a part of the same Railway Hill which four nights before
the Inniskillings and a composite regiment had attempted to take by a
frontal attack with the loss of six hundred men, among whom were three
colonels. By this flank attack, and by using nine regiments instead of
one, the same hills and two others were taken with two hundred
casualties. The fact that this battle, which was called the Battle of
Pieter's Hill, and the surrender of General Cronje and his forces to Lord
Roberts, both took place on the anniversary of the battle of Majuba Hill,
made the whole of Buller's column feel that the ill memory of that
disaster had been effaced.
II--THE RELIEF OF LADYSMITH
After the defeat of the Boers at the battle of Pieter's Hill there were
two things left for them to do. They could fall back across a great
plain which stretched from Pieter's Hill to Bulwana Mountain, and there
make their last stand against Buller and the Ladysmith relief column, or
they could abandon the siege of Ladysmith and slip away after having held
Buller at bay for three months.
Bulwana Mountain is shaped like a brick and blocks the valley in which
Ladysmith lies. The railroad track slips around one end of the brick,
and the Dundee trail around the other. It was on this mountain that the
Boers had placed their famous gun, Long Tom, with which they began the
bombardment of Ladysmith, and with which up to the day before Ladysmith
was relieved they had thrown three thousand shells into that miserable
town.
If the Boers on retreating from Pieter's Hill had fortified this mountain
with the purpose of holding off Buller for a still longer time, they
would have been under a fire from General White's artillery in the town
behind them and from Buller's naval guns in front. Their position would
not have been unlike that of Humpty Dumpty on the wall, so they wisely
adopted the only alternative and slipped away. This was on Tuesday
night, while the British were hurrying up artillery to hold the hills
they had taken that afternoon.
By ten o'clock the following morning from the top of Pieter's Hill you
could still see the Boers moving off along the Dundee road. It was an
easy matter to follow them, for the dust hung above the trail in a yellow
cloud, like mist over a swamp. There were two opinions as to whether
they were halting at Bulwana or passing it, on their way to Laing's Neck.
If they were going only to Bulwana there was the probability of two
weeks' more fighting before they could be dislodged. If they had avoided
Bulwana, the way to Ladysmith was open.
Lord Dundonald, who is in command of a brigade of irregular cavalry, was
scouting to the left of Bulwana, far in advance of our forces. At sunset
he arrived, without having encountered the Boers, at the base of Bulwana.
He could either return and report the disappearance of the enemy or he
could make a dash for it and enter Ladysmith. His orders were "to go,
look, see," and avoid an action, and the fact that none of his brigade
was in the triumphant procession which took place three days later has
led many to think that in entering the besieged town without orders he
offended the commanding general. In any event, it is a family row and of
no interest to the outsider. The main fact is that he did make a dash
for it, and just at sunset found himself with two hundred men only a mile
from the "Doomed City." His force was composed of Natal Carbiniers and
Imperial Light Horse. He halted them, and in order that honors might be
even, formed them in sections with the half sections made up from each of
the two organizations. All the officers were placed in front, and with a
cheer they started to race across the plain.
The wig-waggers on Convent Hill had already seen them, and the
townspeople and the garrison were rushing through the streets to meet
them, cheering and shouting, and some of them weeping. Others, so
officers tell me, who were in the different camps, looked down upon the
figures galloping across the plain in the twilight, and continued making
tea.
Just as they had reached the centre of the town, General Sir George White
and his staff rode down from head-quarters and met the men whose coming
meant for him life and peace and success. They were advancing at a walk,
with the cheering people hanging to their stirrups, clutching at their
hands and hanging to the bridles of their horses.
General White's first greeting was characteristically unselfish and
loyal, and typical of the British officer. He gave no sign of his own in
calculable relief, nor did he give to Caesar the things which were
Caesar's. He did not cheer Dundonald, nor Buller, nor the column which
had rescued him and his garrison from present starvation and probable
imprisonment at Pretoria. He raised his helmet and cried, "We will give
three cheers for the Queen!" And then the general and the healthy,
ragged, and sunburned troopers from the outside world, the starved,
fever-ridden garrison, and the starved, fever-ridden civilians stood with
hats off and sang their national anthem.
The column outside had been fighting steadily for six weeks to get
Dundonald or any one of its force into Ladysmith; for fourteen days it
had been living in the open, fighting by night as well as by day, without
halt or respite; the garrison inside had been for four months holding the
enemy at bay with the point of the bayonet; it was famished for food, it
was rotten with fever, and yet when the relief came and all turned out
well, the first thought of every one was for the Queen!
It may be credulous in them or old-fashioned; but it is certainly very
unselfish, and when you take their point of view it is certainly very
fine.
After the Queen every one else had his share of the cheering, and General
White could not complain of the heartiness with which they greeted him,
he tried to make a speech in reply, but it was a brief one. He spoke of
how much they owed to General Buller and his column, and he congratulated
his own soldiers on the defence they had made.
"I am very sorry, men," he said, "that I had to cut down your rations.
I--I promise you I won't do it again."
Then he stopped very suddenly and whirled his horse's head around and
rode away. Judging from the number of times they told me of this, the
fact that they had all but seen an English general give way to his
feelings seemed to have impressed the civilian mind of Ladysmith more
than the entrance of the relief force. The men having come in and
demonstrated that the way was open, rode forth again, and the relief of
Ladysmith had taken place. But it is not the people cheering in the dark
streets, nor General White breaking down in his speech of welcome, which
gives the note to the way the men of Ladysmith received their freedom.
It is rather the fact that as the two hundred battle-stained and
earth-stained troopers galloped forward, racing to be the first, and
rising in their stirrups to cheer, the men in the hospital camps said,
"Well, they're come at last, have they?" and continued fussing over their
fourth of a ration of tea. That gives the real picture of how Ladysmith
came into her inheritance, and of how she received her rescuers.
On the morning after Dundonald had ridden in and out of Ladysmith, two
other correspondents and myself started to relieve it on our own account.
We did not know the way to Ladysmith, and we did not then know whether or
not the Boers still occupied Bulwana Mountain. But we argued that the
chances of the Boers having raised the siege were so good that it was
worth risking their not having done so, and being taken prisoner.
We carried all the tobacco we could pack in our saddle-bags, and enough
food for one day. My chief regret was that my government, with true
republican simplicity, had given me a passport, type-written on a modest
sheet of notepaper and wofully lacking in impressive seals and coats of
arms. I fancied it would look to Boer eyes like one I might have forged
for myself in the writing-room of the hotel at Cape Town.
We had ridden up Pieter's Hill and scrambled down on its other side
before we learned that the night before Dundonald had raised the siege.
We learned this from long trains of artillery and regiments of infantry
which already were moving forward over the great plain which lies between
Pieter's and Bulwana. We learned it also from the silence of
conscientious, dutiful correspondents, who came galloping back as we
galloped forward, and who made wide detours at sight of us, or who, when
we hailed them, lashed their ponies over the red rocks and pretended not
to hear, each unselfishly turning his back on Ladysmith in the hope that
he might be the first to send word that the "Doomed City" was relieved.
This would enable one paper to say that it had the news "on the street"
five minutes earlier than its hated rivals. We found that the rivalry of
our respective papers bored us. We condemned it as being childish and
weak. London, New York, Chicago were names, they were spots thousands of
leagues away: Ladysmith was just across that mountain. If our horses
held out at the pace, we would be--after Dundonald--the first men in. We
imagined that we would see hysterical women and starving men. They would
wring our hands, and say, "God bless you," and we would halt our steaming
horses in the market-place, and distribute the news of the outside world,
and tobacco. There would be shattered houses, roofless homes, deep pits
in the roadways where the shells had burst and buried themselves. We
would see the entombed miner at the moment of his deliverance, we would
be among the first from the outer world to break the spell of his
silence; the first to receive the brunt of the imprisoned people's
gratitude and rejoicings.
Indeed, it was clearly our duty to the papers that employed us that we
should not send them news, but that we should be the first to enter
Ladysmith. We were surely the best judges of what was best to do. How
like them to try to dictate to us from London and New York, when we were
on the spot! It was absurd. We shouted this to each other as we raced
in and out of the long confused column, lashing viciously with our whips.
We stumbled around pieces of artillery, slid in between dripping
water-carts, dodged the horns of weary oxen, scattered companies of
straggling Tommies, and ducked under protruding tent-poles on the
baggage-wagons, and at last came out together again in advance of the
dusty column.
"Besides, we don't know where the press-censor is, do we?" No, of course
we had no idea where the press-censor was, and unless he said that
Ladysmith was relieved, the fact that twenty-five thousand other soldiers
said so counted for idle gossip. Our papers could not expect us to go
riding over mountains the day Ladysmith was relieved, hunting for a
press-censor. "That press-censor," gasped Hartland, "never--is--where
he--ought to be." The words were bumped out of him as he was shot up and
down in the saddle. That was it. It was the press-censor's fault. Our
consciences were clear now. If our papers worried themselves or us
because they did not receive the great news until every one else knew of
it, it was all because of that press-censor. We smiled again and spurred
the horses forward. We abused the press-censor roundly--we were
extremely indignant with him. It was so like him to lose himself the day
Ladysmith was relieved. "Confound him," we muttered, and grinned
guiltily. We felt as we used to feel when we were playing truant from
school.
We were nearing Pieter's Station now, and were half-way to Ladysmith.
But the van of the army was still about us. Was it possible that it
stretched already into the beleaguered city? Were we, after all, to be
cheated of the first and freshest impressions? The tall lancers turned
at the sound of the horses' hoofs and stared, infantry officers on foot
smiled up at us sadly, they were dirty and dusty and sweating, they
carried rifles and cross belts like the Tommies; and they knew that we
outsiders who were not under orders would see the chosen city before
them. Some of them shouted to us, but we only nodded and galloped on.
We wanted to get rid of them all, but they were interminable. When we
thought we had shaken them off, and that we were at last in advance, we
would come upon a group of them resting on the same ground their shells
had torn up during the battle the day before.
We passed Boer laagers marked by empty cans and broken saddles and black,
cold camp-fires. At Pieter's Station the blood was still fresh on the
grass where two hours before some of the South African Light Horse had
been wounded.
The Boers were still on Bulwana then? Perhaps, after all, we had better
turn back and try to find that press-censor. But we rode on and saw
Pieter's Station, as we passed it, as an absurd relic of by-gone days
when bridges were intact and trains ran on schedule time. One door seen
over the shoulder as we galloped past read, "Station Master's
Office--Private," and in contempt of that stern injunction, which would
make even the first-class passenger hesitate, one of our shells had
knocked away the half of the door and made its privacy a mockery. We had
only to follow the track now and we would arrive in time--unless the
Boers were still on Bulwana. We had shaken off the army, and we were two
miles in front of it, when six men came galloping toward us in an
unfamiliar uniform. They passed us far to the right, regardless of the
trail, and galloping through the high grass. We pulled up when we saw
them, for they had green facings to their gray uniforms, and no one with
Buller's column wore green facings.
We gave a yell in chorus. "Are you from Ladysmith?" we shouted. The
men, before they answered, wheeled and cheered, and came toward us
laughing jubilant. "We're the first men out," cried the officer and we
rode in among them, shaking hands and offering our good wishes. "We're
glad to see you," we said. "We're glad to see _you_," they said. It was
not an original greeting, but it seemed sufficient to all of us. "Are
the Boers on Bulwana?" we asked. "No, they've trekked up Dundee way.
You can go right in."
We parted at the word and started to go right in. We found the culverts
along the railroad cut away and the bridges down, and that galloping
ponies over the roadbed of a railroad is a difficult feat at the best,
even when the road is in working order.
Some men, cleanly dressed and rather pale-looking, met us and said:
"Good-morning." "Are you from Ladysmith?" we called. "No, we're from
the neutral camp," they answered. We were the first men from outside
they had seen in four months, and that was the extent of their interest
or information. They had put on their best clothes, and were walking
along the track to Colenso to catch a train south to Durban or to
Maritzburg, to any place out of the neutral camp. They might have been
somnambulists for all they saw of us, or of the Boer trenches and the
battle-field before them. But we found them of greatest interest,
especially their clean clothes. Our column had not seen clean linen in
six weeks, and the sight of these civilians in white duck and straw hats,
and carrying walking-sticks, coming toward us over the railroad ties,
made one think it was Sunday at home and these were excursionists to the
suburbs.
We had been riding through a roofless tunnel, with the mountain and the
great dam on one side, and the high wall of the railway cutting on the
other, but now just ahead of us lay the open country, and the exit of the
tunnel barricaded by twisted rails and heaped-up ties and bags of earth.
Bulwana was behind us. For eight miles it had shut out the sight of our
goal, but now, directly in front of us, was spread a great city of dirty
tents and grass huts and Red Cross flags--the neutral camp--and beyond
that, four miles away, shimmering and twinkling sleepily in the sun, the
white walls and zinc roofs of Ladysmith.
We gave a gasp of recognition and galloped into and through the neutral
camp. Natives of India in great turbans, Indian women in gay shawls and
nose-rings, and black Kaffirs in discarded kha
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