THE LANDING AND ADVANCE OF THE ARMY
EarlySunday morning, at the little zinc-walled telegraph office under the camp of the marines at Guantanamo, I happened to meet two war correspondents—one of them, if I remember rightly, Mr. Howard of the New York "Journal"—who had just come from the front with a detailed account of the fight at Guasimas. This fight, they said, was not a mere insignificant skirmish, as Admiral Sampson supposed when I saw him on Saturday, but a serious battle, in which a part of General Wheeler's division was engaged, for several hours, with a force of Spanish regulars estimated at two or three thousand men. More than one hundred officers and men on our side had been killed or wounded, among them Captain Capron and Sergeant Hamilton Fish, both of whom were dead. The wounded, Mr. Howard said, had been brought back to Siboney and put into one of the abandoned Spanish houses on the beach, where, only the night before, he had seen them lying, in their blood-stained clothing, on the dirty floor, without blankets or pillows, and without anything that seemed to him like adequate attendance or care. At my request the two correspondents went on board theState of Texasand repeated their statement to Miss Barton, who, after consultation with the officers of her staff, decided to take the steamer back at once to Siboney. We could donothing more at Guantanamo until General Perez should furnish transportation and an escort for the food that we intended to send to the refugees north of the bay, and, meanwhile, we might, perhaps, render some service to the wounded soldiers of General Wheeler's command whom Mr. Howard had seen lying, without blankets or pillows, on the floor. We had on board theState of Texas, at that time, one hundred or more cots, with plenty of bedding, and if the medical officers of the army could not get hospital supplies ashore, we thought that we could. At any rate, we would try. Calling again upon Captain McCalla, I explained to him the reasons for our sudden change of plan, and told him that, although we had decided to go to Siboney, we should try to get back in time to meet the pack-train and escort to be furnished by General Perez. I then returned to theState of Texas, and we sailed for Siboney at two o'clock.
In order to follow intelligently the course of the Santiago campaign, and to understand and appreciate the difficulties with which the medical department of the army had to contend, one must know something of the coast upon which that army landed and the nature of the environment by which it was surrounded. The southeastern coast of Cuba, between the entrance to Santiago harbor and the Bay of Guantanamo, is formed by three parallel ranges of hills and mountains which may be roughly characterized as follows: first, what I shall call the rampart—a high, flat-topped ridge, or narrow table, very steep on the sea side, and broken into long terraces by outcropping ledges of limestone; second, the foot-hills, which rise out of a wooded valley or valleys behind the rampart; and, third, the high mountains of the coast, or Sierra del Cobre, range, which lie back of the foot-hills, at a distance of five or six miles from the sea. This is not a strictly accurate topographical description of the coast, but it is roughly and generally true and will answer my purpose.In the vicinity of Santiago the rampart, or mesa-like elevation which borders the sea, has a height of two or three hundred feet, and stretches eastward and westward, like a stone wall, for a distance of nearly twenty miles. At three points it is cut down to the sea-level in narrow, V-shaped clefts, or notches, which have a width at the bottom of from seventy-five to two hundred yards, and which serve as outlets for three small streams. The first of these notches, as one goes eastward from Morro Castle, is that formed by the mouth of the Aguadores ravine, where the Juragua Railroad, on its way from Siboney to Santiago, crosses the Aguadores or Guamo River, and where the iron railroad-bridge and the approach to the city are guarded by a wooden blockhouse and an old stone fort. In the second notch, about six miles from Aguadores and ten from Morro Castle, are the hamlet and railroad-station of Siboney; and in the third, five miles farther to the eastward, lies the somewhat larger and more important mining village of Daiquiri, which, before the war, was the shipping-port of the Spanish-American Iron Company. There is no harbor, shelter for vessels, or safe anchorage at any of these places; but as the rampart, everywhere else, presents an almost insurmountable barrier, an invading force must either disembark in these notches, or go eastward to the Bay of Guantanamo and march forty miles to Santiago through the foot-hills. General Shafter, after inspecting the coast, decided to land in the notches occupied by the villages of Daiquiri and Siboney. He could then advance on Santiago either along the strip of beach under the rampart, by way of Aguadores and Morro Castle, or over a rough wagon-road running through the valleys and across the foot-hills of the interior, three or four miles back of the rampart.
The first difficulty which confronted him was that due to the lack of landing facilities. Not anticipating, apparently,that he might be forced to disembark on an unsheltered coast, he had neglected to provide himself with suitable surf-boats, and was wholly dependent upon the small boats of the transports and a single scow, or lighter, which he had brought with him from Tampa. Seeing that it would be impossible to land sixteen thousand men safely and expeditiously with such facilities, he applied for help to Admiral Sampson, and was furnished by the latter with fifty-two small boats and a number of steam-launches, all manned by officers and sailors from the fleet. Thus provided, he began the work of disembarkation on the morning of June 22 at Daiquiri, the vessels of the fleet, meanwhile, making feigned attacks at several other points along the coast, and shelling the notches and villages of both Siboney and Daiquiri, in order to drive the enemy back and cover the advance of the loaded boats.
Fortunately for General Shafter and for his troops, the Spaniards did not attempt to oppose the landing. If the sides of the notches and the foot-hills back of them had been fortified with earthworks and held by a daring enemy with a battery or two of light guns, it would have been extremely difficult, if not absolutely impossible, to get the troops ashore. Even without artillery, ten or fifteen hundred men armed with Mausers on the heights which command the notches and the approaches to them might have held off a landing force for days, if not weeks. The war-ships might have shelled them, or swept the heights with machine-guns, but it would have been easy for them to find shelter under the crest of the rampart on the land side, and I doubt whether a force so sheltered could have been dislodged or silenced by Admiral Sampson's whole fleet. In order to drive them out it would have been necessary to land in the surf under fire, and storm the heights by scaling the precipitous terraced front of the rampart on the sea side.This might, perhaps, have been done, but it would have involved a great sacrifice of life. The Spanish officers in Cuba, however, were not skilful tacticians. Instead of anticipating General Shafter's movements and occupying, with an adequate force, the only two places in the vicinity of Santiago where he could possibly land, they overlooked or neglected the splendid defensive positions that nature herself had provided for them, and allowed the army of invasion to come ashore without firing a shot. It was great luck for us, but it was not war.
Before night on the 22d, General Lawton's division, consisting of about six thousand men with a Gatling-gun battery, had landed at Daiquiri, and on the morning of the 23d it marched westward along the wagon-road to Siboney. The Spanish garrison at the latter place retreated in the direction of Santiago as General Lawton appeared, and the village fell into our hands without a struggle. Disembarkation continued throughout the 23d and 24th, at both Daiquiri and Siboney, and before dark on the afternoon of the 24th nine tenths of the army of invasion had landed, with no other accident than the loss of two men drowned.
In the meantime, General Linares, the Spanish commander at Santiago, had marched out of the city, with a force of about three thousand men, to meet the invaders, and had occupied a strong defensive position on the crest of a wooded hill at Guasimas, three or four miles northwest of Siboney, where the two roads from the latter place—one up the valley of the stream and the other over the end of the mesa—come together. He did not know certainly which of these two roads the invading force would take, and therefore posted himself on the hill at their junction, where he could command both.
On the afternoon of the 23d, Cuban scouts reported the position of the enemy to General Wheeler, who was then incommand of our advance, and, after a council of war, it was decided to attack simultaneously by both roads. Early on the morning of Friday, June 24, therefore, General Young, with the First and Tenth dismounted cavalry, marched out of Siboney on the main road to Santiago, and proceeded up the valley of the little stream which empties into the sea through the Siboney notch; while Colonel Wood, at the head of the Rough Riders, climbed the end of the rampart, on the western side of the notch, and advanced toward Guasimas by the mesa trail, which is considerably higher than the main road and lies half a mile to a mile farther west.
The two columns encountered the enemy at about the same time. The Rough Riders, under Colonel Wood, began the attack on the mesa trail, and a few moments later General Young's command, on the Siboney-Santiago road, opened fire with three Hotchkiss mountain guns and began the ascent of the hill from the valley. The whole country was so overgrown with trees, shrubs, and tropical vines that it was almost impossible to see an object fifty yards away, and as the Spaniards used smokeless powder, it was extremely difficult to ascertain their position, or even to know exactly where our own troops were. Colonel Wood deployed his regiment to the right and left of the trail, and endeavored, as he advanced, to extend his line so as to form a junction with General Young's command on the right, and at the same time outflank the enemy on the left; but the tropical undergrowth was so dense and luxuriant that neither of the attacking columns could see the other, and all that they could do, in the way of mutual support and coöperation, was to push ahead toward the junction of the two roads, firing, almost at random, into the bushes and vine-tangled thickets from which the Mauser bullets seemed to come. Colonel Roosevelt told me that once he caught a glimpse of the Spaniards, drawn up in line of battle; butduring the greater part of the engagement they were concealed in the chaparral, and could be seen only when they broke from cover and fled, to escape the searching fire of our steadily advancing line. While Colonel Wood, on the left, was driving the enemy out of the jungles intersected by the mesa trail, General Young, with a part of the Tenth Cavalry (colored) supported by four troops of the First, was engaged in storming the hill up which ran the valley road; and at the end of an hour and a half, after a stubborn defense, the Spaniards were forced to abandon their chosen position and retreat in the direction of Santiago, leaving the junction of the two roads in our possession. The battle of Guasimas—the first fight of the Santiago campaign—had been won.
The number of men engaged in this affair, on our side, was nine hundred and sixty-four, and our loss in killed and wounded was sixty-six, including Captain Capron and Hamilton Fish, both of whom died on the field. The Spaniards, according to the statement of Mr. Ramsden, British consul in Santiago, had a force of nearly three thousand men and reported a loss of seven killed and fourteen wounded. It seems probable, however, that their loss was much greater than this. General Linares would hardly have abandoned a strong position and fallen back on the city after a loss of only twenty-one men out of three thousand.
Two war correspondents, Mr. Richard Harding Davis and Mr. Edward Marshall, took an active part in this engagement, and the latter was so severely wounded by a Mauser bullet, which passed through his body near the spine, that when he was carried from the field he was supposed to be dying. He rallied, however, after being taken to Siboney, and has since partially recovered.
The effect of General Wheeler's victory at Guasimas was to open up the Santiago road to a point within three or four miles of the city; and when we returned in theState of Texasfrom Guantanamo, the Rough Riders were in camp beyond Sevilla, and a dozen other regiments were hurrying to the front.
We reached Siboney after dark on Sunday evening, and found the little cove and the neighboring roadstead filled with transport steamers, whose twinkling anchor-lights—or rather adrift lights, for there was no anchorage—swung slowly back and forth in long curves as the vessels rolled and wallowed in the trough of the sea. As soon as a boat could be lowered, the medical officers of Miss Barton's staff went on shore to investigate the state of affairs and to ascertain whether the Red Cross could render any assistance to the hospital corps of the army. They returned in the course of an hour and reported that in two of the abandoned Spanish houses on the beach they had found two hastily extemporized and wholly unequipped hospitals, one of which was occupied by the Cuban sick and wounded, and the other by our own. No attempt had been made to clean or disinfect either of the buildings, both were extremely dirty, and in both the patients were lying, without blankets or pillows, on the floor. The state of affairs, from a medical and sanitary point of view, was precisely as the correspondents had described it to us, except that some of the wounded of General Wheeler's command had been taken on board the transportsSaratogaandOlivetteduring the day, so that the American hospital was not so crowded as it had been when Mr. Howard saw it the night before. The army surgeons and attendants were doing, apparently, all that they could do to make the sick and wounded comfortable; but the high surf, the absence of landing facilities, the neglect or unwillingness of the quartermaster's department to furnish boats, and the confusion and disorder which everywhere prevailed, made it almost impossible to get hospital supplies ashore. All that the surgeons could do, therefore, was to make thebest of the few medicines and appliances that they had taken in their hands and pockets when they disembarked. The things that seemed to be most needed were cots, blankets, pillows, brooms, soap, scrubbing-brushes, and disinfectants. All of these things we had on board theState of Texas, and the officers of Miss Barton's staff spent a large part of the night in breaking out the cargo and getting the required articles on deck.
Early the next morning, Dr. Lesser, with four or five trained nurses, all women, and a boat-load of hospital supplies, landed at the little pier which had been hastily built by the engineer corps, and walking along the beach through the deep sand to the American hospital, offered their services to Dr. Winter, the surgeon in charge. To their great surprise they were informed that the assistance of the Red Cross—or at least their assistance—was not desired. What Dr. Winter's reasons were for declining aid and supplies when both were so urgently needed I do not know. Possibly he is one of the military surgeons, like Dr. Appel of theOlivette, who think that women, even if they are trained nurses, have no business with an army, and should be snubbed, if not browbeaten, until they learn to keep their place. I hope this suggestion does not do Dr. Winter an injustice; but I can think of no other reason that would lead him to decline the assistance of trained young women who, although capable of rendering the highest kind of professional service, were ready and willing to scrub floors, if necessary, and who asked nothing more than to help him make a clean, decent hospital out of an empty, dirty, abandoned Spanish house.
When told by Dr. Winter that they were not wanted, the nurses went to the Cuban hospital, in a neighboring building, where their services were accepted not only with eagerness, but with grateful appreciation. Before night they hadswept, disinfected, and scrubbed out that hospital with soap and water, and had bathed the Cuban patients, fed them, and put them into clean, fresh cot-beds. Our own soldiers, at the same time, were lying, without blankets or pillows, on the floor, in a building which Dr. Winter and his assistants had neither cleaned nor attempted to clean.
Dr. Appel of the hospital steamerOlivette, in an official report to the surgeon-general of the army, published, in part, in the New York "Herald" of November 4, 1898, says:
"There was, at that time [the time when we arrived off Siboney], a number of surgeons on board theState of Texas, and four trained nurses; but, although we were working night and day, taking care of our sick and wounded, no assistance was given by them until some days afterward, when our own men were ready to drop from fatigue."
The idea conveyed by this ungenerous and misleading statement is that the surgeons and Red Cross nurses on theState of Texasneglected or evaded the very duty that they went to Cuba to perform, and remained, idle and useless, on their steamer, while Dr. Appel and his associates worked themselves into a state of complete physical exhaustion. So far as the statement contains this implication, it is wholly and absolutely false.The State of Texasarrived off Siboney at eight o'clock on the evening of Sunday, June 26. In less than an hour the Red Cross surgeons had offered their services to Major Havard, chief surgeon of the cavalry division, and as early as possible on the following morning Dr. Lesser and four or five Red Cross nurses reported at the American hospital, offered the surgeon in charge the cots, blankets, and hospital supplies which they had brought, or were ready to bring, on shore, and asked to be set to work. When, on account of some prejudice or misapprehension, Dr. Winter declined to let them help him in taking care of our own sick and wounded soldiers, what more could theydo than devote themselves to the Cubans? Two days later, fortunately, Major Lagarde, chief surgeon at Siboney, over-ruled the judgment of his subordinate, accepted the services of the nurses, and set them at work in a branch of the military hospital, under the direction of Dr. Lesser. There they all worked, almost without rest or sleep, until Dr. Lesser, Mrs. Lesser, Mrs. White (a volunteer), and three of the Red Cross nurses were stricken with fever, and four of them were carried on flat-cars to the yellow-fever camp in the hills two miles north of the village. The surgeon of theOlivettewould have shown a more generous and more manly spirit if, in his report to the surgeon-general, he had mentioned these facts, instead of adroitly insinuating that the Red Cross surgeons and nurses were loafing on board theState of Texaswhen they should have been at work in the hospitals.
But Dr. Appel further says, in the report from which I have quoted, that at the time when theState of Texasreached Siboney—two days after the fight at Guasimas—"there was no lack whatever of medical and surgical supplies."
If Major Lagarde, Dr. Munson, Dr. Donaldson, and other army surgeons who worked so heroically to bring order out of the chaos at Siboney, are to be believed, Dr. Appel's statement concerning hospital supplies is as false as his statement with regard to the Red Cross surgeons and nurses. In an official report to the surgeon-general, dated July 29 and published in the New York papers of August 9, Captain Edward L. Munson, assistant surgeon commanding the reserve ambulance company, says: "After the fight at Las Guasimas there were absolutely no dressings, hospital tentage, or supplies of any kind, on shore, within reach of the surgeons already landed." Dr. Munson was the adjutant of Colonel Pope, chief surgeon of the Fifth Army-Corps, and he probably knew a good deal more about the state of affairs at Siboney after the battle of Guasimas than Dr.Appel did. Be that, however, as it may; I know from my own observation and experience that therewasa lack of medical and hospital supplies at Siboney, not only when we arrived there, but for weeks afterward. Dr. Frank Donaldson, surgeon of the Rough Riders, in a letter from Siboney, published in the Philadelphia "Medical Journal" of July 23, says: "The condition of the wounded on shore here is beyond measure wretched, and excites the lively indignation of every one."
The neglect of our soldiers, both at Siboney and at the front, in the early days of the campaign, was discreditable to the army and to the country; and there is no reason why military surgeons should not frankly admit it, because it was not their fault, and they cannot justly be held accountable for it. The blame should rest, and eventually will rest, upon the officer or department that sent thirty-five loaded transports and sixteen thousand men to the Cuban coast without suitable landing facilities in the shape of surf-boats, steam-launches, and lighters.
In criticizing the condition of our hospitals, I cast no reflection upon the zeal, ability, and devotion to duty of such men as Colonel Pope, Major Lagarde, Major Wood, and the surgeons generally of the Fifth Army-Corps. They made the best of a bad situation for which they were not primarily responsible; and if the hospitals were in unsatisfactory condition, it was simply because the supplies furnished in abundance by the medical department were either left in Tampa for lack of water transportation, or held on board the transports because no adequate provision had been made by the commanding general or the quartermaster's department for landing them on a surf-beaten coast and transporting them to the places where they were needed.
A WALK TO THE FRONT
WhenI went on deck, the morning after our return to Siboney, I found that theState of Texashad drifted, during the night, half-way to the mouth of the Aguadores ravine, and was lying two or three miles off the coast, within plain sight of the blockading fleet. The sun was just rising over the foot-hills beyond Daiquiri, and on the higher slopes of the Cobre range it was already day; but the deep notch at Siboney was still in dark-blue shadow, and out of it a faint land-breeze was blowing a thin, hazy cloud of smoke from the recently kindled camp-fires of the troops on the beach. There was no wind where we lay, and the sea seemed to be perfectly smooth; but the languid rolling of the steamer, and a gleam of white surf here and there along the base of the rampart, showed that the swell raised by the fresh breeze of the previous afternoon had not wholly subsided. Fifteen or twenty transport-steamers were lying off the coast, some close in under the shadow of the cliffs, where the smoke from the soldiers' camp-fires drifted through their rigging; some five or six miles out in the open roadstead; and a few hull down beyond the sharply drawn line of the eastern horizon. Three miles away to the northwest the red-and-yellow flag of Spain was blowing out fitfully in the land-breeze over the walls of the stone fort at Aguadores, and four or five milesfarther to the westward, at the end of the long, terraced rampart, I could make out, with a glass, the lighthouse, the tile-roofed barracks, and the gray battlements of the old castle at the entrance to Santiago harbor.
About seven o'clock theState of Texasgot under way, steamed back to Siboney, and succeeded in finding an anchorage, in what looked like a very dangerous position, close to the rocks, on the eastern side of the cove. From this point of view the picture presented by the village and its environment was novel and interesting, if not particularly beautiful. On the right and left of the slightly curved strip of sand which formed the landing-place rose two steep bluffs to a height of perhaps two hundred and fifty feet. The summit of the one on the right, which was the steeper of the two, seemed, at first glance, to be inaccessible; but there must have been a hidden path up to it through the trees, bushes, and vines which clothed its almost precipitous face, because it was crowned with one of the small, square, unpainted log blockhouses which are a characteristic feature of almost every east-Cuban landscape. The western bluff, from which the trees had been cut away, sloped backward a little more than the other, and about half-way up it, in a network of yellow intersecting paths, stood another blockhouse, surrounded by a ditch and a circular "entanglement" of barbed-wire fencing. At the foot of this bluff, and extending westward under the precipitous declivity of the rampart, were two lines of unpainted, one-story wooden houses, which stood gable to gable at intervals of fifty or sixty feet, and looked, in their architectural uniformity, like buildings erected by a manufacturing company to shelter the families of its employees. The boundary of the village, at this end, was marked by still another small, square blockhouse, which was set, at a height of twenty feet, on a huge fragment of rock which had caved away and fallen from the cliff above.Across the bottom of the ravine, between the two bluffs, extended a thickly planted strip of cocoanut-palms, whose gray trunks and drooping, feathery foliage served as a background for half a dozen leaf-thatched Cuban huts, an iron railway-bridge painted red, and a great encampment of white shelter-tents through which roamed thousands of blue-shirted soldiers, Cuban insurgents from the army of Garcia, and dirty, tattered refugees from all parts of the country, attracted to the beach by the landing of the army and the prospect of getting food. On the eastern side of the cove, near the ruins of an old stone fort, the engineer corps had built a rude pier, thirty or forty feet in length, and on either side of it scores of naked soldiers, with metallic identification tags hanging around their necks, were plunging with yells, whoops, and halloos into the foaming surf, or swimming silently, like so many seals, in the smoother water outside.
As the sun rose above the foot-hills and began to throw its scorching rays into the notch, the whooping and yelling ceased as the bathers came out of the water and put on their clothes; the soldiers of the Second Infantry struck and shouldered their shelter-tents, seized their rifles, and formed by companies in marching order; the Cubans of Garcia's command climbed the western bluff, in a long, ragged, disorderly line, on their way to the front by the mesa trail; small boats, laden with food and ammunition from the transports, appeared, one after another, and made their way slowly under oars to the little pier; and the serious work of the day began.
In order to ascertain what progress our forces were making in their march on Santiago, and to get an idea of the difficulties with which they were contending or would have to contend, I determined, about nine o'clock, to go to the front. It was impossible to get a horse or mule in Siboney, for love or money; but if our soldiers could march to thefront under the heavy burden of shelter-tent, blanket roll, rifle, rations, and ammunition, I thought I could do it with no load at all, even if the sunshine were hot. Mr. Elwell, who had lived some years in Santiago and was thoroughly acquainted with the country, agreed to go with me in the capacity of guide and interpreter, and, just before we were ready to start, Dr. Lesser, who had returned to the ship after setting the nurses at work in the Cuban hospital, said that he would like to go.
"All right," I replied. "Get on your togs."
He went to his state-room, and in ten minutes returned dressed in a neat black morning suit, with long trousers, low shoes, a fresh white-linen shirt, and a high, stiffly starched, standing collar.
"Good heavens, doctor!" I exclaimed, as he made his appearance in this Fifth Avenue costume. "Where do you think you are going? To church?"
"No," replied the doctor, imperturbably; "to the front."
"In that dress?"
"Certainly; what's the matter with it?"
"Oh, nothing in particular. As a dress it is a very good dress, and reflects credit on your tailor; but for a tramp of ten or fifteen miles over a muddy trail and through a tropical jungle, wouldn't a neat, simple undershirt, with canvas trousers and a pair of waterproof leggings, be better? Your starched collar, in this heat, won't last ten minutes."
The doctor demurred, and protested that the clothes he was wearing were the oldest he had; but I finally persuaded him to take off his waistcoat and collar, tie a handkerchief around his neck, and put on a pair of my leggings; and in this slightly modified costume he went ashore with us for a march to the camp of the Rough Riders.
About fifteen hundred Cubans, of General Garcia's command, had been brought to Siboney the day before on oneof our transports; and although most of them had started for the front, several hundred were still roaming through the village, or standing here and there in groups on the beach. They did not, at first sight, impress me very favorably. Fully four fifths of them were mulattoes or blacks; the number of half-grown boys was very large; there was hardly a suggestion of a uniform in the whole command; most of the men were barefooted, and their coarse, drooping straw hats, cotton shirts, and loose, flapping cotton trousers had been torn by thorny bushes and stained with Cuban mud until they looked worse than the clothes that a New England farmer hangs on a couple of crossed sticks in his corn-field to scare away the crows. If their rifles and cartridge-belts had been taken away from them they would have looked like a horde of dirty Cuban beggars and ragamuffins on the tramp. I do not mean to say, or even to suggest, that these ragamuffins were not brave men and good soldiers. They may have been both, in spite of their disreputable appearance. When, for months together, a man has lived the life of an outlaw in the woods, scrambling through tropical jungles, wading marshy rivers, and sleeping, without tent or blankets, on the ground, he cannot be expected to look like a veteran of the regular army on dress-parade in a garrison town. Many of our own men, in the later weeks of the Santiago campaign, were almost as ragged and dirty as the poorest of the soldiers who came with General Garcia to Siboney. The Cubans disappointed me, I suppose, because I had pictured them to myself as a better dressed and better disciplined body of men, and had not made allowance enough for the hardships and privations of an insurgent's life.
Turning our backs on the cove, the pier, the white tents of the quartermasters, the tarpaulin-covered piles of provision-boxes, and the throng of soldiers, insurgents, and refugees on the beach, we climbed a steep bank, crossed the railroad-track just west of the red-iron bridge, and joined a company of the Second Infantry on its way to the front.
The Santiago road, after leaving the village of Siboney, runs up a wide marshy valley, full of stagnant ponds and lagoons, and sparsely set with clumps of cocoanut and royal palm. Although this valley heads in the mountains of the Cobre range, and opens on the sea through the Siboney notch, its atmosphere seems hot and close, and is pervaded by a foul, rank odor of decaying vegetation, which is unpleasantly suggestive of malaria and Cuban fever, and makes one wish that one could carry air as one carries water, and breathe, as well as drink, out of a canteen. But one soon escapes from it. A mile or two from the village the road leaves the valley, turns to the left, and begins to ascend a series of densely wooded ridges, or foot-hills, which rise, one above another, to the crest of the watershed just beyond Sevilla. From the point where we left the valley to the summit of the divide, we never had an unobstructed outlook in any direction. Dense tropical forests, almost impenetrable to the eye, closed in upon the road, and when the sea-breeze was cut off and the sun stood vertically overhead, we lost all means of orientation and could hardly guess in what direction we were going. Now and then, at the bottom of a valley or on a sloping hillside, we passed a small, grassy opening, which would be called, in West Virginia, a glade or an interval; but during most of the time we plodded along in the fierce heat, between walls of dark-green foliage which rose out of an impenetrable jungle of vines, piñon-bushes, and Spanish bayonet. I saw no flowers except the clustered heads of a scarlet-and-orange blossom which I heard some one call the "Cuban rose," and I did not see a bird of any kind until we approached the battle-field of Guasimas, where scores of vultures were soaring and circling above the tree-tops, as if aware of the fact that in the leafy depths of the jungle below were still lying the unburied and undiscovered bodies of Spanish dead.
Nothing surprised me more, as I walked from Siboney to the front, than the feebleness of the resistance offered by the Spaniards to our advance. The road, after it enters the hills, abounds in strong defensive positions, and if General Chaffee or General Wood, with five thousand American regulars, had held it, as General Linares attempted to hold it at Guasimas, a Spanish army would not have fought its way through to Santiago in a month. There are at least half a dozen places, between the Siboney valley and the crest of the divide beyond Sevilla, where a few simple intrenchments in the shape of rifle-pits and barricades would have enabled even a small force, fighting as General Vara del Rey's command afterward fought at Caney, to detain our army for days, if not to check its advance altogether. The almost impenetrable nature of the undergrowth on either side would have made flanking movements extremely difficult, and a direct attack along the narrow road, in the face of such a fire as might have been delivered from intrenched positions in front and at the sides, would almost certainly have been disastrous to the advancing column. Even if the Spaniards had been driven from their first line of defense, they could have fallen back a mile or two to a second position, equally strong, and then to a third, and by thus fighting, falling back, and then fighting again, they might have inflicted great loss upon the attacking force long before it got within sight of Santiago.
I can think of only two reasons for their failure to adopt this method of defense. The first is that they did not know certainly whether General Shafter would make his main attack by way of Guasimas and Sevilla, or along the sea-coast by way of Aguadores; and they feared that if they sent thegreater part of their small army to check an advance by the former route, the city, which would be left almost undefended, might be attacked suddenly by a column moving rapidly along the sea-coast and up the Aguadores ravine, or, possibly, by a force which should land at Cabanas and march around the bay. This reason, however, seems to me to have little force, because from the signal-station at Morro Castle they could watch and report all our movements along the coast, and a march of three or four hours would bring the army on the Siboney road back to the city, in ample time to meet an attacking column from either Aguadores or Cabanas.
The second reason is that, for lack of adequate means of transportation, they were unable to keep a large force supplied with food and ammunition at a distance from its base. I doubt whether this reason has any greater force than the other. I saw a large number of native horses and mules in Santiago after the surrender, and as the distance from the city to the strong positions on the Siboney road is only six or eight miles, it would not have required extraordinary transportation facilities to carry thither food and ammunition for three or four thousand men. But even half that number, if they fought as the San Luis brigade afterward fought at Caney, might have held General Shafter's advance in check for days, and made the capture of Santiago a much more serious and costly business than it was.
The truth probably is that General Linares was intimidated by the great show made by our fleet and transports—sixty steam-vessels in all; that he credited us with a much larger army than we really had; and that it seemed to him better to make the decisive fight at once on the commanding hills just east of Santiago than to lose perhaps one third of his small available force in the woods on the Siboney road, and then be driven back to the city at last with wearied and discouraged troops. But it was a mistaken calculation. Ifhe had delayed General Shafter's column, by obstinately resisting its advance through the woods on the Siboney road, he would have given Colonel Escarrio time enough to reach Santiago with the reinforcements from Manzanillo before the decisive battle, and would also have given the climate and the Cuban fever more time to sap the strength and depress the spirits of our badly equipped and improperly fed troops. The final struggle on the hills east of the city might then have had a very different termination.
The policy that General Linares should have adopted was the Fabian policy of obstruction, harassment, and delay. Every hour that he could detain General Shafter's advancing army on the Siboney road increased his own chances of success and lessened those of his adversary; because the army of defense, already acclimated, could stand exposure to sun, rain, and miasma much better than the army of invasion could. Besides that, a column of five thousand regulars from Manzanillo was hurrying to his assistance, and it was of the utmost importance that these reinforcements should reach him before he should be forced into a decisive battle. Instead of resisting General Shafter's advance, however, with obstinate pertinacity on the Siboney road, he abandoned his strong position at Guasimas, after a single sharp but inconclusive engagement, and retreated almost to Santiago without striking another blow. As I have already said with regard to the unopposed landing at Daiquiri and Siboney, it was great luck for General Shafter, but it was not war.
We passed the battle-field of Guasimas about noon, without stopping to examine it, and pushed on toward Sevilla with a straggling, disorderly column of soldiers belonging to the Second and Twenty-first Infantry, who were following a battery of light artillery to the front. The men seemed to be suffering intensely from the heat, and every few hundredyards we would find one of them lying unconscious in the bushes by the roadside, where he had been carried by his comrades after he had fainted and fallen under the fierce, scorching rays of the tropical sun. In one place, where the road was narrow and sunken, we met a pack-train of mules returning from the front. Frightened at something, just before they reached the artillery, they suddenly broke into a wild stampede, and as they could not escape on either side, owing to the height of the banks and the denseness of the undergrowth, they jumped in among the guns and caissons and floundered about until the whole battery was involved in an almost inextricable tangle, which blocked the road for more than an hour. I tried to get around the jam of mules, horses, and cannon by climbing the bank and forcing my way through the jungle; but I was so torn by thorns and pricked by the sharp spines of the Spanish bayonet that I soon gave up the attempt, and, returning to the road, sat down, in the shadiest place I could find, to rest, take a drink from my canteen, and await developments. If General Linares, when he retreated, had left behind a squad or two of sharp-shooters and bushwhackers to harass our advance at narrow and difficult places in the road, what a chance they would have had when the pack-mules jumped into that battery! With the help given by a detachment of engineers, who were working on the road a short distance ahead, the mules were finally extricated, and the procession moved on.
Six or eight miles from Siboney we passed a solitary, and of course empty, house, standing back a little from the road, in a farm-like opening, or clearing. This house, Mr. Elwell informed me, was Sevilla. I had supposed, before I left the ship, that Guasimas and Sevilla were villages—as, indeed, they are represented to be on all the Spanish maps of the country. But I soon learned not to put my trust in Spanish maps. Most of them have not been revised or corrected in half a century, and they were full of errors in the first place. There is not a village, nor a hamlet, on this whole road from Siboney to Santiago; and the only two houses I saw had been abandoned for weeks, if not months. The road runs, almost everywhere, through a tangled, tropical wilderness; and if there ever were any villages on it, they have long since disappeared.
The Sevilla house seems to stand on or near the crest of the highest ridge that the road crosses; and a short distance beyond it, through an opening in the trees, we caught sight, suddenly and unexpectedly, of the city of Santiago itself—a long, ragged line of pink barracks, thatched houses, church steeples, and wide-spreading trees, standing upon a low hill on the other side of what looked like a green, slightly rolling meadow, which was five or six hundred feet below the position that we occupied, and perhaps three miles away. This meadow, as I subsequently ascertained, was itself made up of hills, among them El Pozo and the high, bare ridge of San Juan; but from our elevated point of view the hills and valleys seemed to blend into a gently rolling and slightly inclined plain, which was diversified, here and there, by patches of chaparral or clumps of royal palm, but which presented, apparently, no obstacles at all to the advance of an attacking force. I could not discover anything that looked like a fort or an extensive earthwork; but I counted sixteen Red Cross flags flying over large buildings on the side of the city next to us, and with the aid of a good field-glass I could just see, in front of the long pink barrack, or hospital, two or three faint brown lines which might possibly be embankments or lines of rifle-pits. The houses on the El Pozo and San Juan heights ought to have been well within the limits of vision from that point of view, but, as I did not notice them, I presume they were hidden by the forest on one side or the other of the opening through which we looked.
After studying the city for ten minutes, and wondering a little at its apparent defenselessness, we pushed on down the western slope of the ridge to the camp of the Rough Riders, which we found about half a mile from the Sevilla house, in an open glade, or field, on the right-hand side of the road. The long grass had been beaten down into such trails as a bear would make in wandering hither and thither among the dirty shelter-tents; and following one of these devious paths across the encampment, we found Lieutenant-Colonel Roosevelt standing with two or three other officers in front of a white-cotton rain-sheet, or tent-fly, stretched across a pole so as to protect from rain, or at least from vertical rain, a little pile of blankets and personal effects. There was a camp-chair under the tree, and near it, in the shade, had been slung a hammock; but, with these exceptions, Lieutenant-Colonel Roosevelt's quarters were no more comfortable than those of his men. He was dressed in the costume which he wore throughout the Santiago campaign—a coarse blue-flannel shirt, wide open at the throat; brown-canvas trousers and leggings; and a broad-brimmed felt hat put on over a blue polka-dot handkerchief in such a way that the kerchief hung down, like a havelock, over the nape of his neck. As he cordially shook hands with me there flashed into the field of my mental vision a picture of him as I had seen him last—in full evening dress, making a speech at the Fellowcraft Club in New York, and expressing, in a metaphor almost pictorially graphic, his extremely unfavorable opinion of the novels of Edgar Saltus. In outward appearance there was little resemblance between the Santiago Rough Rider and the orator of the Fellowcraft Club; but the force, vigor, and strength of the personality were so much more striking than the dress in which it happened, for the moment, to be clothed, that there seemed to be really no difference between my latest recollection and my present impression of the man.
We were presented to Colonel (now General) Wood, who seemed to me to be a man of quiet manner but great reserve power, and for twenty minutes we discussed the fight at Guasimas,—which Roosevelt said he would not have missed for the best year in his life,—the road, the campaign, and the latest news from the United States. Then, as it was getting late in the afternoon and we had eight or nine miles to walk before dark, we refreshed ourselves with a hasty lunch of hard bread and water, took a number of letters from officers of the Rough Riders to post at the first opportunity, and started back for the ship.
The Siboney-Santiago road, at that time and for several days thereafter, was comparatively dry and in fairly good condition. It had to be widened a little in some places, and a company or two of soldiers from the Tenth Cavalry were working on it just beyond the Rough Riders' camp; but, as far as we went, loaded army wagons could get over it without the least difficulty. Supplies at the front, nevertheless, were very short. Lieutenant-Colonel Roosevelt told me that his command had only enough hard bread and bacon for that night's supper, and that if more did not come before dark there would be no breakfast for them in the morning. I cannot now remember whether we met a supply-train on our way back to Siboney, or not; but I think not.
At the intersection of the road with the mesa trail, we stopped for a few moments to look over the battle-field of Guasimas. Evidences and traces of the fight, in the shape of cartridge-shells and clips, bullet-splintered trees, improvised stretchers, and blood-soaked clothes and bandages, were to be seen almost everywhere, and particularly on the trail along which the Rough Riders had advanced. At one spot, in a little hollow or depression of the trail, from which one could see out into an open field about one hundred yards distant, the ground was completely covered with cartridge-shells and-clips from both Mauser and Krag-Jorgensen rifles. A squad of Spaniards had apparently used the hollow as a place of shelter first, and had fired two or three hundred shots from it, strewing the ground with the clips and brass shells of their Mauser cartridges. Then the Rough Riders had evidently driven them out and occupied the hollow themselves, firing two or three hundred more shots, and covering the yellow cartridge-shells of the Mauser rifles with a silvery layer of empty tubes from the Krag-Jorgensens. It looked as if one might pick up a bushel or two of these shells in an area ten or fifteen feet square.
A short distance from the intersection of the trail with the road was a large grave-shaped mound of fresh earth, under which had been buried together eight of the men killed on our side during the fight. There had been no time, apparently, to prepare and put up an inscribed headboard to show who the dead men were, but some of their comrades had carefully collected two or three hundred stones and pebbles—things not easy to find in a tropical jungle—and had laid them close together on the burial-mound in the form of a long cross.
Near this mound, and on the trail leading to it from Siboney, I saw, for the first time, Cuban land-crabs, and formed the opinion, which subsequent experience only confirmed, that they, with the bloody-necked Cuban vultures, are the most disgusting and repellent of all created things. Tarantulas, rattlesnakes, and some lizards are repulsive to the eye and unpleasantly suggestive to the imagination; but the ugliest of them all is not half so uncanny, hideous, and loathsome to me as the Cuban land-crab. It resembles the common marine crab in form, and varies in size from the diameter of a small saucer to that of a large dinner-plate. Instead of being gray or brown, however, like its aquatic relative, it is highly colored in diversified shades of red, scarlet, lightyellow, orange, and black. Sometimes one tint prevails, sometimes another, and occasionally all of these colors are fantastically blended in a single specimen. The creature has two long fore claws, or pincers; small eyes, mounted like round berries on the ends of short stalks or pedicels; and a mouth that seems to be formed by two horny, beak-like mandibles. It walks or runs with considerable rapidity in any direction,—backward, sidewise, or straight ahead,—and is sure to go in the direction that you least expect. If you approach one, it throws itself into what seems to be a defensive attitude, raises aloft its long fore claws, looks at you intently for a moment, and then backs or sidles away on its posterior legs, gibbering noiselessly at you with the horny mandibles of its impish mouth, and waving its arms distractedly in the air like a frightened and hysterical woman trying to keep off some blood-chilling apparition.
All of these crabs are scavengers by profession and night-prowlers by habit, and they do not emerge from their lurking-places in the jungle and make their appearance on the trails until the sun gets low in the west. Then they come out by the hundred, if not by the thousand; and as it begins to grow dark, the still atmosphere of the deep, lonely forest is filled with the rustling, crackling noise that they make as they scramble through the bushes or climb over the stiff, dry blades of the Spanish bayonet. I think it is not an exaggeration to say that at almost any point on the Cuban trail between Guasimas and Siboney I could stand still for a moment and count from fifty to one hundred of them, crawling out of the forest and across the path. Lieutenant-Colonel Roosevelt told me that nothing interfered so much at first with his sleep in the field as the noise made by these crabs in the bushes. It is so like the noise that would be made by a party of guerrillas or bushwhackers, stealing up to the camp under cover of darkness, that it might wellkeep awake even a man who was neither nervous nor imaginative.
Cuban land-crabs, like Cuban vultures, are haunters of battle-fields; but they seek the dead at night, while the vultures drink the eyes and tear off the lips of an unburied corpse in the broad light of day. On the battle-field of Guasimas, however, while the sun was still above the horizon, I saw, crawling over a little pile of bloody rags, or bandages, a huge crab whose pale, waxy-yellow body suggested the idea that he had been feeding on a yellow-fever corpse and had absorbed its color. At my approach he backed slowly off the rags, opening and shutting his mouth noiselessly, and waving his fore claws toward me in the air with what seemed like impish intelligence, as if he were saying: "Go away! What business have you here? Blood and the dead are mine."
There may be something more repulsive and uncanny than such a performance by a huge corpse-colored land-crab; but, if so, I have never happened to see it. It made me feel as if I should like to do as the Russian peasant does in similar cases—spit and cross myself.
We reached Siboney about half-past five, and happening to find a boat from theState of Texaswaiting at the pier, we got on board in time for dinner, after a walk of sixteen or eighteen miles.
SIBONEY ON THE EVE OF BATTLE
Duringmy absence at the front on Monday, the auxiliary cruiserYale, with two or three regiments of Michigan troops on board, arrived off Siboney, and when I went on deck on Tuesday morning these reinforcements were just beginning to go ashore in a long line of small boats, towed by a steam-launch from one of the war-ships of the blockading fleet.
The landing of troops and supplies on the Cuban coast was the first serious difficulty with which General Shafter had to contend. The little cove at Siboney was wholly unsheltered; there was no wharf or pier at which a steamer might lie; a gale, or even a fresh breeze, from the southeast raised a heavy surf on the strip of sand in front of the village; the water deepened so suddenly and abruptly, at a distance of fifty yards from the shore, that there was practically no anchorage; and all men and stores had to be landed by putting them into small boats and running them up on the beach through the breakers. At Daiquiri, where General Lawton's division disembarked, the situation was a little better, for the reason that the Spanish-American Iron Company had built there a substantial pier, of which the army of invasion could make use. At that place, therefore, General Shafter disembarked a large part of his command, andunloaded all his wagons, siege-guns, light artillery, etc. The mules and horses were put ashore—or rather pitched overboard with the expectation that they would swim ashore—at Siboney; but, owing to unskilful management and lack of guidance, twelve per cent. of the mules—fifty out of four hundred and fifteen—perished. Some, instead of making for the shore, swam directly out to sea until they became exhausted and sank; while others attempted to land on the eastern side of the cove, where there was no beach, and were drowned under the rocks. Inasmuch as the total number of draft-and pack-animals loaded at Tampa was wholly inadequate to meet the necessities of such an expedition, the drowning of twelve per cent. of them, after they had reached their destination, was a serious and, it seems to me, unnecessary loss.
In the disembarkation of his troops, General Shafter had the assistance of skilled officers and well-drilled sailors from the blockading fleet, to say nothing of half a dozen steam-launches and fifty-two good boats; but when it came to unloading and landing stores, he had to rely on his own men and his own facilities, and it soon became painfully evident that they were not equal to the requirements of the situation. I watched the landing of supplies all day Tuesday, and formed the opinion that it was disorderly, unskilful, and unintelligent. In the first place, many of the steamers from which supplies were being taken lay too far from the beach; and there seemed to be no one who had authority or power enough to compel them to come nearer. As a result of this, the boats and lighters were unable to make as quick and frequent trips as they might have made if the transports had been within one hundred yards of the beach, instead of half a mile away.
In the second place, most of the boats and lighters seemed to be directed and handled by men who had had little experience in boating and no experience whatever in landing through heavy surf. As a result of this, boats were often stove against the timbers of the little pier which the engineer corps had hastily built; while the lighters, instead of being held by an anchor and stern-line as they went into the breakers, were allowed to swing around into the trough of the sea, where they either filled and sank, or drifted ashore, broadside to the beach, in such a position that fifty men could hardly turn them around and get them off.
Finally, the soldiers and Cubans who acted as stevedores, carrying the boxes from the boats and piling them on the pier, were not intelligently directed, and, consequently, labored without method or judgment—getting in one another's way; allowing the pier to become so blocked up with stuff that nobody could move on it, much less work; and wasting more energy in talking, shouting, and bossing one another than they utilized in doing the thing that was to be done.
If I had ever had any doubt with regard to the expediency of giving to the navy full and absolute control of the army and its supplies while at sea, such doubt would have been removed by one day's observation at Siboney. Army officers, as a rule, know nothing of water transportation, and cannot reasonably be expected to know anything about it; and to put them in charge of transports, lighters, and surf-boats is almost as inconsiderate as to put a sailor in charge of a farm and expect him, without any previous training, to run reaping-, binding-, and threshing-machines, take proper care of his live stock, and get as much out of the soil as an agricultural expert would. Every man to his trade; and the landing of supplies from thirty or forty transports, in small boats, on an unsheltered, surf-beaten coast, is not the trade of an army quartermaster. Lieutenant-Colonel Humphrey and Major Jacobs undoubtedly did all that they could do, with their knowledge and experience, and with the limited facilitiesthat General Shafter had provided for them, to get supplies ashore; but the results were not gratifying, either to observers at Siboney, or to soldiers at the front. If officers of the navy had directed the loading of stores on the transports at Tampa, and the unloading and landing of them at Daiquiri and Siboney, there would have been a properly equipped hospital at the latter place five days sooner than there was; there would have been forty or fifty more mules in the army's pack-train; the beach would not have been strewn with the wrecks of mismanaged boats and lighters; and the transport-steamersAlamo,Breakwater,Iroquois,Vigilancia, andLa Grande Duchessewould not have brought back to the United States hundreds of tons of supplies intended for, and urgently needed by, our soldiers at the front.
On the afternoon of Tuesday, June 28, one of the small vessels of the mosquito fleet arrived from Guantanamo Bay with a letter from Captain McCalla in which he said that General Perez had furnished a pack-train and an escort for the food that the Red Cross had promised to send to the Guantanamo refugees, and that he would like to have us return there as soon as possible and land five thousand rations. As our hospital work on shore was well under way, and Dr. Lesser and the nurses had been supplied with everything that they would need for a day or two, Miss Barton decided to fill Captain McCalla's requisition at once. Late Tuesday evening, therefore, theState of Texasleft Siboney, and after a quiet and peaceful run down the coast entered Guantanamo Bay about six o'clock Wednesday morning. At half-past six Captain McCalla came on board to make arrangements for the landing, and in less than two hours there was a large lighter alongside, with a steam-launch to tow it to the place where an officer of General Perez's command was waiting for it with a pack-train and an escort. Before noon ten or fifteen thousand pounds of supplies, consisting principally of beans,rice, hard bread, and South American jerked beef, had been safely landed on the western side of the entrance to the lower harbor; and as we passed the point, on our return, we saw a large party of Cubans carrying the boxes and barrels up the bank.
We reached Siboney early that evening, drifted and rolled all night on a heavy swell, a mile or two off the coast, and at daybreak on the following morning ran close in to the beach and began landing supplies for several thousand destitute Cuban refugees who had assembled at the little village of Firmeza, three miles back of Siboney in the hills. In getting provisions ashore at Siboney, we encountered precisely the same difficulties that the army had to meet; but we fortunately had with us, as chief of transportation, a man who was familiar with boats and who had had large experience in handling them in circumstances and under conditions similar to those that prevailed on the Cuban coast. In proportion to our facilities, therefore, we got more stuff ashore in a given time than the army quartermasters did, and with fewer accidents. Mr. Warner, I think, was the first man to use, at Siboney, an anchor and a stern-line to prevent a boat or a lighter from broaching to in the surf. It was a simple enough expedient, but nobody, apparently, had thought of it. By dropping an anchor astern, just before the lighter reached the outer edge of the breakers, and then slacking off the line until the boat was near enough so that thirty Cubans could rush into the water, seize it, and run it up on the beach, a landing was effected without difficulty or risk. Then, when the supplies had been unloaded, the stern-anchor line could be used again as a means of pulling the lighter off through the surf into smooth water and preventing it from swinging around broadside to the sea while being launched. The best time for this work was between five and ten o'clock in the morning. After ten o'clock there was almost alwaysa fresh breeze from the southeast, which raised such a surf on the beach that unless the landing of supplies was a matter of extreme urgency it had to be temporarily suspended. We succeeded in getting ashore on Wednesday food enough to satisfy the wants of the refugees at Firmeza, and Mr. Elwell was sent there to superintend its distribution.
Wednesday evening, as there seemed to be no prospect of an immediate engagement at the front, I decided to go to Port Antonio, Jamaica, with Mr. Trumbull White, on the Chicago "Record's" despatch-boatHercules, to post my letters and the letters that had been intrusted to me by Colonel Wood and Lieutenant-Colonel Roosevelt, and to get some articles of camp equipment which I had ordered in New York, but which had failed to reach me before theState of Texassailed from Key West.
We reached Port Antonio at eight o'clock on Thursday, spent the day there, and returned the next night to Siboney. Early Friday morning, as we were approaching the Cuban coast, the captain of theHerculescame down into the cabin with the astounding news that the blockading fleet had disappeared. "The jig is up, boys!" he exclaimed excitedly. "They've taken the city, and the fleet is inside the harbor. I can't see a sign of a ship anywhere along the coast."
We all rushed on deck and gazed with sinking hearts at the long black line of the rampart and the high blue mountains beyond it. If Santiago had been taken in our absence, it would be the cruelest blow that fortune had ever dealt us! Although the sun was still below the horizon, the atmosphere was crystal-clear, and we could see without a glass the step-like outline of Morro Castle, and even the hazy blue smoke rising from the camp-fires on-the beach at Siboney; but of the war-ships—theNew York, theBrooklyn, theIndiana, and theTexas—there was not a sign. I do not know what Mr. White thought,—he seemed to be as cool and imperturbableas ever,—but when I fully realized that the fleet was not there, and drew from that fact the inevitable conclusion that the city had been captured, I was ready to anathematize the British West Indies, Port Antonio, theHercules, and the cruel ill luck which had taken me a hundred miles away at the decisive moment of the Santiago campaign.
As the sun rose over the level plain of the Caribbean, and the swift ocean-going tug bore us nearer and nearer to the dark line of the still distant coast, the captain, who had been sweeping the base of the rampart with a long marine telescope, suddenly shouted: "Aha! I think I can see theBrooklyn, boys. It may be all right yet." I looked eagerly toward the position that Commodore Schley's flagship usually occupied on the western side of the harbor entrance, but could see nothing that even suggested theBrooklyn'sfamiliar outline. If there were any vessels of the blockading fleet between us and the land, they certainly were off their stations and very close in under the shadow of the land. But the captain's eyesight was better than mine. In five minutes more he announced that he could see theBrooklyn, theNew York, and theIowa. "They're all there," he added after another look, "but some of them seem to be away out of position. TheNew Yorkis off Aguadores, and theBrooklynis half-way down to Aserraderos."
In fifteen minutes more it became apparent to us all that the height of the rampart and the mountains back of it, together with the crystalline clearness of the atmosphere, had led us to underestimate the distance, and that, when we first took alarm at the apparent absence of the blockading fleet, the war-ships were at least fifteen miles away, although the coast did not seem to be five. At such a distance the dull gray hulls of the vessels could hardly be seen, even if they were not below our horizon. With much lighter hearts, but with a feeling, nevertheless, that something of importance had occurred or was about to occur, we ran down alongside theIowa, hailed her through a megaphone, and asked if there was any news. "It's reported that they are fighting over there," replied the officer of the deck, waving his hand toward Santiago, "but we haven't any particulars." There was no smoke rising above the rampart in the direction of the city, we could hear no sound of cannonading, and I was more than half inclined to believe that the report of fighting at the front was premature; but whether this were so or not, theIowa, theTexas, theNew York, and all the warships near us were cleared for action; their officers seemed to be eagerly awaiting orders; Admiral Sampson's flagship was exchanging wigwag flag-signals with a man on the beach beyond the mouth of the Aguadores ravine, and it was perfectly evident that something was expected to happen. Under such circumstances, the thing for us to do was to get back, as speedily as possible, to Siboney. Turning in a great circle around theIowa, we steamed swiftly eastward along the coast, passing theNew York, theSuwanee, and theGloucester, which were lying, cleared for action, close under the walls of the Aguadores fort; exchanging greetings with the New York "Sun's" graceful despatch-boatKanapaha, which came hurrying westward as if bound for some important field of expected activity; and finally rounding to alongside theState of Texasin the Siboney cove.
There was nothing in the appearance of the village to indicate that a battle was in progress, or even in anticipation. Boats were going to and fro between the transports and the pier as usual; there was the usual crowd of Cuban ragamuffins and tatterdemalions on the beach, with a sprinkling of soldiers in the streets; everything seemed to be quiet on board theState of Texas, and I said to Mr. White, as I bade him good-by, that I did not believe we had missed anything after all.
We soon had evidence, however, that there was an engagement in progress off the coast, if not at the front. Between nine and ten o'clock in the morning heavy cannonading could be heard in the direction of Morro Castle, and great clouds of white smoke began to rise over a projecting point of the rampart which hid, from our point of view, the mouth of the Aguadores ravine. Anxious to see what was going on, I persuaded Miss Barton to let theState of Texasrun out of the cove and take some position from which we might witness the bombardment. Getting under way at once, we steamed out four or five miles in a west-southwest direction to a point about three miles off Aguadores, from which we could see the whole line of the coast. A column of infantry—the Thirty-third Michigan, I think, under command of General Duffield—had moved westward along the railroad under the rampart to the mouth of the Aguadores ravine, and was apparently engaged in attacking the enemy's position there under cover of Admiral Sampson's guns. We could not clearly follow the movements of the troops, for the reason that they were hidden, or partially hidden, by the bushes and trees, but we could see every movement made and every shot fired by the war-ships. TheGloucester, on the western side of the notch, was knocking to pieces the old stone fort half-way up the hill; theNew York, from a position directly in front of the railroad-bridge, was enfilading the ravine with four-and eight-inch shells; while theSuwanee, completely hidden most of the time in a great cloud of smoke, was close in to the mouth of the river, sweeping the whole adjacent region with a storm of projectiles from her rapid-fire and machine guns. I do not know whether the old Aguadores fort had any armament or not. Its sea face had been reduced to a heap of crumbled masonry before we reached the scene of action, and I did not afterward see a shot fired from it, nor a single soldier in or about it. Its offensive power—if it ever hadany—was so completely destroyed, that I momentarily expected General Duffield's troops to ford the river above the railroad-bridge and take undisputed possession of it. But the Michigan men were apparently prevented from doing so by the fire from some rifle-pits up the ravine, which the guns of the war-ships could not, or did not, wholly silence. We were not in a position, perhaps, to form a trustworthy judgment with regard to the strength of the Spaniards' defense; but it seemed to me that if the attack had been vigorously made and persistently followed up, the enemy might have been driven from the ravine. Admiral Sampson, in his report of the engagement, says that the Spaniards had no artillery except one small field-piece, which they fired only four or five times, and that not more than fifteen or twenty of them could be seen, at any time, in or about the rifle-pits. General Duffield, on the other hand, reports that they numbered five hundred, and that their artillery shelled the railroad track and the woods where his troops were until 3P.M.—about five hours. That their fire was not very destructive sufficiently appears from the fact that, in half a day of more or less continuous skirmishing, General Duffield lost only two men killed and six wounded.
Between three and four o'clock in the afternoon the Michigan troops returned by rail to Siboney; the war-ships withdrew to their blockading stations; and the field, as well as the honors, remained in possession of the Spaniards. After the engagement theState of Texasran close in to the shore, and we saw perhaps a dozen Spanish soldiers standing or walking on the hillside west of the ravine. There may have been more of them in the concealment of the woods; but my impression is that their force was very small, and that General Duffield, with the aid and support of the war-ships, should have been able to clear the ravine and take possession not only of the abandoned fort but of the commanding heights above it.
When we got back to Siboney, late in the afternoon, the village was full of rumors of heavy fighting in front of Santiago; and, an hour or two after dark, wounded men, some on foot and some in army wagons, began to arrive at the Siboney hospital from the distant field of battle. As they had all been disabled and sent to the rear in the early part of the day, they could give us no information with regard to the result of the engagement. Many of them had been wounded before they had seen a Spanish intrenchment, or even a Spanish soldier; and all they knew about the fight was that the army had moved forward at daybreak and they themselves had been shot in the woods by an enemy whom they could neither locate nor see.
The Siboney hospital, thanks to the devotion and unwearied energy of Major Lagarde and his assistants, was by this time in fairly good working order. There was a lack of blankets, pillows, and tentage, and the operating facilities, perhaps, were not as ample as they might have been; but in view of the extraordinary difficulties with which the surgeons had had to contend, the results were highly creditable to them, even if not wholly satisfactory to an observer. As fast as the wounded arrived, they walked, or were carried on stretchers, to two or three large tents, pitched end to end and opening into one another, where hospital stewards and nurses placed them on the tables, and the surgeons, some of them stripped naked to the waist, examined their injuries by candle-light, and performed such operations as were necessary to give them relief. They were then taken or led away, and, as far as possible, furnished with blankets and shelter; but as the supply of blankets was very short, and all the available houses and tents were soon filled, the wounded who came in after midnight were laid in a row on the ground and covered with a long strip of canvas. Fortunately, the night was clear, still, and warm, and a nearly full moon made it almostas light as day, so that it was not so cheerless and uncomfortable to lie out on the ground without a blanket as it would have been if the night had been dark and cold, or rainy; but it was bad enough.
Most of our Red Cross surgeons and nurses were assisting in the operating-tents, and I remained on shore until after three o'clock in the morning. There was little that I could do beyond looking up the wounded, who frequently came into the village on foot, after a painful march of ten or twelve miles, and were so weak, hungry, and exhausted that, instead of coming to the hospital, they lay down anywhere in the street or under the wall of a house. Some of these men I found, with the assistance of a friendly and sympathetic Cuban, and had them carried on litters to the operating-tents. All of the wounded who came back from the front that night ought to have had hot tea or coffee, and some such easily digested food as malted milk, as most of them had eaten nothing since the early morning and were worn out with pain and fatigue. But of course no provision had been made for supplying them even with hard bread and water, and when taken from the operating-tables they were simply laid on the ground, to get through the night as best they could without nourishment or drink. We all understand, of course, that, in the oft-quoted words of General Sherman, "war is hell"; but it might be made a little less hellish by adequate preparation for the reception and care of the wounded.
I went off to theState of Texasbetween three and four o'clock, and threw myself into my berth just as day was beginning to break over the hills east of the cove.