followed that first shell screaming toward the little Christmas toy
sitting in the sun on that distant little hill. And yet it was nothing.
Another and yet another mass of shrapnel went screaming, and still there
was no response, no sign. It was nothing--nothing at all. Was the
Spaniard asleep?
Crittenden could see attaché, correspondent, aid, staff-officer,
non-combatant, sight-seer crowding close about the guns--so close that
the gunners could hardly work. He could almost hear them saying, one to
another:
"Why, is this war--really war? Why, this isn't so bad."
Twanged just then a bow-string in the direction of San Juan hill, and
the twang seemed to be getting louder and to be coming toward the little
blue farm-house. No cannon was in sight; there was no smoke visible, and
many, with an upward look, wondered what the queer sound could be.
Suddenly there was a screeching, crackling answer in the air; the
atmosphere was rent apart as by a lightning stroke directly overhead.
The man and the horse by the blue wall dropped noiselessly to the earth.
A Rough Rider paled and limped down the hill and Blackford shook his
hand--a piece of shrapnel had fallen harmlessly on his wrist. On the
hill--Crittenden laughed as he looked--on the hill, nobody
ran--everybody tumbled. Besides the men at the guns, only two others
were left--civilians.
"You're a fool," said one.
"You're another."
"What'd you stay here for?"
"Because you did. What'd you stay for?"
"Because _you_ did."
Then they went down together--rapidly--and just in time. Another shell
shrieked. Two artillerymen and two sergeants dropped dead at their guns,
and a corporal fell, mortally wounded. A third burst in a group of
Cubans. Several of them flew out, killed or wounded, into the air; the
rest ran shrieking for the woods. Below, those woods began to move.
Under those shells started the impatient soldiers down that narrow lane
through the jungle, and with Reynolds and Abe Long on the "point" was
Crittenden, his Krag-Jorgensen across his breast--thrilled, for all the
world, as though he were on a hunt for big game.
* * * * *
And all the time the sound of ripping cloth was rolling over from Caney,
the far-away rumble of wagons over cobble-stones, or softened stage hail
and stage thunder around the block-house, stone fort, and town. At first
it was a desultory fire, like the popping of a bunch of fire-crackers
that have to be relighted several times, and Basil and Grafton,
galloping toward it, could hear the hiss of bullets that far away. But,
now and then, the fire was as steady as a Gatling-gun. Behind them the
artillery had turned on the stone fort, and Grafton saw one shot tear a
hole through the wall, then another, and another. He could see Spaniards
darting from the fort and taking refuge in the encircling stone-cut
trenches; and then nothing else--for their powder was smokeless--except
the straw hats of the little devils in blue, who blazed away from their
trenches around the fort and minded the shells bursting over and around
them as little as though they had been bursting snowballs. If the boy
ahead noted anything, Grafton could not tell. Basil turned his head
neither to right nor left, and at the foot of the muddy hill, the black
horse that he rode, without touch of spur, seemed suddenly to leave the
earth and pass on out of sight with the swift silence of a shadow. At
the foot of a hill walked the first wounded man--a Colonel limping
between two soldiers. The Colonel looked up smiling--he had a terrible
wound in the groin.
"Well," he called cheerily, "I'm the first victim."
Grafton wondered. Was it possible that men were going to behave on a
battlefield just as they did anywhere else--just as naturally--taking
wounds and death and horror as a matter of course? Beyond were more
wounded--the wounded who were able to help themselves. Soon he saw them
lying by the roadside, here and there a dead one; by and by, he struck a
battalion marching to storm a block-house. He got down, hitched his
horse a few yards from the road and joined it. He was wondering how it
would feel to be under fire, when just as they were crossing another
road, with a whir and whistle and buzz, a cloud of swift insects buzzed
over his head. Unconsciously imitating the soldiers near him, he bent
low and walked rapidly. Right and left of him sounded two or three low,
horrible crunching noises, and right and left of him two or three blue
shapes sank limply down on their faces. A sudden sickness seized him,
nauseating him like a fetid odour--the crunching noise was the sound of
a bullet crashing into a living human skull as the men bent forward.
One man, he remembered afterward, dropped with the quick grunt of an
animal--he was killed outright; another gave a gasping cry, "Oh,
God"--there was a moment of suffering consciousness for him; a third
hopped aside into the bushes--cursing angrily. Still another, as he
passed, looked up from the earth at him with a curious smile, as though
he were half ashamed of something.
"I've got it, partner," he said, "I reckon I've got it, sure." And
Grafton saw a drop of blood and the tiny mouth of a wound in his gullet,
where the flaps of his collar fell apart. He couldn't realize how he
felt--he was not interested any longer in how he felt. The instinct of
life was at work, and the instinct of self-defence. When the others
dropped, he dropped gladly; when they rose, he rose automatically. A
piece of brush, a bush, the low branch of a tree, a weed seemed to him
protection, and he saw others possessed with the same absurd idea. Once
the unworthy thought crossed his mind, when he was lying behind a squad
of soldiers and a little lower than they, that his chance was at least
better than theirs. And once, and only once--with a bitter sting of
shame--he caught himself dropping back a little, so that the same squad
should be between him and the enemy: and forthwith he stepped out into
the road, abreast with the foremost, cursing himself for a coward, and
thereafter took a savage delight in reckless exposure whenever it was
possible. And he soon saw that his position was a queer one, and an
unenviable one, as far as a cool test of nerve was the point at issue.
The officers, he saw, had their men to look after--orders to obey--their
minds were occupied. The soldiers were busy getting a shot at the
enemy--their minds, too, were occupied. It was his peculiar province to
stand up and be shot at without the satisfaction of shooting
back--studying his sensations, meanwhile, which were not particularly
pleasant, and studying the grewsome horrors about him. And it struck
him, too, that this was a ghastly business, and an unjustifiable, and
that if it pleased God to see him through he would never go to another
war except as a soldier. One consideration interested him and was
satisfactory. Nobody was shooting at him--nobody was shooting at anybody
in particular. If he were killed, or when anybody was killed, it was
merely accident, and it was thus pleasant to reflect that he was in as
much danger as anybody.
The firing was pretty hot now, and the wounded were too many to be
handled. A hospital man called out sharply:
"Give a hand here." Grafton gave a hand to help a poor fellow back to
the field hospital, in a little hollow, and when he reached the road
again that black horse and his boy rider were coming back like shadows,
through a rain of bullets, along the edge of the woods. Once the horse
plunged sidewise and shook his head angrily--a Mauser had stung him in
the neck--but the lad, pale and his eyes like stars, lifted him in a
flying leap over a barbed-wire fence and swung him into the road again.
"Damn!" said Grafton, simply.
Then rose a loud cheer from the battery on the hill, and, looking west,
he saw the war-balloon hung high above the trees and moving toward
Santiago. The advance had begun over there; there was the main
attack--the big battle. It was interesting and horrible enough where he
was, but Caney was not Santiago; and Grafton, too, mounted his horse and
galloped after Basil.
* * * * *
At head-quarters began the central lane of death that led toward San
Juan, and Basil picked his way through it at a slow walk--his excitement
gone for the moment and his heart breaking at the sight of the terrible
procession on its way to the rear. Men with arms in slings; men with
trousers torn away at the knee, and bandaged legs; men with brow, face,
mouth, or throat swathed; men with no shirts, but a broad swathe around
the chest or stomach--each bandage grotesquely pictured with human
figures printed to show how the wound should be bound, on whatever part
of the body the bullet entered. Men staggering along unaided, or between
two comrades, or borne on litters, some white and quiet, some groaning
and blood-stained, some conscious, some dying, some using a rifle for a
support, or a stick thrust through the side of a tomato-can. Rolls,
haversacks, blouses, hardtack, bibles, strewn by the wayside, where the
soldiers had thrown them before they went into action. It was curious,
but nearly all of the wounded were dazed and drunken in appearance,
except at the brows, which were tightly drawn with pain. There was one
man, with short, thick, upright red hair, stumbling from one side of the
road to the other, with no wound apparent, and muttering:
"Oh, I don't know what happened to me. I don't know what happened to
me."
Another, hopping across the creek on one leg--the other bare and
wounded--and using his gun, muzzle down, as a vaulting-pole. Another,
with his arm in the sling, pointing out the way.
"Take this road," he said. "I don't know where that one goes, but I know
this one. I went up this one, and brought back a _souvenir_," he added,
cheerily, shaking a bloody arm.
And everywhere men were cautioning him to beware of the guerillas, who
were in the trees, adding horror to the scene--shooting wounded men on
litters, hospital men, doctors. Once, there was almost the horror of a
panic in the crowded road. Soldiers answered the guerilla fire from the
road; men came running back; bullets spattered around.
Ahead, the road was congested with soldiers. Beyond them was anchored
the balloon, over the Bloody Ford--drawing the Spanish fire to the
troops huddled beneath it. There was the death-trap.
And, climbing from an ambulance to mount his horse, a little, bent old
man, weak and trembling from fever, but with his gentle blue eyes
glinting fire--Basil's hero--ex-Confederate Jerry Carter.
"Give the Yanks hell, boys," he shouted.
* * * * *
It had been a slow, toilsome march up that narrow lane of death, and, so
far, Crittenden had merely been sprinkled with Mauser and shrapnel. His
regiment had begun to deploy to the left, down the bed of a stream. The
negro cavalry and the Rough Riders were deploying to the right. Now
broke the storm. Imagine sheet after sheet of hailstones, coated with
polished steel, and swerved when close to the earth at a sharp angle to
the line of descent, and sweeping the air horizontally with an awful
hiss--swifter in flight than a peal of thunder from sky to earth, and
hardly less swift than the lightning flash that caused it.
"T-t-seu-u-u-h! T-t-seu-oo! T-t-seu-oo!"--they went like cloud after
cloud of lightning-winged insects, and passing, by God's mercy and the
Spaniard's bad marksmanship--passing high. Between two crashes, came a
sudden sputter, and some singing thing began to play up and down through
the trees, and to right and left, in a steady hum. It was a machine gun
playing for the range--like a mighty hose pipe, watering earth and trees
with a steady, spreading jet of hot lead. It was like some strange, huge
monster, unseeing and unseen, who knows where his prey is hidden and is
searching for it blindly--by feeling or by sense of smell--coming ever
nearer, showering the leaves down, patting into the soft earth ahead,
swishing to right and to left, and at last playing in a steady stream
about the prostrate soldiers.
"Swish-ee! Swish-ee! Swishee!"
"Whew!" said Abe Long.
"God!" said Reynolds.
Ah, ye scornful veterans of the great war. In ten minutes the Spaniard
let fly with his Mauser more bullets than did you fighting hard for two
long hours, and that one machine gun loosed more death stings in an hour
than did a regiment of you in two. And they were coming from
intrenchments on an all but vertical hill, from piles of unlimited
ammunition, and from soldiers who should have been as placid as the
earth under them for all the demoralization that hostile artillery fire
was causing them.
And not all of them passed high. After that sweep of glistening steel
rain along the edge of the woods rose the cry here, there, everywhere:
"Hospital man! hospital man!"
And here and there, in the steady pelt of bullets, went the quiet, brave
fellows with red crosses on their sleeves; across the creek, Crittenden
could see a tall, young doctor, bare-headed in the sun, stretching out
limp figures on the sand under the bank--could see him and his
assistants stripping off blouse and trousers and shirt, and wrapping and
binding, and newly wounded being ever brought in.
And behind forged soldiers forward, a tall aide at the ford urging them
across and stopping a panic among volunteers.
"Come back, you cowards--come back! Push 'em back, boys!"
A horse was crossing the stream. There was a hissing shriek in the air,
a geyser spouting from the creek, the remnants of a horse thrown upward,
and five men tossed in a swirl like straw: and, a moment later, a boy
feebly paddling towards the shore--while the water ran past him red with
blood. And, through it all, looking backward, Crittenden saw little
Carter coming on horseback, calm of face, calm of manner, with his hands
folded over his saddle, and his eyes looking upward--little Carter who
had started out in an ambulance that morning with a temperature of one
hundred and four, and, meeting wounded soldiers, gave up his wagon to
them, mounted his horse, and rode into battle--to come out normal at
dusk. And behind him--erect, proud, face aflame, eyes burning, but
hardly less cool--rode Basil. Crittenden's eyes filled with love and
pride for the boy.
"God bless him--God save him!"
* * * * *
A lull came--one of the curious lulls that come periodically in battle
for the reason that after any violent effort men must have a breathing
spell--and the mist of bullets swept on to the right like a swift
passing shower of rain.
There was a splash in the creek behind Crittenden, and someone fell on
his face behind the low bank with a fervent:
"Thank God, I've got this far!" It was Grafton.
"That nigger of yours is coming on somewhere back there," he added, and
presently he rose and calmly peered over the bank and at the line of
yellow dirt on the crest of the hill. A bullet spat in the ground close
by.
"That hit you?" he asked, without altering the tone of his
voice--without even lowering his glasses.
Reynolds, on his right, had ducked quickly. Crittenden looked up in
surprise. The South had no monopoly of nerve--nor, in that campaign, the
soldier.
"Well, by God," said Reynolds, irritably--the bullet had gone through
his sleeve. "This ain't no time to joke."
Grafton's face was still calm--he was still looking. Presently he turned
and beckoned to somebody in the rear.
"There he is, now."
Looking behind, Crittenden had to laugh. There was Bob, in a
cavalryman's hat, with a Krag-Jorgensen in his hand, and an ammunition
belt buckled around him.
As he started toward Grafton, a Lieutenant halted him.
"Why aren't you with your regiment?" he demanded sharply.
"I ain't got no regiment. I'se looking fer Ole Captain."
"Get back into your regiment," said the officer, with an oath, and
pointing behind to the Tenth Coloured Cavalry coming up.
"Huh!" he said, looking after the officer a moment, and then he came on
to the edge of the creek.
"Go to the rear, Bob," shouted Crittenden, sharply, and the next moment
Bob was crashing through the bushes to the edge of the creek.
"Foh Gawd, Ole Cap'n, I sutn'ly is glad to fine you. I wish you'd jes
show me how to wuk this gun. I'se gwine to fight right side o' you--you
heah me."
"Go back, Bob," said Crittenden, firmly.
"Silence in the ranks," roared a Lieutenant. Bob hesitated. Just then a
company of the Tenth Cavalry filed down the road as they were deployed
to the right. Crittenden's file of soldiers could see that the last man
was a short, fat darky--evidently a recruit--and he was swinging along
as jauntily as in a cake-walk. As he wheeled pompously, he dropped his
gun, leaped into the air with a yell of amazed rage and pain, catching
at the seat of his trousers with both hands. A bullet had gone through
both buttocks.
"Gawd, Ole Cap'n, did you see dat nigger?"
A roar of laughter went down the bed of the creek.
"Go back!" repeated Crittenden, threateningly, "and stop calling me Old
Captain." Bob looked after the file of coloured troops, and then at
Crittenden.
"All right, Ole Cap'n; I tol' you in ole Kentuck that I gwine to fight
wid the niggers ef you don't lemme fight wid you. I don't like
disgracin' the family dis way, but 'tain't my fault, an' s'pose you git
shot--" the slap of the flat side of a sword across Bob's back made him
jump.
"What are you doing here?" thundered an angry officer." Get into
line--get into line."
"I ain't no sojer."
"Get into line," and Bob ran after the disappearing file, shaking his
head helplessly.
The crash started again, and the hum of bees and the soft snap of the
leaves when bullets clipped them like blows with a rattan cane, and the
rattling sputter of the machine guns, and once more came that long, long
wait that tries the soldier's heart, nerve, and brain.
"Why was not something done--why?"
And again rose the cry for the hospital men, and again the limp figures
were brought in from the jungle, and he could see the tall doctor with
the bare head helping the men who had been dressed with a first-aid
bandage to the protecting bank of the creek farther up, to make room for
the fresh victims. And as he stood up once, Crittenden saw him throw his
hand quickly up to his temple and sink to the blood-stained sand. The
assistant, who bent over him, looked up quickly and shook his head to
another, who was binding a wounded leg and looking anxiously to know the
fatal truth.
"I've got it," said a soldier to Crittenden's left; joyously, he said
it, for the bullet had merely gone through his right shoulder. He could
fight no more, he had a wound and he could wear a scar to his grave.
"So have I," said another, with a groan. And then next him there was a
sudden, soft thud:
"T-h-u-p!" It was the sound of a bullet going into thick flesh, and the
soldier sprang to his feet--the impulse seemed uncontrollable for the
wounded to spring to their feet--and dropped with a groan--dead.
Crittenden straightened him out sadly--putting his hat over his face and
drawing his arms to his sides. Above, he saw with sudden nausea,
buzzards circling--little cared they whether the dead were American or
Spaniard, as long as there were eyes to pluck and lips to tear away, and
then straightway, tragedy merged into comedy as swiftly as on a stage.
Out of the woods across the way emerged a detail of negro troopers--sent
to clear the woods behind of sharpshooters--and last came Bob. The
detail, passing along the creek on the other bank from them, scattered,
and with Bob next the creek. Bob shook his gun aloft.
"I can wuk her now!"
Another lull came, and from the thicket arose the cry of a thin, high,
foreign voice:
"Americano--Americano!"
"Whut regiment you b'long to?" the voice was a negro's and was Bob's,
and Grafton and Crittenden listened keenly. Bob had evidently got a
sharpshooter up a tree, and caught him loading his gun.
"Tenth Cav'rly--Tenth!" was the answer. Bob laughed long and loud.
"Well, you jus the man I been lookin' fer--the fust white man I ever
seed whut 'longed to a nigger regiment. Come down, honey." There was the
sharp, clean crack of a Krag-Jorgensen, and a yell of savage triumph.
"That nigger's a bird," said Grafton.
Something serious was going to be done now--the intuition of it ran down
the line in that mysterious fashion by which information passes down a
line of waiting men. The line rose, advanced, and dropped again.
Companies deployed to the left and behind--fighting their way through
the chaparral as a swimmer buffets his way through choppy waves. Every
man saw now that the brigade was trying to form in line of battle for a
charge on that curving, smokeless flame of fire that ran to and fro
around the top of the hill--blazing fiercely and steadily here and
there. For half an hour the officers struggled to form the scattering
men. Forward a little way; slipping from one bush and tree to another;
through the thickets and bayonet grass; now creeping; now a dash through
an open spot; now flat on the stomach, until Crittenden saw a wire fence
stretching ahead. Followed another wait. And then a squad of negro
troopers crossed the road, going to the right, and diagonally. The
bullets rained about them, and they scuttled swiftly into the brush. The
hindmost one dropped; the rest kept on, unseeing; but Crittenden saw a
Lieutenant--it was Sharpe, whom he had met at home and at
Chickamauga--look back at the soldier, who was trying to raise himself
on his elbow--while the bullets seemed literally to be mowing down the
tall grass about him. Then Crittenden heard a familiar grunt behind him,
and the next minute Bob's figure sprang out into the open--making for
the wounded man by the sympathy of race. As he stooped, to Crittenden's
horror, Bob pitched to the ground--threshing around like an animal that
has received a blow on the head. Without a thought, without
consciousness of his own motive or his act, Crittenden sprang to his
feet and dashed for Bob. Within ten feet of the boy, his toe caught in a
root and he fell headlong. As he scrambled to his feet, he saw Sharpe
making for him--thinking that he had been shot down--and, as he turned,
with Bob in his arms, half a dozen men, including Grafton and his own
Lieutenant, were retreating back into cover--all under the same impulse
and with the same motive having started for him, too. Behind a tree,
Crittenden laid Bob down, still turning his head from side to side
helplessly. There was a trail of blood across his temple, and, wiping it
away, he saw that the bullet had merely scraped along the skull without
penetrating it. In a moment, Bob groaned, opened his eyes, sat up,
looked around with rolling eyes, grunted once or twice, straightened
out, and reached for his gun, shaking his head.
"Gimme drink, Ole Cap'n, please, suh."
Crittenden handed him his canteen, and Bob drank and rose unsteadily to
his feet.
"Dat ain't nuttin'," he said, contemptuously, feeling along the wound.
"'Tain't nigh as bad as mule kick. 'Tain't nuttin', 't all." And then he
almost fell.
"Go back, Bob."
"All right, Ole Cap'n, I reckon I'll jus' lay down heah little while,"
he said, stretching out behind the tree.
And Grafton reached over for Crittenden's hand. He was getting some new
and startling ideas about the difference in the feeling toward the negro
of the man who once owned him body and soul and of the man who freed him
body and soul. And in the next few minutes he studied Crittenden as he
had done before--taking in detail the long hair, lean face strongly
chiselled, fearless eye, modest demeanour--marking the intellectual look
of the face--it was the face of a student--a gentleman--gently born.
And, there in the heat of the fight, he fell to marvelling over the
nation that had such a man to send into the field as a common soldier.
Again they moved forward. Crittenden's Lieutenant dropped--wounded.
"Go on," he cried, "damn it, go on!"
Grafton helped to carry him back, stepping out into the open for him,
and Crittenden saw a bullet lick up the wet earth between the
correspondent's feet.
Forward again! It was a call for volunteers to advance and cut the
wires. Crittenden was the first to spring to his feet, and Abe Long and
Reynolds sprang after him. Forward they slipped on their bellies, and
the men behind saw one brown, knotty hand after another reach up from
the grass and clip, clip, clip through the thickly braided wires.