After the Guasimas fight on June 24, the army was advanced along the
single trail which leads from Siboney on the coast to Santiago. Two
streams of excellent water run parallel with this trail for short
distances, and some eight miles from the coast crossed it in two places.
Our outposts were stationed at the first of these fords, the Cuban
outposts a mile and a half farther on at the ford nearer Santiago, where
the stream made a sharp turn at a place called El Poso. Another mile and
a half of trail extended from El Poso to the trenches of San Juan. The
reader should remember El Poso, as it marked an important starting-point
against San Juan on the eventful first of July.
For six days the army was encamped on either side of the trail for three
miles back from the outposts. The regimental camps touched each other,
and all day long the pack-trains carrying the day's rations passed up and
down between them. The trail was a sunken wagon road, where it was
possible, in a few places, for two wagons to pass at one time, but the
greater distances were so narrow that there was but just room for a
wagon, or a loaded mule-train, to make its way. The banks of the trail
were three or four feet high, and when it rained it was converted into a
huge gutter, with sides of mud, and with a liquid mud a foot deep between
them. The camps were pitched along the trail as near the parallel stream
as possible, and in the occasional places where there was rich, high
grass. At night the men slept in dog tents, open at the front and back,
and during the day spent their time under the shade of trees along the
trail, or on the banks of the stream. Sentries were placed at every few
feet along these streams to guard them from any possible pollution. For
six days the army rested in this way, for as an army moves and acts only
on its belly, and as the belly of this army was three miles long, it
could advance but slowly.
This week of rest, after the cramped life of the troop-ship, was not
ungrateful, although the rations were scarce and there was no tobacco,
which was as necessary to the health of the men as their food.
During this week of waiting, the chief excitement was to walk out a mile
and a half beyond the outposts to the hill of El Poso, and look across
the basin that lay in the great valley which leads to Santiago. The left
of the valley was the hills which hide the sea. The right of the valley
was the hills in which nestle the village of El Caney. Below El Poso, in
the basin, the dense green forest stretched a mile and a half to the
hills of San Juan. These hills looked so quiet and sunny and well kept
that they reminded one of a New England orchard. There was a blue
bungalow on a hill to the right, a red bungalow higher up on the right,
and in the centre the block-house of San Juan, which looked like a
Chinese pagoda. Three-quarters of a mile behind them, with a dip
between, were the long white walls of the hospital and barracks of
Santiago, wearing thirteen Red Cross flags, and, as was pointed out to
the foreign attaches later, two six-inch guns a hundred yards in advance
of the Red Cross flags.
It was so quiet, so fair, and so prosperous looking that it breathed of
peace. It seemed as though one might, without accident, walk in and take
dinner at the Venus Restaurant, or loll on the benches in the Plaza, or
rock in one of the great bent-wood chairs around the patio of the Don
Carlos Club.
But, on the 27th of June, a long, yellow pit opened in the hill-side of
San Juan, and in it we could see straw sombreros rising and bobbing up
and down, and under the shade of the block-house, blue-coated Spaniards
strolling leisurely about or riding forth on little white ponies to
scamper over the hills. Officers of every regiment, _attaches_ of
foreign countries, correspondents, and staff officers daily reported the
fact that the rifle-pits were growing in length and in number, and that
in plain sight from the hill of El Poso the enemy was intrenching himself
at San Juan, and at the little village of El Caney to the right, where he
was marching through the streets. But no artillery was sent to El Poso
hill to drop a shell among the busy men at work among the trenches, or to
interrupt the street parades in El Caney. For four days before the
American soldiers captured the same rifle-pits at El Caney and San Juan,
with a loss of two thousand men, they watched these men diligently
preparing for their coming, and wondered why there was no order to
embarrass or to end these preparations.
On the afternoon of June 30, Captain Mills rode up to the tent of Colonel
Wood, and told him that on account of illness, General Wheeler and
General Young had relinquished their commands, and that General Sumner
would take charge of the Cavalry Division; that he, Colonel Wood, would
take command of General Young's brigade, and Colonel Carroll, of General
Sumner's brigade.
"You will break camp and move forward at four o'clock," he said. It was
then three o'clock, and apparently the order to move forward at four had
been given to each regiment at nearly the same time, for they all struck
their tents and stepped down into the trail together. It was as though
fifteen regiments were encamped along the sidewalks of Fifth Avenue and
were all ordered at the same moment to move into it and march downtown.
If Fifth Avenue were ten feet wide, one can imagine the confusion.
General Chaffee was at General Lawton's head-quarters, and they stood
apart whispering together about the march they were to take to El Caney.
Just over their heads the balloon was ascending for the first time and
its great glistening bulk hung just above the tree tops, and the men in
different regiments, picking their way along the trail, gazed up at it
open-mouthed. The head-quarters camp was crowded. After a week of
inaction the army, at a moment's notice, was moving forward, and every
one had ridden in haste to learn why.
There were _attaches_, in strange uniforms, self-important Cuban
generals, officers from the flagship _New York_, and an army of
photographers. At the side of the camp, double lines of soldiers passed
slowly along the two paths of the muddy road, while, between them, aides
dashed up and down, splashing them with dirty water, and shouting, "You
will come up at once, sir." "You will not attempt to enter the trail
yet, sir." "General Sumner's compliments, and why are you not in your
place?"
Twelve thousand men, with their eyes fixed on a balloon, and treading on
each other's heels in three inches of mud, move slowly, and after three
hours, it seemed as though every man in the United States was under arms
and stumbling and slipping down that trail. The lines passed until the
moon rose. They seemed endless, interminable; there were cavalry mounted
and dismounted, artillery with cracking whips and cursing drivers, Rough
Riders in brown, and regulars, both black and white, in blue. Midnight
came, and they were still stumbling and slipping forward.
General Sumner's head-quarters tent was pitched to the right of El Poso
hill. Below us lay the basin a mile and a half in length, and a mile and
a half wide, from which a white mist was rising. Near us, drowned under
the mist, seven thousand men were sleeping, and, farther to the right,
General Chaffee's five thousand were lying under the bushes along the
trails to El Caney, waiting to march on it and eat it up before
breakfast.
The place hardly needs a map to explain it. The trails were like a
pitchfork, with its prongs touching the hills of San Juan. The long
handle of the pitchfork was the trail over which we had just come, the
joining of the handle and the prongs were El Poso. El Caney lay half-way
along the right prong, the left one was the trail down which, in the
morning, the troops were to be hurled upon San Juan. It was as yet an
utterly undiscovered country. Three miles away, across the basin of
mist, we could see the street lamps of Santiago shining over the San Juan
hills. Above us, the tropical moon hung white and clear in the dark
purple sky, pierced with millions of white stars. As we turned in, there
was just a little something in the air which made saying "good-night" a
gentle farce, for no one went to sleep immediately, but lay looking up at
the stars, and after a long silence, and much restless turning on the
blanket which we shared together, the second lieutenant said: "So, if
anything happens to me, to-morrow, you'll see she gets them, won't you?"
Before the moon rose again, every sixth man who had slept in the mist
that night was either killed or wounded; but the second lieutenant was
sitting on the edge of a Spanish rifle-pit, dirty, sweaty, and weak for
food, but victorious, and the unknown she did not get them.
El Caney had not yet thrown off her blanket of mist before Capron's
battery opened on it from a ridge two miles in the rear. The plan for
the day was that El Caney should fall in an hour. The plan for the day
is interesting chiefly because it is so different from what happened.
According to the plan the army was to advance in two divisions along the
two trails. Incidentally, General Lawton's division was to pick up El
Caney, and when El Caney was eliminated, his division was to continue
forward and join hands on the right with the divisions of General Sumner
and General Kent. The army was then to rest for that night in the woods,
half a mile from San Juan.
On the following morning it was to attack San Juan on the two flanks,
under cover of artillery. The objection to this plan, which did not
apparently suggest itself to General Shafter, was that an army of twelve
thousand men, sleeping within five hundred yards of the enemy's
rifle-pits, might not unreasonably be expected to pass a bad night. As
we discovered the next day, not only the five hundred yards, but the
whole basin was covered by the fire from the rifle-pits. Even by
daylight, when it was possible to seek some slight shelter, the army
could not remain in the woods, but according to the plan it was expected
to bivouac for the night in those woods, and in the morning to manoeuvre
and deploy and march through them to the two flanks of San Juan. How the
enemy was to be hypnotized while this was going forward it is difficult
to understand.
According to this programme, Capron's battery opened on El Caney and
Grimes's battery opened on the pagoda-like block-house of San Juan. The
range from El Poso was exactly 2,400 yards, and the firing, as was
discovered later, was not very effective. The battery used black powder,
and, as a result, after each explosion the curtain of smoke hung over the
gun for fully a minute before the gunners could see the San Juan
trenches, which was chiefly important because for a full minute it gave a
mark to the enemy. The hill on which the battery stood was like a
sugar-loaf. Behind it was the farm-house of El Poso, the only building
in sight within a radius of a mile, and in it were Cuban soldiers and
other non-combatants. The Rough Riders had been ordered to halt in the
yard of the farm-house and the artillery horses were drawn up in it,
under the lee of the hill. The First and Tenth dismounted Cavalry were
encamped a hundred yards from the battery along the ridge. They might as
sensibly have been ordered to paint the rings in a target while a company
was firing at the bull's-eye. To our first twenty shots the enemy made
no reply; when they did it was impossible, owing to their using smokeless
powder, to locate their guns. Their third shell fell in among the Cubans
in the block-house and among the Rough Riders and the men of the First
and Tenth Cavalry, killing some and wounding many. These casualties were
utterly unnecessary and were due to the stupidity of whoever placed the
men within fifty yards of guns in action.
[Picture: Grime's battery at El Poso. The third Spanish shell fell in
among the Cubans in the block-house and among the Rough Riders]
A quarter of an hour after the firing began from El Poso one of General
Shafter's aides directed General Sumner to advance with his division down
the Santiago trail, and to halt at the edge of the woods.
"What am I to do then?" asked General Sumner.
"You are to await further orders," the aide answered.
As a matter of fact and history this was probably the last order General
Sumner received from General Shafter, until the troops of his division
had taken the San Juan hills, as it became impossible to get word to
General Shafter, the trail leading to his head-quarters tent, three miles
in the rear, being blocked by the soldiers of the First and Tenth
dismounted Cavalry, and later, by Lawton's division. General Sumner led
the Sixth, Third, and Ninth Cavalry and the Rough Riders down the trail,
with instructions for the First and Tenth to follow. The trail, virgin
as yet from the foot of an American soldier, was as wide as its narrowest
part, which was some ten feet across. At places it was as wide as
Broadway, but only for such short distances that it was necessary for the
men to advance in column, in double file. A maze of underbrush and trees
on either side was all but impenetrable, and when the officers and men
had once assembled into the basin, they could only guess as to what lay
before them, or on either flank. At the end of a mile the country became
more open, and General Sumner saw the Spaniards intrenched a half-mile
away on the sloping hills. A stream, called the San Juan River, ran
across the trail at this point, and another stream crossed it again two
hundred yards farther on. The troops were halted at this first stream,
some crossing it, and others deploying in single file to the right. Some
were on the banks of the stream, others at the edge of the woods in the
bushes. Others lay in the high grass which was so high that it stopped
the wind, and so hot that it almost choked and suffocated those who lay
in it.
The enemy saw the advance and began firing with pitiless accuracy into
the jammed and crowded trail and along the whole border of the woods.
There was not a single yard of ground for a mile to the rear which was
not inside the zone of fire. Our men were ordered not to return the fire
but to lie still and wait for further orders. Some of them could see the
rifle-pits of the enemy quite clearly and the men in them, but many saw
nothing but the bushes under which they lay, and the high grass which
seemed to burn when they pressed against it. It was during this period
of waiting that the greater number of our men were killed. For one hour
they lay on their rifles staring at the waving green stuff around them,
while the bullets drove past incessantly, with savage insistence, cutting
the grass again and again in hundreds of fresh places. Men in line
sprang from the ground and sank back again with a groan, or rolled to one
side clinging silently to an arm or shoulder. Behind the lines hospital
stewards passed continually, drawing the wounded back to the streams,
where they laid them in long rows, their feet touching the water's edge
and their bodies supported by the muddy bank. Up and down the lines, and
through the fords of the streams, mounted aides drove their horses at a
gallop, as conspicuous a target as the steeple on a church, and one after
another paid the price of his position and fell from his horse wounded or
dead. Captain Mills fell as he was giving an order, shot through the
forehead behind both eyes; Captain O'Neill, of the Rough Riders, as he
said, "There is no Spanish bullet made that can kill me." Steel, Swift,
Henry, each of them was shot out of his saddle.
Hidden in the trees above the streams, and above the trail,
sharp-shooters and guerillas added a fresh terror to the wounded. There
was no hiding from them. Their bullets came from every side. Their
invisible smoke helped to keep their hiding-places secret, and in the
incessant shriek of shrapnel and the spit of the Mausers, it was
difficult to locate the reports of their rifles. They spared neither the
wounded nor recognized the Red Cross; they killed the surgeons and the
stewards carrying the litters, and killed the wounded men on the litters.
A guerilla in a tree above us shot one of the Rough Riders in the breast
while I was helping him carry Captain Morton Henry to the
dressing-station, the ball passing down through him, and a second shot,
from the same tree, barely missed Henry as he lay on the ground where we
had dropped him. He was already twice wounded and so covered with blood
that no one could have mistaken his condition. The surgeons at work
along the stream dressed the wounds with one eye cast aloft at the trees.
It was not the Mauser bullets they feared, though they passed
continuously, but too high to do their patients further harm, but the
bullets of the sharp-shooters which struck fairly in among them,
splashing in the water and scattering the pebbles. The sounds of the two
bullets were as different as is the sharp pop of a soda-water bottle from
the buzzing of an angry wasp.
For a time it seemed as though every second man was either killed or
wounded; one came upon them lying behind the bush, under which they had
crawled with some strange idea that it would protect them, or crouched
under the bank of the stream, or lying on their stomachs and lapping up
the water with the eagerness of thirsty dogs. As to their suffering, the
wounded were magnificently silent, they neither complained nor groaned
nor cursed.
"I've got a punctured tire," was their grim answer to inquiries. White
men and colored men, veterans and recruits and volunteers, each lay
waiting for the battle to begin or to end so that he might be carried
away to safety, for the wounded were in as great danger after they were
hit as though they were in the firing line, but none questioned nor
complained.
I came across Lieutenant Roberts, of the Tenth Cavalry, lying under the
roots of a tree beside the stream with three of his colored troopers
stretched around him. He was shot through the intestines, and each of
the three men with him was shot in the arm or leg. They had been
overlooked or forgotten, and we stumbled upon them only by the accident
of losing our way. They had no knowledge as to how the battle was going
or where their comrades were or where the enemy was. At any moment, for
all they knew, the Spaniards might break through the bushes about them.
It was a most lonely picture, the young lieutenant, half naked, and wet
with his own blood, sitting upright beside the empty stream, and his
three followers crouching at his feet like three faithful watch-dogs,
each wearing his red badge of courage, with his black skin tanned to a
haggard gray, and with his eyes fixed patiently on the white lips of his
officer. When the white soldiers with me offered to carry him back to
the dressing-station, the negroes resented it stiffly. "If the
Lieutenant had been able to move, we would have carried him away long
ago," said the sergeant, quite overlooking the fact that his arm was
shattered.
"Oh, don't bother the surgeons about me," Roberts added, cheerfully.
"They must be very busy. I can wait."
As yet, with all these killed and wounded, we had accomplished
nothing--except to obey orders--which was to await further orders. The
observation balloon hastened the end. It came blundering down the trail,
and stopped the advance of the First and Tenth Cavalry, and was sent up
directly over the heads of our men to observe what should have been
observed a week before by scouts and reconnoitring parties. A balloon,
two miles to the rear, and high enough in the air to be out of range of
the enemy's fire may some day prove itself to be of use and value. But a
balloon on the advance line, and only fifty feet above the tops of the
trees, was merely an invitation to the enemy to kill everything beneath
it. And the enemy responded to the invitation. A Spaniard might
question if he could hit a man, or a number of men, hidden in the bushes,
but had no doubt at all as to his ability to hit a mammoth glistening
ball only six hundred yards distant, and so all the trenches fired at it
at once, and the men of the First and Tenth, packed together directly
behind it, received the full force of the bullets. The men lying
directly below it received the shrapnel which was timed to hit it, and
which at last, fortunately, did hit it. This was endured for an hour, an
hour of such hell of fire and heat, that the heat in itself, had there
been no bullets, would have been remembered for its cruelty. Men gasped
on their backs, like fishes in the bottom of a boat, their heads burning
inside and out, their limbs too heavy to move. They had been rushed here
and rushed there wet with sweat and wet with fording the streams, under a
sun that would have made moving a fan an effort, and they lay prostrate,
gasping at the hot air, with faces aflame, and their tongues sticking
out, and their eyes rolling. All through this the volleys from the
rifle-pits sputtered and rattled, and the bullets sang continuously like
the wind through the rigging in a gale, shrapnel whined and broke, and
still no order came from General Shafter.
Captain Howse, of General Sumner's staff, rode down the trail to learn
what had delayed the First and Tenth, and was hailed by Colonel Derby,
who was just descending from the shattered balloon.
"I saw men up there on those hills," Colonel Derby shouted; "they are
firing at our troops." That was part of the information contributed by
the balloon. Captain Howse's reply is lost to history.
General Kent's division, which, according to the plan, was to have been
held in reserve, had been rushed up in the rear of the First and Tenth,
and the Tenth had deployed in skirmish order to the right. The trail was
now completely blocked by Kent's division. Lawton's division, which was
to have re-enforced on the right, had not appeared, but incessant firing
from the direction of El Caney showed that he and Chaffee were fighting
mightily. The situation was desperate. Our troops could not retreat, as
the trail for two miles behind them was wedged with men. They could not
remain where they were, for they were being shot to pieces. There was
only one thing they could do--go forward and take the San Juan hills by
assault. It was as desperate as the situation itself. To charge
earthworks held by men with modern rifles, and using modern artillery,
until after the earthworks have been shaken by artillery, and to attack
them in advance and not in the flanks, are both impossible military
propositions. But this campaign had not been conducted according to
military rules, and a series of military blunders had brought seven
thousand American soldiers into a chute of death from which there was no
escape except by taking the enemy who held it by the throat and driving
him out and beating him down. So the generals of divisions and brigades
stepped back and relinquished their command to the regimental officers
and the enlisted men.
"We can do nothing more," they virtually said. "There is the enemy."
Colonel Roosevelt, on horseback, broke from the woods behind the line of
the Ninth, and finding its men lying in his way, shouted: "If you don't
wish to go forward, let my men pass." The junior officers of the Ninth,
with their negroes, instantly sprang into line with the Rough Riders, and
charged at the blue block-house on the right.
I speak of Roosevelt first because, with General Hawkins, who led Kent's
division, notably the Sixth and Sixteenth Regulars, he was, without
doubt, the most conspicuous figure in the charge. General Hawkins, with
hair as white as snow, and yet far in advance of men thirty years his
junior, was so noble a sight that you felt inclined to pray for his
safety; on the other hand, Roosevelt, mounted high on horseback, and
charging the rifle-pits at a gallop and quite alone, made you feel that
you would like to cheer. He wore on his sombrero a blue polka-dot
handkerchief, a la Havelock, which, as he advanced, floated out straight
behind his head, like a guidon. Afterward, the men of his regiment who
followed this flag, adopted a polka-dot handkerchief as the badge of the
Rough Riders. These two officers were notably conspicuous in the charge,
but no one can claim that any two men, or any one man, was more brave or
more daring, or showed greater courage in that slow, stubborn advance,
than did any of the others. Some one asked one of the officers if he had
any difficulty in making his men follow him. "No," he answered, "I had
some difficulty in keeping up with them." As one of the brigade generals
said: "San Juan was won by the regimental officers and men. We had as
little to do as the referee at a prize-fight who calls 'time.' We called
'time' and they did the fighting."
I have seen many illustrations and pictures of this charge on the San
Juan hills, but none of them seem to show it just as I remember it. In
the picture-papers the men are running uphill swiftly and gallantly, in
regular formation, rank after rank, with flags flying, their eyes aflame,
and their hair streaming, their bayonets fixed, in long, brilliant lines,
an invincible, overpowering weight of numbers. Instead of which I think
the thing which impressed one the most, when our men started from cover,
was that they were so few. It seemed as if some one had made an awful
and terrible mistake. One's instinct was to call to them to come back.
You felt that some one had blundered and that these few men were blindly
following out some madman's mad order. It was not heroic then, it seemed
merely absurdly pathetic. The pity of it, the folly of such a sacrifice
was what held you.
They had no glittering bayonets, they were not massed in regular array.
There were a few men in advance, bunched together, and creeping up a
steep, sunny hill, the tops of which roared and flashed with flame. The
men held their guns pressed across their chests and stepped heavily as
they climbed. Behind these first few, spreading out like a fan, were
single lines of men, slipping and scrambling in the smooth grass, moving
forward with difficulty, as though they were wading waist high through
water, moving slowly, carefully, with strenuous effort. It was much more
wonderful than any swinging charge could have been. They walked to greet
death at every step, many of them, as they advanced, sinking suddenly or
pitching forward and disappearing in the high grass, but the others waded
on, stubbornly, forming a thin blue line that kept creeping higher and
higher up the hill. It was as inevitable as the rising tide. It was a
miracle of self-sacrifice, a triumph of bull-dog courage, which one
watched breathless with wonder. The fire of the Spanish riflemen, who
still stuck bravely to their posts, doubled and trebled in fierceness,
the crests of the hills crackled and burst in amazed roars, and rippled
with waves of tiny flame. But the blue line crept steadily up and on,
and then, near the top, the broken fragments gathered together with a
sudden burst of speed, the Spaniards appeared for a moment outlined
against the sky and poised for instant flight, fired a last volley, and
fled before the swift-moving wave that leaped and sprang after them.
The men of the Ninth and the Rough Riders rushed to the block-house
together, the men of the Sixth, of the Third, of the Tenth Cavalry, of
the Sixth and Sixteenth Infantry, fell on their faces along the crest of
the hills beyond, and opened upon the vanishing enemy. They drove the
yellow silk flags of the cavalry and the flag of their country into the
soft earth of the trenches, and then sank down and looked back at the
road they had climbed and swung their hats in the air. And from far
overhead, from these few figures perched on the Spanish rifle-pits, with
their flags planted among the empty cartridges of the enemy, and
overlooking the walls of Santiago, came, faintly, the sound of a tired,
broken cheer.