THE LANDING AND ADVANCE OF THE ARMY
Early Sunday 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 the _State of Texas_ and 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
do nothing 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 the _State 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 the _State 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 in command 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 cooeperation, 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; but during 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 the _State of Texas_ from 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 transports _Saratoga_ and _Olivette_
during 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 the best
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 the _State 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
the _Olivette_, 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 had swept, 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 steamer _Olivette_, 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 the _State 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 the _State of Texas_ neglected 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 Texas_ arrived 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 they do 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 the
_Olivette_ would 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 the _State of Texas_ when 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 the _State of Texas_ reached 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 there _was_ a 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.