A WALK TO THE FRONT
When I went on deck, the morning after our return to Siboney, I found
that the _State of Texas_ had 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 miles farther 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 the _State of Texas_ got 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 the
front 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 one of 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, pinon-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 the greater 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. If he 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 hundred
yards 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,
light yellow, 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 well keep 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 the _State of Texas_ waiting at the pier, we got on board in time
for dinner, after a walk of sixteen or eighteen miles.