Books: Notes of a War Correspondent
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Richard Harding Davis >> Notes of a War Correspondent
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12 NOTES OF A WAR CORRESPONDENT
Contents:
The Cuban-Spanish War
The Death of Rodriguez
The Greek-Turkish War
The Battle of Velestinos
The Spanish-American War
I. The Rough Riders at Guasimas
II. The Battle of San Juan Hill
III. The Taking of Coamo
IV. The Passing of San Juan Hill
The South African War
I. With Buller's Column
II. The Relief of Ladysmith
III. The Night Before the Battle
The Japanese-Russian War
Battles I did not see
A War Correspondent's Kit
THE CUBAN-SPANISH WAR: THE DEATH OF RODRIGUEZ {1}
Adolfo Rodriguez was the only son of a Cuban farmer, who lived nine
miles outside of Santa Clara, beyond the hills that surround that
city to the north.
When the revolution in Cuba broke out young Rodriguez joined the
insurgents, leaving his father and mother and two sisters at the
farm. He was taken, in December of 1896, by a force of the Guardia
Civile, the corps d'elite of the Spanish army, and defended himself
when they tried to capture him, wounding three of them with his
machete.
He was tried by a military court for bearing arms against the
government, and sentenced to be shot by a fusillade some morning
before sunrise.
Previous to execution he was confined in the military prison of Santa
Clara with thirty other insurgents, all of whom were sentenced to be
shot, one after the other, on mornings following the execution of
Rodriguez.
His execution took place the morning of the 19th of January, 1897, at
a place a half-mile distant from the city, on the great plain that
stretches from the forts out to the hills, beyond which Rodriguez had
lived for nineteen years. At the time of his death he was twenty
years old.
I witnessed his execution, and what follows is an account of the way
he went to his death. The young man's friends could not be present,
for it was impossible for them to show themselves in that crowd and
that place with wisdom or without distress, and I like to think that,
although Rodriguez could not know it, there was one person present
when he died who felt keenly for him, and who was a sympathetic
though unwilling spectator.
There had been a full moon the night preceding the execution, and
when the squad of soldiers marched from town it was still shining
brightly through the mists. It lighted a plain two miles in extent,
broken by ridges and gullies and covered with thick, high grass, and
with bunches of cactus and palmetto. In the hollow of the ridges the
mist lay like broad lakes of water, and on one side of the plain
stood the walls of the old town. On the other rose hills covered
with royal palms that showed white in the moonlight, like hundreds of
marble columns. A line of tiny camp-fires that the sentries had
built during the night stretched between the forts at regular
intervals and burned clearly.
But as the light grew stronger and the moonlight faded these were
stamped out, and when the soldiers came in force the moon was a white
ball in the sky, without radiance, the fires had sunk to ashes, and
the sun had not yet risen.
So even when the men were formed into three sides of a hollow square,
they were scarcely able to distinguish one another in the uncertain
light of the morning.
There were about three hundred soldiers in the formation. They
belonged to the volunteers, and they deployed upon the plain with
their band in front playing a jaunty quickstep, while their officers
galloped from one side to the other through the grass, seeking a
suitable place for the execution. Outside the line the band still
played merrily.
A few men and boys, who had been dragged out of their beds by the
music, moved about the ridges behind the soldiers, half-clothed,
unshaven, sleepy-eyed, yawning, stretching themselves nervously and
shivering in the cool, damp air of the morning.
Either owing to discipline or on account of the nature of their
errand, or because the men were still but half awake, there was no
talking in the ranks, and the soldiers stood motionless, leaning on
their rifles, with their backs turned to the town, looking out across
the plain to the hills.
The men in the crowd behind them were also grimly silent. They knew
that whatever they might say would be twisted into a word of sympathy
for the condemned man or a protest against the government. So no one
spoke; even the officers gave their orders in gruff whispers, and the
men in the crowd did not mix together, but looked suspiciously at one
another and kept apart.
As the light increased a mass of people came hurrying from the town
with two black figures leading them, and the soldiers drew up at
attention, and part of the double line fell back and left an opening
in the square.
With us a condemned man walks only the short distance from his cell
to the scaffold or the electric chair, shielded from sight by the
prison walls, and it often occurs even then that the short journey is
too much for his strength and courage.
But the Spaniards on this morning made the prisoner walk for over a
half-mile across the broken surface of the fields. I expected to
find the man, no matter what his strength at other times might be,
stumbling and faltering on this cruel journey; but as he came nearer
I saw that he led all the others, that the priests on either side of
him were taking two steps to his one, and that they were tripping on
their gowns and stumbling over the hollows in their efforts to keep
pace with him as he walked, erect and soldierly, at a quick step in
advance of them.
He had a handsome, gentle face of the peasant type, a light, pointed
beard, great wistful eyes, and a mass of curly black hair. He was
shockingly young for such a sacrifice, and looked more like a
Neapolitan than a Cuban. You could imagine him sitting on the quay
at Naples or Genoa lolling in the sun and showing his white teeth
when he laughed. Around his neck, hanging outside his linen blouse,
he wore a new scapular.
It seems a petty thing to have been pleased with at such a time, but
I confess to have felt a thrill of satisfaction when I saw, as the
Cuban passed me, that he held a cigarette between his lips, not
arrogantly nor with bravado, but with the nonchalance of a man who
meets his punishment fearlessly, and who will let his enemies see
that they can kill but cannot frighten him.
It was very quickly finished, with rough and, but for one frightful
blunder, with merciful swiftness. The crowd fell back when it came
to the square, and the condemned man, the priests, and the firing
squad of six young volunteers passed in and the line closed behind
them.
The officer who had held the cord that bound the Cuban's arms behind
him and passed across his breast, let it fall on the grass and drew
his sword, and Rodriguez dropped his cigarette from his lips and bent
and kissed the cross which the priest held up before him.
The elder of the priests moved to one side and prayed rapidly in a
loud whisper, while the other, a younger man, walked behind the
firing squad and covered his face with his hands. They had both
spent the last twelve hours with Rodriguez in the chapel of the
prison.
The Cuban walked to where the officer directed him to stand, and
turning his back on the square, faced the hills and the road across
them, which led to his father's farm.
As the officer gave the first command he straightened himself as far
as the cords would allow, and held up his head and fixed his eyes
immovably on the morning light, which had just begun to show above
the hills.
He made a picture of such pathetic helplessness, but of such courage
and dignity, that he reminded me on the instant of that statue of
Nathan Hale which stands in the City Hall Park, above the roar of
Broadway. The Cuban's arms were bound, as are those of the statue,
and he stood firmly, with his weight resting on his heels like a
soldier on parade, and with his face held up fearlessly, as is that
of the statue. But there was this difference, that Rodriguez, while
probably as willing to give six lives for his country as was the
American rebel, being only a peasant, did not think to say so, and he
will not, in consequence, live in bronze during the lives of many
men, but will be remembered only as one of thirty Cubans, one of whom
was shot at Santa Clara on each succeeding day at sunrise.
The officer had given the order, the men had raised their pieces, and
the condemned man had heard the clicks of the triggers as they were
pulled back, and he had not moved. And then happened one of the most
cruelly refined, though unintentional, acts of torture that one can
very well imagine. As the officer slowly raised his sword,
preparatory to giving the signal, one of the mounted officers rode up
to him and pointed out silently that, as I had already observed with
some satisfaction, the firing squad were so placed that when they
fired they would shoot several of the soldiers stationed on the
extreme end of the square.
Their captain motioned his men to lower their pieces, and then walked
across the grass and laid his hand on the shoulder of the waiting
prisoner.
It is not pleasant to think what that shock must have been. The man
had steeled himself to receive a volley of bullets. He believed that
in the next instant he would be in another world; he had heard the
command given, had heard the click of the Mausers as the locks
caught--and then, at that supreme moment, a human hand had been laid
upon his shoulder and a voice spoke in his ear.
You would expect that any man, snatched back to life in such a
fashion would start and tremble at the reprieve, or would break down
altogether, but this boy turned his head steadily, and followed with
his eyes the direction of the officer's sword, then nodded gravely,
and, with his shoulders squared, took up the new position,
straightened his back, and once more held himself erect.
As an exhibition of self-control this should surely rank above feats
of heroism performed in battle, where there are thousands of comrades
to give inspiration. This man was alone, in sight of the hills he
knew, with only enemies about him, with no source to draw on for
strength but that which lay within himself.
The officer of the firing squad, mortified by his blunder, hastily
whipped up his sword, the men once more levelled their rifles, the
sword rose, dropped, and the men fired. At the report the Cuban's
head snapped back almost between his shoulders, but his body fell
slowly, as though some one had pushed him gently forward from behind
and he had stumbled.
He sank on his side in the wet grass without a struggle or sound, and
did not move again.
It was difficult to believe that he meant to lie there, that it could
be ended so without a word, that the man in the linen suit would not
rise to his feet and continue to walk on over the hills, as he
apparently had started to do, to his home; that there was not a
mistake somewhere, or that at least some one would be sorry or say
something or run to pick him up.
But, fortunately, he did not need help, and the priests returned--the
younger one with the tears running down his face--and donned their
vestments and read a brief requiem for his soul, while the squad
stood uncovered, and the men in hollow square shook their
accoutrements into place, and shifted their pieces and got ready for
the order to march, and the band began again with the same quickstep
which the fusillade had interrupted.
The figure still lay on the grass untouched, and no one seemed to
remember that it had walked there of itself, or noticed that the
cigarette still burned, a tiny ring of living fire, at the place
where the figure had first stood.
The figure was a thing of the past, and the squad shook itself like a
great snake, and then broke into little pieces and started off
jauntily, stumbling in the high grass and striving to keep step to
the music.
The officers led it past the figure in the linen suit, and so close
to it that the file closers had to part with the column to avoid
treading on it. Each soldier as he passed turned and looked down on
it, some craning their necks curiously, others giving a careless
glance, and some without any interest at all, as they would have
looked at a house by the roadside, or a hole in the road.
One young soldier caught his foot in a trailing vine, just opposite
to it, and fell. He grew very red when his comrades giggled at him
for his awkwardness. The crowd of sleepy spectators fell in on
either side of the band. They, too, had forgotten it, and the
priests put their vestments back in the bag and wrapped their heavy
cloaks about them, and hurried off after the others.
Every one seemed to have forgotten it except two men, who came slowly
towards it from the town, driving a bullock-cart that bore an
unplaned coffin, each with a cigarette between his lips, and with his
throat wrapped in a shawl to keep out the morning mists.
At that moment the sun, which had shown some promise of its coming in
the glow above the hills, shot up suddenly from behind them in all
the splendor of the tropics, a fierce, red disk of heat, and filled
the air with warmth and light.
The bayonets of the retreating column flashed in it, and at the sight
a rooster in a farm-yard near by crowed vigorously, and a dozen
bugles answered the challenge with the brisk, cheery notes of the
reveille, and from all parts of the city the church bells jangled out
the call for early mass, and the little world of Santa Clara seemed
to stretch itself and to wake to welcome the day just begun.
But as I fell in at the rear of the procession and looked back, the
figure of the young Cuban, who was no longer a part of the world of
Santa Clara, was asleep in the wet grass, with his motionless arms
still tightly bound behind him, with the scapular twisted awry across
his face, and the blood from his breast sinking into the soil he had
tried to free.
THE GREEK-TURKISH WAR: THE BATTLE OF VELESTINOS {2}
The Turks had made three attacks on Velestinos on three different
days, and each time had been repulsed. A week later, on the 4th of
May, they came back again, to the number of ten thousand, and brought
four batteries with them, and the fighting continued for two more
days. This was called the second battle of Velestinos. In the
afternoon of the 5th the Crown Prince withdrew from Pharsala to take
up a stronger position at Domokos, and the Greeks under General
Smolenski, the military hero of the campaign, were forced to retreat,
and the Turks came in, and, according to their quaint custom, burned
the village and marched on to Volo. John Bass, the American
correspondent, and myself were keeping house in the village, in the
home of the mayor. He had fled from the town, as had nearly all the
villagers; and as we liked the appearance of his house, I gave Bass a
leg up over the wall around his garden, and Bass opened the gate, and
we climbed in through his front window. It was like the invasion of
the home of the Dusantes by Mrs. Lecks and Mrs. Aleshine, and, like
them, we were constantly making discoveries of fresh treasure-trove.
Sometimes it was in the form of a cake of soap or a tin of coffee,
and once it was the mayor's fluted petticoats, which we tried on, and
found very heavy. We could not discover what he did for pockets.
All of these things, and the house itself, were burned to ashes, we
were told, a few hours after we retreated, and we feel less troubled
now at having made such free use of them.
On the morning of the 4th we were awakened by the firing of cannon
from a hill just over our heads, and we met in the middle of the room
and solemnly shook hands. There was to be a battle, and we were the
only correspondents on the spot. As I represented the London Times,
Bass was the only representative of an American newspaper who saw
this fight from its beginning to its end.
We found all the hills to the left of the town topped with long lines
of men crouching in little trenches. There were four rows of hills.
If you had measured the distance from one hill-top to the next, they
would have been from one hundred to three hundred yards distant from
one another. In between the hills were gullies, or little valleys,
and the beds of streams that had dried up in the hot sun. These
valleys were filled with high grass that waved about in the breeze
and was occasionally torn up and tossed in the air by a shell. The
position of the Greek forces was very simple. On the top of each
hill was a trench two or three feet deep and some hundred yards long.
The earth that had been scooped out to make the trench was packed on
the edge facing the enemy, and on the top of that some of the men had
piled stones, through which they poked their rifles. When a shell
struck the ridge it would sometimes scatter these stones in among the
men, and they did quite as much damage as the shells. Back of these
trenches, and down that side of the hill which was farther from the
enemy, were the reserves, who sprawled at length in the long grass,
and smoked and talked and watched the shells dropping into the gully
at their feet.
The battle, which lasted two days, opened in a sudden and terrific
storm of hail. But the storm passed as quickly as it came, leaving
the trenches running with water, like the gutters of a city street
after a spring shower; and the men soon sopped them up with their
overcoats and blankets, and in half an hour the sun had dried the wet
uniforms, and the field-birds had begun to chirp again, and the grass
was warm and fragrant. The sun was terribly hot. There was no other
day during that entire brief campaign when its glare was so intense
or the heat so suffocating. The men curled up in the trenches, with
their heads pressed against the damp earth, panting and breathing
heavily, and the heat-waves danced and quivered about them, making
the plain below flicker like a picture in a cinematograph.
From time to time an officer would rise and peer down into the great
plain, shading his eyes with his hands, and shout something at them,
and they would turn quickly in the trench and rise on one knee. And
at the shout that followed they would fire four or five rounds
rapidly and evenly, and then, at a sound from the officer's whistle,
would drop back again and pick up the cigarettes they had placed in
the grass and begin leisurely to swab out their rifles with a piece
of dirty rag on a cleaning rod. Down in the plain below there was
apparently nothing at which they could shoot except the great shadows
of the clouds drifting across the vast checker-board of green and
yellow fields, and disappearing finally between the mountain passes
beyond. In some places there were square dark patches that might
have been bushes, and nearer to us than these were long lines of
fresh earth, from which steam seemed to be escaping in little wisps.
What impressed us most of what we could see of the battle then was
the remarkable number of cartridges the Greek soldiers wasted in
firing into space, and the fact that they had begun to fire at such
long range that, in order to get the elevation, they had placed the
rifle butt under the armpit instead of against the shoulder. Their
sights were at the top notch. The cartridges reminded one of corn-
cobs jumping out of a corn-sheller, and it was interesting when the
bolts were shot back to see a hundred of them pop up into the air at
the same time, flashing in the sun as though they were glad to have
done their work and to get out again. They rolled by the dozens
underfoot, and twinkled in the grass, and when one shifted his
position in the narrow trench, or stretched his cramped legs, they
tinkled musically. It was like wading in a gutter filled with
thimbles.
Then there began a concert which came from just overhead--a concert
of jarring sounds and little whispers. The "shrieking shrapnel," of
which one reads in the description of every battle, did not seem so
much like a shriek as it did like the jarring sound of telegraph
wires when some one strikes the pole from which they hang, and when
they came very close the noise was like the rushing sound that rises
between two railroad trains when they pass each other in opposite
directions and at great speed. After a few hours we learned by
observation that when a shell sang overhead it had already struck
somewhere else, which was comforting, and which was explained, of
course, by the fact that the speed of the shell is so much greater
than the rate at which sound travels. The bullets were much more
disturbing; they seemed to be less open in their warfare, and to
steal up and sneak by, leaving no sign, and only to whisper as they
passed. They moved under a cloak of invisibility, and made one feel
as though he were the blind man in a game of blind-man's-buff, where
every one tapped him in passing, leaving him puzzled and ignorant as
to whither they had gone and from what point they would come next.
The bullets sounded like rustling silk, or like humming-birds on a
warm summer's day, or like the wind as it is imitated on the stage of
a theatre. Any one who has stood behind the scenes when a storm is
progressing on the stage, knows the little wheel wound with silk that
brushes against another piece of silk, and which produces the
whistling effect of the wind. At Velestinos, when the firing was
very heavy, it was exactly as though some one were turning one of
these silk wheels, and so rapidly as to make the whistling
continuous.
When this concert opened, the officers shouted out new orders, and
each of the men shoved his sight nearer to the barrel, and when he
fired again, rubbed the butt of his gun snugly against his shoulder.
The huge green blotches on the plain had turned blue, and now we
could distinguish that they moved, and that they were moving steadily
forward. Then they would cease to move, and a little later would be
hidden behind great puffs of white smoke, which were followed by a
flash of flame; and still later there would come a dull report. At
the same instant something would hurl itself jarring through the air
above our heads, and by turning on one elbow we could see a sudden
upheaval in the sunny landscape behind us, a spurt of earth and
stones like a miniature geyser, which was filled with broken branches
and tufts of grass and pieces of rock. As the Turkish aim grew
better these volcanoes appeared higher up the hill, creeping nearer
and nearer to the rampart of fresh earth on the second trench until
the shells hammered it at last again and again, sweeping it away and
cutting great gashes in it, through which we saw the figures of men
caught up and hurled to one side, and others flinging themselves face
downward as though they were diving into water; and at the same
instant in our own trench the men would gasp as though they had been
struck too, and then becoming conscious of having done this would
turn and smile sheepishly at each other, and crawl closer into the
burrows they had made in the earth.
From where we sat on the edge of the trench, with our feet among the
cartridges, we could, by leaning forward, look over the piled-up
earth into the plain below, and soon, without any aid from field-
glasses, we saw the blocks of blue break up into groups of men.
These men came across the ploughed fields in long, widely opened
lines, walking easily and leisurely, as though they were playing golf
or sowing seed in the furrows.
The Greek rifles crackled and flashed at the lines, but the men below
came on quite steadily, picking their way over the furrows and
appearing utterly unconscious of the seven thousand rifles that were
calling on them to halt. They were advancing directly toward a
little sugar-loaf hill, on the top of which was a mountain battery
perched like a tiara on a woman's head. It was throwing one shell
after another in the very path of the men below, but the Turks still
continued to pick their way across the field, without showing any
regard for the mountain battery. It was worse than threatening; it
seemed almost as though they meant to insult us. If they had come up
on a run they would not have appeared so contemptuous, for it would
have looked then as though they were trying to escape the Greek fire,
or that they were at least interested in what was going forward. But
the steady advance of so many men, each plodding along by himself,
with his head bowed and his gun on his shoulder, was aggravating.
There was a little village at the foot of the hill. It was so small
that no one had considered it. It was more like a collection of
stables gathered round a residence than a town, and there was a wall
completely encircling it, with a gate in the wall that faced us.
Suddenly the doors of this gate were burst open from the inside, and
a man in a fez ran through them, followed by many more. The first
man was waving a sword, and a peasant in petticoats ran at his side
and pointed up with his hand at our trench. Until that moment the
battle had lacked all human interest; we might have been watching a
fight against the stars or the man in the moon, and, in spite of the
noise and clatter of the Greek rifles, and the ghostlike whispers and
the rushing sounds in the air, there was nothing to remind us of any
other battle of which we had heard or read. But we had seen pictures
of officers waving swords, and we knew that the fez was the sign of
the Turk--of the enemy--of the men who were invading Thessaly, who
were at that moment planning to come up a steep hill on which we
happened to be sitting and attack the people on top of it. And the
spectacle at once became comprehensible, and took on the human
interest it had lacked. The men seemed to feel this, for they sprang
up and began cheering and shouting, and fired in an upright position,
and by so doing exposed themselves at full length to the fire from
the men below. The Turks in front of the village ran back into it
again, and those in the fields beyond turned and began to move away,
but in that same plodding, aggravating fashion. They moved so
leisurely that there was a pause in the noise along the line, while
the men watched them to make sure that they were really retreating.
And then there was a long cheer, after which they all sat down,
breathing deeply, and wiping the sweat and dust across their faces,
and took long pulls at their canteens.
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