Books: Notes of a War Correspondent
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Richard Harding Davis >> Notes of a War Correspondent
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The different trenches were not all engaged at the same time. They
acted according to the individual judgment of their commanding
officer, but always for the general good. Sometimes the fire of the
enemy would be directed on one particular trench, and it would be
impossible for the men in that trench to rise and reply without
haying their heads carried away; so they would lie hidden, and the
men in the trenches flanking them would act in their behalf, and rake
the enemy from the front and from every side, until the fire on that
trench was silenced, or turned upon some other point. The trenches
stretched for over half a mile in a semicircle, and the little hills
over which they ran lay at so many different angles, and rose to such
different heights, that sometimes the men in one trench fired
directly over the heads of their own men. From many trenches in the
first line it was impossible to see any of the Greek soldiers except
those immediately beside you. If you looked back or beyond on either
hand there was nothing to be seen but high hills topped with fresh
earth, and the waving yellow grass, and the glaring blue sky.
General Smolenski directed the Greeks from the plain to the far right
of the town; and his presence there, although none of the men saw nor
heard of him directly throughout the entire day, was more potent for
good than would have been the presence of five thousand other men
held in reserve. He was a mile or two miles away from the trenches,
but the fact that he was there, and that it was Smolenski who was
giving the orders, was enough. Few had ever seen Smolenski, but his
name was sufficient; it was as effective as is Mr. Bowen's name on a
Bank of England note. It gave one a pleasant feeling to know that he
was somewhere within call; you felt there would be no "routs" nor
stampedes while he was there. And so for two days those seven
thousand men lay in the trenches, repulsing attack after attack of
the Turkish troops, suffocated with the heat and chilled with sudden
showers, and swept unceasingly by shells and bullets--partly because
they happened to be good men and brave men, but largely because they
knew that somewhere behind them a stout, bull-necked soldier was
sitting on a camp-stool, watching them through a pair of field-
glasses.
Toward mid-day you would see a man leave the trench with a comrade's
arm around him, and start on the long walk to the town where the
hospital corps were waiting for him. These men did not wear their
wounds with either pride or braggadocio, but regarded the wet sleeves
and shapeless arms in a sort of wondering surprise. There was much
more of surprise than of pain in their faces, and they seemed to be
puzzling as to what they had done in the past to deserve such a
punishment.
Other men were carried out of the trench and laid on their backs on
the high grass, staring up drunkenly at the glaring sun, and with
their limbs fallen into unfamiliar poses. They lay so still, and
they were so utterly oblivious of the roar and rattle and the anxious
energy around them that one grew rather afraid of them and of their
superiority to their surroundings. The sun beat on them, and the
insects in the grass waving above them buzzed and hummed, or burrowed
in the warm moist earth upon which they lay; over their heads the
invisible carriers of death jarred the air with shrill crescendoes,
and near them a comrade sat hacking with his bayonet at a lump of
hard bread. He sprawled contentedly in the hot sun, with humped
shoulders and legs far apart, and with his cap tipped far over his
eyes. Every now and again he would pause, with a piece of cheese
balanced on the end of his knife-blade, and look at the twisted
figures by him on the grass, or he would dodge involuntarily as a
shell swung low above his head, and smile nervously at the still
forms on either side of him that had not moved. Then he brushed the
crumbs from his jacket and took a drink out of his hot canteen, and
looking again at the sleeping figures pressing down the long grass
beside him, crawled back on his hands and knees to the trench and
picked up his waiting rifle.
The dead gave dignity to what the other men were doing, and made it
noble, and, from another point of view, quite senseless. For their
dying had proved nothing. Men who could have been much better spared
than they, were still alive in the trenches, and for no reason but
through mere dumb chance. There was no selection of the unfittest;
it seemed to be ruled by unreasoning luck. A certain number of
shells and bullets passed through a certain area of space, and men of
different bulks blocked that space in different places. If a man
happened to be standing in the line of a bullet he was killed and
passed into eternity, leaving a wife and children, perhaps, to mourn
him. "Father died," these children will say, "doing his duty." As a
matter of fact, father died because he happened to stand up at the
wrong moment, or because he turned to ask the man on his right for a
match, instead of leaning toward the left, and he projected his bulk
of two hundred pounds where a bullet, fired by a man who did not know
him and who had not aimed at him, happened to want the right of way.
One of the two had to give it, and as the bullet would not, the
soldier had his heart torn out. The man who sat next to me happened
to stoop to fill his cartridge-box just as the bullet that wanted the
space he had occupied passed over his bent shoulder; and so he was
not killed, but will live for sixty years, perhaps, and will do much
good or much evil. Another man in the same trench sat up to clean
his rifle, and had his arm in the air driving the cleaning rod down
the barrel, when a bullet passed through his lungs, and the gun fell
across his face, with the rod sticking in it, and he pitched forward
on his shoulder quite dead. If he had not cleaned his gun at that
moment he would probably be alive in Athens now, sitting in front of
a cafe and fighting the war over again. Viewed from that point, and
leaving out the fact that God ordered it all, the fortunes of the
game of war seemed as capricious as matching pennies, and as
impersonal as the wheel at Monte Carlo. In it the brave man did not
win because he was brave, but because he was lucky. A fool and a
philosopher are equal at a game of dice. And these men who threw
dice with death were interesting to watch, because, though they
gambled for so great a stake, they did so unconcernedly and without
flinching, and without apparently appreciating the seriousness of the
game.
There was a red-headed, freckled peasant boy, in dirty petticoats,
who guided Bass and myself to the trenches. He was one of the few
peasants who had not run away, and as he had driven sheep over every
foot of the hills, he was able to guide the soldiers through those
places where they were best protected from the bullets of the enemy.
He did this all day, and was always, whether coming or going, under a
heavy fire; but he enjoyed that fact, and he seemed to regard the
battle only as a delightful change in the quiet routine of his life,
as one of our own country boys at home would regard the coming of the
spring circus or the burning of a neighbor's barn. He ran dancing
ahead of us, pointing to where a ledge of rock offered a natural
shelter, or showing us a steep gully where the bullets could not
fall. When they came very near him he would jump high in the air,
not because he was startled, but out of pure animal joy in the
excitement of it, and he would frown importantly and shake his red
curls at us, as though to say: "I told you to be careful. Now, you
see. Don't let that happen again." We met him many times during the
two days, escorting different companies of soldiers from one point to
another, as though they were visitors to his estate. When a shell
broke, he would pick up a piece and present it to the officer in
charge, as though it were a flower he had plucked from his own
garden, and which he wanted his guest to carry away with him as a
souvenir of his visit. Some one asked the boy if his father and
mother knew where he was, and he replied, with amusement, that they
had run away and deserted him, and that he had remained because he
wished to see what a Turkish army looked like. He was a much more
plucky boy than the overrated Casabianca, who may have stood on the
burning deck whence all but him had fled because he could not swim,
and because it was with him a choice of being either burned or
drowned. This boy stuck to the burning deck when it was possible for
him at any time to have walked away and left it burning. But he
stayed on because he was amused, and because he was able to help the
soldiers from the city in safety across his native heath. He was
much the best part of the show, and one of the bravest Greeks on the
field. He will grow up to be something fine, no doubt, and his
spirit will rebel against having to spend his life watching his
father's sheep. He may even win the race from Marathon.
Another Greek who was a most interesting figure to us was a
Lieutenant Ambroise Frantzis. He was in command of the mountain
battery on the flat, round top of the high hill. On account of its
height the place seemed much nearer to the sun than any other part of
the world, and the heat there was three times as fierce as in the
trenches below. When you had climbed to the top of this hill it was
like standing on a roof-garden, or as though you were watching a
naval battle from a fighting top of one of the battleships. The top
of the hill was not unlike an immense circus ring in appearance. The
piled-up earth around its circular edge gave that impression, and the
glaring yellow wheat that was tramped into glaring yellow soil, and
the blue ammunition-boxes scattered about, helped out the illusion.
It was an exceedingly busy place, and the smoke drifted across it
continually, hiding us from one another in a curtain of flying yellow
dust, while over our heads the Turkish shells raced after each other
so rapidly that they beat out the air like the branches of a tree in
a storm. On account of its height, and the glaring heat, and the
shells passing, and the Greek guns going off and then turning
somersaults, it was not a place suited for meditation; but Ambroise
Frantzis meditated there as though he were in his own study. He was
a very young man and very shy, and he was too busy to consider his
own safety, or to take time, as the others did, to show that he was
not considering it. Some of the other officers stood up on the
breastworks and called the attention of the men to what they were
doing; but as they did not wish the men to follow their example in
this, it was difficult to see what they expected to gain by their
braggadocio. Frantzis was as unconcerned as an artist painting a big
picture in his studio. The battle plain below him was his canvas,
and his nine mountain guns were his paint brushes. And he painted
out Turks and Turkish cannon with the same concentrated, serious
expression of countenance that you see on the face of an artist when
he bites one brush between his lips and with another wipes out a
false line or a touch of the wrong color. You have seen an artist
cock his head on one side, and shut one eye and frown at his canvas,
and then select several brushes and mix different colors and hit the
canvas a bold stroke, and then lean back to note the effect.
Frantzis acted in just that way. He would stand with his legs apart
and his head on one side, pulling meditatively at his pointed beard,
and then taking a closer look through his field-glasses, would select
the three guns he had decided would give him the effect he wanted to
produce, and he would produce that effect. When the shot struck
plump in the Turkish lines, and we could see the earth leap up into
the air like geysers of muddy water, and each gunner would wave his
cap and cheer, Frantzis would only smile uncertainly, and begin
again, with the aid of his field-glasses, to puzzle out fresh
combinations.
The battle that had begun in a storm of hail ended on the first day
in a storm of bullets that had been held in reserve by the Turks, and
which let off just after sundown. They came from a natural trench,
formed by the dried-up bed of a stream which lay just below the hill
on which the first Greek trench was situated. There were bushes
growing on the bank of the stream nearest to the Greek lines, and
these hid the men who occupied it. Throughout the day there had been
an irritating fire from this trench from what appeared to be not more
than a dozen rifles, but we could see that it was fed from time to
time with many boxes of ammunition, which were carried to it on the
backs of mules from the Turkish position a half mile farther to the
rear. Bass and a corporal took a great aversion to this little group
of Turks, not because there were too many of them to be disregarded,
but because they were so near; and Bass kept the corporal's services
engaged in firing into it, and in discouraging the ammunition mules
when they were being driven in that direction. Our corporal was a
sharp-shooter, and, accordingly, felt his superiority to his
comrades; and he had that cheerful contempt for his officers that all
true Greek soldiers enjoy; and so he never joined in the volley-
firing, but kept his ammunition exclusively for the dozen men behind
the bushes and for the mules. He waged, as it were, a little battle
on his own account. The other men rose as commanded and fired
regular volleys, and sank back again, but he fixed his sights to suit
his own idea of the range, and he rose when he was ready to do so,
and fired whenever he thought best. When his officer, who kept
curled up in the hollow of the trench, commanded him to lie down, he
would frown and shake his head at the interruption, and paid no
further attention to the order. He was as much alone as a hunter on
a mountain peak stalking deer, and whenever he fired at the men in
the bushes he would swear softly, and when he fired at the mules he
would chuckle and laugh with delight and content. The mules had to
cross a ploughed field in order to reach the bushes, and so we were
able to mark where his bullets struck, and we could see them skip
across the field, kicking up the dirt as they advanced, until they
stopped the mule altogether, or frightened the man who was leading it
into a disorderly retreat.
It appeared later that instead of there being but twelve men in these
bushes there were six hundred, and that they were hiding there until
the sun set in order to make a final attack on the first trench.
They had probably argued that at sunset the strain of the day's work
would have told on the Greek morale, that the men's nerves would be
jerking and their stomachs aching for food, and that they would be
ready for darkness and sleep, and in no condition to repulse a fresh
and vigorous attack. So, just as the sun sank, and the officers were
counting the cost in dead and wounded, and the men were gathering up
blankets and overcoats, and the firing from the Greek lines had
almost ceased, there came a fierce rattle from the trench to the
right of us, like a watch-dog barking the alarm, and the others took
it up from all over the hill, and when we looked down into the plain
below to learn what it meant, we saw it blue with men, who seemed to
have sprung from the earth. They were clambering from the bed of the
stream, breaking through the bushes, and forming into a long line,
which, as soon as formed, was at once hidden at regular intervals by
flashes of flame that seemed to leap from one gun-barrel to the next,
as you have seen a current of electricity run along a line of gas-
jets. In the dim twilight these flashes were much more blinding than
they had been in the glare of the sun, and the crash of the artillery
coming on top of the silence was the more fierce and terrible by the
contrast. The Turks were so close on us that the first trench could
do little to help itself, and the men huddled against it while their
comrades on the surrounding hills fought for them, their volleys
passing close above our heads, and meeting the rush of the Turkish
bullets on the way, so that there was now one continuous whistling
shriek, like the roar of the wind through the rigging of a ship in a
storm. If a man had raised his arm above his head his hand would
have been torn off. It had come up so suddenly that it was like two
dogs, each springing at the throat of the other, and in a greater
degree it had something of the sound of two wild animals struggling
for life. Volley answered volley as though with personal hate--one
crashing in upon the roll of the other, or beating it out of
recognition with the bursting roar of heavy cannon. At the same
instant all of the Turkish batteries opened with great, ponderous,
booming explosions, and the little mountain guns barked and snarled
and shrieked back at them, and the rifle volleys crackled and shot
out blistering flames, while the air was filled with invisible
express trains that shook and jarred it and crashed into one another,
bursting and shrieking and groaning. It seemed as though you were
lying in a burning forest, with giant tree trunks that had withstood
the storms of centuries crashing and falling around your ears, and
sending up great showers of sparks and flame. This lasted for five
minutes or less, and then the death-grip seemed to relax, the volleys
came brokenly, like a man panting for breath, the bullets ceased to
sound with the hiss of escaping steam, and rustled aimlessly by, and
from hill-top to hill-top the officers' whistles sounded as though a
sportsman were calling off his dogs. The Turks withdrew into the
coming night, and the Greeks lay back, panting and sweating, and
stared open-eyed at one another, like men who had looked for a moment
into hell, and had come back to the world again.
The next day was like the first, except that by five o'clock in the
afternoon the Turks appeared on our left flank, crawling across the
hills like an invasion of great ants, and the Greek army that at
Velestinos had made the two best and most dignified stands of the war
withdrew upon Halmyros, and the Turks poured into the village and
burned it, leaving nothing standing save two tall Turkish minarets
that many years before, when Thessaly belonged to the Sultan, the
Turks themselves had placed there.
I--THE ROUGH RIDERS AT GUASIMAS
On the day the American troops landed on the coast of Cuba, the
Cubans informed General Wheeler that the enemy were intrenched at
Guasimas, blocking the way to Santiago. Guasimas is not a village,
nor even a collection of houses; it is the meeting place of two
trails which join at the apex of a V, three miles from the seaport
town of Siboney, and continue merged in a single trail to Santiago.
General Wheeler, guided by the Cubans, reconnoitred this trail on the
23rd of June, and with the position of the enemy fully explained to
him, returned to Siboney and informed General Young and Colonel Wood
that on the following morning he would attack the Spanish position at
Guasimas. It has been stated that at Guasimas, the Rough Riders were
trapped in an ambush, but, as the plan was discussed while I was
present, I know that so far from any ones running into an ambush,
every one of the officers concerned had a full knowledge of where he
would find the enemy, and what he was to do when he found him.
That night no one slept, for until two o'clock in the morning, troops
were still being disembarked in the surf, and two ships of war had
their searchlights turned on the landing-place, and made Siboney as
light as a ball-room. Back of the searchlights was an ocean white
with moonlight, and on the shore red camp-fires, at which the half-
drowned troops were drying their uniforms, and the Rough Riders, who
had just marched in from Baiquiri, were cooking a late supper, or
early breakfast of coffee and bacon. Below the former home of the
Spanish comandante, which General Wheeler had made his head-quarters,
lay the camp of the Rough Riders, and through it Cuban officers were
riding their half-starved ponies, and scattering the ashes of the
camp-fires. Below them was the beach and the roaring surf, in which
a thousand or so naked men were assisting and impeding the progress
shoreward of their comrades, in pontoons and shore boats, which were
being hurled at the beach like sleds down a water chute.
It was one of the most weird and remarkable scenes of the war,
probably of any war. An army was being landed on an enemy's coast at
the dead of night, but with the same cheers and shrieks and laughter
that rise from the bathers at Coney Island on a hot Sunday. It was a
pandemonium of noises. The men still to be landed from the "prison
hulks," as they called the transports, were singing in chorus, the
men already on shore were dancing naked around the camp-fires on the
beach, or shouting with delight as they plunged into the first bath
that had offered in seven days, and those in the launches as they
were pitched head-first at the soil of Cuba, signalized their arrival
by howls of triumph. On either side rose black overhanging ridges,
in the lowland between were white tents and burning fires, and from
the ocean came the blazing, dazzling eyes of the search-lights
shaming the quiet moonlight.
After three hours' troubled sleep in this tumult the Rough Riders
left camp at five in the morning. With the exception of half a dozen
officers they were dismounted, and carried their blanket rolls,
haversacks, ammunition, and carbines. General Young had already
started toward Guasimas the First and Tenth dismounted Cavalry, and
according to the agreement of the night before had taken the eastern
trail to our right, while the Rough Riders climbed the steep ridge
above Siboney and started toward the rendezvous along the trail to
the west, which was on high ground and a half mile to a mile distant
from the trail along which General Young and his regulars were
marching. There was a valley between us, and the bushes were so
thick on both sides of our trail that it was not possible at any
time, until we met at Guasimas, to distinguish the other column.
As soon as the Rough Riders had reached the top of the ridge, not
twenty minutes after they had left camp, which was the first
opportunity that presented itself, Colonel Wood ordered Captain
Capron to proceed with his troop in front of the column as an advance
guard, and to choose a "point" of five men skilled as scouts and
trailers. Still in advance of these he placed two Cuban scouts. The
column then continued along the trail in single file. The Cubans
were at a distance of two hundred and fifty yards; the "point" of
five picked men under Sergeant Byrne and duty-Sergeant Fish followed
them at a distance of a hundred yards, and then came Capron's troop
of sixty men strung out in single file. No flankers were placed for
the reason that the dense undergrowth and the tangle of vines that
stretched from the branches of the trees to the bushes below made it
a physical impossibility for man or beast to move forward except
along the single trail.
Colonel Wood rode at the head of the column, followed by two regular
army officers who were members of General Wheeler's staff, a Cuban
officer, and Lieutenant-Colonel Roosevelt. They rode slowly in
consideration of the troopers on foot, who under a cruelly hot sun
carried heavy burdens. To those who did not have to walk, it was not
unlike a hunting excursion in our West; the scenery was beautiful and
the view down the valley one of luxuriant peace. Roosevelt had never
been in the tropics and Captain McCormick and I were talking back at
him over our shoulders and at each other, pointing out unfamiliar
trees and birds. Roosevelt thought it looked like a good deer
country, as it once was; it reminded McCormick of Southern
California; it looked to me like the trails in Central America. We
advanced, talking in that fashion and in high spirits, and
congratulating ourselves in being shut of the transport and on
breathing fine mountain air again, and on the fact that we were on
horseback. We agreed it was impossible to appreciate that we were
really at war--that we were in the enemy's country. We had been
riding in this pleasant fashion for an hour and a half with brief
halts for rest, when Wood stopped the head of the column, and rode
down the trail to meet Capron, who was coming back. Wood returned
immediately, leading his horse, and said to Roosevelt:
"Pass the word back to keep silence in the ranks."
The place at which we had halted was where the trail narrowed, and
proceeded sharply downward. There was on one side of it a stout
barbed-wire fence of five strands. By some fortunate accident this
fence had been cut just where the head of the column halted. On the
left of the trail it shut off fields of high grass blocked at every
fifty yards with great barricades of undergrowth and tangled trees
and chapparal. On the other side of the trail there was not a foot
of free ground; the bushes seemed absolutely impenetrable, as indeed
they were later found to be.
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