Books: Notes of a War Correspondent

R >> Richard Harding Davis >> Notes of a War Correspondent

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When we halted, the men sat down beside the trail and chewed the long
blades of grass, or fanned the air with their hats. They had no
knowledge of the situation such as their leaders possessed, and their
only emotion was one of satisfaction at the chance the halt gave them
to rest and to shift their packs. Wood again walked down the trail
with Capron and disappeared, and one of the officers informed us that
the scouts had seen the outposts of the enemy. It did not seem
reasonable that the Spaniards, who had failed to attack us when we
landed at Baiquiri, would oppose us until they could do so in force,
so, personally, I doubted that there were any Spaniards nearer than
Santiago. But we tied our horses to the wire fence, and Capron's
troop knelt with carbines at the "Ready," peering into the bushes.
We must have waited there, while Wood reconnoitred, for over ten
minutes. Then he returned, and began deploying his troops out at
either side of the trail. Capron he sent on down the trail itself.
G Troop was ordered to beat into the bushes on the right, and K and A
were sent over the ridge on which we stood down into the hollow to
connect with General Young's column on the opposite side of the
valley. F and E Troops were deployed in skirmish-line on the other
side of the wire fence. Wood had discovered the enemy a few hundred
yards from where he expected to find him, and so far from being
"surprised," he had time, as I have just described, to get five of
his troops into position before a shot was fired. The firing, when
it came, started suddenly on our right. It sounded so close that--
still believing we were acting on a false alarm, and that there were
no Spaniards ahead of us--I guessed it was Capron's men firing at
random to disclose the enemy's position. I ran after G Troop under
Captain Llewellyn, and found them breaking their way through the
bushes in the direction from which the volleys came. It was like
forcing the walls of a maze. If each trooper had not kept in touch
with the man on either hand he would have been lost in the thicket.
At one moment the underbrush seemed swarming with our men, and the
next, except that you heard the twigs breaking, and heavy breathing
or a crash as a vine pulled some one down, there was not a sign of a
human being anywhere. In a few minutes we broke through into a
little open place in front of a dark curtain of vines, and the men
fell on one knee and began returning the fire that came from it.

The enemy's fire was exceedingly heavy, and his aim was excellent.
We saw nothing of the Spaniards, except a few on the ridge across the
valley. I happened to be the only one present with field glasses,
and when I discovered this force on the ridge, and had made sure, by
the cockades in their sombreros, that they were Spaniards and not
Cubans, I showed them to Roosevelt. He calculated they were five
hundred yards from us, and ordered the men to fire on them at that
range. Through the two hours of fighting that followed, although men
were falling all around us, the Spaniards on the ridge were the only
ones that many of us saw. But the fire against us was not more than
eighty yards away, and so hot that our men could only lie flat in the
grass and return it in that position. It was at this moment that our
men believed they were being attacked by Capron's troop, which they
imagined must have swung to the right, and having lost its bearings
and hearing them advancing through the underbrush, had mistaken them
for the enemy. They accordingly ceased firing and began shouting in
order to warn Capron that he was shooting at his friends. This is
the foundation for the statement that the Rough Riders had fired on
each other, which they did not do then or at any other time. Later
we examined the relative position of the trail which Capron held, and
the position of G Troop, and they were at right angles to one
another.

Capron could not possibly have fired into us at any time, unless he
had turned directly around in his tracks and aimed up the very trail
he had just descended. Advancing, he could no more have hit us than
he could have seen us out of the back of his head. When we found
many hundred spent cartridges of the Spaniards a hundred yards in
front of G Troop's position, the question as to who had fired on us
was answered.

It was an exceedingly hot corner. The whole troop was gathered in
the little open place blocked by the network of grape-vines and
tangled bushes before it. They could not see twenty feet on three
sides of them, but on the right hand lay the valley, and across it
came the sound of Young's brigade, who were apparently heavily
engaged. The enemy's fire was so close that the men could not hear
the word of command, and Captain Llewellyn and Lieutenant Greenway,
unable to get their attention, ran among them, batting them with
their sombreros to make them cease firing. Lieutenant-Colonel
Roosevelt ran up just then, bringing with him Lieutenant Woodbury
Kane and ten troopers from K Troop. Roosevelt lay down in the grass
beside Llewellyn and consulted with him eagerly. Kane was smiling
with the charming content of a perfectly happy man. When Captain
Llewellyn told him his men were not needed, and to rejoin his troop,
he led his detail over the edge of the hill on which we lay. As he
disappeared below the crest he did not stoop to avoid the bullets,
but walked erect, still smiling. Roosevelt pointed out that it was
impossible to advance farther on account of the network of wild
grape-vines that masked the Spaniards from us, and that we must cross
the trail and make to the left. The shouts the men had raised to
warn Capron had established our position to the enemy, and the firing
was now fearfully accurate. Sergeant Russell, who in his day had
been a colonel on a governor's staff, was killed, and the other
sergeant was shot through the wrist. In the space of three minutes
nine men were lying on their backs helpless. Before we got away,
every third man was killed, or wounded. We drew off slowly to the
left, dragging the wounded with us. Owing to the low aim of the
enemy, we were forced to move on our knees and crawl. Even then men
were hit. One man near me was shot through the head. Returning
later to locate the body and identify him, I found that the buzzards
had torn off his lips and his eyes. This mutilation by these hideous
birds was, without doubt, what Admiral Sampson mistook for the work
of the Spaniards, when the bodies of the marines at Guantanamo were
found disfigured. K Troop meantime had deployed into the valley
under the fire from the enemy on the ridge. It had been ordered to
establish communication with General Young's column, and while
advancing and firing on the ridge, Captain Jenkins sent the guidon
bearer back to climb the hill and wave his red and white banner where
Young's men could see it. The guidon bearer had once run for
Congress on the gold ticket in Arizona, and, as some one said, was
naturally the man who should have been selected for a forlorn hope.
His flag brought him instantly under a heavy fire, but he continued
waving it until the Tenth Cavalry on the other side of the valley
answered, and the two columns were connected by a skirmish-line
composed of K Troop and A, under Captain "Bucky" O'Neill.

G Troop meanwhile had hurried over to the left, and passing through
the opening in the wire fence had spread out into open order. It
followed down after Captain Luna's troop and D and E Troops, which
were well already in advance. Roosevelt ran forward and took command
of the extreme left of this line. Wood was walking up and down along
it, leading his horse, which he thought might be of use in case he
had to move quickly to alter his original formation. His plan, at
present, was to spread out his men so that they would join Young on
the right, and on the left swing around until they flanked the enemy.
K and A Troops had already succeeded in joining hands with Young's
column across the valley, and as they were capable of taking care of
themselves, Wood was bending his efforts to keep his remaining four
companies in a straight line and revolving them around the enemy's
"end." It was in no way an easy thing to do. The men were at times
wholly hidden from each other, and from him; probably at no one time
did he see more than two of his troops together. It was only by the
firing that he could tell where his men lay, and that they were
always advancing.

The advances were made in quick, desperate rushes--sometimes the
ground gained was no more than a man covers in sliding for a base.
At other times half a troop would rise and race forward and then
burrow deep in the hot grass and fire. On this side of the line
there was an occasional glimpse of the enemy. But for a great part
of the time the men shot at the places from where the enemy's fire
seemed to come, aiming low and answering in steady volleys. The fire
discipline was excellent. The prophets of evil of the Tampa Bay
Hotel had foretold that the cowboys would shoot as they chose, and,
in the field, would act independently of their officers. As it
turned out, the cowboys were the very men who waited most patiently
for the officers to give the word of command. At all times the
movement was without rest, breathless and fierce, like a cane-rush,
or a street fight. After the first three minutes every man had
stripped as though for a wrestling match, throwing off all his
impedimenta but his cartridge-belt and canteen. Even then the sun
handicapped their strength cruelly. The enemy was hidden in the
shade of the jungle, while they, for every thicket they gained, had
to fight in the open, crawling through grass which was as hot as a
steam bath, and with their flesh and clothing torn by thorns and the
sword-like blade of the Spanish "bayonet." The glare of the sun was
full in their eyes and as fierce as a lime-light.

When G Troop passed on across the trail to the left I stopped at the
place where the column had first halted--it had been converted into a
dressing station and the wounded of G Troop were left there in the
care of the hospital stewards. A tall, gaunt young man with a cross
on his arm was just coming back up the trail. His head was bent, and
by some surgeon's trick he was carrying a wounded man much heavier
than himself across his shoulders. As I stepped out of the trail he
raised his head, and smiled and nodded, and left me wondering where I
had seen him before, smiling in the same cheery, confident way and
moving in that same position. I knew it could not have been under
the same conditions, and yet he was certainly associated with another
time of excitement and rush and heat. Then I remembered him. As now
he had been covered with blood and dirt and perspiration, but then he
wore a canvas jacket and the man he carried on his shoulders was
trying to hold him back from a white-washed line. And I recognized
the young doctor, with the blood bathing his breeches, as "Bob"
Church, of Princeton. That was only one of four badly wounded men he
carried that day on his shoulders over a half-mile of trail that
stretched from the firing-line back to the dressing station and under
an unceasing fire. {3} As the senior surgeon was absent he had chief
responsibility that day for all the wounded, and that so few of them
died is greatly due to this young man who went down into the firing-
line and pulled them from it, and bore them out of danger. The comic
paragraphers who wrote of the members of the Knickerbocker Club and
the college swells of the Rough Riders and of their imaginary valets
and golf clubs, should, in decency, since the fight at Guasimas
apologize. For the same spirit that once sent these men down a
white-washed field against their opponents' rush line was the spirit
that sent Church, Channing, Devereux, Ronalds, Wrenn, Cash, Bull,
Lamed, Goodrich, Greenway, Dudley Dean, and a dozen others through
the high hot grass at Guasimas, not shouting, as their friends the
cowboys did, but each with his mouth tightly shut, with his eyes on
the ball, and moving in obedience to the captain's signals.

Judging from the sound, our firing-line now seemed to be half a mile
in advance of the place where the head of the column had first
halted. This showed that the Spaniards had been driven back at least
three hundred yards from their original position. It was impossible
to see any of our men in the field, so I ran down the trail with the
idea that it would lead me back to the troop I had left when I had
stopped at the dressing station. The walk down that trail presented
one of the most grewsome pictures of the war. It narrowed as it
descended; it was for that reason the enemy had selected that part of
it for the attack, and the vines and bushes interlaced so closely
above it that the sun could not come through.

The rocks on either side were spattered with blood and the rank grass
was matted with it. Blanket rolls, haversacks, carbines, and
canteens had been abandoned all along its length. It looked as
though a retreating army had fled along it, rather than that one
troop had fought its way through it to the front. Except for the
clatter of the land-crabs, those hideous orchid-colored monsters that
haunt the places of the dead, and the whistling of the bullets in the
trees, the place was as silent as a grave. For the wounded lying
along its length were as still as the dead beside them. The noise of
the loose stones rolling under my feet brought a hospital steward out
of the brush, and he called after me:

"Lieutenant Thomas is badly wounded in here, and we can't move him.
We want to carry him out of the sun some place, where there is shade
and a breeze." Thomas was the first lieutenant of Capron's troop.
He is a young man, large and powerfully built. He was shot through
the leg just below the trunk, and I found him lying on a blanket half
naked and covered with blood, and with his leg bound in tourniquets
made of twigs and pocket-handkerchiefs. It gave one a thrill of awe
and wonder to see how these cowboy surgeons, with a stick that one
would use to light a pipe and with the gaudy 'kerchiefs they had
taken from their necks, were holding death at bay. The young officer
was in great pain and tossing and raving wildly. When we gathered up
the corners of his blanket and lifted him, he tried to sit upright,
and cried out, "You're taking me to the front, aren't you? You said
you would. They've killed my captain--do you understand? They've
killed Captain Capron. The --- Mexicans! They've killed my
captain."

The troopers assured him they were carrying him to the firing-line,
but he was not satisfied. We stumbled over the stones and vines,
bumping his wounded body against the ground and leaving a black
streak in the grass behind us, but it seemed to hurt us more than it
did him, for he sat up again clutching at us imploringly with his
bloody hands.

"For God's sake, take me to the front," he begged. "Do you hear? I
order you; damn you, I order--We must give them hell; do you hear? we
must give them hell. They've killed Capron. They've killed my
captain."

The loss of blood at last mercifully silenced him, and when we had
reached the trail he had fainted and I left them kneeling around him,
their grave boyish faces filled with sympathy and concern.

Only fifty feet from him and farther down the trail I passed his
captain, with his body propped against Church's knee and with his
head fallen on the surgeon's shoulder. Capron was always a handsome,
soldierly looking man--some said that he was the most soldierly
looking of any of the young officers in the army--and as I saw him
then death had given him a great dignity and nobleness. He was only
twenty-eight years old, the age when life has just begun, but he
rested his head on the surgeon's shoulder like a man who knew he was
already through with it and that, though they might peck and mend at
the body, he had received his final orders. His breast and shoulders
were bare, and as the surgeon cut the tunic from him the sight of his
great chest and the skin, as white as a girl's, and the black open
wound against it made the yellow stripes and the brass insignia on
the tunic, strangely mean and tawdry.

Fifty yards farther on, around a turn in the trail, behind a rock, a
boy was lying with a bullet wound between his eyes. His chest was
heaving with short, hoarse noises which I guessed were due to some
muscular action entirely, and that he was virtually dead. I lifted
him and gave him some water, but it would not pass through his fixed
teeth. In the pocket of his blouse was a New Testament with the name
Fielder Dawson, Mo., scribbled in it in pencil. While I was writing
it down for identification, a boy as young as himself came from
behind me down the trail.

"It is no use," he said; "the surgeon has seen him; he says he is
just the same as dead. He is my bunkie; we only met two weeks ago at
San Antonio; but he and me had got to be such good friends--But
there's nothing I can do now." He threw himself down on the rock
beside his bunkie, who was still breathing with that hoarse inhuman
rattle, and I left them, the one who had been spared looking down
helplessly with the tears creeping across his cheeks.

The firing was quite close now, and the trail was no longer filled
with blanket rolls and haversacks, nor did pitiful, prostrate figures
lie in wait behind each rock. I guessed this must mean that I now
was well in advance of the farthest point to which Capron's troop had
moved, and I was running forward feeling confident that I must be
close on our men, when I saw the body of a sergeant blocking the
trail and stretched at full length across it. Its position was a
hundred yards in advance of that of any of the others--it was
apparently the body of the first man killed. After death the bodies
of some men seem to shrink almost instantly within themselves; they
become limp and shapeless, and their uniforms hang upon them
strangely. But this man, who was a giant in life, remained a giant
in death--his very attitude was one of attack; his fists were
clinched, his jaw set, and his eyes, which were still human, seemed
fixed with resolve. He was dead, but he was not defeated. And so
Hamilton Fish died as he had lived--defiantly, running into the very
face of the enemy, standing squarely upright on his legs instead of
crouching, as the others called to him to do, until he fell like a
column across the trail. "God gives," was the motto on the watch I
took from his blouse, and God could not have given him a nobler end;
to die, in the fore-front of the first fight of the war, quickly,
painlessly, with a bullet through the heart, with his regiment behind
him, and facing the enemies of his country.

The line at this time was divided by the trail into two wings. The
right wing, composed of K and A Troops, was advancing through the
valley, returning the fire from the ridge as it did so, and the left
wing, which was much the longer of the two, was swinging around on
the enemy's right flank, with its own right resting on the barbed-
wire fence. I borrowed a carbine from a wounded man, and joined the
remnant of L Troop which was close to the trail.

This troop was then commanded by Second Lieutenant Day, who on
account of his conduct that morning and at the battle of San Juan
later, when he was shot through the arm, was promoted to be captain
of L Troop, or, as it was later officially designated, Capron's
troop. He was walking up and down the line as unconcernedly as
though we were at target practice, and an Irish sergeant, Byrne, was
assisting him by keeping up a continuous flow of comments and
criticisms that showed the keenest enjoyment of the situation. Byrne
was the only man I noticed who seemed to regard the fight as in any
way humorous. For at Guasimas, no one had time to be flippant, or to
exhibit any signs of braggadocio. It was for all of them, from the
moment it started, through the hot, exhausting hour and a half that
it lasted, a most serious proposition. The conditions were
exceptional. The men had made a night march the evening before, had
been given but three hours' troubled sleep on the wet sand, and had
then been marched in full equipment uphill and under a cruelly hot
sun, directly into action. And eighty per cent. of them had never
before been under fire. Nor had one man in the regiment ever fired a
Krag-Jorgensen carbine until he fired it at a Spaniard, for their
arms had been issued to them so soon before sailing that they had
only drilled with them without using cartridges. To this handicap
was also added the nature of the ground and the fact that our men
could not see their opponents. Their own men fell or rolled over on
every side, shot down by an invisible enemy, with no one upon whom
they could retaliate, with no sign that the attack might not go on
indefinitely. Yet they never once took a step backward, but advanced
grimly, cleaning a bush or thicket of its occupants before charging
it, and securing its cover for themselves, and answering each volley
with one that sounded like an echo of the first. The men were
panting for breath; the sweat ran so readily into their eyes that
they could not see the sights of their guns; their limbs unused to
such exertion after seven days of cramped idleness on the troop-ship,
trembled with weakness and the sun blinded and dazzled them; but time
after time they rose and staggered forward through the high grass, or
beat their way with their carbines against the tangle of vines and
creepers. A mile and a half of territory was gained foot by foot in
this fashion, the three Spanish positions carried in that distance
being marked by the thousands of Mauser cartridges that lay shining
and glittering in the grass and behind the barricades of bushes. But
this distance had not been gained without many losses, for every one
in the regiment was engaged. Even those who, on account of the heat,
had dropped out along the trail, as soon as the sound of the fight
reached them, came limping to the front--and plunged into the firing-
line. It was the only place they could go--there was no other line.
With the exception of Church's dressing station and its wounded there
were no reserves.

Among the first to be wounded was the correspondent, Edward Marshall,
of the New York Journal, who was on the firing-line to the left. He
was shot through the body near the spine, and when I saw him he was
suffering the most terrible agonies, and passing through a succession
of convulsions. He nevertheless, in his brief moments of comparative
peace, bore himself with the utmost calm, and was so much a soldier
to duty that he continued writing his account of the fight until the
fight itself was ended. His courage was the admiration of all the
troopers, and he was highly commended by Colonel Wood in the official
account of the engagement.

Nothing so well illustrated how desperately each man was needed, and
how little was his desire to withdraw, as the fact that the wounded
lay where they fell until the hospital stewards found them. Their
comrades did not use them as an excuse to go to leave the firing-
line. I have watched other fights, where the men engaged were quite
willing to unselfishly bear the wounded from the zone of danger.

The fight had now lasted an hour, and the line had reached a more
open country, with a slight incline upward toward a wood, on the edge
of which was a ruined house. This house was a former distillery for
aguardiente, and was now occupied in force by the enemy. Lieutenant-
Colonel Roosevelt on the far left was moving up his men with the
intention of taking this house on the flank; Wood, who was all over
the line, had the same objective point in his mind. The troop
commanders had a general idea that the distillery was the key to the
enemy's position, and were all working in that direction. It was
extremely difficult for Wood and Roosevelt to communicate with the
captains, and after the first general orders had been given them they
relied upon the latter's intelligence to pull them through. I do not
suppose Wood, out of the five hundred engaged, saw more than thirty
of his men at any one time. When he had passed one troop, except for
the noise of its volley firing, it was immediately lost to him in the
brush, and it was so with the next. Still, so excellent was the
intelligence of the officers, and so ready the spirit of the men,
that they kept an almost perfect alignment, as was shown when the
final order came to charge in the open fields. The advance upon the
ruined building was made in stubborn, short rushes, sometimes in
silence, and sometimes firing as we ran. The order to fire at will
was seldom given, the men waiting patiently for the officers' signal,
and then answering in volleys. Some of the men who were twice Day's
age begged him to let them take the enemy's impromptu fort on the
run, but he answered them tolerantly like spoiled children, and held
them down until there was a lull in the enemy's fire, when he would
lead them forward, always taking the advance himself. By the way
they made these rushes, it was easy to tell which men were used to
hunting big game in the West and which were not. The Eastern men
broke at the word, and ran for the cover they were directed to take
like men trying to get out of the rain, and fell panting on their
faces, while the Western trappers and hunters slipped and wriggled
through the grass like Indians; dodging from tree trunk to tree
trunk, and from one bush to another. They fell into line at the same
time with the others, but while doing so they had not once exposed
themselves. Some of the escapes were little short of miraculous.
The man on my right, Champneys Marshall, of Washington, had one
bullet pass through his sleeve, and another pass through his shirt,
where it was pulled close to his spine. The holes where the ball
entered and went out again were clearly cut. Another man's skin was
slightly burned by three bullets in three distinct lines, as though
it had been touched for an instant by the lighted end of a cigar.
Greenway was shot through this shirt across the breast, and Roosevelt
was so close to one bullet, when it struck a tree, that it filled his
eyes and ears with tiny splinters. Major Brodie and Lieutenant
Thomas were both wounded within a few feet of Colonel Wood, and his
color-sergeant, Wright, who followed close at his heels, was clipped
three times in the head and neck, and four bullets passed through the
folds of the flag he carried. One trooper, Rowland, of Deming, was
shot through the lower ribs; he was ordered by Roosevelt to fall back
to the dressing station, but there Church told him there was nothing
he could do for him then, and directed him to sit down until he could
be taken to the hospital at Siboney. Rowland sat still for a short
time, and then remarked restlessly, "I don't seem to be doing much
good here," and picking up his carbine, returned to the firing-line.
There Roosevelt found him.

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