The coast of Cuba between Cape Cruz and Santiago is formed by a striking and beautiful range of mountains, known to the Spaniards as the "Sierra Maestra," or "Master Range," which extends eastward and westward for more than a hundred miles and contains some of the highest peaks to be found on the island. As seen from the water its furrowed slopes and flanks are deceptively foreshortened, so that they appear to fall with extraordinary steepness and abruptness to the sea; its rocky, wave-worn base is whitened by a long line of snowy breakers; its deep, wild ravines are filled with soft blue summer haze; and down from the clouds which shroud its higher peaks tumble in white, tortuous streaks the foaming waters of unnamed and almost unknown mountain torrents. As one sails, at a distance of two or three miles, along this wild, beautiful coast, the picture presented by the fringe of feathery palms over the white line of surf, the steep slopes of the foot-hills, shaggy with dark-green tropical vegetation, and the higher peaks broken in places by cliffs or rocky escarpments and rising into the region of summer clouds, is one hardly to be surpassed, I think, in the tropics. The average height of this range is three or four thousand feet; but in many places it is much greater than this, and the summit of the peak of Turquino, about midway between Cape Cruz and Santiago, is eighty-four hundred feet above the level of the sea.

Our captain thought that we should be off the entrance to Santiago harbor about three o'clock Saturday morning, and at half-past three I was on the bridge. There was not a sign, as yet, of dawn, and although I could make out faintly the loom of high land to the northward, it was so dark on the water that nothing could be distinguished at a distance of five hundred yards, and in the absence of all lights on the coast it was almost impossible to determine our exact position. Somewhere ahead of us,—or perhaps around us,—in the impenetrable gloom, were twelve or fifteen ships of war; but they were cruising about in silence and darkness, and the first evidence that we should probably have of their proximity would be the glare of a search-light and the thunder of a gun. About four o'clock the lookout forward shouted to the captain, "Vessel on the port bow, sir," and a large, dark object stole silently out toward us from under the shadow of the land. I took it, at first, for a gunboat; but it proved to be the transport Santiago, which had not yet disembarked her troops and was cruising aimlessly back and forth, as we were, waiting for daylight.

At a quarter past four the sky in the east began to grow lighter, and as the hidden sun climbed swiftly to the horizon the world about us began to assume form and color. Almost directly in front of us were two fine groups of high, forest-clad mountains, separated by an interval of perhaps ten or fifteen miles. In this gap and nearer the sea was a long stretch of lower, but still high, table-land, which extended from one group of mountains to the other and seemed to form the outer rampart of the coast. About the middle of this rocky, flat-topped rampart there was a deep, narrow notch, on the eastern side of which I could see with a glass a huge grayish-stone building, elevated a little above the level of the table-land on one side and extending down the steep declivity of the notch in a series of titanic steps on the other. I hardly needed to be informed that the notch was the entrance to the harbor of Santiago, and that the grayish-stone building was Morro Castle. Between us and the land, in a huge, bow-shaped curve, lay the war-ships of the blockading fleet, with Commodore Schley's flagship, the Brooklyn, at one end, Admiral Sampson's flagship, the New York, at the other, and the battle-ships Texas, Indiana, Iowa, Massachusetts, and half a dozen gunboats and cruisers lying at intervals between. The convex side of the crescent was nearest to Morro Castle, and in this part of the curve were the battle-ships Texas, Indiana, and Iowa, with the small gunboat Suwanee thrown out as scout or skirmisher in the position that the head of the arrow would occupy if the line of the blockading vessels were a bent bow eight miles long.

We steamed directly in toward the entrance to the harbor, without being stopped or questioned, and took a position in front of Morro Castle, about one thousand yards south of the battle-ship Indiana. From this point of view, with the aid of a good glass, we could make out quite distinctly the outlines of the castle, and were a little disappointed to see still floating over it the red-and-yellow banner of Spain. We had had no news for more than a week, and thought it possible that both the castle and the city were in the possession of General Shafter's army.

The entrance to the Bay of Santiago appears, from a distance of three or four miles, to be a narrow cleft or notch in the high, flat-topped rampart which forms the coast-line. On account of an eastward curve in the channel just beyond Morro Castle, one cannot look through the notch into the upper harbor. At a distance of a quarter of a mile from the entrance, the line of vision strikes against a steep hill, which forms one side of the curving, fiord-like passage leading to the city. Owing to the great depth of water off the entrance to the bay, it is impossible for vessels to anchor there, and the ships of the blockading fleet simply drifted back and forth with the winds and tides, getting under way occasionally, when it became necessary to change position.

After breakfast I went off in a boat to the flagship New York, called upon Admiral Sampson, and obtained from him a brief account of all that had happened off that coast since the 1st of May.

Admiral Cervera, with a fleet of seven Spanish war-ships, left the Cape Verde Islands for West Indian waters on the 29th of April. On the 13th of May he was reported at the French port of St. Pierre, Martinique, and from there he sailed to Curacao, an island off the coast of Venezuela, nearly due south of Haiti. From Curacao it was thought he would be likely to go either to Cienfuegos or Havana; and on the 19th of May Commodore Schley, with the Flying Squadron, was sent to watch the former port, while Admiral Sampson, who had just returned from Porto Rico, resumed the blockade of Havana. Cervera, however, did not go to either place. Leaving Curacao on the 16th, he crossed the Caribbean Sea, and at daybreak on the morning of Thursday, May 19, he entered the harbor of Santiago de Cuba for the purpose of obtaining a fresh supply of coal. His fleet then consisted of the second-class battle-ship Cristobal Colon, the armored cruisers Vizcaya, Almirante Oquendo, and Maria Teresa, and the torpedo-boat destroyers Furor and Pluton. What he expected to do, after coaling his vessels, does not clearly appear; but certain of his Spanish friends in the United States have recently published what seems to be an authorized statement, in which they set forth his views as follows:

Admiral Cervera did not enter Santiago harbor with any intention of remaining there, or of seeking refuge from the pursuit of the American fleets. His object was merely to make some slight repairs to his vessels, obtain a fresh supply of coal, and then run out to sea. As a result of interference from Havana, however, he was prevented from carrying out his plans. No sooner had he reported his arrival in Santiago than "Captain-General Blanco communicated with Spain and asked the Minister of Marine to place Admiral Cervera and his fleet under his (Blanco's) orders. Blanco then ordered Cervera to remain in Santiago and assist in the defense of the shore batteries. Admiral Cervera protested strongly against this, and appealed to Spain; but it is doubtful whether his appeal ever reached the government. He asked to be allowed to coal up and then leave Santiago, where he might be free to meet the American fleet, rather than to be bottled up in a blockaded harbor. He contended that he could not possibly be useful to Spain by remaining in Santiago harbor, with the certainty of American ships coming to keep him there, whereas, outside and free, his strong fleet could be of great value to the Spanish cause. The answer of General Blanco was that Admiral Cervera was now subject to his orders; that he, and not Admiral Cervera, was in command of affairs in Cuba, and that the admiral must obey his command. Cervera could then do nothing."

If this semi-official statement of Admiral Cervera's case is an accurate one, the Santiago campaign, which ended in the destruction of Cervera's fleet and the capture of the city, was the direct result of General Blanco's interference. The Spanish admiral had plenty of time to coal his vessels and make his escape before either of our fleets reached the mouth of the harbor, and if he had done so there might have been no Santiago campaign, and the whole course of the war might have been changed. But the opportunity soon passed.

On the 20th of May the news of Cervera's appearance at Santiago was reported to the Navy Department in Washington, and Secretary Long immediately cabled it to Admiral Sampson by way of Key West. On the following day, May 21, Sampson sent the Marblehead to the southern coast of Cuba with an order directing Commodore Schley to proceed at once to Santiago unless he had good reason to believe that the Spanish fleet was really in Cienfuegos. When this order reached Schley, on the 23d of May, he felt sure that he had Cervera "bottled up" in Cienfuegos harbor, and he did not become aware of his error until the 25th. He then proceeded with his fleet to Santiago, but did not reach there until the 26th. Cervera had then had a whole week in which to coal his vessels and make his escape. That he fully intended to do this seems to be evident from the statement of Mr. Frederick W. Ramsden, British consul at Santiago, whose recently published diary contains the following entry, under date of May 23: "The Spanish fleet is taking in coal, water, and provisions in a hurry, and it is evident that it is preparing to go to sea, probably to-night or in the morning, as I hear the pilots have been ordered for this evening."

If Cervera had gone to sea on the evening of May 23, or the morning of the 24th, as was plainly his intention, he would have made his escape without the slightest difficulty, because Admiral Sampson was then cruising off Havana, while Schley was still blockading Cienfuegos. What would have been the course of the war in that event, it is impossible to say; but General Shafter would certainly have been held at Tampa until the Spanish fleet had been overtaken and destroyed, and then, very likely, the army of invasion would have landed at some point nearer to Havana. Admiral Cervera, however, for some reason not yet positively known, remained in Santiago a whole week, and at the expiration of that time it is doubtful whether he could have made his escape, even had he wished to do so, because Commodore Schley, with the Flying Squadron, was off the entrance to the harbor. Six days later, when Schley's squadron was reinforced by the powerful fleet of Admiral Sampson, Cervera's last chance of escape vanished, and there was nothing left for him to do but assist the forts and the garrison to defend the city to the last, or make a desperate and almost hopeless attempt to break through the line of the blockading fleet.

Late in May, while Admiral Sampson was still cruising off Havana, he sent an order, by the captain of the New Orleans, to Commodore Schley, directing the latter to "use the collier Sterling to obstruct the [Santiago] channel at its narrowest part leading into the harbor," so as to make the escape of the Spanish fleet absolutely impossible. "I believe," he said, "that it would be perfectly practicable to steam this vessel into position, drop all her anchors, allow her to swing across the channel, and then sink her, either by opening the valves, or whatever means may be best."

Commodore Schley, for some reason, did not obey this order; but as soon as Admiral Sampson reached the mouth of Santiago harbor, he proceeded to carry out the plan himself. At three o'clock on the morning of June 3, Lieutenant R. P. Hobson, with a volunteer crew of seven men, ran the steam-collier Merrimac into the mouth of the harbor, under a heavy fire from the Spanish batteries, dropped her anchors in mid-channel between Churruca Point and Smith Cay, opened her sea connections, exploded a number of torpedoes hung along her sides at the water-line, and when she sank, hung on to a raft attached by a rope to the sunken vessel. They were rescued from this position by the Spaniards and thrown into Morro Castle, but were treated with the consideration and courtesy to which their gallantry entitled them. On the afternoon of the same day, Admiral Cervera, who with his own hand had dragged Hobson from the water, sent his chief of staff out to the New York, under a flag of truce, with a letter to Admiral Sampson, in which he informed the latter that the lieutenant and his men were safe, and referred in terms of admiration and respect to their courage and devotion to duty.

Unfortunately,—or perhaps fortunately,—the object for which Lieutenant Hobson and his men risked their lives was not attained. The Merrimac failed to swing around so as to lie transversely across the channel, but sank in such a way as to place her hull parallel with the middle of it and near its eastern edge. This left plenty of water and plenty of room for vessels to pass on the western, or Smith Cay, side. Egress, however, although still possible, was extremely difficult and dangerous, on account of the strictness and closeness of the blockade which was established when Admiral Sampson arrived and took command of the combined fleets. The battle-ships and larger vessels, which formed the outer line of the blockade, were disposed in a semicircle around the mouth of the harbor, at a distance of four or five miles, with the flagship New York at one end of the line and the Brooklyn at the other. Inside of this semicircle, and much nearer the entrance, were stationed two or three small cruisers or gunboats, whose duty it was to watch the mouth of the harbor incessantly and give instant warning of the appearance of any hostile vessel. At night, when the danger from the Spanish torpedo-boats was greatest and when Cervera's fleet was most likely to escape, a powerful and piercing search-light was held constantly on the mouth of the narrow canon between Morro and Socapa; the battle-ships closed in so as to diminish the radius of their semicircle by nearly one half; the cruisers and gunboats, under cover of the blinding radiance of the search-light, moved a mile nearer to the mouth of the harbor; and three steam-launches patrolled the coast all night within pistol-shot of the enemy's batteries. In the face of such a blockade it was virtually impossible for Cervera to escape, and almost equally impossible for his torpedo-boats to come out of the harbor unobserved, or to reach any of our larger vessels even if they should venture out. Long before they could get across the mile and a half or two miles of water that separated the harbor entrance from the nearest battleship, they would be riddled with projectiles from perhaps a hundred rapid-fire guns. Torpedo-boats, however, did not play an important part on either side. Our own were prevented from entering the harbor by a strong log boom stretched across the channel just north of the Estrella battery, and those of the Spaniards never even attempted to make an aggressive movement in the period covered by the blockade. Admiral Cervera evidently thought that the chance of accomplishing anything by means of a torpedo-boat attack was too remote to justify the risk.

On the 6th of June Admiral Sampson bombarded the shore batteries and the mouth of the harbor for two hours and a half, destroying a number of houses on Smith Cay, setting fire to the Spanish cruiser Reina Mercedes, which was moored near the end of the Socapa promontory, and killing or wounding twenty-five or thirty officers and men on the cruiser, in the batteries, and in Morro Castle. The earthwork batteries east and west of the entrance did not prove to be very formidable and were quickly silenced; but the submarine mines in the narrow channel leading to the upper harbor, which prevented our fleet from forcing an entrance, could not be removed without the cooeperation of a land force. All that Admiral Sampson could do, therefore, was to bombard the harbor fortifications now and then, so as to prevent further work on them; occupy the lower part of Guantanamo Bay, forty miles east of Santiago, as a coaling-station; and urge the government in Washington, by telegraph, to send the army forward as speedily as possible.

The fleet of transports which conveyed General Shafter's command to the southern coast of Cuba arrived off the entrance to Santiago harbor at midday on the 20th of June, after a tedious and uneventful voyage of five days from the Dry Tortugas around the eastern end of the island. General Shafter at once held a conference with Admiral Sampson and with the Cuban general Garcia, who had come to the coast to meet the fleet, and, after considering every possible line of attack, decided to land his force at two points, within supporting distance of each other, ten or fifteen miles east of the entrance to Santiago harbor, and then march toward the city through the interior. The points selected for debarkation were Siboney, a small village about ten miles east of Morro Castle, and Daiquiri,[3] another similar village five miles farther away, which, before the war, was the shipping-port of the Spanish-American Iron Company. From Daiquiri there was a rough wagon-road to Siboney, and the latter place was connected with Santiago by a narrow-gage railroad along the coast and up the Aguadores ravine, as well as by a trail or wagon-road over the foot-hills and through the marshy, jungle-skirted valleys of the interior.

When we reached the entrance to Santiago harbor in the Red Cross steamer State of Texas on the 25th of June, the Fifth Army-Corps—or most of it—had already landed, and was marching toward Santiago along the interior road by way of Guasimas and Sevilla. The landing had been made, Admiral Sampson told me, without the least opposition from the Spaniards, but there had been a fight, on the day before our arrival, between General Wheeler's advance and a body of troops supposed to be the rear-guard of the retiring enemy, at a place called Guasimas, three or four miles from Siboney, on the Santiago road. Details of the fight, he said, had not been received, but it was thought to be nothing more than an unimportant skirmish.

In reply to my question whether he had any orders for us, or any suggestions to make with regard to our movements, he said that, as there seemed to be nothing for the Red Cross to do in the vicinity of Santiago, he should advise us to go to Guantanamo Bay, where Captain McCalla had opened communications with the insurgents under General Perez, and where we should probably find Cuban refugees suffering for food. Acting upon this suggestion, we got under way promptly, steamed into the little cove of Siboney to take a look at the place and to land Mr. Louis Kempner of the Post-Office Department, whom we had brought from Key West, and then proceeded eastward to Guantanamo Bay.



CHAPTER VII

THE FIGHT AT GUANTANAMO

As the southeastern coast of Cuba is high and bold, with deep water extending close up to the line of surf, vessels going back and forth between Santiago and Guantanamo run very near to the land; and the ever-changing panorama of tropical forest and cloud-capped mountain which presents itself to the eye as the steamer glides swiftly past, within a mile of the rock-terraced bluffs and headlands, is a constant source of surprise and delight, even to the most experienced voyager. It is an extremely beautiful and varied coast. In the foreground, only a rifle-shot away across the blue undulating floor of the Caribbean, rises a long terraced mesa, fronting on the sea, with its rocky base in a white smother of foaming surf, and its level summit half hidden by a drooping fringe of dark-green chaparral and vines. Over the cyclopean wall of this mesa appear the rounded tops of higher and more distant foot-hills, densely clad in robes of perennial verdure, while beyond and above them all, at a distance of five or six miles, rise the aerial peaks of the splendid Sierra del Cobre, with a few summer clouds drifting across their higher slopes and casting soft violet shadows into the misty blue of their intervening valleys. Here and there the terraced mesa, which forms the coast-line, is cut into picturesque castle-like bluffs by a series of wedge-shaped clefts, or notches, and through the openings thus made in the rocky wall one may catch brief glimpses of deep, wild ravines down which mountain torrents from the higher peaks tumble to the sea under the dense concealing shade of mango-and mimosa-trees, vines, flowering shrubs, and the feathery foliage of cocoanut and royal palms.

Wild, beautiful, and picturesque, however, as the coast appears to be, not a sign does it anywhere show of a bay, an inlet, or a safe sheltered harbor. For miles together the surf breaks almost directly against the base of the terraced rampart which forms the coast-line, and even where streams have cut deep V-shaped notches in the rocky wall, the strips of beach formed at their mouths are wholly unsheltered and afford safe places of landing only when the sea is smooth and the wind at rest. Often, for days at a time, they are lashed by a heavy and dangerous surf, which makes landing upon them in small boats extremely difficult, if not absolutely impracticable.

About thirty-five miles from Santiago harbor, as one sails eastward, the wall-like mesa on the left sinks from a height of two or three hundred feet to a height of only twenty or thirty; the mountains of the Sierra del Cobre come to an end or recede from the coast, leaving only a few insignificant hills; and through a blue, tremulous heat-haze one looks far inland over the broad, shallow valley of the Guantanamo River.

We entered the beautiful Bay of Guantanamo about half-past five o'clock on Saturday afternoon, and found it full of war-ships and transports. The white hospital steamer Solace lay at anchor over toward the western side of the harbor, and between her and the eastern shore were the Dolphin, the Eagle, the Resolute, the Marblehead, and three or four large black colliers from Key West. As we rounded the long, low point on the western side of the entrance and steamed slowly into the spacious bay, a small steam-launch came puffing out to meet us, and, as soon as she was within hailing distance, an officer in the white uniform of the navy rose in the stern-sheets, put his hands to his mouth, and shouted: "Captain McCalla presents his compliments to the captain of the State of Texas, and requests that you follow me and anchor between the Marblehead and the Haitian cable-steamer."

"All right," replied Captain Young, from the bridge.

"That sounds well," I said to one of the Red Cross men who was standing near me. "It shows that things are not allowed to go helter-skelter here."

We followed the little launch into the harbor and dropped anchor in the place indicated, which was about one hundred yards from shore on the eastern side of the channel, and just opposite the intrenched camp of Colonel Huntington's marines. I was impatient to land and see the place where the American flag had first been raised on Cuban soil; but darkness came on soon, and it did not seem worth while to leave the ship that night.

After breakfast on the following morning, I took a small boat and went off to the Marblehead to call upon Captain McCalla, who was in command of the station. I had made his acquaintance in Washington, when he was one of the members of a board appointed to consider means of sending relief to the Greely arctic expedition; but I had not seen him in many years, and it is not surprising, perhaps, that I almost failed to recognize him in his Cuban costume. The morning was hot and oppressive, and I found him clad in what was, in the strictest sense of the words, an undress uniform, consisting of undershirt, canvas trousers, and an old pair of slippers. Like the sensible man I knew him to be, he made no apology for his dress, but welcomed me heartily and introduced me to Captain Philip of the battle-ship Texas, who had just come into the harbor after a fresh supply of coal. As I entered, Captain McCalla was telling Captain Philip, with great glee, the story of his experience off the Cuban coast between Morro Castle and Aguadores, when his vessel, the Marblehead, was suddenly attacked one night by the whole blockading fleet.

"They saw a railroad-train," he said, "running along the water's edge toward Siboney, and in the darkness mistook it for a Spanish torpedo-boat. The train, of course, soon disappeared; but I happened to be cruising close inshore, just there, as it passed, and they all turned their search-lights on me and opened fire."

"All except the Iowa," corrected Captain Philip, with a smile.

"Yes, all except the Iowa," assented Captain McCalla, laughing heartily, as if it were the funniest of jokes. "Even the Texas didn't show me any mercy; but Bob Evans knew the difference between a railroad-train and a torpedo-boat, and didn't shoot. I told him, the last time I saw him, that he was clearly entitled to take a crack at me. Every other ship in the fleet had had the privilege, and it was his turn. I'm the only man in the navy," he said, with renewed laughter, "who has ever sustained the fire of a whole fleet of battle-ships and cruisers and got away alive."

After Captain Philip had made his call and taken his leave, I explained to Captain McCalla the object of our coming to Guantanamo Bay, and asked whether there were any Cuban refugees in the vicinity who needed food and could be reached. He replied unhesitatingly that there were. He was in almost daily communication, he said, with General Perez, an insurgent leader who was then besieging Guantanamo city, and through that officer he thought he could send food to a large number of people who had taken refuge in the woods north of the bay and were in a destitute and starving condition. He had already sent to them all the food he himself could spare, but it was not half enough to meet their wants. With characteristic promptness and energy he called his stenographer and dictated a letter to General Perez, in which he said that Miss Clara Barton, president of the American National Red Cross, had just reached Guantanamo Bay in the steamer State of Texas, with fourteen hundred tons of food intended for Cuban reconcentrados, and asked whether he (Perez) could furnish pack-animals and an escort for, say, five thousand rations, if they could be landed on the western side of the lower bay. This letter he sent to General Perez by a special courier from the detachment of Cubans then serving with the marines, and said that he should probably receive a reply in the course of two or three days. As nothing more could be done at that time, I returned to the State of Texas, reported progress to Miss Barton, and then went on shore to send a telegram to Washington by the Haitian cable, which had just been recovered and repaired, and to take a look at the camp of the marines.

When, on May 26, Commodore Schley, with the Flying Squadron, arrived off the entrance to Santiago harbor, and began the blockade of that port, the great need of his vessels was a safe and sheltered coaling-station. The heavy swell raised along the southern coast of Cuba by the prevailing easterly winds makes it often dangerous and always difficult to lay a collier alongside a battle-ship in the open sea and transfer coal from one to the other. Understanding and appreciating this difficulty, Secretary Long telegraphed Admiral Sampson on May 28 to consider the question whether it would not be possible to "seize Guantanamo and occupy it as a coaling-station." Sampson replied that he thought it might be done, and immediately cabled Commodore Schley off Santiago as follows: "Send a ship to examine Guantanamo with a view to occupying it as a base, coaling one heavy ship at a time." The official correspondence thus far published does not show whether Commodore Schley received this order in time to act upon it before Sampson arrived or not; but as soon as the latter came he caused a reconnaissance of Guantanamo Bay to be made, decided that the lower part of it might be seized by a comparatively small land force if protected by the guns of a few war-ships, and immediately sent to Key West for the first battalion of marines, which was the only available landing force at his command. Meanwhile the auxiliary cruiser Yankee bombarded and burned a Spanish blockhouse situated on a hill near the entrance to the lower harbor of Guantanamo, and on June 8 Captain McCalla, in the Marblehead, seized and occupied—as far as he could do so without a landing force—all that part of the bay which lies between the entrance and the narrow strait leading to the fortified post of Caimanera.

The marines, under command of Lieutenant-Colonel Huntington, arrived on the steamer Panther, Friday, June 10, and proceeded at once to disembark. The place selected for a landing was a low, rounded, bush-covered hill on the right, or eastern, side of the bay, about a quarter of a mile from the entrance. On the summit of this hill the Spaniards had made a little clearing in the chaparral and erected a small square blockhouse; but inasmuch as this blockhouse had already been destroyed and its garrison driven to the woods by the fire of the Yankee, all that the marines had to do was to occupy the abandoned position and again fortify the hill. In some respects this hill, which was about one hundred and fifty feet in height, made a strong and easily defended position; but, unfortunately, it was covered nearly to the summit with a dense growth of bushes and scrub, and was commanded by a range of higher hills a little farther to the eastward. The enemy, therefore, could not only creep close up to the camp under cover of the dense chaparral, but could fire down upon it from the higher slopes of the wooded range which runs parallel with the bay on its eastern side.

The landing was made, without opposition, about two o'clock on the afternoon of Friday, June 10. Under cover of the guns of the war-ships, the marines disembarked on the strip of beach at the foot of the hill; burned all the houses and huts left by the Spaniards, so as to guard against the danger of infection with yellow fever; and then deployed up the hill, pitched their shelter-tents on its eastern slope, and spent all the afternoon and a large part of the next day in landing ammunition and stores, establishing outposts, and making arrangements for a permanent camp.

The Spaniards, who must have been watching these operations from the concealment of the bushes and from the slopes of the adjacent hills, gave no sign, at first, of their presence; but seeing that the marines were comparatively few in number, they finally plucked up courage, and about five o'clock Saturday afternoon began a desultory, skirmishing attack which lasted the greater part of that day and night, and, indeed, continued, with an occasional intermission, for three or four days and nights. Major Cochrane, who described the fight to me, said that he slept only an hour and a half in four days, and that many of his men became so exhausted that they fell asleep standing on their feet with their guns in their hands.

The strength of the marine battalion at that time was between five and six hundred men. They were armed with rifles of the Lee or Lee-Metford pattern, and had, in addition, two automatic Colt machine-guns and three rapid-fire Hotchkiss cannon of three-inch caliber. The greatest disadvantage under which they labored was that due to the tangled, almost impenetrable nature of the chaparral that surrounded the camp, and the facilities which it afforded the enemy for concealment and stealthy approach. The gunboats shelled the woods from time to time, drove the hidden Spaniards back, and silenced their fire; but as soon as night fell they would creep silently up through the bushes until they were so near to the camp that the pickets of the marines could smell the smoke of their cigarettes, and yet could neither see them nor hear them. Then the nocturnal skirmishing would begin again. There were six successive attacks from different directions on the night of the 11th, and a still greater number on the night of the 12th, with more or less desultory skirmishing during the day, so that for a period of forty-eight hours the gallant marines had no rest or sleep at all.

There was some danger, at first, that the enemy, reinforced from Caimanera or Guantanamo city, would assemble in force on the slopes of the eastern hills, creep up through the scrub until they were within a short distance of the camp, and then overwhelm the marines in a sudden rush-assault. They were known to have six thousand regulars at Guantanamo city, only about fifteen miles away, and it was quite within the bounds of possibility that they might detach a large part of this force for offensive operations on the eastern side of the lower bay. To provide for this contingency, and to strengthen his defensive position, Lieutenant-Colonel Huntington withdrew his men from the eastern slope of the hill, where they had first been stationed, and posted them on the crest and upper part of the western slope, where they would be nearer the fleet and better protected by its guns. At the same time our small force, in the intervals of fighting, dug a trench and erected a barricade around the crest of the hill on the land side, so as to enlarge the clearing, give more play to the automatic and rapid-fire guns, and make it more difficult for the enemy to approach unseen. When this had been done, there was little probability that a rush-assault would succeed. The best troops in the world, unless they were in overwhelming force, could hardly hope to cross a clearing that was swept by the fire of six hundred rifles, two machine-guns, and three Hotchkiss cannon hurling canister or shrapnel.

In the course of the first three days' engagement the marines were joined by eighty or a hundred Cuban insurgents; but opinions differ as to the value of the latter's cooeperation. Some officers with whom I talked spoke favorably of them, while others said that they became wildly excited, fired recklessly and at random, and were of little use except as guides and scouts. Captain Elliott, who saw them under fire, reported that they were brave enough, but that their efficiency as fighting men was on a par with that of the enemy; while Captain McCalla called attention officially to their devotion to freedom, and said that one of them, who had been shot through the heart, died on the field, crying with his last breath: "Viva Cuba libre!"

At the end of the third day's fighting, all attacks of the Spaniards having been repulsed, Lieutenant-Colonel Huntington determined to take the offensive himself. About six miles southeast of the camp, at a place called Cuzco, there was a well from which the Spanish troops were said to obtain all their drinking-water, and a heliograph signal-station by means of which they maintained communication with Caimanera. On the morning of June 14 Captain Elliott, with two companies of marines and about fifty Cuban volunteers, was sent to attack this place, drive the Spaniards away, and destroy the well and signal-station. The expeditionary force engaged the enemy, five hundred strong, about eleven o'clock in the morning, and fought with them until three in the afternoon, driving them from their position and inflicting upon them a loss of sixty men killed and one hundred and fifty wounded. Then, after capturing the heliograph outfit, burning the station, and filling up the well, the heroic little detachment returned, exhausted but triumphant, to its camp, with a loss of only two men killed, six wounded, and twenty or thirty overcome by heat.

On the fourth day of the long struggle for the possession of Guantanamo Bay, the Spaniards virtually gave up the contest and abandoned the field. A few guerrillas still remained in the chaparral, firing occasionally at long range either into the camp or at the vessels of the fleet; but, finally, even this desultory, long-range target practice ceased, and the last of the enemy fled, either to the fort at Caimanera or to Guantanamo city, leaving the plucky marines in undisputed control of the whole eastern coast of the lower bay. Our total loss in the series of engagements was only six men killed and twelve or fifteen wounded; but among the killed was the lamented Dr. Gibbs, acting assistant surgeon, United States navy, who was shot at one o'clock on the night of the 11th.

After the four days of fighting were over, Captain McCalla, with the Marblehead, the auxiliary cruiser St. Louis, and the battle-ship Texas, steamed up the bay to the little village of Caimanera, demolished the fort there with a few well-directed shots, and drove the garrison back into the woods. In the course of this expedition the Marblehead and the Texas ran into a number of submarine contact mines, or fouled them with their screws; but, fortunately, none of them exploded. The firing-pins had become so incrusted with barnacles and other marine growths during their long immersion that the force of the blow when the ships struck them did not drive them in far enough to explode the charges. When we reached Guantanamo in the State of Texas, Captain McCalla's boats and launches had thoroughly explored and dragged the lower bay, and had taken out safely no less than thirteen contact mines, each containing about one hundred pounds of guncotton. The upper bay was still in the possession of the Spaniards; but its control was not a matter of any particular importance. What Admiral Sampson wanted was a safe and sheltered coaling-and repairing-station for the vessels of his fleet, and this he obtained when his war-ships and marines, after four days of almost incessant fighting, drove the Spanish troops from the whole eastern coast of the lower bay.



CHAPTER VIII

THE LANDING AND ADVANCE OF THE ARMY

Early Sunday morning, at the little zinc-walled telegraph office under the camp of the marines at Guantanamo, I happened to meet two war correspondents—one of them, if I remember rightly, Mr. Howard of the New York "Journal"—who had just come from the front with a detailed account of the fight at Guasimas. This fight, they said, was not a mere insignificant skirmish, as Admiral Sampson supposed when I saw him on Saturday, but a serious battle, in which a part of General Wheeler's division was engaged, for several hours, with a force of Spanish regulars estimated at two or three thousand men. More than one hundred officers and men on our side had been killed or wounded, among them Captain Capron and Sergeant Hamilton Fish, both of whom were dead. The wounded, Mr. Howard said, had been brought back to Siboney and put into one of the abandoned Spanish houses on the beach, where, only the night before, he had seen them lying, in their blood-stained clothing, on the dirty floor, without blankets or pillows, and without anything that seemed to him like adequate attendance or care. At my request the two correspondents went on board the State of Texas and repeated their statement to Miss Barton, who, after consultation with the officers of her staff, decided to take the steamer back at once to Siboney. We could do nothing more at Guantanamo until General Perez should furnish transportation and an escort for the food that we intended to send to the refugees north of the bay, and, meanwhile, we might, perhaps, render some service to the wounded soldiers of General Wheeler's command whom Mr. Howard had seen lying, without blankets or pillows, on the floor. We had on board the State of Texas, at that time, one hundred or more cots, with plenty of bedding, and if the medical officers of the army could not get hospital supplies ashore, we thought that we could. At any rate, we would try. Calling again upon Captain McCalla, I explained to him the reasons for our sudden change of plan, and told him that, although we had decided to go to Siboney, we should try to get back in time to meet the pack-train and escort to be furnished by General Perez. I then returned to the State of Texas, and we sailed for Siboney at two o'clock.

In order to follow intelligently the course of the Santiago campaign, and to understand and appreciate the difficulties with which the medical department of the army had to contend, one must know something of the coast upon which that army landed and the nature of the environment by which it was surrounded. The southeastern coast of Cuba, between the entrance to Santiago harbor and the Bay of Guantanamo, is formed by three parallel ranges of hills and mountains which may be roughly characterized as follows: first, what I shall call the rampart—a high, flat-topped ridge, or narrow table, very steep on the sea side, and broken into long terraces by outcropping ledges of limestone; second, the foot-hills, which rise out of a wooded valley or valleys behind the rampart; and, third, the high mountains of the coast, or Sierra del Cobre, range, which lie back of the foot-hills, at a distance of five or six miles from the sea. This is not a strictly accurate topographical description of the coast, but it is roughly and generally true and will answer my purpose. In the vicinity of Santiago the rampart, or mesa-like elevation which borders the sea, has a height of two or three hundred feet, and stretches eastward and westward, like a stone wall, for a distance of nearly twenty miles. At three points it is cut down to the sea-level in narrow, V-shaped clefts, or notches, which have a width at the bottom of from seventy-five to two hundred yards, and which serve as outlets for three small streams. The first of these notches, as one goes eastward from Morro Castle, is that formed by the mouth of the Aguadores ravine, where the Juragua Railroad, on its way from Siboney to Santiago, crosses the Aguadores or Guamo River, and where the iron railroad-bridge and the approach to the city are guarded by a wooden blockhouse and an old stone fort. In the second notch, about six miles from Aguadores and ten from Morro Castle, are the hamlet and railroad-station of Siboney; and in the third, five miles farther to the eastward, lies the somewhat larger and more important mining village of Daiquiri, which, before the war, was the shipping-port of the Spanish-American Iron Company. There is no harbor, shelter for vessels, or safe anchorage at any of these places; but as the rampart, everywhere else, presents an almost insurmountable barrier, an invading force must either disembark in these notches, or go eastward to the Bay of Guantanamo and march forty miles to Santiago through the foot-hills. General Shafter, after inspecting the coast, decided to land in the notches occupied by the villages of Daiquiri and Siboney. He could then advance on Santiago either along the strip of beach under the rampart, by way of Aguadores and Morro Castle, or over a rough wagon-road running through the valleys and across the foot-hills of the interior, three or four miles back of the rampart.

The first difficulty which confronted him was that due to the lack of landing facilities. Not anticipating, apparently, that he might be forced to disembark on an unsheltered coast, he had neglected to provide himself with suitable surf-boats, and was wholly dependent upon the small boats of the transports and a single scow, or lighter, which he had brought with him from Tampa. Seeing that it would be impossible to land sixteen thousand men safely and expeditiously with such facilities, he applied for help to Admiral Sampson, and was furnished by the latter with fifty-two small boats and a number of steam-launches, all manned by officers and sailors from the fleet. Thus provided, he began the work of disembarkation on the morning of June 22 at Daiquiri, the vessels of the fleet, meanwhile, making feigned attacks at several other points along the coast, and shelling the notches and villages of both Siboney and Daiquiri, in order to drive the enemy back and cover the advance of the loaded boats.

Fortunately for General Shafter and for his troops, the Spaniards did not attempt to oppose the landing. If the sides of the notches and the foot-hills back of them had been fortified with earthworks and held by a daring enemy with a battery or two of light guns, it would have been extremely difficult, if not absolutely impossible, to get the troops ashore. Even without artillery, ten or fifteen hundred men armed with Mausers on the heights which command the notches and the approaches to them might have held off a landing force for days, if not weeks. The war-ships might have shelled them, or swept the heights with machine-guns, but it would have been easy for them to find shelter under the crest of the rampart on the land side, and I doubt whether a force so sheltered could have been dislodged or silenced by Admiral Sampson's whole fleet. In order to drive them out it would have been necessary to land in the surf under fire, and storm the heights by scaling the precipitous terraced front of the rampart on the sea side. This might, perhaps, have been done, but it would have involved a great sacrifice of life. The Spanish officers in Cuba, however, were not skilful tacticians. Instead of anticipating General Shafter's movements and occupying, with an adequate force, the only two places in the vicinity of Santiago where he could possibly land, they overlooked or neglected the splendid defensive positions that nature herself had provided for them, and allowed the army of invasion to come ashore without firing a shot. It was great luck for us, but it was not war.

Before night on the 22d, General Lawton's division, consisting of about six thousand men with a Gatling-gun battery, had landed at Daiquiri, and on the morning of the 23d it marched westward along the wagon-road to Siboney. The Spanish garrison at the latter place retreated in the direction of Santiago as General Lawton appeared, and the village fell into our hands without a struggle. Disembarkation continued throughout the 23d and 24th, at both Daiquiri and Siboney, and before dark on the afternoon of the 24th nine tenths of the army of invasion had landed, with no other accident than the loss of two men drowned.

In the meantime, General Linares, the Spanish commander at Santiago, had marched out of the city, with a force of about three thousand men, to meet the invaders, and had occupied a strong defensive position on the crest of a wooded hill at Guasimas, three or four miles northwest of Siboney, where the two roads from the latter place—one up the valley of the stream and the other over the end of the mesa—come together. He did not know certainly which of these two roads the invading force would take, and therefore posted himself on the hill at their junction, where he could command both.

On the afternoon of the 23d, Cuban scouts reported the position of the enemy to General Wheeler, who was then in command of our advance, and, after a council of war, it was decided to attack simultaneously by both roads. Early on the morning of Friday, June 24, therefore, General Young, with the First and Tenth dismounted cavalry, marched out of Siboney on the main road to Santiago, and proceeded up the valley of the little stream which empties into the sea through the Siboney notch; while Colonel Wood, at the head of the Rough Riders, climbed the end of the rampart, on the western side of the notch, and advanced toward Guasimas by the mesa trail, which is considerably higher than the main road and lies half a mile to a mile farther west.

The two columns encountered the enemy at about the same time. The Rough Riders, under Colonel Wood, began the attack on the mesa trail, and a few moments later General Young's command, on the Siboney-Santiago road, opened fire with three Hotchkiss mountain guns and began the ascent of the hill from the valley. The whole country was so overgrown with trees, shrubs, and tropical vines that it was almost impossible to see an object fifty yards away, and as the Spaniards used smokeless powder, it was extremely difficult to ascertain their position, or even to know exactly where our own troops were. Colonel Wood deployed his regiment to the right and left of the trail, and endeavored, as he advanced, to extend his line so as to form a junction with General Young's command on the right, and at the same time outflank the enemy on the left; but the tropical undergrowth was so dense and luxuriant that neither of the attacking columns could see the other, and all that they could do, in the way of mutual support and cooeperation, was to push ahead toward the junction of the two roads, firing, almost at random, into the bushes and vine-tangled thickets from which the Mauser bullets seemed to come. Colonel Roosevelt told me that once he caught a glimpse of the Spaniards, drawn up in line of battle; but during the greater part of the engagement they were concealed in the chaparral, and could be seen only when they broke from cover and fled, to escape the searching fire of our steadily advancing line. While Colonel Wood, on the left, was driving the enemy out of the jungles intersected by the mesa trail, General Young, with a part of the Tenth Cavalry (colored) supported by four troops of the First, was engaged in storming the hill up which ran the valley road; and at the end of an hour and a half, after a stubborn defense, the Spaniards were forced to abandon their chosen position and retreat in the direction of Santiago, leaving the junction of the two roads in our possession. The battle of Guasimas—the first fight of the Santiago campaign—had been won.

The number of men engaged in this affair, on our side, was nine hundred and sixty-four, and our loss in killed and wounded was sixty-six, including Captain Capron and Hamilton Fish, both of whom died on the field. The Spaniards, according to the statement of Mr. Ramsden, British consul in Santiago, had a force of nearly three thousand men and reported a loss of seven killed and fourteen wounded. It seems probable, however, that their loss was much greater than this. General Linares would hardly have abandoned a strong position and fallen back on the city after a loss of only twenty-one men out of three thousand.

Two war correspondents, Mr. Richard Harding Davis and Mr. Edward Marshall, took an active part in this engagement, and the latter was so severely wounded by a Mauser bullet, which passed through his body near the spine, that when he was carried from the field he was supposed to be dying. He rallied, however, after being taken to Siboney, and has since partially recovered.

The effect of General Wheeler's victory at Guasimas was to open up the Santiago road to a point within three or four miles of the city; and when we returned in the State of Texas from Guantanamo, the Rough Riders were in camp beyond Sevilla, and a dozen other regiments were hurrying to the front.

We reached Siboney after dark on Sunday evening, and found the little cove and the neighboring roadstead filled with transport steamers, whose twinkling anchor-lights—or rather adrift lights, for there was no anchorage—swung slowly back and forth in long curves as the vessels rolled and wallowed in the trough of the sea. As soon as a boat could be lowered, the medical officers of Miss Barton's staff went on shore to investigate the state of affairs and to ascertain whether the Red Cross could render any assistance to the hospital corps of the army. They returned in the course of an hour and reported that in two of the abandoned Spanish houses on the beach they had found two hastily extemporized and wholly unequipped hospitals, one of which was occupied by the Cuban sick and wounded, and the other by our own. No attempt had been made to clean or disinfect either of the buildings, both were extremely dirty, and in both the patients were lying, without blankets or pillows, on the floor. The state of affairs, from a medical and sanitary point of view, was precisely as the correspondents had described it to us, except that some of the wounded of General Wheeler's command had been taken on board the transports Saratoga and Olivette during the day, so that the American hospital was not so crowded as it had been when Mr. Howard saw it the night before. The army surgeons and attendants were doing, apparently, all that they could do to make the sick and wounded comfortable; but the high surf, the absence of landing facilities, the neglect or unwillingness of the quartermaster's department to furnish boats, and the confusion and disorder which everywhere prevailed, made it almost impossible to get hospital supplies ashore. All that the surgeons could do, therefore, was to make the best of the few medicines and appliances that they had taken in their hands and pockets when they disembarked. The things that seemed to be most needed were cots, blankets, pillows, brooms, soap, scrubbing-brushes, and disinfectants. All of these things we had on board the State of Texas, and the officers of Miss Barton's staff spent a large part of the night in breaking out the cargo and getting the required articles on deck.

Early the next morning, Dr. Lesser, with four or five trained nurses, all women, and a boat-load of hospital supplies, landed at the little pier which had been hastily built by the engineer corps, and walking along the beach through the deep sand to the American hospital, offered their services to Dr. Winter, the surgeon in charge. To their great surprise they were informed that the assistance of the Red Cross—or at least their assistance—was not desired. What Dr. Winter's reasons were for declining aid and supplies when both were so urgently needed I do not know. Possibly he is one of the military surgeons, like Dr. Appel of the Olivette, who think that women, even if they are trained nurses, have no business with an army, and should be snubbed, if not browbeaten, until they learn to keep their place. I hope this suggestion does not do Dr. Winter an injustice; but I can think of no other reason that would lead him to decline the assistance of trained young women who, although capable of rendering the highest kind of professional service, were ready and willing to scrub floors, if necessary, and who asked nothing more than to help him make a clean, decent hospital out of an empty, dirty, abandoned Spanish house.

When told by Dr. Winter that they were not wanted, the nurses went to the Cuban hospital, in a neighboring building, where their services were accepted not only with eagerness, but with grateful appreciation. Before night they had swept, disinfected, and scrubbed out that hospital with soap and water, and had bathed the Cuban patients, fed them, and put them into clean, fresh cot-beds. Our own soldiers, at the same time, were lying, without blankets or pillows, on the floor, in a building which Dr. Winter and his assistants had neither cleaned nor attempted to clean.

Dr. Appel of the hospital steamer Olivette, in an official report to the surgeon-general of the army, published, in part, in the New York "Herald" of November 4, 1898, says:

"There was, at that time [the time when we arrived off Siboney], a number of surgeons on board the State of Texas, and four trained nurses; but, although we were working night and day, taking care of our sick and wounded, no assistance was given by them until some days afterward, when our own men were ready to drop from fatigue."

The idea conveyed by this ungenerous and misleading statement is that the surgeons and Red Cross nurses on the State of Texas neglected or evaded the very duty that they went to Cuba to perform, and remained, idle and useless, on their steamer, while Dr. Appel and his associates worked themselves into a state of complete physical exhaustion. So far as the statement contains this implication, it is wholly and absolutely false. The State of Texas arrived off Siboney at eight o'clock on the evening of Sunday, June 26. In less than an hour the Red Cross surgeons had offered their services to Major Havard, chief surgeon of the cavalry division, and as early as possible on the following morning Dr. Lesser and four or five Red Cross nurses reported at the American hospital, offered the surgeon in charge the cots, blankets, and hospital supplies which they had brought, or were ready to bring, on shore, and asked to be set to work. When, on account of some prejudice or misapprehension, Dr. Winter declined to let them help him in taking care of our own sick and wounded soldiers, what more could they do than devote themselves to the Cubans? Two days later, fortunately, Major Lagarde, chief surgeon at Siboney, over-ruled the judgment of his subordinate, accepted the services of the nurses, and set them at work in a branch of the military hospital, under the direction of Dr. Lesser. There they all worked, almost without rest or sleep, until Dr. Lesser, Mrs. Lesser, Mrs. White (a volunteer), and three of the Red Cross nurses were stricken with fever, and four of them were carried on flat-cars to the yellow-fever camp in the hills two miles north of the village. The surgeon of the Olivette would have shown a more generous and more manly spirit if, in his report to the surgeon-general, he had mentioned these facts, instead of adroitly insinuating that the Red Cross surgeons and nurses were loafing on board the State of Texas when they should have been at work in the hospitals.

But Dr. Appel further says, in the report from which I have quoted, that at the time when the State of Texas reached Siboney—two days after the fight at Guasimas—"there was no lack whatever of medical and surgical supplies."

If Major Lagarde, Dr. Munson, Dr. Donaldson, and other army surgeons who worked so heroically to bring order out of the chaos at Siboney, are to be believed, Dr. Appel's statement concerning hospital supplies is as false as his statement with regard to the Red Cross surgeons and nurses. In an official report to the surgeon-general, dated July 29 and published in the New York papers of August 9, Captain Edward L. Munson, assistant surgeon commanding the reserve ambulance company, says: "After the fight at Las Guasimas there were absolutely no dressings, hospital tentage, or supplies of any kind, on shore, within reach of the surgeons already landed." Dr. Munson was the adjutant of Colonel Pope, chief surgeon of the Fifth Army-Corps, and he probably knew a good deal more about the state of affairs at Siboney after the battle of Guasimas than Dr. Appel did. Be that, however, as it may; I know from my own observation and experience that there was a lack of medical and hospital supplies at Siboney, not only when we arrived there, but for weeks afterward. Dr. Frank Donaldson, surgeon of the Rough Riders, in a letter from Siboney, published in the Philadelphia "Medical Journal" of July 23, says: "The condition of the wounded on shore here is beyond measure wretched, and excites the lively indignation of every one."

The neglect of our soldiers, both at Siboney and at the front, in the early days of the campaign, was discreditable to the army and to the country; and there is no reason why military surgeons should not frankly admit it, because it was not their fault, and they cannot justly be held accountable for it. The blame should rest, and eventually will rest, upon the officer or department that sent thirty-five loaded transports and sixteen thousand men to the Cuban coast without suitable landing facilities in the shape of surf-boats, steam-launches, and lighters.

In criticizing the condition of our hospitals, I cast no reflection upon the zeal, ability, and devotion to duty of such men as Colonel Pope, Major Lagarde, Major Wood, and the surgeons generally of the Fifth Army-Corps. They made the best of a bad situation for which they were not primarily responsible; and if the hospitals were in unsatisfactory condition, it was simply because the supplies furnished in abundance by the medical department were either left in Tampa for lack of water transportation, or held on board the transports because no adequate provision had been made by the commanding general or the quartermaster's department for landing them on a surf-beaten coast and transporting them to the places where they were needed.



CHAPTER IX

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.