CHAPTER XVII

MORRO CASTLE

In the course of the first week after I landed in Santiago, I made a number of interesting excursions to points in the vicinity of the harbor, for the purpose of ascertaining the real nature and strength of the Spanish fortifications and intrenchments. From the front of our army, after the battle of July 1-2, I had carefully examined, with a strong glass, the blockhouses and rifle-pits which defended the city on the land side; and from the bridge of the State of Texas, two weeks later, I had obtained a general idea of the appearance of Morro Castle and the batteries at the mouth of the harbor which protected the city from an attack by water; but I was not satisfied with this distant and superficial inspection. External appearances are often deceptive, and forts or earthworks that look very formidable and threatening from the front, and at a distance of half a mile, may prove to have little real strength when seen from the other side and at a distance of only a few yards. I wished, therefore, to get into these forts and batteries before any changes had been made in them, and before their guns had been removed or touched, so that I might see how strong they really were and how much damage had been done to them by the repeated bombardments to which they had been subjected.

The first excursion that I made was to Morro Castle and the fortifications at the entrance to the harbor. It was my intention to start at 4 A.M., so as to reach the castle before it should get uncomfortably hot; but as I had no alarm-clock, and as no one in the club ever thought of getting up before six, I very naturally overslept myself, and by the time I had dressed, eaten a hasty breakfast of oatmeal, hard bread, and tea, and filled my canteen with boiled water, it was after seven. The air ought to have been fresh and cool even then; but on the southeastern coast of Cuba the change from the damp chilliness of night to the torrid heat of the tropical day is very rapid, and if there is no land-breeze, the rays of the unclouded sun, even as early as seven o'clock in the morning, have a fierce, scorching intensity that is hardly less trying than the heat of noon. The only really cool part of the day is from four to six o'clock in the morning.

I put a can of baked beans and a-few crackers of hard bread into my haversack for lunch, threw the strap of my field-glass over my shoulder, took my canteen in my hand, and hurried down Gallo Street to the pier of the Juragua Iron Company, where I had engaged a colored Cuban fisherman to meet me with a sail-boat at 4 A.M. He had been waiting for me, patiently or impatiently, more than three hours; but he merely looked at me reproachfully, and pointed to the sun, as if to say, "You agreed to be here at daybreak, and now see where the sun is." I laid my head down sidewise on the palm of my hand, shut my eyes, snored vociferously, and explained to him in Russian that I had overslept myself. I was gratified to see that he understood my Russian perfectly. In communicating with Cubans and Spaniards I have always made it a practice to address them in Russian, for the obvious reason that, as they are foreigners, and Russian is a foreign tongue, they must necessarily understand that language a little better than they could possibly understand English. It may seem like an absurd idea, but I have no hesitation in saying that a skilful and judicious combination of Russian with the sign-language is a good deal more intelligible to a Cuban fisherman than either Pidgin-English or Volapuek. Voltaire once cynically remarked that "paternosters will shave if said over a good razor." So Russian will convey a perfectly clear idea to a Cuban fisherman if accompanied by a sufficiently pictorial pantomime. I tried it repeatedly on my boatman, and became convinced that if I only spoke Russian a little more grammatically, and gesticulated the sign-language a little more fluently, I could explain to him the outlines of cosmic philosophy and instruct him in the doctrines of esoteric Buddhism. I never should have got to Morro Castle and back with him if I had not been able to draw diagrams in the air with both hands and my head simultaneously, and then explain them to him in colloquial Russian.

The surface of the bay, as we pushed off from the pier, was almost as smooth and glassy as an expanse of oil; and although my negro boatman whistled persuasively for a breeze, after the manner of sailors, and even ejaculated something that sounded suspiciously like "Come up 'leven!" as he bent to his clumsy oars, he could not coax the Cuban AEolus to unloose the faintest zephyr from the cave of the winds in the high blue mountains north of the city. He finally suspended his whistling to save his breath, wiped his sweaty face on his shirt-sleeve, and made a few cursory remarks in Spanish to relieve his mind and express his unfavorable opinion of the weather. I shared his feelings, even if I could not adopt his language, and, pantomimically wringing the perspiration out of my front hair, I remarked in Russian that it was zharko (hot). Encouraged by what he took for sympathetic and responsive profanity on my side, he scowled fiercely and exclaimed, "Mucha sol—damn!" whereupon we smiled reciprocally and felt much cooler.

We crept slowly down the eastern side of the bay, past the conical hill crowned with a cubical blockhouse which marks the southern boundary of the city, around the end of the long iron trestle of the Juragua Iron Company, past the flat-topped mesa on which stands the harbor signal-station, and finally into the narrow neck of the Santiago water-bottle which Hobson vainly tried to cork with the collier Merrimac. From this point of view we could see, between the steep bluffs which form the entrance to the bay, a narrow strip of blue, sunlit ocean, and on its left the massive gray bastions of Morro Castle, projecting in a series of huge steps, like ledges or terraces of natural rock, from the crest of the eastern promontory.

All the maps of Santiago harbor that I have seen show another castle, called Socapa, nearly opposite Morro on the western side of the channel; but I have never been able to discover it. If it still exists, it must be in ruins and so overgrown with vegetation as to be completely hidden. The only fortification I could find on that side of the bay is the so-called "western battery," a recently constructed earthwork situated on the crest of the long, flat-topped hill which forms the outer coast-line. This earthwork could never have been known as a "castle"; it is at least three hundred yards west of the point indicated on the map as the site of Socapa, and it cannot be seen at all from the channel, or even from the highest parapet of Morro. Unless Socapa Castle, therefore, is so small and inconspicuous as to have escaped my notice, it must have fallen into ruins or been destroyed. There is no castle on the western side of the entrance now that can be seen from the water, from the Estrella battery, or from Morro.

After passing Cayo Smith, the sunken collier Merrimac, and the dismantled wreck of the Reina Mercedes, we turned abruptly to the left, opposite the Estrella battery, and entered a deep, sheltered cove, directly behind the Morro promontory and almost under the massive walls of the castle itself. Landing at a little wooden pier on the northern side of the miniature bay, I walked up to the road leading to the Estrella battery, and there stopped and looked about me. The cove was completely shut in by high hills, and the only road or path leading out of it, so far as I could see, was the one on which I stood. This began, apparently, at the Estrella battery, ran around the head of the cove, and then, turning to the right, climbed the almost precipitous side of the Morro promontory, in a long, steep slant, to a height of one hundred and fifty feet. There it made another turn which carried it out of sight behind a buttress of rock under the northwestern corner of the castle. Near the mouth of the cove, on my right, rose the white, crenellated, half-ruined wall of the Estrella battery—a dilapidated open stone fort of the eighteenth century, which contained no guns, and which, judging from its appearance, had long been abandoned. It occupied, however, a very strong position, and if the Spaniards had had any energy or enterprise they would have put it in repair and mounted in it a modern mortar which lay on a couple of skids near the pier, and two or three small rapid-fire guns which they might have obtained from one of Admiral Cervera's cruisers. Antiquated and obsolete as it was, it might then have been of some use.

Near the head of the cove was an old ordnance storehouse, or magazine, which proved upon examination to contain nothing more interesting than a few ancient gun-carriages, a lot of solid six-inch projectiles, an assortment of rammers and spongers for muzzle-loading cannon, and a few wooden boxes of brass-jacketed cartridges for Remington rifles. Three long smooth-bore iron culverins lay on the ground between this magazine and the pier, but they had not been fired, apparently, in a century, and were so eaten and pitted by rust that I could not find on them any trace of inscription or date. There was nothing really useful, effective, or modern, either in the Estrella battery or in the magazine, except the Remington rifle-cartridges and the unmounted mortar.

Finding nothing else of interest in the vicinity of the cove, I started up the road that led to the front or western face of Morro Castle. I call it a "road" by courtesy, because it did show some signs of labor and engineering skill; but it was broken every few yards into rude steps by transverse ledges of tough, intractable rock, and how any wheeled vehicle could ever have been drawn up it I cannot imagine. The fringe of plants, bushes, and low trees that bordered this road was bright with flowers, among which I noticed the white spider-lily (apparently a variety of Cleome pungens), the so-called "Cuban rose" (a flower that flaunts the scarlet and yellow of the Spanish flag and looks a little like Potentilla la Vesuve), and a beautiful climbing vine with large violet blossoms which resembled in shape and color the butterfly-pea (Centrosema).

In and out among these plants and bushes ran nimble lizards of at least half a dozen different kinds: lizards that carried their tails curled up over their backs like pug-dogs; lizards that amused themselves by pushing out a whitish, crescent-shaped protuberance from under their throats and then drawing it in again; lizards that changed color while I watched them; and big gray iguanas, two or three feet in length, which, although perfectly harmless, looked ugly and malevolent enough to be classed with Cuban land-crabs and tarantulas. I saw no animals except these lizards, and no birds except the soaring vultures, which are never absent from Cuban skies, and which hang in clouds over every battle-field, fort, city, and village on the island.

The road from the head, of the Estrella cove to the crest of the Morro promontory forks at a distance of seventy-five or one hundred yards from the cable-house, one branch of it turning to the left and climbing a steep grade to the summit of the ridge east of the castle, where stand the lighthouse and the barracks, while the other branch goes straight on in a rising slant to a rocky buttress situated almost perpendicularly over the point where the southern shore of the cove intersects the eastern margin of the harbor channel. Turning to the left around this buttress, it runs horizontally southward along a shelf-like cornice in the face of the precipice until it reaches a spacious terrace, or esplanade, cut out of the solid rock, at a height of one hundred and fifty feet above the water. This terrace, which is on the western face of the castle and directly under its lower bastions, seems to have been intended originally for a gun-platform, but there is nothing there now to indicate that guns were ever mounted on it. It has no parapet, or battlement, and is merely a wide, empty shelf of rock, overhanging the narrow entrance to the harbor, and overhung, in turn, by the walls of the fortress. In the mountain-side back of it are four or five quadrangular apertures, which look from a distance like square port-holes, or embrasures, for heavy cannon, but which prove upon closer examination to be doors leading to huge subterranean chambers, designed, I presume, for the safekeeping of ammunition and explosives. At the time when I went through them they contained nothing more dangerous than condemned shovels and pickaxes, empty bottles, old tin cans, metal lamps, dirty straw hats, discarded hammocks, and cast-off shoes. I found nothing in the shape of ammunition except two or three dozen spherical iron cannon-balls, which lay scattered over the rocky floor of the esplanade, as if the soldiers of the garrison had been accustomed to play croquet with them there, just to pass away the time in the intervals between Admiral Sampson's bombardments.

After looking about the esplanade and exploring the dim recesses of the gloomy ammunition-vaults, I climbed a crooked flight of disintegrating stone steps and entered, between two massive quadrangular bastions,[6] the lower story—if I may so call it—of the castle proper. As seen from the ocean outside of the harbor, this ancient fortress appears to consist of three huge cubes of gray masonry, superimposed one upon another in such a manner as to present in profile the outline of three rocky terraces; but whether this profile view gives anything like a correct idea of the real shape of the building I am unable to say. From the time when I entered the gateway at the head of the flight of stone steps that led up from the esplanade, I was lost in a jumbled aggregation of intercommunicating corridors, bastions, grated cells, stairways, small interior courtyards, and huge, gloomy chambers, which I could not mentally group or combine so as to reduce them to intelligible order or bring them into anything like architectural harmony. The almost complete absence of windows made it impossible to orient one's self by glancing occasionally at some object of known position outside; the frequent turns in the passages and changes of level in the floors were very confusing; the small courtyards which admitted light to the interior afforded no outlook, and I simply roamed from bastion to bastion and from corridor to corridor, without knowing where I was, or what relation the place in which I stood bore to the castle as a whole. Now and then I would ascend a flight of stone steps at the side of a courtyard and come out unexpectedly upon what seemed to be a flat roof, from which I could see the entrance to the harbor and the white walls of the Estrella battery hundreds of feet below; but as soon as I went back into the maze of passages, chambers, and bastions on that level, I lost all sense of direction, and five minutes later I could not tell whether I was on the northern side of the castle or the southern side, nor whether I was in the second of the three cubes of masonry or the third.

The most surprising thing about the castle, to me, was its lack of offensive power. Its massive stone walls gave it, of course, a certain capacity for endurance, and even for resistance of a passive kind; but it was almost as incapable of inflicting injury on an enemy as a Dutch dike or a hillock of the mound-builders would be. Until I reached what, for want of a better name, I shall have to call the roof of the uppermost cube, I did not find anywhere a single round of ammunition, nor a gun of any caliber, nor a casemate intended for a gun, nor an embrasure from which a gun could have been fired. So far as architectural adaptation to the conditions of modern warfare is concerned, it was as harmless as an old Norman keep, and might have been planned and built two centuries before guns were used or gunpowder invented. I have been unable to ascertain the date of its erection; but the city of Santiago was founded by Diego Velasquez in 1514, and all the evidence furnished by the castle itself would seem to indicate that it dates back to the sixteenth, or at latest to the seventeenth, century. There is certainly nothing in its plan or in its appearance to show that the engineers who designed it were acquainted even with the art of fortification as developed in the seventeenth century by Vauban. It is simply an old feudal castle, with moat, drawbridge, and portcullis, built after the model of medieval strongholds before heavy siege-ordnance came into general use. The idea that it could have done any serious damage to Admiral Sampson's fleet seems absolutely ludicrous when one has explored the interior of it and taken stock of its antiquated, not to say obsolete and useless, armament.

After wandering about for half an hour in the two lower stories, I climbed a crooked flight of stone steps, half blocked up with debris from a shattered parapet above, and came out on the flat roof of the highest and largest of the three cubes that together make up the fortress. It was a spacious battlemented floor, of rectangular but irregular outline, having an extreme length of perhaps one hundred and fifty feet, with an average width of seventy-five to one hundred.[7] On its eastern side it overlooked a deep, wide moat, intended to protect the wall from an assault made along the crest of the promontory, while on the other three sides one might look down hundreds of feet to the wide blue plain of the ocean, the narrow mouth of the harbor, and the deep sheltered cove of the Estrella battery. The city of Santiago was hidden behind the flat-topped hill on which the signal-station stands; but I could see a part of the beautiful bay, with the bare green mountains behind it, while eastward and westward I could follow the surf-whitened coast-line to the distant blue capes formed by the forest-clad slopes of Turquino on one side and the billowy foot-hills of the Gran Piedra on the other. The fleet of Admiral Sampson had disappeared; but its place had already been taken by a little fleet of fishing-smacks from Santiago, whose sun-illumined sails looked no larger, on the dark-blue expanse of the Caribbean, than the wings of white Cuban butterflies that had fallen into the sea.

For ten minutes after I reached the aerial platform of the bastion roof I had no eyes for anything except the magnificent natural cyclorama of blue water, rolling foot-hills, deep secluded valleys, and palm-fringed mountains that surrounded me; but, withdrawing my gaze reluctantly at last from the enchanting scenery, I turned my attention again to the castle and its armament. Scattered about here and there on the flat roof of the bastion were five short bronze mortars of various calibers and two muzzle-loading smooth-bore cannon, mounted, like field-pieces, on clumsy wooden carriages with long "trails" and big, heavy wheels. It was evident at a glance that neither of the cannon would be likely to hit a battle-ship at a distance of five hundred yards without a special interposition of Providence; and as the mortars had no elevating, training, or sighting gear, and could be discharged only at a certain fixed angle, it is doubtful whether they could drop a shell upon a floating target a mile in diameter—and yet these five mortars and two eighteen-pounder muzzle-loading guns were all the armament that Morro Castle had.

After looking the pieces over superficially and forming from mere inspection a judgment as to their value, I proceeded to examine them closely for dates. The larger of the two cannon, which was trained over the northern parapet as if to bombard the city of Santiago, bore the following inscription:

MARS PLURIBUS NEC IMPAR[8] 12 Jun 1748 PAR JEAN MARITZ

ULTIMO RATIO REGUM[9]

LOUIS CHARLES DE BOURBON COMPTE D'EU DUC D'AUMALE

The other cannon, which was trained over the western parapet and aimed at the place where Socapa Castle ought to have been, was inscribed:

LE COMPTE DE PROVENCE

ULTIMO RATIO REGUM

LOUIS CHARLES DE BOURBON COMPTE D'EU DUC D'AUMALE 1755

The mortars, which were embellished with Gorgons' heads and were fine specimens of bronze casting, bore inscriptions or dates as follows:

No. 1. EL MANTICORA 1733

STRVXITDVCTOREXERC ITM REGISBENqVE (sic) [* enlarged small letter q. (note of transcriber)] ————————— PHIL II HISPAN REX[10] ELISA FAR HIS REGINA

No. 2. VOĨE ABET FECIT SEVILLE ANO D 1724

No. 3. EL COMETA 1737

No. 4. 1780

No. 5. 1781

From the above inscriptions and dates it appears that the most modern piece of ordnance in the Morro Castle battery was cast one hundred and seventeen years ago, and the oldest one hundred and seventy-four years ago. It would be interesting to know the history of the two French cannon which, in obedience to the order of Louis XIV, were marked "ULTIMO RATIO REGUM." Iean Maritz, their founder, doubtless regarded them, a century ago, with as much pride as Herr Krupp feels now when he turns out a fifteen-inch steel breech-loader at Essen; but the ultimo ratio regum does not carry as much weight on this side of the Atlantic in the nineteenth century as it carried on the other side in the eighteenth, and the recent discussions between Morro Castle and Admiral Sampson's fleet proved conclusively that the "last argument of kings" is much less cogent and convincing than the first argument of battle-ships. It is doubtful, however, whether these antiquated guns were ever fired at Admiral Sampson's fleet. They were not pointed toward the sea when the castle was evacuated; I could not find any ammunition for them, either on the bastion roof where they stood or in the vaults of the castle below; there were no rammers or spongers on or about the gun-platforms, where they would naturally have been left when the guns were abandoned; and there was nothing whatever to show that they had been fired in fifty years. But it could have made little difference to the blockading fleet whether they were fired or not. They were hardly more formidable than the "crakys of war" used by Edward III against the French at the battle of Crecy. As for the mortars, they were fit only for a museum of antiquities, or a collection of obsolete implements of war like that in the Tower of London. I hope that Secretary Alger or Secretary Long will have "El Manticora" and "El Cometa" brought to the United States and placed at the main entrance of the War Department or the Navy Department as curiosities, as fine specimens of artistic bronze casting, and as trophies of the Santiago campaign.

When I had finished copying the inscriptions on the cannon and the mortars, I went down into the interior of the castle to examine some pictures and inscriptions that I had noticed on the walls of a chamber in the second story, which had been used, apparently, as a guard-room or barrack. It was a large, rectangular, windowless apartment, with a wide door, a vaulted ceiling, and smooth stone walls which had been covered with plaster and whitewashed. Among the Spanish soldiers who had occupied this room there was evidently an amateur artist of no mean ability, who had amused himself in his hours of leisure by drawing pictures and caricatures on the whitewashed walls. On the left of the door, at a height of five or six feet, was a life-sized and very cleverly executed sketch of a Spaniard in a wide sombrero, reading a Havana newspaper. His eyes and mouth were wide open, as if he were amazed and shocked beyond measure by the news of some terrible calamity, and his attitude, as well as the horror-stricken expression of his elongated face, seemed to indicate that, at the very least, he had just found in the paper an announcement of the sudden and violent death of all his family. Below, in quotation-marks, were the words:!!! Que BARBARIDAD.!!! Han apresado UN VIVERO." ("What BARBARITY!!! They have captured A FISHING-SMACK!!!")

This is evidently a humorous sneer at the trifling value of the prizes taken by the vessels of our blockading fleet off Havana in the early days of the war. But there is more in the Spanish words than can well be brought out in a translation, for the reason that vivero means a vessel in which fish are brought from the Yucatan banks alive, in large salt-water tanks. We had been accusing the Spaniards of cruelty and barbarity in their treatment of the insurgents. The artist "gets back at us," to use a slang phrase, by exclaiming, in pretended horror, "What barbarous cruelty! They have captured a boat-load of living fish!"

For a Spanish soldier, that is not bad; and the touch is as delicate in the sneer of the legend as in the technic of the cartoon.

A little farther along and higher up, on the same wall, was a carefully executed and beautifully finished life-sized portrait of a tonsured Roman Catholic monk—a sketch that I should have been glad to frame and hang in my library, if it had only been possible to get it off the wall without breaking the plaster upon which it had been drawn. I thought of trying to photograph it; but the light in the chamber was not strong enough for a snap shot, and I had no tripod to support my camera during a time-exposure.

There were several other sketches and caricatures on the left-hand wall; but none of them was as good as were the two that I have described, and, after examining them all carefully, I cast my eyes about the room to see what I could find in the shape of "loot" that would be worth carrying away as a memento of the place. Apart from old shoes, a modern kerosene-lamp of glass, a dirty blanket or two, and a cot-bed, there seemed to be nothing worth confiscating except a couple of Spanish newspapers hanging against the right-hand wall on a nail. One was "El Imparcial," a sheet as large as the New York "Sun"; and the other, "La Saeta," an illustrated comic paper about the size of "Punch." They had no intrinsic value, of course, and as "relics" they were not particularly characteristic; but "newspapers from a bastion in Morro Castle" would be interesting, I thought, to some of my journalistic friends at home, so I decided to take them. I put up my hand to lift them off the nail without tearing them, and was amazed to discover that neither nail nor newspapers had any tangible existence. They had been drawn on the plaster, by that confounded soldier-artist, with a lead-pencil I felt worse deceived and more chagrined than the Greek pony that neighed at the painted horse of Apelles! But I need not have felt so humiliated. Those newspapers would have deceived the elect; and I am not sure that the keenest-sighted proof-reader of the "Imparcial" would not have read and corrected a whole column before he discovered that the paper was plaster and that the letters had been made with a pencil. Major Greene of the United States Signal-Service, to whom I described these counterfeit newspapers, went to the castle a few days later, and, notwithstanding the fact that he had been forewarned, he tried to take "La Saeta" off the nail. He trusted me enough to believe that one of the papers was deceptive; but he felt sure that a real copy of "La Saeta" had been hung over a counterfeit "Imparcial" in order to make the latter look more natural. If the soldier who drew the caricatures, portraits, and newspapers in that guard-room escaped shot, shell, and calenture, and returned in safety to Spain, I hope that he may sometime find in a Spanish journal a translation of this chapter, and thus be made aware of the respectful admiration that I shall always entertain for him and his artistic talents.

In all the rooms of the castle that had been occupied by soldiers I found, scratched or penciled on the walls, checker-board calendars on which the days had been successively crossed off; rude pictures and caricatures of persons or things; individual names; and brief reflections or remarks in doggerel rhyme or badly spelled prose, which had been suggested to the writers, apparently, by their unsatisfactory environment. One man, for example, has left on record this valuable piece of advice:

"Unless you have a good, strong 'pull' [mucha influencia], don't complain that your rations are bad. If you do, you may have to come and live in Morro Castle, where they will be much worse."

Another, addressing a girl named "Petenera," who seems to have gotten him into trouble, exclaims:

Petenera, my life! Petenera, my heart! It is all your fault. That I lie here in Morro Suffering pain and writing my name On the plastered wall.

JOSE.

Probably "Jose" went to see "Petenera" without first obtaining leave of absence, and was shut up in one of the gloomy guard-rooms of Morro Castle as a punishment.

Another wall-writer, in a philosophic, reflective, and rather melancholy mood, says:

Tu me sobreviviras. Que vale el ser del hombres Cuando un escrito vale mas!

You [my writing] will survive me. What avails it to be a man, when a scrap of writing is worth more!

It is a fact which, perhaps, may not be wholly unworthy of notice that, among the sketches I saw and the mural inscriptions I copied in all parts of Morro Castle, there was not an indecent picture nor an improper word, sentence, or line. Spanish soldiers may be cruel, but they do not appear to be vicious or corrupt in the way that soldiers often are.

In wandering through the corridors and gloomy chambers of the castle, copying inscriptions on walls and cannon, and exploring out-of-the-way nooks and corners, I spent a large part of the day. I found that the masonry of the fortress had suffered even less from the guns of Admiral Sampson's fleet than I had supposed. The eastern and southeastern faces of the upper cube had been damaged a little; the parapet, or battlement, of the gun-floor had been shattered in one place, and the debris from it had fallen over and partly blocked up the steps leading to that floor from the second story; two or three of the corner turrets had been injured by small shells; and there was a deep scar, or circular pit, in the face of the eastern wall, over the moat, where the masonry had been struck squarely by a heavy projectile; but, with the exception of these comparatively trifling injuries, the old fortress remained intact. Newspaper men described it as "in ruins" or "almost destroyed" half a dozen times in the course of the summer; and the correspondent of a prominent metropolitan journal, who entered the harbor on his despatch-boat just behind the State of Texas the day that Santiago surrendered, did not hesitate to say: "The old fort is a mass of ruins. The stone foundation has been weakened by the shells from the fleet, causing a portion of the castle to settle from ten to twenty feet. Only the walls on the inner side remain. The terraces have been obliterated and the guns dismounted and buried in the debris. There are great crevices in the supporting walls, and the fort is in a general state of collapse."

How any intelligent man, with eyes and a field-glass, could get such an erroneous impression, or make such wild and reckless statements, I am utterly unable to imagine. As a matter of fact, the fleet never tried or intended to injure the castle, and all the damage done to it was probably accidental. I have no doubt that Admiral Sampson might have reduced the fortress to the condition that the correspondent so graphically describes,—I saw him destroy the stone fort of Aguadores in a few hours, with only three ships,—but he discovered, almost as soon as he reached Santiago, that the old castle was perfectly harmless, and, with the cool self-restraint of a thoughtful and level-headed naval officer, he determined to save it as a picturesque and interesting relic of the past. Most of the projectiles that struck it were aimed at the eastern battery, the lighthouse, or the barracks on the crest of the bluff behind it; and all the damage accidentally done to it by these shots might easily be repaired in two or three days. If Cuba ever becomes a part of the United States, the people of this country will owe a debt of gratitude to Admiral Sampson for resisting the temptation to show what his guns could do, and for preserving almost intact one of the most interesting and striking old castles in the world.

Leaving the fortress through the eastern gateway and crossing the dry moat on a wooden trestle which had taken the place of the drawbridge, I walked along the crest of the bluff toward the eastern battery. It was evident, from the appearance of the lighthouse and the one-story, tile-roofed buildings on the crest of the hill, that if Morro Castle escaped serious injury it was not because the gunners of our fleet were unable to hit it. Every other structure in its vicinity had been shattered, riddled, or smashed. The lighthouse, which was a tapering cylinder of three-quarter-inch iron twelve feet in diameter at the base and perhaps thirty feet high, had been struck at least twenty or thirty times. The western half of it, from top to bottom, had been carried away bodily; there were eleven shot-holes in the other half; the lantern had been completely demolished; and the ground everywhere in the vicinity was strewn with fragments of iron and glass. The flagstaff of the signal-station had been struck twice, slender and difficult to hit as it was, and the walls and roofs of the barracks and ammunition storehouses had been pierced and torn by shot and shell in a dozen different places. It is not likely, of course, that all this damage was done at any one time or in any single bombardment. The gunners of our fleet probably used these buildings as targets, and fired at them, every time they got a chance, just for amusement and practice. The white cylinder of the lighthouse made a particularly good mark, and the eleven shot-holes in the half of it that remained standing showed that Admiral Sampson's gunners found no difficulty in hitting a target ten feet by thirty at a distance of more than a mile. The captain of the Spanish cruiser Vizcaya told Lieutenant Van Duzer of the battle-ship Iowa that, at the height of the naval engagement off the mouth of the harbor on July 3, his vessel was struck by a shell, on an average, once a second. He spoke as if he had been greatly surprised by the extraordinary accuracy of our gunners' fire; but if he had taken one look at that Morro lighthouse before he ran out of the harbor he would have known what to expect.

After examining the shattered barracks and the half-demolished lighthouse, I walked on to the so-called "eastern battery," a strong earthwork on the crest of the ridge about one hundred and fifty yards from the castle. Here, in a wide trench behind a rampart of earth strengthened with barrels of cement, I found four muzzle-loading iron siege-guns of the last century, two modern mortars like the one that I had seen on the skids near the head of the Estrella cove, one smooth-bore cannon dated 1859, and two three-inch breech-loading rifles. The eighteenth-century guns were no more formidable than those on the roof of Morro, but the mortars and three-inch rifles were useful and effective. It was a shell from one of these mortars that killed or wounded eight sailors on the battle-ship Texas. One gun had been dismounted in this battery, but all other damage to it by the fleet had been repaired. Owing to the fact that its guns were in a wide trench, six or eight feet below the level of the hilltop, it was extremely difficult to hit them; and although Admiral Sampson repeatedly silenced this battery by shelling the gunners out of it, he was never able to destroy it.

The only other fortifications that I was able to find in the vicinity of Morro Castle were two earthworks known respectively as the "western battery" and the "Punta Gorda battery." The western battery, which was situated on the crest of the hill opposite Morro, on the other side of the harbor entrance, contained seven guns of various sizes and dates, but only two of them were modern. The Punta Gorda battery, which occupied a strong position on a bluff inside the harbor and behind the Estrella cove, had only two guns, but both were modern and of high power. In the three batteries—eastern, western, and Punta Gorda—there were only eight pieces of artillery that would be regarded as effective or formidable in modern warfare, and two of these were so small that their projectiles would have made no impression whatever upon a battle-ship, and could hardly have done much damage even to a protected cruiser. Six of these guns were so situated that, although they commanded the outside approach to the bay, they could not possibly hit an enemy that had once passed Morro and entered the channel. The neck of the bottle-shaped harbor, or, in other words, the narrow strait between Morro Castle and the upper bay, had absolutely no defensive intrenchment except the Punta Gorda battery, consisting of two guns taken from the old cruiser Reina Mercedes.

"Why," it may be asked, "did not Admiral Sampson fight his way into the harbor, if its defenses were so weak?"

Simply because the channel was mined. He might have run past the batteries without serious risk; but in so narrow a strip of water it was impossible to avoid or escape the submarine mines, four of which were very powerful and could be exploded by electricity. He offered to force an entrance if General Shafter would seize the mine-station north of Morro; but the general could not do this without changing his plan of campaign. The cooeperation of the navy, therefore, was limited to the destruction of Cervera's fleet and the bombardment of the city from the mouth of Aguadores ravine.



CHAPTER XVIII

FEVER IN THE ARMY

The most serious and threatening feature of the situation at Santiago after the capture of the city was the ill health of the army. In less than a month after it began its Cuban campaign the Fifth Army-Corps was virtually hors de combat. On Friday, July 22, I made a long march around the right wing from a point near the head of the bay to the Siboney road, and had an opportunity to see what the condition of the troops was in that part of our line. I do not think that more than fifty per cent. of them were fit for any kind of active duty, and if they had been ordered to march back to Siboney between sunrise and dark, or to move a distance of ten miles up into the hills, I doubt whether even forty per cent. of them would have reached their destination. There were more than a thousand sick in General Kent's division alone, and a surgeon from the First Division hospital—the only field-hospital of the Fifth Army-Corps—told me that a conservative estimate of the number of sick in the army as a whole would be about five thousand. Of course the greater part of these sick men were not in the hospitals. I saw hundreds of them dragging themselves about the camps with languid steps, or lying in their little dog-kennel tents on the ground; but all of them ought to have been in hospitals, and would have been had our hospital space and facilities been adequate. Inasmuch, however, as our hospital accommodations were everywhere deplorably inadequate, and inasmuch as our surgeons sent to the yellow-fever camps many patients who were suffering merely from malarial fever, a majority of our sick soldiers remained in their own tents, from necessity or from choice, and received only such care as their comrades could give them.

Yellow fever and calenture broke out among the troops in camp around Santiago about the same time that they appeared in Siboney. Calenture soon became epidemic, and in less than a fortnight there were thousands of cases, and nearly one half of the army was unfit for active service, if not completely disabled.

The questions naturally arise, Was this state of affairs inevitable, or might it have been foreseen as a possibility and averted? Is the climate of eastern Cuba in the rainy season so deadly that Northern troops cannot be subjected to it for a month without losing half their effective force from sickness, or was the sickness due to other and preventable causes? In trying to answer these questions I shall say not what I think, nor what I suppose, nor what I have reason to believe, but what I actually know, from personal observation and from the testimony of competent and trustworthy witnesses. I was three different times at the front, spent a week in the field-hospital of the Fifth Army-Corps, and saw for myself how our soldiers ate, drank, slept, worked, and suffered. I shall try not to exaggerate anything, but, on the other hand, I shall not suppress or conceal anything, or smooth anything over. Poultney Bigelow was accused of being unpatriotic, disloyal, and even seditious because he told what I am now convinced was the truth about the state of affairs at Tampa; but it seems to me that when the lives of American soldiers are at stake it is a good deal more patriotic and far more in accordance with the duty of a good citizen to tell a disagreeable and unwelcome truth that may lead to a reform than it is to conceal the truth and pretend that everything is all right when it is not all right.

The truth, briefly stated, is that, owing to bad management, lack of foresight, and the almost complete breakdown of the commissary and medical departments of the army, our soldiers in Cuba suffered greater hardships and privations, in certain ways, than were ever before endured by an American army in the field. They were not half equipped, nor half fed, nor half cared for when they were wounded or sick; they had to sleep in dog-kennel shelter-tents, which afforded little or no protection from tropical rains; they had to cook in coffee-cups and old tomato-cans because they had no camp-kettles; they never had a change of underclothing after they landed; they were forced to drink brook-water that was full of disease-germs because they had no suitable vessels in which to boil it or keep it after it had been boiled; they lived a large part of the time on hard bread and bacon, without beans, rice, or any of the other articles which go to make up the full army ration; and when wounded they had to wait hours for surgical aid, and then, half dead from pain and exhaustion, they lay all night on the water-soaked ground, without shelter, blanket, pillow, food, or attendance. To suppose that an army will keep well and maintain its efficiency under such conditions is as unreasonable and absurd as to suppose that a man will thrive and grow fat in the stockaded log pen of a Turkish quarantine. It cannot be fairly urged in explanation of the sickness in the army that it was due to the deadliness of the Cuban climate and was therefore what policies of marine insurance call an "act of God." The Cuban climate played its part, of course, but it was a subordinate part. The chief and primary cause of the soldiers' ill health was neglect, due, as I said before, to bad management, lack of foresight, and the almost complete breakdown of the army's commissary and medical departments. If there be any fact that should have been well known, and doubtless was well known, to the higher administrative officers of the Fifth Army-Corps, it is the fact that if soldiers sleep on the ground in Cuba without proper shelter and drink unboiled water from the brooks they are almost certain to contract malarial fever; and yet twelve or fifteen thousand men were sent into the woods and chaparral between Siboney and Santiago without hammocks or wall-tents, and without any vessel larger than a coffee-cup in which to boil water. I can hardly hint at the impurities and the decaying organic matter that I have seen washed down into the brooks by the almost daily rains which fall in that part of Cuba in mid-summer, and yet it was the unboiled water from these polluted brooks that the soldiers had to drink. One captain whom I know took away the canteens from all the men in his company, kept them under guard, and tried to force his command to boil in their tin coffee-cups all the water that they drank; but he was soon compelled to give up the plan as utterly impracticable. In all the time that I spent at the front I did not see a single camp-kettle in use among the soldiers, and there were very few even among officers. Late in July the men of the Thirty-fourth Michigan were bringing every day in their canteens, from a distance of two miles, all the water required for regimental use. They had nothing else to carry it in, nothing else to keep it in after they got it to camp, and nothing bigger than a tin cup in which to boil it or make coffee.

In the matter of tents and clothing the equipment of the soldiers was equally deficient. Dog-kennel shelter-tents will not keep out a tropical rain, and when the men got wet they had to stay wet for lack of a spare suit of underclothes. The officers fared little better than the men. A young lieutenant whom I met in Santiago after the surrender told me that he had not had a change of underclothing in twenty-seven days. The baggage of all the officers was left on board of the transports when the army disembarked, and little, if any, of it was ever carried to the front.

Nothing, perhaps, is more important, so far as its influence upon health is concerned, than food, and the rations of General Shafter's army were deficient in quantity and unsatisfactory in quality from the very first. With a few exceptions, the soldiers had nothing but hard bread and bacon after they left the transports at Siboney, and short rations at that. A general of brigade who has had wide and varied experience in many parts of the United States, and whose name is well and favorably known in New York, said to me in the latter part of July: "The whole army is suffering from malnutrition. The soldiers don't get enough to eat, and what they do get is not sufficiently varied and is not adapted to this climate. A soldier can live on hardtack and bacon for a while, even in the tropics, but he finally sickens of them and craves oatmeal, rice, hominy, fresh vegetables, and dried fruits. He gets none of these things; he has come to loathe hard bread and bacon three times a day, and he consequently eats very little and isn't adequately nourished. Nothing would do more to promote the health of the men than a change of diet."

A sufficient proof that the soldiers were often hungry is furnished by the fact that men detailed from the companies frequently marched from the front to Siboney and back (from eighteen to twenty-five miles, over a bad road), in order to get such additional supplies, particularly in the shape of canned vegetables, as they could carry in their hands and haversacks or transport on a rude, improvised stretcher. Officers and men from Colonel Roosevelt's Rough Riders repeatedly came into Siboney in this way on foot, and once or twice with a mule or a horse, and begged food from the Red Cross for their sick and sickening comrades in their camp at the front.

It is not hard to understand why soldiers contracted malarial fever in a country like Cuba, when they were imperfectly sheltered, inadequately equipped, insufficiently fed and clothed, forced to sleep on the ground, and compelled to drink unboiled water from contaminated brooks. But there was another reason for the epidemic character and wide prevalence of the calenture from which the army suffered, and that was exposure to exhalations from the malarious, freshly turned earth of the rifle-pits and trenches. All pioneers who have broken virgin soil with a plow in a warm, damp, wooded country will remember that for a considerable time thereafter they suffered from various forms of remittent and intermittent fever. Our soldiers around Santiago had a similar experience. The unexpected strength and fighting capacity shown by the Spaniards in the first day's battle, and their counter-attack upon our lines on the night of the following day, led our troops to intrench themselves by digging rifle-pits and constructing rude bomb-proofs as places of refuge from shrapnel. During the armistice these intrenchments were greatly extended and strengthened, and before Santiago surrendered they stretched along our whole front for a distance of several miles. In or near these rifle-pits and trenches our men worked, stood guard, or slept, for a period of more than two weeks, and the exhalations from the freshly turned earth, acting upon organisms already weakened by hardships and privations, brought about an epidemic of calenture upon the most extensive scale.

By August 3 the condition of the army had become so alarming that its general officers drew up and sent to General Shafter the following letter:

We, the undersigned officers, commanding the various brigades, divisions, etc., of the army of occupation in Cuba, are of the unanimous opinion that this army should be at once taken out of the island of Cuba and sent to some point on the northern sea-coast of the United States; that it can be done without danger to the people of the United States; that yellow fever in the army at present is not epidemic; that there are only a few sporadic cases, but that the army, is disabled by malarial fever, to the extent that its efficiency is destroyed, and that it is in a condition to be practically entirely destroyed by an epidemic of yellow fever, which is sure to come in the near future.

We know from the reports of competent officers and from personal observation that the army is unable to move into the interior, and that there are no facilities for such a move if attempted, and that it could not be attempted until too late. Moreover, the best medical authorities of the island say that with our present equipment we could not live in the interior during the rainy season without losses from malarial fever, which is almost as deadly as yellow fever.

This army must be moved at once or perish. As the army can be safely moved now, the persons responsible for preventing such a move will be responsible for the unnecessary loss of many thousands of lives.

Our opinions are the result of careful personal observation, and they are also based on the unanimous opinion of our medical officers with the army, and who understand the situation absolutely.

This letter was signed by Generals Kent, Bates, Chaffee, Sumner, Ludlow, Ames, and Wood, and Colonel Roosevelt.

In view of such a state of affairs as that disclosed by this letter there was, of course, only one thing to be done. The War Department decided to remove the Fifth Army-Corps at once from Cuba, and before the middle of August a large part of General Shatter's command was on its way to Montauk Point.

As a result, I presume, of sleeping without shelter from the heavy dew in the field-hospital at the front, and over-exerting myself by walking around the lines of the army in the blazing sunshine of midday, I was finally prostrated with illness myself. At three o'clock on the night of Tuesday, July 26, I awoke in a chill, and before morning I had all the symptoms of calenture, with a temperature of 104.

Calenture, or Cuban malarial fever, comes on rather suddenly with a chill of greater or less severity and a violent headache. The temperature frequently rises to 105, and the fever, instead of being intermittent, runs continuously with little, if any, diurnal variation. If the attack is not a very severe one the headache gradually subsides; the temperature falls to 102 or 103, and in the course of three or four days the disease begins to yield to treatment. In some cases the fever is interrupted by a second chill, followed by another rise of temperature; but, as a rule, there is only one chill, and the fever, after running from four days to a week, gradually abates. The treatment most favored in Santiago consists of the administration of a large dose of sulphate of magnesia at the outset, followed up with quinine and calomel, or perhaps quinine and sulphur. The patient is not allowed to take any nourishment while the fever lasts, and if he keeps quiet, avoids sudden changes of temperature, and does not fret, he generally recovers in a week or ten days. He suffers from languor and prostration, however, for a fortnight or more, and if he overeats, moves about in the sunshine, or exposes himself to the night air, he is liable to have another chill, with a relapse, in which the fever is higher and more obstinate, perhaps, than at first. Under ordinary circumstances the fever is not dangerous, and the worst thing about it is the wretched, half-dead, half-alive condition in which it leaves one. My attack was not a very severe one, and in the course of ten days I was able to walk about again; but the first time I went out into the sunshine I had a relapse, which reduced me to such a state of weakness and helplessness that I could no longer care for myself, and had either to leave the country or go into one of the crowded Santiago hospitals and run the risk of being sent as a "suspect" to the yellow-fever camp near Siboney. Upon the advice of Dr. Egan, I decided to take the first steamer for New York, and sailed from Santiago on August 12, after a Cuban campaign of only seven weeks.



CHAPTER XIX

THE SANTIAGO CAMPAIGN

It is my purpose, in the concluding chapters of this volume, to review as fully and dispassionately as I can the series of military operations known collectively as "the Santiago campaign," including, first, the organization and equipment of the expedition of General Shafter at Tampa; second, the disembarkation of troops and the landing of supplies at Daiquiri and Siboney; third, the strategic plan of the campaign and its execution; and, fourth, the wrecking of the army by disease after the decisive battle of July 1-2. The point of view from which I shall regard this campaign is not that of a trained military expert or critic, but merely that of an attentive and fair-minded civilian observer. I do not pretend to speak ex cathedra, nor do I claim for my judgments any other value than that given to them by such inherent reasonableness and fairness as they may seem to have. I went to Cuba without any prejudice for or against any particular plan of operations; I had very little acquaintance with or knowledge of the officers of the Fifth Army-Corps; and the opinions and conclusions that I shall here set forth are based on personal observations made in the field without conscious bias or prepossession of any kind.

In reviewing a military campaign, an arctic expedition, a voyage of discovery, or any other enterprise involving the employment of a certain force for the accomplishment of a certain purpose, the first question to be considered is the question of responsibility. Who is to be held accountable for the management and the results of this enterprise—the leader who directed and had charge of it, or the superior power which gave him his orders, furnished him with his equipment, and sent him into the field? When General Shafter was ordered to "go and capture the garrison at Santiago and assist in capturing the harbor and the fleet," did he become personally responsible for the management and the results of the campaign, or did he share that responsibility with the War Department? Unless there is some evidence to the contrary, the presumption in such a case is that the general in command of the army is told in due time where he is to go and what he is expected to do, and is then allowed to make his own plan of campaign, and to call upon the War Department for such supplies and means of transportation as, in the exercise of his individual judgment, he may think necessary for the successful execution of that plan. If he is given time enough to acquaint himself thoroughly with the field in which he is to operate, if his plan of campaign, in its general outlines, is approved, and if all his requisitions for vessels, horses, mules, wagons, ambulances, tents, guns, ammunition, and miscellaneous supplies are duly honored, there is no reason that I can see why he should not be held to a strict personal accountability for results, both generally and in detail. He has made his own plan; he has had everything that he asked for; and if the campaign does not go as it should, he, and not the War Department, is to blame. If, however, the department, after selecting him and approving his plan, does not furnish him with the transportation and the stores that he needs and has called for, he ought to protect himself and his own reputation by referring respectfully to that fact in his report of the campaign, so that, if any of his bricks are imperfect for lack of straw, the people may know that he was not supplied with straw and had no means whatever of getting it in the field to which he was sent. The importance of this point will become apparent when an attempt is made to ascertain the causes and fix the responsibility for the wrecking of the Fifth Army-Corps by disease in the short space of one calendar month.

There is nothing in the official documents thus far published to indicate that General Shafter was unreasonably hurried, or that he failed to get from the War Department anything for which he made timely requisition. The invasion of eastern Cuba was planned as early as the first week in May—possibly much earlier than that, and, at any rate, long before Admiral Cervera's fleet took refuge in Santiago harbor. Colonel Babcock, Shafter's adjutant-general, told me on May 7 that the government had decided to send the army of invasion to the eastern end of the island, and to leave Havana and the western provinces unmolested until later in the season. Before General Shafter sailed from Tampa, therefore, he had nearly or quite six weeks in which to acquaint himself with the Santiago field and mature a plan of operations. The question whether or not he was furnished with all the means of transportation and all the supplies for which he made requisition is in more doubt; but, inasmuch as he seems to have made no complaint or protest, and does not refer in his official reports to deficiencies of any kind, it may be assumed, for the purposes of this review, that he had been furnished by the War Department with everything for which he asked. Upon this assumption he was unquestionably responsible for the whole Santiago campaign, and must not only be given credit for the success that crowned it, but be held accountable for the blunders and oversights by which it was marred. He can relieve himself from such accountability only by showing that his equipment was inadequate and that the inadequacy was the result of causes beyond his control.

We are now prepared to consider:

I. The organization and equipment of the Santiago expedition.

When a general is appointed to lead and direct an expedition in a foreign country, the first questions, I think, that he must ask himself are: (1) What is the nature of the field in which I am to operate, and what are the difficulties—especially the unusual and unfamiliar difficulties—with which I shall have to contend? (2) Can I disembark my army in a harbor, or shall I have to land it on an open, unprotected coast, and perhaps through surf? (3) Are there any roads leading back into the interior, and, if so, what is their nature, and what is likely to be their condition at this season of the year? (4) Is the climate of the country to which I am going an unhealthful one, and, if so, how can I best protect my men from the diseases likely to attack them?

It is not always practicable to obtain satisfactory answers to such questions as these; but that answers should be had, if possible, and that the equipment of the force and the plan of campaign should be made to accord with the information obtained by means of them, is unquestionable. In the particular case now under consideration there was no difficulty whatever in getting full and satisfactory replies, not only to all of the above questions, but to scores of others of a similar nature that might have been and ought to have been asked. For nearly a month before General Shafter sailed from Tampa the vessels of Admiral Sampson's fleet had been patrolling the southeastern coast of Cuba from Santiago harbor to Guantanamo Bay, and their officers were in a position to furnish all the information that might be desired with regard to the nature of the coast, the facilities for landing an army, the strength and direction of the prevailing winds, the danger to be apprehended from heavy surf, and a dozen other matters of vital importance to an invading army. At Daiquiri, Siboney, and Santiago there were stations of an American iron-mining company, and its officers and employees, who might easily have been found, were in a position to furnish any amount of accurate and trustworthy information with regard to climate, topography, roads, rains, surf, and local conditions generally, in the very field that General Shafter's army was to occupy.

The sources of information above indicated were not the only sources accessible at the time when the Santiago campaign was decided upon; but they were the most important ones, and it is fair to presume that General Shafter made use of them to the fullest possible extent. If so, he was able to answer the questions above suggested in some such way as this:

1. The field to which I am going is a tropical field, and the unusual and unfamiliar difficulties with which I shall have to contend are probably those dependent upon climatic conditions.

2. There are no sheltered harbors on the southeastern coast of Cuba between Cape Cruz and Cape Maysi except the harbor of Santiago and the Bay of Guantanamo. The former is in possession of the enemy, and cannot, therefore, be used, while the latter is too far away from the city of Santiago, which I am ordered to capture. It is probable, therefore, that I shall have to land my army on an unsheltered part of the coast. The prevailing winds in the summer are from the east and southeast, and the swell that rolls in from the Caribbean Sea often breaks on the exposed coast-line in heavy and dangerous surf.

3. The roads leading back into the interior in the direction of Santiago are generally narrow and bad; they traverse almost impenetrable jungles; and they are liable, at this season of the year, to be rendered impassable for wheeled vehicles by heavy and frequent rains.

4. The climate is unhealthful, and unless men from the North are well fed, suitably clothed, securely sheltered, and furnished with boiled water for drinking purposes, they are almost certain to suffer from calenture, the characteristic fever of the region, as well as from yellow fever and dysentery.

This, in the briefest possible summary, is the information that General Shafter had, or might have had, before he sailed from Tampa. What preparation did he make to meet the difficulties suggested by this knowledge, and how far is the influence of it to be traced in the organization and equipment of his command?

Take, first, the problem of disembarking an army of sixteen thousand men, with the supplies necessary for its maintenance, on an unsheltered coast.

In 1847, when General Scott had in contemplation the landing of an army of twelve thousand men on the open beach at Vera Cruz, he caused sixty-seven surf-boats to be built for that particular service, each of them capable of holding from seventy to eighty men. Every detail of the disembarkation had been carefully considered and planned; every contingency that could be foreseen had been provided for; and the landing was successfully made in the course of two or three hours, without a single error or accident.

When General Shafter sailed from Tampa, on June 14, with an army considerably larger than that of General Scott, his equipment for disembarkation on an exposed, surf-beaten coast consisted, according to his own report, of only two scows! One of these went adrift at sea, and the loss of it, the general says, "proved to be very serious and was greatly felt." I don't wonder! Two scows, for an army of sixteen thousand men and ten or fifteen ship-loads of supplies, was a sufficiently economical allowance; and when that number was reduced by half, and a whole army-corps became dependent upon one scow, I am not surprised to learn that "the disembarkation was delayed and embarrassed." There is a reference in the report to certain "lighters sent by the quartermaster's department," and intended, apparently, for use on the Cuban coast; but when and by what route they were "sent" does not appear, and inasmuch as they were lost at sea before they came into General Shafter's control, they can hardly be regarded as a part of his equipment. All that he had with him was this flotilla of two scows. I heard vague reports of a pontoon-train stowed away under hundreds of tons of other stuff in the hold of one of the transports; but whether it was intended to supplement the flotilla of scows, or to be employed in the bridging of rivers, I am unable to say. I do not think it was ever unloaded in Cuba, and I am quite sure that it never was used.

The almost complete absence of landing equipment, in the shape of surf-boats, lighters, and launches, eventually proved, as I shall hereafter show, to be disastrous in the extreme; and if the navy had not come to the rescue, at Daiquiri and Siboney, it is not at all certain that General Shafter could have landed his army. In a telegram to the War Department dated "Playa del Este, June 25," he frankly admits this, and says: "Without them [the navy] I could not have landed in ten days, and perhaps not at all."

Now, it seems to me that the responsibility for this lack of boats, which came near ruining the expedition at the outset and which hampered and embarrassed it for three weeks afterward, can be definitely fixed. The difficulty to be overcome was one that might have been foreseen and provided for. If General Shafter did not foresee and provide for it, as General Scott did at Vera Cruz, he, manifestly, is the person to blame; while, on the other hand, if he did foresee it, but failed to get from the War Department the necessary boats, the department is to blame. The committee of investigation which is holding its sessions at the time this book goes to press ought to have no trouble in putting the responsibility for this deficiency where it belongs.

Boats, however, were not the only things that were lacking in the equipment of General Shafter's army. Next in importance to landing facilities come facilities for moving supplies of all kinds from the sea-coast to the front, or, in other words, means of land transportation. In his official report of the campaign General Shafter says: "There was no lack of transportation, for at no time, up to the surrender, could all the wagons I had be used." If I were disposed to be captious, I should say that the reason why the general could not use the wagons he had was that a large number of them lay untouched in the holds of the transports. He might have said, with equal cogency, that there was no lack of food, because at no time could all the hard bread and bacon in his ships be eaten. The usefulness of food and wagons is dependent to some extent upon their location. A superfluity of wagons on board a steamer, five miles at sea, is not necessarily a proof that there are more than enough wagons on shore.

When the army began its march in the direction of Santiago, without suitable tents, without hospital supplies, without camp-kettles, without hammocks, without extra clothing or spare blankets, and with only a limited supply of food and ammunition, there were one hundred and eighteen army wagons still on board the transport Cherokee. When they were unloaded, if ever, I do not know, but they were not available in the first week of the campaign, when the army began its advance and when the roads were comparatively dry and in fairly good condition. It must be observed, moreover, that transportation is not wholly a matter of wagons. Vehicles of any kind are useless without animals to draw them; and General Shafter does not anywhere say that he had a superfluity of mules, or that he could not use all the horses he had. It was in draft-animals that the weakness of the quartermaster's department became most apparent as the campaign progressed. There were never half enough mules to equip an adequate supply-train for an army of sixteen thousand men, even if that army never went more than ten or twelve miles from its base. If it had been forced to go fifty miles from its base, the campaign would have collapsed at the outset.

General Shafter seems disposed to attribute the difficulty that he experienced in supplying his army with food to the condition of the roads rather than to the lack of mules, packers, teamsters, and wagons. In an interview with a correspondent of the Boston "Herald" at Santiago on August 25 he is reported as saying: "There has been some question concerning the transportation facilities of the army. The facilities were all there, and the transportation equipment provided was all that it should have been; but our difficulties were enormous. There was only one road; to build another would have taken two years. The nature of the country, the weather, all these things helped to disorganize this department. The use of wagons was almost impossible. The pack-train, as a matter of fact, did the real service. I had not, at first, thought the pack-train would be of service; but if it had not been there, I do not know what the army would have done for food. The roads were practically impassable. With the bridges down, the wagons could not be worked. I had a great deal of concern when we were only able to get up one day's rations at a time, but as soon as we were able to get a few days' rations ahead, we knew we were prepared for anything."

It is hardly accurate to say, without qualification and without limitation as to time, that the "roads were practically impassable." They were unquestionably very bad, and perhaps impassable, at the last; but before they became so there was ample time to take over them, with a suitable supply-train, all the tents, cooking-utensils, clothing, medical supplies, and provisions that the army so urgently needed but did not have. The road from Daiquiri and Siboney to the front did not become impassable for loaded wagons until the end of the second week in July. For ten days after the army landed it was comparatively dry and good; and for ten days or two weeks more it was at least passable, and was constantly traversed, not only by pack-trains, but by wagons with loads.

Captain Henry L. Marcotte, a retired officer of the Seventeenth Infantry, who went with General Shafter's army as correspondent for the "Army and Navy Journal," describes the condition of the road as follows:

"The road from Daiquiri to Siboney, about seven miles, leads over the foot-hill slopes of the mountain-ranges and crosses a winding stream several times during that distance. The road-bed, being mostly of rock, and well shaded by tropical growths, with good water every few hundred yards, made the journey for the Catling battery a picnic without obstacles. From Siboney to [a point] near El Pozo the road was as good as [from Daiquiri] to Siboney, with the exception of one part. This, with five minutes' work, was made passable for the battery and for the three army wagons which the quartermaster's department had ventured to send out. In fact, the road, all the way to Santiago, proved equal to most country roads, and there was not the slightest excuse for not using the hundred or more wagons stowed in the hold of the Cherokee to transport tentage, medical and other supplies close upon the heels of the slow-moving Fifth Corps.... There is a mystery about the 'condition of the road' that may remain so unless it is fixed upon as the scape-goat for the lack of transportation.... The condition of the road at no time would have prevented a farmer from taking a load of hay to market.... There was no point from Daiquiri to the trenches which could not have been as easily reached by wagons as by pack-mules between June 22 and July 18."

Captain Marcotte, as a retired officer of the regular army, is better qualified than I am to express an opinion with regard to the availability of a road for military purposes, and he does not hesitate to say that the road from Daiquiri and Siboney to the front was practicable for loaded wagons up to July 18, or for a period of nearly a month subsequent to the landing of the army. During a part of that time, he says, its condition was not such as to prevent a farmer from taking a load of hay over it.

I myself went over this road from Siboney to the front four times between June 26 and July 9,—twice on foot, once in an ambulance, and once in an army wagon,—and my own judgment is that for ten days after the disembarkation of the army the road was comparatively dry and good. After that it became muddy and bad, but was by no means impassable, even for heavily loaded wagons, when I traversed it for the last time, five days before the surrender of Santiago. With the fall of that city the army's base of supplies was transferred from Siboney to Santiago harbor, and the condition of the Siboney road ceased to be a factor in the transportation problem. When a dozen steamers, loaded with supplies of all kinds, anchored off the Santiago piers, on July 15, the bulk of the army was within two miles of them, and there ought to have been no difficulty in getting to the troops everything that they needed.

If the road from Siboney to the front was practicable for both pack-mules and wagons from the time when the army landed to the time when its base of supplies was transferred to Santiago, and if, as General Shafter asserts, "the facilities were all there, and the transportation equipment provided was all that it should have been," why was the army left for almost a month without suitable tents, without adequate hospital supplies, without camp-kettles, without cooking-utensils other than tin plates, coffee-cups, and old tomato-cans, without hammocks, without extra clothing or spare blankets, and with only a limited supply of food? That this was the state of the army is beyond question.

Lieutenant John H. Parker of the Gatling-gun battery reported to Adjutant-General Corbin, under date of July 23, that he and his men had been entirely without tents for a period of twenty-eight days.

John Henry of the Twenty-first Infantry wrote to his cousin in Lowell, Massachusetts, that his regiment had been on the firing line seventeen days. For two days they had nothing at all to eat, and no shelter, and lay on the ground in puddles of water.

Ex-Representative F. H. Krebs of the Second Massachusetts Regiment says that for twenty-six consecutive days he had only hard bread, bacon, and coffee, and that for three days he lived on one hardtack a day. The soldiers of his regiment did all their cooking in tin plates and coffee-cups, and slept for two months on the wet ground, under what are called "shelter"-tents, for the reason, I suppose,—lucus a non lucendo,—that they do not shelter.

Dr. James S. Kennedy, first assistant surgeon of the Second Division hospital, wrote from the hospital camp near Santiago: "There is an utter lack of suitable medicines with which to combat disease. There has been so much diarrhea, dysentery, and fever, and no medicine at all to combat them, that men have actually died for want of it. Four days after my reporting here there was not a single medicine in the entire hospital for the first two diseases, and nothing but quinine for the fever."

Dr. Edward L. Munson reported to Surgeon-General Sternberg, under date of July 29, that "at the time of the battle of Las Guasimas there were absolutely no dressings, hospital tentage, or supplies of any kind on shore, within reach of the surgeons already landed. The medical department was compelled to rely upon its own energies and improvise its own transportation. I feel justified in saying that at the time of my departure [from Siboney] large quantities of medical supplies, urgently needed on shore, still remained on the transports, a number of which were under orders to return to the United States. Had the medical department carried along double the amount of supplies, it is difficult to see how, with the totally inadequate land and water transportation provided by the quartermaster's department, the lamentable conditions on shore could have been in any way improved. The regimental medical officers had no means of transportation even for their field-chests."

Lieutenant-Colonel Senn, chief of the surgical operating staff, in a letter to the "Medical Record," dated "Siboney, August 3," disclaimed responsibility for the want of medical and surgical supplies in the field-hospitals, and said: "The lack of proper transportation from the landing to the front cannot be charged to the medical department."

Finally, General Shafter himself, in a telegram to President McKinley, dated "Santiago, August 8," reported as follows: "At least seventy-five per cent. of the command have been down with malarial fever, from which they recover very slowly.... What put my command in its present condition was the twenty days of the campaign when they had nothing but meat, bread, and coffee, without change of clothes, and without any shelter whatever."

In view of the above statements, made, not by irresponsible "newspaper correspondents and camp-followers," but by the officers and men of the Fifth Army-Corps, and in view of the confirmation given to them by the commanding general himself in a telegram to the President, it is proper, I think, to press once more the question, Why was the army left for almost a month without suitable tents, without adequate hospital supplies, without camp-kettles, without cooking-utensils, without hammocks, without extra clothing or spare blankets, and with only a limited supply of food? The answer to the question, it seems to me, is obvious. The army had not half transportation enough to supply its wants. General Miles discovered this fact when he reached Siboney on July 11, and he immediately cabled the War Department for more draft-animals; but it was then too late to make good the deficiency. The troops were already breaking down, as General Shafter admitted in his telegram to the President, from "twenty days of meat, bread, and coffee, without change of clothes, and without any shelter whatever." I do not know how many draft-animals General Shafter had; but in four journeys over the road between Siboney and the front I happened to see only two pack-trains, one of them going forward with ammunition, and the other returning without load. But whatever may have been the strength of the pack-train equipment, it was certainly inadequate, and the common practice of detailing soldiers to march into Siboney after food and bring it back to the front on their shoulders or on improvised hand-litters showed the urgency of the need. Many such details or deputations came on board the State of Texas, obtained small quantities of hospital supplies or delicacies for the sick, and carried them back to the camps in their hands.

This inadequacy of transportation facilities was apparent to every one who had any knowledge of the condition of the army, and it was a subject of common talk in Siboney, in Daiquiri, on board the fleet, and in every one of our hospitals and camps. I shall try, in another chapter, to show how it affected the health and fighting efficiency of the troops, and how near it came to wrecking not only the Fifth Army-Corps, but the whole Cuban expedition. Suffice it to say, for the present, that General Shafter sailed from Tampa without a sufficient number of mules, teamsters, and packers to supply, equip, and maintain his army in the field. The responsibility for this deficiency, as well as the responsibility for the lack of boats, must rest either upon the War Department or upon the general in command. If the latter did not ask for adequate means of land and water transportation before he left Tampa, he is the person to be held accountable. If he asked and failed to obtain, the War Department must stand in the gap.



CHAPTER XX

THE SANTIAGO CAMPAIGN (Continued)

When, on June 14, General Shafter's army sailed for the southeastern coast of Cuba, without adequate facilities for disembarkation, and without a sufficient number of mules, packers, teamsters, and army wagons to insure its proper equipment, subsistence, and maintenance in the field, it was, ipso facto, predestined to serious embarrassment and difficulty, if not to great suffering and peril. No amount of zeal, energy, and ability on the part of quartermasters and commissaries, after the army had reached its destination, could possibly make up for deficiencies that should have had attention before the army sailed. Boats, mules, and wagons were not to be had at Siboney, and when the urgent need of them became apparent it was too late to procure them from the United States. General Shafter cabled the War Department for lighters and steam-tugs almost as soon as he reached the Cuban coast, and General Miles telegraphed for more draft-animals before he had been in Siboney twenty-four hours; but neither the boats nor the mules came in time to be of any avail. Cuban fever waits for no man, and before the boats that should have landed more supplies and the mules that should have carried them to the front reached Siboney, seventy-five per cent. of General Shafter's command had been prostrated by disease, due, as he himself admits, to insufficient food, "without change of clothes, and without any shelter whatever."[11]

But the lack of adequate land and water transportation was not the only deficiency in the equipment of the Fifth Army-Corps when it sailed from Tampa. It was also ill provided with medical stores and the facilities and appliances needed in caring for sick and wounded soldiers. Dr. Nicholas Senn, chief of the operating staff of the army, says that "ambulances in great number had been sent to Tampa, but they were not unloaded and sent to the front." I myself passed a whole train-load of ambulances near Tampa in May, but I never saw more than three in use at the front, and, according to the official report of Dr. Guy C. Godfrey, commanding officer of the hospital-corps company of the First Division, Fifth Army-Corps, "the number of ambulances for the entire army was limited to three, and it was impossible to expect them to convey the total number of wounded from the collecting-stations to the First Division hospital."[12]

Lieutenant-Colonel Jacobs of the quartermaster's department, who was assistant to General Humphreys in Cuba, testified before the Investigating Commission on November 16 that he had fifty ambulances at Tampa, and that he was about to load them on one of the transports when General Shafter appeared and ordered them left behind.

The surgeon-general declared, in a letter to the "Medical Record," dated August 6, that "General Shafter's army at Tampa was thoroughly well supplied with the necessary medicines, dressings, etc., for field-service; but, owing to insufficient transportation, he left behind at Tampa his reserve medical supplies and ambulance corps."

General Shafter himself admits that he had not enough medical supplies, but seems to assert, by implication, that he was not to blame for the deficiency. In a telegram to Adjutant-General Corbin, dated "Santiago, August 3," he said: "From the day this expedition left Tampa until to-day there has never been sufficient medical attendance or medicines for the daily wants of the command, and three times within that time the command has been almost totally out of medicines. I say this on the word of the medical directors, who have in each instance reported the matter to me, the last time yesterday, when the proposition was made to me to take medicines away from the Spanish hospital.... The surgeons have worked as well as any men that ever lived, and their complaint has been universal of lack of means and facilities. I do not complain of this, for no one could have foreseen all that would be required; but I will not quietly submit to having the onus laid on me for the lack of these hospital facilities."

The state of affairs disclosed by these official reports and telegrams seems to me as melancholy and humiliating as anything of the kind ever recorded in the history of American wars. Three ambulances for a whole corps of sixteen thousand men; an army "almost totally out of medicines" three times in seven weeks; and a proposition to make up our own deficiencies by seizing and confiscating the medical supplies of a Spanish hospital! I do not wonder that General Shafter wishes to escape responsibility for such a manifestation of negligence or incompetence; but I do not see how he can be allowed to do so. It is just as much the business of a commanding general to know that he has medicines and ambulances enough as it is to know that he has food and ammunition enough. He is the man who plans the campaign, and, to a certain extent, predetermines the number of sick and wounded; he is the man who makes requisition upon the War Department for transports, mules, and wagons enough to carry the army and its equipment to the field where it is to operate; and he is the man who should consider all contingencies and emergencies likely to arise as a result of climatic or other local conditions, and who should see that ample provision is made for them. General Shafter says that "no one could have foreseen all that would be required." That is probably true; but any one, it seems to me, could have foreseen that an army of sixteen thousand men, which was expected to attack intrenched positions, would need more than three ambulances for the transportation of the wounded, to say nothing of the sick. The same remark applies to medicines and medical supplies. Every one knew that our army was going to a very unhealthful region, and it was not difficult to foresee that it would require perhaps two or three times the quantity of medical supplies that would be needed in a temperate climate and a more healthful environment. The very reason assigned for General Shafter's hurried advance toward Santiago is that he knew his army would soon be disabled by disease, and wished to strike a decisive blow while his men were still able to fight. If he anticipated the wrecking of his army by sickness that could not be averted nor long delayed, why did he not make sure, before he left Tampa, that he had medical supplies and hospital facilities enough to meet the inevitable emergency? His telegram to Adjutant-General Corbin seems to indicate that he was not only unprepared for an emergency, but unprepared to meet even the ordinary demands of an army in the field, inasmuch as he declares, without limitation or qualification, that from June 14 to August 3 he never had medicines enough for the daily wants of his command.

It may be thought that the view here taken of the responsibility of the commanding general for everything that pertains to the well-being and the fighting efficiency of his command is too extreme and exacting, and that he ought not to be held personally accountable for the mistakes or the incompetence of his staff-officers. Waiving a discussion of this question on its merits, it need only be said that, inasmuch as General Shafter has officially recommended all of his staff-officers for promotion on account of "faithful and meritorious services throughout the campaign," he is estopped from saying now that they did not do their duty, or that they made errors of judgment so serious as to imperil the lives of men, if not the success of the expedition. The responsibility for the lack of medical supplies and hospital facilities, therefore, as well as the responsibility for the lack of boats, mules, and wagons, must rest either upon the War Department or upon the general in command. If the latter made timely requisition for them, and for transports enough to carry them to the Cuban coast, and failed to obtain either or both, the War Department must be held accountable; while, on the other hand, if General Shafter did not ask for medical supplies enough to meet the probable wants of his army in a tropical climate and an unhealthful environment, he must shoulder the responsibility for his own negligence or want of foresight.

I shall now try to show how this lack of boats, mules, wagons, and medical supplies affected General Shafter's command in the field.

II. The landing at Daiquiri and Siboney.

The points selected for the disembarkation of the army and the landing of supplies were the best, perhaps, that could be found between Santiago harbor and Guantanamo Bay; but they were little more, nevertheless, than shallow notches in the coast-line, which afforded neither anchorage nor shelter from the prevailing wind. There was one small pier erected by the Spanish-American Iron Company at Daiquiri, but at Siboney there were no landing facilities whatever, and the strip of beach at the bottom of the wedge-shaped notch in the precipitous wall of the coast was hardly more than one hundred yards in length. The water deepened so suddenly and abruptly at a distance of fifty yards from the shore that there was practically no anchorage, and General Shafter's fleet of more than thirty transports had to lie in what was virtually an open roadstead and drift back and forth with the currents and tides. The prevailing winds were from the east and southeast, and the long swell which rolled in from the Caribbean Sea broke in heavy and at times dangerous surf upon the narrow strip of unsheltered beach where the army had to land. All of these local conditions were known, or might have been known, to General Shafter before he left Tampa; but when he arrived off the coast they seemed to take him wholly by surprise. He had brought with him neither surf-boats, nor steam-launches, nor suitable lighters, nor materials with which to construct a pier. How he ever would have disembarked his command without the assistance of the navy, I do not know. I doubt whether a landing could have been effected at all. Fortunately, the navy was at hand, and its small boats and steam-launches, manned by officers and sailors from the fleet, landed the whole army through the surf with the loss of only two men. The navy then retired from the scene of action, and General Shafter was left to his own devices—and deplorably weak and ineffective they proved to be.

The engineer corps found near the railroad at Siboney a few sticks of heavy timber belonging to the Iron Company, out of which they improvised a small, narrow pier; but it was soon undermined and knocked to pieces by the surf. The chief quartermaster discovered on or near the beach three or four old lighters, also belonging to the Iron Company, which he used to supplement the service rendered by the single scow attached to the expedition; but as he put them in charge of soldiers, who had had no experience in handling boats in broken water, they were soon stove against the corners of the pier, or swamped in the heavy surf that swept the beach. All that could be done then was to land supplies as fast as possible in the small rowboats of the transports. If General Shafter had had competent and experienced officers to put in command of these boats, and steam-launches to tow them back and forth in strings or lines of half a dozen each, and if he had made provision for communication with the captains of the steamers by means of wigwag flag-signals, so as to be able to give them orders and control their movements, he might have landed supplies in this way with some success. But none of the difficulties of the situation had been foreseen, and no arrangements had been made to cope with them. The captains of the transports put their vessels wherever they chose, and when a steamer that lay four or five miles at sea was wanted closer inshore, there was no means of sending orders to her except by rowboat. The captains, as a rule, did not put officers in charge of their boats, and the sailors who manned them, having no competent direction, acted upon their own judgment. Finally, boats which could have made a round trip between the transports and the shore in half an hour if towed by a steam-launch often used up the greater part of two hours in toiling back and forth through a heavy sea under oars.

It is not a matter for surprise that, with such facilities and under such conditions, General Shafter found it almost impossible to land even food and ammunition enough to keep his army properly supplied. In his official report of the campaign he says: "It was not until nearly two weeks after the army landed that it was possible to place on shore three days' supplies in excess of those required for daily consumption."

In addition to all the unnecessary difficulties and embarrassments above described, there was another, almost, if not quite, as serious, arising from the manner in which the transports had been loaded at Tampa. Stores were put into the steamers apparently without any reference to the circumstances under which they would be taken out, and without any regard to the order in which they would be needed at the point of destination. Medical supplies, for example, instead of being put all together in a single transport, were scattered among twenty or more vessels, so that in order to get all of them it was necessary either to bring twenty steamers close to shore, one after another, and take a little out of each, or send rowboats around to them all where they lay at distances ranging from one mile to five.[13] Articles of equipment that would be required as soon as the army landed were often buried in the holds of the vessels under hundreds of tons of stuff that would not be needed in a week, and the army went forward without them, simply because they could not be quickly got at. Finally, I am inclined to believe, from what I saw and heard of the landing of supplies at Siboney, that there was not such a thing as a bill of lading, manifest, or cargo list in existence, and that the chief quartermaster had no other guide to the location of a particular article than that furnished by his own memory or the memory of some first mate. I do not assert this as a fact; I merely infer it from the difficulty that there seemed to be in finding and getting ashore quickly a particular kind of stores for which there happened to be an immediate and urgent demand. After the fight of the Rough Riders at Guasimas, for example, General Wood found himself short of ammunition for his Hotchkiss rapid-fire guns. He sent Lieutenant Kilbourne back to General Shafter at Siboney with a request that a fresh supply be forwarded at the earliest possible moment. General Shafter said that he had no idea where that particular kind of ammunition was to be found, and referred the applicant to Quartermaster Jacobs at Daiquiri. Lieutenant Kilbourne walked seven miles to Daiquiri, only to find that the quartermaster had no more idea where that ammunition was than the commanding general had. He thereupon returned to Guasimas, after a march of more than twenty miles, and reported to General Wood that ammunition for the rapid-fire guns could not be had, because nobody knew where it was. If the commanding general and the quartermaster could not put their hands on ammunition when it was needed, they could hardly be expected to find, and forward promptly, articles of less vital importance, such as camp-kettles, hospital tents, clothing, and spare blankets.