As soon as his foot felt like it, he held a council of war. In his judgment there were two battles to be fought, both on the same day. From his headquarters he could see the countryside; lush jungle crossed by a creek, a river, and a web of threadlike paths. This tract ended on the outskirts of the city, where the land rose abruptly in a series of stark ridges. It was on these heights that the Spaniards were preparing their big stand. Over four thousand yards of works had been dug there; in places the lines were three deep.
Shafter intended to meet this challenge head-on, but first the Army would take the spur of El Caney, six miles to the right. El Caney supported a palm-thatched fort and a church steeple full of sharpshooters. Shafter believed its capture would protect the main attack. Six thousand men were to jump it at dawn on July first, and the moment they had carried it—they would be allowed two hours—the corps’ remaining eight thousand would move on Santiago’s outer ridge, the key to which was a crest with a flanking knoll. The knoll was called Kettle Hill because it was capped by a huge iron kettle, probably used for sugar refining. The taller crest, with its red-tile-roofed blockhouse, was San Juan Hill.
Such was the general’s strategy. It had grave defects. He was splitting his forces—a needless risk, since El Caney lay outside the Spanish line and could have been bypassed. Nor could he himself coordinate the attack; by morning he was stricken again, this time by the heat. Further, in the principal assault, foot soldiers, backed by ineffectual artillery, were to force entrenched peaks. San Juan was within range of Admiral Sampson’s guns, but Shafter had no intention of sharing honors with the Navy.
The worst botch of all was the approach march. Both pincers had to reach the front at night on a sunken jungle trail no wider than a sidewalk. Rain had left three inches of mud, and by midnight the entire corps was wedged in the swamp. The El Caney troops branched off and slept among chaparral and mangoes; the two other divisions, one of infantry and one of horseless cavalry, lurched doggedly on. “Three miles away, across the basin of mist,” wrote Richard Harding Davis, “we could see the street lamps of Santiago shining over the San Juan hills. Above us, the tropical moon hung white and clear in the dark purple sky, pierced with millions of white stars.”
At dawn the sun glittered tragically on a glossy Signal Corps balloon. It had been sent up to find another path to San Juan and so relieve the congestion, and it appears to have occurred to no one that if Americans could see it, so could Spanish cannoneers. Before it fell—“dying a gigantic and public death before the eyes of two armies,” as Stephen Crane reported—it did discover a second route. But the enemy riflemen knew about both. Alerted, they zeroed in on the mouths of each. Our ancient field pieces opened up at 2500 yards, achieving nothing but the pinpointing of their own refuges. In forty-five minutes they were silent. The lords of military misrule had run out of their string of boners. All the enemy now faced was the courage of the individual American soldier.
It seemed insufficient. Because El Caney was proving stubborn, the San Juan drive had been halted on the edge of the jungle. Every landmark acquired a grim name: Bloody Ford, Bloody Bend, Bloody Angle, Hell’s Pocket. The Seventy-first New York broke. In ten minutes a quarter of the Sixth Infantry were casualties. Messages went back, begging for orders, and shortly after noon one finally arrived—“The heights must be taken at all hazards. A retreat now would be a disastrous defeat.” On the left this went to the infantry division, deployed before San Juan Hill. On the right it reached the man who had been waiting for it all his life: Lieutenant Colonel Theodore Roosevelt.
A blue polka-dot bandanna fluttering behind him, the Oyster Bay dandy mounted his horse and paraded slowly back and forth in full view of the enemy. He was brandishing a souvenir pistol from the Maine, rounding up troops. As cheering volunteers, regulars and the Negro cavalrymen whose survivors were later to be assigned menial hospital chores surged toward him, he wheeled on Kettle Hill and waved his hand for the charge. Then, all teeth and flashing eyeglasses, he galloped straight up the slope. Bullets singed his mount and nicked his elbow, a small stream delayed him, and forty yards from the top he encountered a fence, but leaping to the ground, he continued on foot until he and the panting ranks behind him reached the peak. They were alone; the enemy had fled. The knoll was theirs, and they were just in time to see the main assault on San Juan Hill. TR called it a “splendid view.”
It was. Bully as his ride had been, the charge to his left was bullier. This was a veterans’ show—red-neckerchiefed Indian fighters from the old western army scrambling upward in the sunlit, waist-high grass while the crag above crackled with Mauser fire. The hill was slippery, steep, wired; the storming troops clutched at barbs with their bare hands, sawed at the wire with bayonets.
It was not an orderly charge. There was little form to it, and not much mass. Richard Harding Davis thought the men were pitifully few: “It seemed as if someone had made an awful and terrible mistake. One’s instinct was to call to them to come back.” But the thin ragged line edged higher and higher, a rising ribbon of Army blue. “Yes, they were going up the hill, up the hill,” wrote Stephen Crane. “It was the best moment of anybody’s life.” One last burst from the Spaniards, one instant when enemy riflemen were silhouetted against the bruise-blue horizon; then they were gone, and the Stars and Stripes floated over the blockhouse.
According to Shafter’s calculations, Santiago should have been doomed now. It wasn’t, because the Spaniards had prepared a second, stronger defense line. Teddy sprinted recklessly toward it, but after a hundred yards he hurried back. He had glanced over his shoulder and made the unsettling discovery that the Rough Riders weren’t following him. Even the Ivy League had had enough. Indeed, there were doubts about whether the Army could keep the toehold it had.
That night shallow foxholes were dug in the rocky soil, and the victorious El Caney division arrived to plug gaps; but still the pessimism grew. Cuban rebels had failed to block the road to the north. A mile and a quarter away Spanish reinforcements were pouring into Santiago. Roosevelt concluded that “We are within measurable distance of a terrible military disaster.” Shafter, shocked by the thousand casualties of San Juan, told Washington he was thinking of withdrawing five miles, and Sampson prepared to land for a conference—which explains why the American admiral was wearing leggings and spurs the day the Navy fought the decisive battle of the war.
It was Sunday, July first. Captain Evans had just finished his breakfast aboard the Iowa and was lighting a cigar when his son, a naval cadet, peered through a porthole and shouted, “Papa, the enemy’s ships are coming out!” Led by the flagship Infanta Maria Teresa, Cervera’s squadron was making its break. One by one the Spanish cruisers dropped their harbor pilots and turned westward, proceeding, said the captain of the Texas, “as gaily as brides to the altar.” Their scarlet-and-yellow battle flags flew proudly, if despairingly.
Cervera had preferred to tarry in Santiago, but the Spanish Governor General had sternly ordered him out. U.S. sailors in the fighting tops—they still had fighting tops—spotted the move immediately. Even so, there was a chase; Sampson, anticipating a dash, had decided that the enemy could be destroyed at the harbor entrance, but his battleships took time to get under way, and presently the two fleets were sailing in parallel columns, the Spaniards near the shore and the Americans in irregular pursuit.
Both were sailing away from Sampson. Each night he had illuminated the shore with searchlights to be sure this moment didn’t elude him. Now it found him off on the New York, approaching Shafter for their conference on the land war. To make matters worse, the command devolved upon his bitter enemy, Commodore W. S. Schley, a blustering clown whose chief contribution to victory was to turn his own ship away from the battle and bellow, “Give them hell, bullies!”
It made no difference. Bluejacket gunners were on target. The Teresa caught fire and turned, blazing, toward the beach. Cervera’s force crumbled quickly; three hours later the last of his vessels ran agroun
d fifty miles from Santiago. At a cost of three American casualties, Spanish sea power had been smashed. The flying squadron which was to have relieved Manila scurried back through Suez to guard the homeland. All that remained was for Sampson to dispute the laurels with Schley, which he did for the rest of his life.
Ashore, according to Lieut. John J. Pershing, “everybody drew a long breath.” The Spaniards hadn’t counterattacked, so instead of retreating from Santiago, Shafter besieged it. Day by day the Army extended its trenches, until the city was invested by a horseshoe of works decorated with regimental flags. Other flags—of truce—paraded back and forth between the lines. Both sides were ready to quit. The Spaniards were starving, the Americans were ill. Inept in combat, the gouty American general displayed persistent skill in negotiation, and Washington helped by promising a quick trip home for all enemy troops who surrendered unconditionally.
That did it. On July seventeenth Shafter nursed his throbbing foot into a stirrup and rode to a field outside Santiago, where the Sixth Cavalry band played “Hail Columbia.” The Spanish soldados presented arms, and their ensign was hauled down the flagstaff over the Governor’s Palace, thus ending four centuries of rule. Each side wanted the ceremony to be flawless, but it was spoiled by a New York World reporter. He demanded a role in the raising of the U.S. colors. Rebuffed, he strode up to Shafter, who was standing painfully in front of his troops, and punched him in the face.
So the Cuban adventure ended, as it had begun, with misconduct by the press. Today such behavior would be incredible, but it was common enough in that period, and this little war is a period piece. In each of its campaigns the same notes are dominant: American individualism, American arrogance, Spanish defeatism. The defeatism grew after Santiago’s surrender. When Puerto Rico was invaded nine days later—J. P. Morgan’s armed yacht led the way, flying an immense flag, and Washington learned about the landing from journalists—our officers were swamped with dinner invitations from reconciled Spanish civilians. Their army’s morale wasn’t much higher. The expedition, said Finley Peter Dunne, creator of Mr. Dooley, turned into a “moonlight picnic.”
On Guam and Luzon there didn’t seem to be any morale at all. Guam’s comandante hadn’t been told that war had been declared. Informed of it by an American cruiser, he explained ruefully that he hadn’t any cannon—not, he added hastily, that he had the slightest intention of fighting; he merely wanted to fire a salute to his conquerors. In Manila, where U.S. troops had arrived, the two armies fought one of the most extraordinary engagements in history. The dons were quite willing to capitulate; they just wanted to preserve appearances. Accordingly, the Belgian consul consented to arrange a sham battle—gunfire without casualties. Once this bargain had been struck the defenders seem to have lost interest. A white banner was raised, but when Gen. Francis V. Greene galloped up and inquired whether the city had been surrendered, the Spaniards who had put it up replied languidly that they really couldn’t say; all they knew was that someone had told them to hoist the flag. Later their superiors stirred themselves and called for Greene in style.
It was a good thing there hadn’t been any real fighting in Manila: no one there knew it, but the war had ended the previous afternoon. Spain had prepared to throw in the towel the day the World man hit Shafter. Within twenty-four hours Madrid had asked Paris to intercede, and on August twelfth the French ambassador signed the peace protocol in Washington. Cuba was free; Guam and Puerto Rico were ceded to the United States, and the fate of the Philippine Islands was to be decided later. The Galahad spirit of the spring had been forgotten. McKinley’s Secretary of State approached the globe in the Cabinet Room murmuring, “Let’s see what we get by this.”
Later that year we got the Philippines for twenty million dollars. As the President told a committee of missionaries, we meant to “uplift them and civilize them and Christianize them.” The difficulty was that the Filipinos had notions of independence, and thanks to Dewey they were in a position to be difficult. After winning the battle of Manila Bay the commodore had erred grievously. He knew that Kaiser Wilhelm had been dickering for the islands, and the arrival of five German warships seemed ominous. Pacing the Olympia’s bridge and fingering his lucky rabbit’s foot, he reached a momentous decision: Emilio Aguinaldo, the exiled leader of the Filipino guerrillas, was to be brought back from Hong Kong as an ally. “If old Dewey had just sailed away when he smashed the Spanish fleet, what a lot of trouble he would have saved us,” McKinley later complained. For Aguinaldo promptly declared himself president of a republic, and when he heard America was taking over he drew his sword. The Philippine insurrection dragged on for three bloody years, dwarfing the struggle with Spain.
Despite our military blunders we had won an easy decision in the field. Yet we had only begun to pay the price of triumph. Casualty figures were rapidly obscured by the deaths from disease, both in Cuba and in the United States, where camp sanitation was frightful. Clara Barton had hurried to Santiago, in vain. Shafter’s sick list stood at four thousand. Reveille each morning was followed by the dirge of taps, echoing through hour after hour of burials until one day there were no calls at all, because the buglers were down too.
Roosevelt, now a full colonel, led a round-robin demand that the Army be moved at once, and after boarding their scraggly ships the troops were transferred to a quarantine camp at Montauk Point, on the tip of Long Island. Visiting civilians were shocked. The soldiers had left fit; now they were wasted invalids. The War Department, ever consistent, sent exercise horses for bedridden cavalrymen and, as the weather grew bleak, light duck uniforms for all.
McKinley appeared in a frock coat. “I am glad to meet you,” he said to the convalescents, looking them in the eye and adding sonorously, “you have come home after two months of severe campaigning, which has embraced assault and siege and battle, so brilliant in achievement, so far-reaching in results as to command the unstinted praise of all your countrymen.”
It is doubtful that even he knew how far-reaching those results were to be. Forces had been set in motion that would alter the nation’s life in countless little ways. Guantánamo Bay led to a revitalized Marine Corps, bad rations to the Pure Food and Drug Laws, the pine coffins in Santiago to Major Walter Reed’s identification of the yellow-fever virus. The structure on Kettle Hill turned out not to have been a kettle after all; it was the White House that TR had captured.
To America he was the Hero of San Juan Hill, despite Mr. Dooley’s tart comment on his reminiscences: “I haven’t time f’r to tell ye the wurruk Tiddy did in ar-rmin’ an’ equippin’ himself, how he fed himself, how he steadied himself in battles an’ encouraged himself with a few well-chosen worruds whin th’ sky was darkest…. But if I was him I’d call th’ book ‘Alone in Cubia.’”
Overshadowing all these developments, however—transcending even Teddy’s gubernatorial campaign in New York that autumn, with a Rough Rider bugler riding on the rear platform of his whistle-stop train—was the emergence of the United States as a world power. America the superstate was born in the fumbles and confusions of 1898. The administration had picked up vast tracts of land overseas, not all of them from Spain. Hawaii had been seized on the pretext that it was needed as a war base. From this time forward the United States was to play the role of colonial sahib, staring across the Pacific at rising Japan. The first military commandant of Manila was Major General Arthur MacArthur, whose son Douglas was then a West Point cadet.
But these legacies then belonged to the future. The great thing then was that we had won a war. The republic was exhilarated, intoxicated, ready to strut, and there was a hot time in the old town the night Dewey returned to claim his sword. Girls bought sailor hats and Dewey shirtwaists; a brand of gum was named “Dewey Chewies,” and a laxative package bore his portrait and the slogan, “The ‘Salt’ of Salts.” On Fifth Avenue the epauletted hero marched under a rococo arch on which sculptured figures represented the winged goddess Victory and the brave boys in blue.
The statues were a huge success. Unfortunately, they were only plaster.
The Great War
In my childhood the statue of the lean bronze doughboy was already darkening on its marble Lest-We-Forget plinth in the square downtown, but people still sang “There’s a Long, Long Trail” as they drove the family flivver in from the country Sunday evenings, and at least once a week there would be an argument down at the white clapboard Legion Hall over whether the Hindenburg Line had been broken by the Yankee Division, the Rainbow, or by the Marines.
I used to hang around the hall cadging doughnuts, and the character I remember best was a town card who had been too old to fight and couldn’t have found France, let alone the Argonne, on a map of Europe. Every Memorial Day he would clown around in a mishmash of military livery: an overseas cap, a Navy blouse, sky-blue trousers and rolled puttees. He wasn’t a veteran of anything—even I knew that—so he wasn’t allowed in the A.E.F. parade. I wanted him to march because he looked so dashing; now I think he was truer to his time than he knew. The war he never fought, like the uniform he wore, was from first to last a hopeless muddle; but, like his uniform, the war was carried off with a flair that almost made you forget how senseless it was.
Never, not even in our war with Spain, was a conflict more fouled up. When the guns stopped, historians couldn’t even decide what to call it; most were divided between the Great War and the World War. After Hitler showed his fist it was filed away as World War I, a forgotten curtain-raiser, but they were right the first time. It was a great war.
Controversy And Other Essays in Journalism (1950–1975) Page 11