by Tony Roberts
They stopped after an hour and a half to get a rest and take in water. They needed it, and the men were gasping on the sides of the trail, some lying amongst the undergrowth. “There’s a fence up ahead on the left,” one of the men relayed a message that was passing down from up ahead. “Barbed wire. Seems to be fields off that way.”
“Civilization,” Casey said ironically.
Some of the men around him laughed but it was brief. They needed to save their strength for the march further on. They waited for a while and some of the men were wondering aloud why they were not moving off. The corporal came moving down the line of men. “Trail narrows up ahead and moves downhill. Reports are that the enemy have been sighted up ahead so we’re going to move off slowly and quietly. No shouting or talking, you lot, got it?”
The men nodded and got ready to move out, but this time they spread out more, concern on their faces as they now had the real prospect of getting into action, and from an enemy they couldn’t see. Sure enough, the trail narrowed as they went along and began to slope down, and the jungle pressed in on them oppressively from the right. To the left a barbed wire fence suddenly began, held up on wooden posts, and beyond it were fields of tall grass, with rows of trees marking the boundaries of each field.
Shots suddenly rattled out to the right and ahead and they all ducked involuntarily. “Spanish!” someone exclaimed.
“Shut it!” the corporal, in amongst them, snapped.
Casey crouched by the fence and hurriedly studied the terrain to the left and ahead. Nothing. The shooting was definitely coming from the right, where the jungle was at its thickest. “Come on,” he muttered, “don’t just stay here, move!”
Corrigan and Root looked at him silently. Both were nervous in their own way. While the Kid showed it in his strained face, Corrigan’s fingers drumming on the carbine he held showed his tenseness. More shots.
Casey winced. Stuck here on a trail was the worst they could do. “Get off the fucking trail,” he growled.
Someone must have thought the same, for now they could hear men crashing through the foliage on the right. Holland appeared. “Get over this fence and spread out. Advance in a thin line. We’re going to try to push the enemy back!”
Casey sprang up. “At last!” He shoved the wooden post over and the base snapped. Others did the same, too, and the fence just fell flat onto the grass so the men could just walk over the barbs and onto the field. They spread out, under the urgings of Holland, the corporal and Casey, then at a crouch they began to move forward towards the first of the tree lines.
Shooting now filled the air and the men were definitely much more hesitant in going forward. Casey ran for a few paces, then threw himself forward and peered ahead through the long stalks. Gradually the rest followed suit and soon all were doing the same. When the first shot came their way everyone threw themselves flat. “Jeez!” the Kid exclaimed, his face full of grass, “they’re shooting at us!”
“Well they ain’t gonna give you a huge kiss for coming over here, are they?” Corrigan grunted. “Where the hell are they?”
“Somewhere up ahead,” Casey answered, his eyes narrowed and his head turned slightly off-center. His peripheral vision would pick up any movement better. Another shot spat close by and he lowered his head to the ground, cursing under his breath. He glanced to his left. “Hey, Corporal, shouldn’t we get moving up and at them?”
The corporal just hugged the ground and whimpered.
Waste of time. Casey grumbled. Peace-timer, probably in the army just so he was out of jail or in the gutter. He certainly was no soldier. “Alright you lot, listen up!” he said across the lines and clumps of prone men. There were about fifty of them. “We’re gonna leapfrog ahead, troop by troop. F troop will give covering fire while E troop run forward five paces and then throw themselves flat, then give F troop covering fire while they advance five paces. Got it?”
“We’ll shoot one another!” someone complained.
“Space out, you idiot!” Casey snapped. “Give yourselves plenty of room to fire without hitting a friend.”
“Yeah, I don’t want an extra butthole,” one of the others commented. That brought a few laughs.
Casey kept his head down but watched as the other section spread themselves out and got ready. “Alright, on my count to three, F troop shoot once at those trees, keeping clear of our asses, and E troops run five paces. Got it?”
Everyone nodded or acknowledged with an affirmative, and he counted to three. He got up, scrambled hard and pounded forward five paces and threw himself into the dirt and grass again, his breath exploding out of his body with one explosive grunt. A few shots came scattering out of the brush ahead and a few men groveled deeper into the grass. “Aim at the shots!” Casey shouted. He leveled his carbine and squinted down the barrel. It seemed there were just a few Spaniards up ahead. “E troop, you ready to shoot?”
A few barrels came up, the men grimacing or gritting their teeth. “On my count, one, two, three, fire!” They blasted shots at the undergrowth and the troop behind them came running up and threw themselves to the ground. They had advanced fifteen or twenty feet without a casualty. But now the shooting intensified, both to their right and ahead.
“What do we do, Casey?” the Kid asked, his eyes wild, peering out from under the brim of his felt hat.
“They can’t see us that well, what with this long grass, so let’s crawl forward in groups. Al, pass the word, shoot, advance, shoot, advance.”
With the corporal still trying to burrow into the dirt back by the fence, Casey now got the men to shoot and run, drop, shoot, run and drop. Sergeant Holland came crawling up to him after a short while. “Good work, Long. Report to me after this skirmish is over. I’ll take over the right flank, you stay here on the left. We got a good movement going here.” He crawled away, and the American troops kept up a steady rate of advance.
One man was hit on the shoulder and lay on his side, face creased with pain, blood seeping through his shirt. Two men stopped to tend to him, and one was ordered to go back and get a medic. There would be some with the colonel. Casey pushed through the first line of trees and rested the barrel of his gun against a branch that ran horizontally. Ahead was about fifty yards of open space before the next line. Killing ground.
Disturbed footprints in the dirt told him that the Spanish had been here and he saw a ground-up cigarette butt in the earth to his right. They had dislodged the defenders from their first line. But they were now holding onto their second, the distant tree-line, and shots were rattling out from it. There were vague movements and Casey waved the men to keep down and return fire.
Shots spat out back and forth as both sides tested the other. Casey wondered how many soldiers were there. “Aim low!” he shouted. “Don’t try head shots, go for the guts.”
He hazarded a guess as to where an enemy soldier was and loosed off one shot. He reloaded and aimed carefully again. Another shot. He sucked in through his teeth. They would have to risk it if they were to push the enemy back again. Fifty yards with a rifle was ludicrously close. Anyone half-decent would score a hit at least half the time.
“Alright you lot,” he said, looking along the line of prone men. “They’re up ahead behind those trees. We’re gonna take that line with a steady advance. As before, fire, up for five paces, drop, shoot, then on again. Ready? On my count to three… one, two, three!”
He got up and ran five paces, then dropped and knelt. No good trying to shoot through long grass at boot level. He had to aim over the stalks and shoot more accurately. The men were shooting in groups and leapfrogging forward. The Spanish shot at them a few times then he caught sight of them melting away in the face of the inexorable advance. “That’s it, boys,” he shouted, “they’ve abandoned the tree line. Get there in one!”
He led the run and made it, taking cover. Now he could see the terrain change yet again. Beyond the trees the jungle opened up to series of fields with tall grass, with the
ground sloping uphill. Directly ahead was a large clearing with a treeline at the far end, and off to the right from where he was, on top of the ridge, there was a ruined building, which looked like an old distillery.
The Spanish occupied this line and he guessed the distance was about 200 yards away from the Americans. He sucked on his lower lip thoughtfully.
“Any ideas, Casey?” Corrigan asked, wiping his brow. “Don’ like the thought of runnin’ up that hill into the teeth of their firing.”
“Neither do I. Let’s wait here and keep on shooting. Sooner or later one of the officers will make a decision.”
They traded shots for a short while, then along came Lieutenant-Colonel Roosevelt and a few accompanying attendants. Roosevelt got the basic details from Holland, crouching low behind the line of trees, nodding a few times, and both looked in Casey’s direction. Then Roosevelt came over and beckoned to the eternal mercenary. Casey moved at a crouch back from the trees and knelt on one knee in front of Roosevelt. “Sir?”
“Private Long. It seems you’ve been a hero again.”
“Me, sir?”
“Yeah. Took over when Corporal Junkin froze back there. Since you’ve done a good enough job, I’m going to promote you to corporal in his place. Congratulations.”
Casey grinned. It seemed he always got promoted to corporal or sergeant in conflicts he took part in. He guessed he was that good at his job that those above him wanted him to be responsible for the men around him. It all helped save lives which was the best thing that could come out of war. If one won a war but lost most of your men, then was that a victory? Casey briefly thought of a famous Greek general who had been around before his time, Pyrrhus of Epirus, whose losses on the battlefield were so bad that it gave the name to a costly victory ever since; pyrrhic.
He thanked Roosevelt.
The lieutenant-colonel smiled in return. “And don’t go getting yourself killed because my friends want to interview you afterwards for a story.”
Casey rolled his eyes. Why do that? All he wanted to do was to fight this war and help the guys around him survive, if possible. “Sir, I don’t plan on getting shot.”
“Good man. Now lets go get this battle won.”
With Roosevelt now in charge of the left flank and Colonel Wood on the right, they got the line of soldiers organized. The word went along the line that they were going to charge in one big group, rushing the Spanish line ahead of them. Corrigan snorted deeply and spat a hunk of phlegm onto the ground ahead of him. “Is that sensible? Those guys up there will have a clear sight of us.”
“True, but will they stand and fight against a line of charging soldiers?” Casey asked. “We’ll see. If things get bad we’ll have to retreat back to this line. Either we’ll get stopped partway up the slope, or we’ll get to the top and drive them off.”
“Hell, this is insane,” Corrigan grumbled but got ready to rise up and charge.
“War is insane,” Casey replied and looked along the line. “Alright you guys, be ready to get up on your feet and rush the slope. Keep firing.”
Roosevelt, a few men to the left, looked up at the slope, his pistol in his hand, nodded. “Let’s go!”
At the urging of the NCOs the entire line of the Rough Riders rose and pushed through the line of trees, carbines in hands, grim-faced. The hill rose up before them, not a steep one nor a tall one, but a rise nonetheless, giving the defenders a distinct advantage. Casey had a sense of déjà vu as he went with his group, thinking back not too long ago when he had been part of Pickett’s advance up Cemetery Ridge at Gettysburg. Not again, I hope, he thought. But then it had been hundreds and hundreds of men against well dug-in massed soldiers. The Spanish didn’t look that numerous and all that well dug-in either.
Maybe something that happened then, though, may work. The Confederates had been famous for their Rebel Yell which had, apparently, unnerved some of their enemies, and he was sure the Spanish hadn’t experienced that ever. Maybe that might help?
A few ragged shots spat their way, but the bullets went too high. “Come on, boys!” Casey relaxed into his rebel persona. “Let’s show them we ain’t gonna be fazed by a few shots!” He hollered at the top of his voice and began running hard up the gradual slope. The rest around him picked up the yell and before long all the Americans were shouting , yelling and hollering as they forged uphill against the surprised Spanish soldiers.
There was one ragged volley, and then the Spanish were peeling away off the ridge and fleeing for their lives. “That’s it,” someone shouted, “they’re a-runnin’!”
The Rough Riders pounded up the final stretch of hill and came to a halt at the top, sweat pouring from their faces, looking at the last of the fleeing enemy as they plunged through the jungle on the far side. Casey breathed in hard and placed the butt of his carbine on the soil and stared across the valley before him. It was a sea of treetops and brush, and in the distance off to the west ran another ridge, a higher one.
He pursed his lips thoughtfully; they would probably have to storm that one, too, before they got to Santiago.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Another session with the newspaper reporters, with Roosevelt feeding Casey the lines so that the soldier was clearly doing it under the Lieutenant-Colonel’s orders. Another solider stood in the background, the one whom would be photographed for the papers. He looked suitably heroic and rough, to fit Roosevelt’s intended image of ‘his’ unit. Colonel Wood may be in charge, but everyone knew who was the main man.
Casey didn’t give a rat’s ass about publicity or crowing to the press. Roosevelt was clearly there to get an image with the public; he was a politician first and foremost, and this had never changed in all the time Casey had been around. Even before he was born, in fact, for Julius Caesar was a politician first and foremost, and gained popularity through successful wars and ‘roughing’ it with the legions so the men would follow him no matter what.
Not that Roosevelt would ask the Rough Riders to march with him on the US Senate, crossing the Potomac or something, like Caesar had with the Rubicon, but he was projecting himself as the hero of the war already. They were winning because of him. They were winning because the Rough Riders were the elite of the US V Corps and he was the best officer of that unit, leading from the front.
Casey snorted in disgust. The battle of Las Guasimas had cost the American unit eight dead and thirty-four wounded, including the commander of the advance unit, a Captain Capron. Who knows how many Spanish had died, too? That was what needed to be reported, if the papers were honest.
He wanted nothing to do with it, but orders were orders. He contented himself with having got the men to advance under fire against an enemy dug in and come away with just a handful of losses. He now had his corporal stripes to sew on so he sat on an upturned pail in the new camp and diligently put them on.
Where they were now was the village of Sevilla, but it was nothing like the Sevilla of old Spain. Oh no, not in the slightest. The old Sevilla still gave him the shudders, for it was there he had been a prisoner of the Inquisition and had been there for years and years, from, oh, 1485 to about 1518. The old bastard Tomas Torqemada himself had interrogated him and it was only by showing the superstitious Catholics his power of healing and immortality and that his blood was poison, killing a rat in the process, that he had been left to rot in the cell for all those years, with nobody to disturb him and only a scant meal per day put before him.
He’d slowly worn the iron links of his chain away through the years by urinating on it, gradually wearing it away and when he’d finally got the two chains eaten through, had hung himself with them from the ceiling, knowing he would come round from his ‘death’ sooner or later. His corpse had been thrown into a burial pit outside Sevilla and he’d recovered soon enough and crawled away in a thunderstorm.
Sevilla was one of those places that left him with the shivers because of that. This Sevilla was a small settlement set in amongst the trees and brush, and t
he road from Siboney to Santiago passed through this place, curving from the south-east to the west as it passed by. There were some houses and sheds and a couple of stone buildings for the villagers to meet and pray. The army was encamped everywhere and some of the villagers were afraid of what may happen and had locked themselves in their homes.
The road itself, grandly called the Camino Real – the Royal Road – was in reality a dirt track, churned up now by thousands of feet and a downpour had reduced it to a mudslide. Supplies were having trouble in getting through so soldiers had been seconded to the engineers to provide the muscle to make a corduroy road out of felled trees. It would take a few days for the bottleneck to be sorted out.
In the meantime the army had been ordered to halt and not advance. Casey thought it dumb, for they ought to send out scouts up ahead to see what lay before the city of Santiago, which wasn’t that far away now.
The Rough Riders, having been the first to arrive at Sevilla, had their camp close to the edge of the village and they had become friendly with some of the villagers, especially the kids who ran around excitedly, stealing what they could.
It was not unusual to see a kid wearing a felt hat or running about with one of the satchels or knapsacks bounding off their thighs or legs. The practice was tolerated with amusement by the soldiers who called out the kids names as they came running past. Eventually the adults in Sevilla took steps to curb the wild behavior and most of the time the kids were told to stay within the confines of the settlement.
Two of the kids, however, were braver than the rest and sneaked out to the soldiers to share chow and listen to the soldiers’ talk. Casey especially drew them because of his fluent Spanish, and the two, brothers Carlos and Tiago, sat enthralled at Casey’s talk of old Spain, of the Moorish castles, and the grand Alhambra Palace, of the sweeping Sierra Nevada of southern Spain, the majestic peaks of the Pyrenees, and the huge rivers that flowed across the plains, the Guadalquivir, the Guadelete, the Ebro and the Tagus.