by John McCain
Years later a lieutenant in the 20th remembered the day bitterly: “We took into that charge five hundred and thirty-three men. It did not last over fifteen minutes and when the line reformed . . . we had only three or four officers and one hundred and ten men.”
Abbott’s death shocked and demoralized the regiment, and it seemed to have been the final blow for Holmes. After the Wilderness the two armies fought almost continuously, shedding blood on fields where blood had copiously flowed already. Relentlessly the Army of the Potomac kept pushing to the left, paying whatever price Lee extracted from them, until it reached Petersburg and dug in and then, finally, Richmond. Well before then Holmes had written his parents after weeks of incessant fighting: “By the time you get this you will know how immense the butcher’s bill has been. . . . I have not been & am not likely to be in the mood for writing details. . . . Enough that these nearly two weeks have contained all of fatigue & horror that war can furnish. . . . Nearly every regimental off[icer] I knew or cared for is dead or wounded.” He had decided to stay on staff and resign at the end of the campaign, he told them, “if I am not killed before.”
He stayed with the army until July. Early that month the VI Corps was recalled to defend Washington from an attack by Lieutenant General Jubal Early. During the battle at Fort Stevens in northwestern Washington, Holmes is reported to have shouted at President Lincoln, who had come to observe the engagement and was standing up to get a better view, “Sit down, you damn fool.”
He arrived home ten days later.
ALL WARS CHANGE THE men who fight them, but the Civil War was the most transformative conflict in the nation’s history. Nothing on this scale had ever been seen before. The killing was so prodigious, yet the cause was so great and the outcome so consequential it was worth the human cost, staggering and sometimes senseless though it was. In its “new birth of freedom,” America could become the just nation and the example to mankind our founding had promised and slavery had prevented. That future was worth every drop of blood spilled, every life claimed or shattered and changed forever.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. became one of the most eminent jurists in the country’s history, serving on the Massachusetts Supreme Court and then as associate justice on the U.S. Supreme Court for thirty years. He died in 1935 at the age of ninety-four, more famous than his celebrated father.
Family and close friends thought him dispirited, even embittered after he came home. He had surely been disillusioned. Most people who go to war return, if they return, without the illusions they had brought to it. What replaces those illusions determines how we are transformed. Wars don’t change us once; they go on changing us, as we keep looking for meaning in the things that happened to us and the things we did.
For Holmes it was as Harvard’s current president, Dr. Drew Gilpin Faust, wrote in her profound book, The Republic of Suffering: “The very purposelessness of sacrifice created its purpose.”
Holmes gave a Memorial Day address in 1884 in Keene, New Hampshire, in which he touchingly recalled many of his fallen friends. He mentioned the Reveres and Charlie Cabot, who had a premonition of his death before Fredericksburg. He recalled “another youthful lieutenant in the Seven Days battle,” referring to his cousin James Lowell. Right before the battle began, he said, “we caught each other’s eye and saluted. When next I looked, he was gone.” He described Little Abbott bravely leading his company through the firestorm at Fredericksburg: “If you had seen him with his indifferent carriage, and sword swinging from his finger like a cane, you would never have suspected that he was doing more than conducting a company drill on the camp parade ground.”
These men, he said, though so “very near and dear to him,” were no greater than other fallen heroes. “In the great democracy of self-devotion private and general stand side by side. Unmarshalled save by their own deeds, the army of the dead sweep before us, ‘wearing their wounds like stars.’ ”
They had been transformed by war, he said, and by the suffering and loss that attended the transformation. He called it “our great good fortune” that “in our youth our hearts were touched with fire. It was given to us to learn at the outset that life is a profound and passionate thing.”
Eleven years later he gave another Memorial Day tribute to the veterans of the Civil War, this time at Harvard. It was a shorter address than his earlier one, and he titled it “The Soldier’s Faith.” He talked again of the transformative power of the war. “We have shared the incommunicable experience of war,” he told his fellow veterans, “we have felt, we still feel the passion of life to its top.” Then he spoke of the meaning of their sacrifice, of finding purpose, shorn of illusions, for suffering and losses that could not be borne and yet were: “In the midst of doubt, in the collapse of creeds, there is one thing I do not doubt . . . that the faith is true and adorable which leads a soldier to throw away his life in obedience to a blindly accepted duty, in a cause which he little understands, in a plan of campaign of which he has little notion, under tactics of which he does not see the use.”
He had lost illusions, ideals, and friends. He had been ill-used. He had been bored and exhilarated, brave and terrified, grateful and resentful. It was said that forever after he was a skeptical man in matters of jurisprudence and morality. And for the rest of his long life he carried his lunch in a tin ammunition box he had brought home from the war and preferred the address “Captain” over “Judge.”
“War, when you are at it,” he said, “is horrible and dull. It is only when time has passed that you see its message was divine,” that man was, after all, “capable of miracle, able to lift himself by the might of his own soul.”
Captain Edward L. Baker, Buffalo Soldier, officer in the 49th U.S. Volunteers, and recipient of the Medal of Honor for heroism in the Battle of San Juan Heights.
CHAPTER FIVE
Fog
Edward Baker was a Buffalo Soldier whose courage and leadership under fire set an example for the Americans, white and black, who fought in Cuba.
ALL WE KNOW FOR CERTAIN about the sinking of the USS Maine is that five tons of gunpowder in her forward hold erupted in a sudden explosion at about nine thirty in the evening of February 15, 1898. She quickly sank to the bottom of Havana Harbor, and 266 men were killed. Most of the dead were enlisted; their sleeping quarters were in the forward part of the ship, where the explosion occurred. Officers were quartered aft, and most of them survived. A spontaneous fire is believed to have ignited the blast, but its cause was suspicious enough at the time that newspapers and politicians advocating a war with Spain could attribute it to a Spanish mine. Confusion, misunderstanding, and surprise, features of every war, were present at the very start of the Spanish-American War.
As wars go, it was a short one, at least that part of it fought on the island nation of Cuba, the theater that is this chapter’s setting. The first American soldiers went ashore in Cuba on June 22, 1898, and the fighting was effectively finished with the surrender of Santiago on July 17. The first American troops embarked for home on August 7, fleeing a yellow fever epidemic.
The 9th U.S. Cavalry Regiment was left behind as a temporary occupying force. It was one of four “colored” regiments in the army, two cavalry and two infantry regiments in which the enlisted men were exclusively black and the officers exclusively white. All four regiments, the 9th and 10th Cavalry, and the 24th and 25th Infantry, were among the first American units ashore in Cuba. They boasted some of the most experienced fighters in the army, who had served in remote frontier forts fighting Indians and outlaws. In one of those “scientific” theories of the time that seem more social rationalization than rational explanation, African Americans were believed not to be susceptible to yellow fever, and the “colored” regiments were known in Cuba as the “Immunes.” History remembers them by the name they were given by the Indians they had fought: Buffalo Soldiers.
The New York Times journalist Timothy Egan described the battles fought by the 1st U.S. Volunteer C
avalry—Teddy Roosevelt’s famed “Rough Riders”— as “sharp, vicious crawls through jungle terrain in killing heat.” Let’s add the adjective confusing to Egan’s description. Soldiers’ uncertainty of their situation, what the great nineteenth-century strategist Carl von Clausewitz called “the fog of war,” was as common in the brief war in Cuba as it was in other wars. The experience of the Rough Riders was shared by most of the regiments fighting in Cuba, including the Buffalo Soldiers, who advanced alongside them from the American landings at Daiquirí to the ascent up the San Juan Heights. And they deserve an equal share of the credit for the army’s quick and complete victory in Cuba. History gives them a greater measure of it than their country gave them at the time. There is another kind of fog associated with war, the kind that changes a nation’s way of looking at the world and itself. Unlike soldiers, a country can choose, at least for a time, not to see everyone’s sacrifices equally.
The invasion of Cuba began with a two-hour naval bombardment on the village of Daiquirí, about fifteen miles east of Santiago. It succeeded in frightening off three hundred or so Spanish defenders, and the initial landing of V Corps, the army’s invasion force, proceeded unopposed. Given the problems that attended the landing, had the Spanish soldiers opposed it instead of torching the village and fleeing, they might have turned the opening engagement of the invasion into a disaster for the Americans.
V Corps was commanded by Major General William Rufus Shafter, a corpulent, walrus-mustached, sixty-three-year-old veteran of the Civil War and Indian campaigns. He received his nickname, “Pecos Bill,” during his service in the West, where he had commanded the 24th Colored Infantry Regiment and had hounded from service the first African American West Point graduate, Lieutenant Henry O. Flipper. Shafter proved to be overmatched by the Cuban assignment. Both the assembly of V Corps in Tampa, Florida, and the organization of its transport to Cuba was haphazard and slow. So too were the landings at Daiquirí.
It took two days to get all the troops ashore. The landing boats were small and too few, and there was no means to lower the troops into the boats; soldiers carrying full packs on their backs had to squeeze through portholes to reach them. The surf was exceptionally rough, and large breakers pounded the small beach. Several boats were smashed against rocks. Horses and pack mules were the biggest problem. All but one cavalry regiment fought dismounted, for there hadn’t been room on the transport ships for their horses. The most senior cavalry officers were allowed to bring their mounts to Cuba, and one reserve brigade included a mounted regiment. But there was no means for conveying ashore the animals that did make the trip, so they were simply forced overboard in the hope they would swim ashore. Some didn’t and drowned, but an alert trooper sounded “right wheel” on his bugle and succeeded in turning most of the horses toward the shore. Among the survivors was Little Texas, one of two mounts Teddy Roosevelt had brought to Tampa.
The troops were landed at an abandoned railroad pier, which required them to leap from their boats on the crest of a swelling wave. Some boats smashed against the pier’s pilings. Two troopers from the 10th Cavalry, Corporal Edward Cobb and Trooper John English, missed the pier and sank in the turbulent waters below it. Rough Rider William “Buckey” O’Neill, whom Roosevelt called “the iron-nerved, iron-willed fighter from Arizona,” jumped in and swam beneath the surface in a futile attempt to rescue them.
The 2nd Infantry Division, under the command of another Civil War veteran, Brigadier General Henry Lawton, was the first to disembark. It comprised three brigades, one of which, General Nelson Miles’s 3rd Brigade, included the 25th Colored Infantry Regiment. The 2nd Division was followed by Major General “Fighting Joe” Wheeler’s cavalry division, which included the 9th and 10th “colored” regiments and the Rough Riders’ 1st Volunteer Cavalry. During the Civil War Wheeler had been a senior cavalry commander in the Confederate Army of Tennessee. Brigadier General Jacob Kent’s 1st Infantry Division, which included General Shafter’s old command, the 24th Infantry Regiment, would be the last to disembark, along with Shafter, who remained aboard ship, ostensibly directing the chaotic landings.
V Corps’ main objective was Santiago, fifteen miles away. A Spanish fleet was anchored there, and a Spanish force of ten thousand defended it. The American fleet, commanded by Rear Admiral William Sampson, prowled the waters waiting for its opportunity. Shafter ordered Lawton’s 2nd Division to Siboney, ten miles west of Daiquirí, where he and Kent’s division would go ashore in the morning. Wheeler’s dismounted cavalry followed. The Americans made camp at Siboney just after nightfall as a tropical storm drenched them.
Shafter had ordered Wheeler to remain near Siboney until the rest of the army disembarked; they were not to initiate contact with the enemy if it could be helped. But Wheeler had other ideas. He ordered the Rough Riders, commanded by Colonel Leonard Wood with Lieutenant Colonel Theodore Roosevelt second-in-command, and a squadron of four troops each from the 1st and 10th regular cavalry regiments under the command of Brigadier General Samuel Young, about twelve hundred troopers in all, to march at first light on June 24 toward the town of Sevilla. His real objective was a Spanish rearguard of two thousand men that Cuban rebels reported were entrenched with artillery on a low ridge near a village called Las Guásimas.
General Young and the regulars proceeded in a column along the main road to Santiago, while Colonel Wood took the Rough Riders on a parallel, very narrow and steep trail to their left. Young’s column reached the ridge first and waited for the Rough Riders to arrive before launching an attack on the front and right flank of the first Spanish line. General Wheeler rode up and waited with him. Young ordered his Hotchkiss field guns brought to the front and fired a couple rounds at a blockhouse on the ridge. The Spanish answered immediately with two 75 mm Krupp guns, and the battle commenced.
The 10th Regiment’s Sergeant Major Edward Lee Baker Jr., a Buffalo Soldier with sixteen years of experience on the frontier, recorded in his diary the following summary of the Battle of Las Guásimas: “The advance guard was soon hotly engaged with them; after a very desperate fight of over an hour, the enemy was driven in confusion from their intrenchments. Our men were too exhausted to follow.”
It was a desperate fight certainly, its length closer to two hours than one. The Spanish did eventually withdraw, but they were withdrawing to Santiago anyway. They hadn’t been driven from their trenches. They hadn’t been surprised. They had been waiting in ambush, and the results were very nearly a disaster for the Americans, particularly the 1st Volunteer Cavalry.
That’s not to say the Rough Riders and the two regular cavalry regiments were found wanting that day. The Americans at Las Guásimas showed commendable courage, persistence, and resourcefulness. But what emerged from the fog of that first battle in Cuba was a story of a near calamity brought on by a commanding general’s eagerness for a fight and of glory saved in the end by the valor of the Buffalo Soldiers and the tactics they had learned fighting Indians.
WHILE THE 10TH WAS suddenly engaged at the center of the line, an advance party of Rough Riders led by Sergeant Hamilton Fish III, scion of the eminent New York family, had reached a junction in the trail where they found the body of a Spanish soldier killed by Cuban rebels in an engagement the day before. Fish passed word back to his troop captain, Allyn Capron Jr., and to Wood, who decided to split his column in two, placing a squadron under Major Alexander Brodie to the left of the trail and another under Roosevelt to the right. As they were getting into position the Spanish began to fire at the front of the column. Sergeant Fish was the first man to fall, followed by three troopers in his advance party. Captain Capron, whom Roosevelt later described as “the archetype of the fighting man” and “fitted to play his part to perfection,” and whose father commanded an artillery battalion in Cuba, rushed with the rest of his troops to their fallen comrades’ aid. He was shot in the chest and killed.
The American lines in the front and left were at an extreme disadvantage. They were fi
ghting in dense jungle, hemmed in by barbed-wire fences in “undergrowth so thick and tall,” Sergeant Major Baker described it, “scarcely any breeze could get to you.” The Spanish had Mauser repeating rifles, superior to the Americans’ Krag rifles, and pinned the Americans down with incessant volleys. They used smokeless gunpowder that didn’t give away their positions. Rough Riders and Buffalo Soldiers alike struggled to find targets as they advanced to the base of the ridge.
The Rough Riders were soon in dire straits, exposed in a sunken road, trapped between wire and jungle and the heights from which enfilading fire poured down on them. They were stuck: they couldn’t advance and wouldn’t retreat. Both Major Brodie and Roosevelt conspicuously exposed themselves to fire, and Brodie was seriously wounded.
With smoke from their Hotchkiss gun giving away their position, troopers from the 10th fought to free the trapped Rough Riders by advancing on the enemy and drawing their fire, while their left flank struggled to reach the volunteers’ lines. Roosevelt described the confused and desperate scene in his memoir, Rough Riders, when regulars from the 10th pushed forward:
The denseness of the jungle and the fact that they used absolutely smokeless powder, made it exceedingly difficult to place exactly where they were, and almost immediately Young, who always liked to get as close as possible to his enemy, began to push his troops forward. They were deployed on both sides of the road in such thick jungle that it was only here and there that they could possibly see ahead, and some confusion, of course, ensued, the support gradually getting mixed with the advance.