Complete Works of Frank Norris

by Frank Norris

  “Too high!”

  “What’s the matter with you fellows?” shouted the captain. “You’re a hundred yards too high. Is number two ready? Go ahead and shoot! I want to tear ’em all up! I want ’em cut all to pieces!”

  Numbers two and three fired, and then number one, and by the time the dense curtain of white smoke thinned we could see that the range had been found and the column was scattered and galloping. Twice more the battery fired, but it was only at the spot where the column had been. We began to hear the sputtering of rifles again, this time on the right, where Chaffee’s brigade was moving toward the Santiago road. To the left, where Ludlow was, the sputtering was fiercer than ever, till soon there was a continuous, nervous ripple of discharges, extending across the entire front of our line. We began to look at one another and nod our heads. “By Jove, it’s getting hot down there!”

  “Look! there they are, firing from the blockhouse — the big one on the hill. I knew that so long as the flag was up there would be troops there!”

  A faint blue haze was curling up from the summit of the hill just below the blockhouse.

  “Now, then!” cried the captain. “At the blockhouse, at twenty-four hundred yards, with percussion shell!”

  An interval of scrambling and confusion ensued; then, one by one: “Number four, ready!”

  “Number one, ready!”

  “Number two, ready!”

  “Here, what’s the matter with you men? Isn’t number three ready?”

  “Number three, ready!”

  “Fire number four, there!”

  “Number four, ready! Fire!”

  Such gunnery as we witnessed that morning I never again expect to see equalled. It could not be surpassed for it was well nigh perfect. Not only did the gunners reach the blockhouse whenever they pleased, but they reached whichever corner or angle they picked out beforehand. The first one or two shots went wide; then the shells began to creep in closer and closer, and great fountains of brown earth spouted from the location of the trenches and rifle pits, and pinwheels of smoke, mortar dust, brick, and stone whirled off the surface of the fort as the great projectiles struck. With every successful shot the crowd of watchers on the hilltop cheered. And now the flag was down.

  “Look out, now!” cried the battery captain. “There’ll probably be a man come out to set it up again; get him with shrapnel, if you can.”

  A man did come out; we could see him dodge from an embrasure around an angle of the fort.

  “He’ll be on top in a minute; get him now with shrapnel. Who’s ready there? Whichever gun is ready, fire!”

  Number four fired. The shell was still screaming when we caught sight of the man scrambling upon the ledge of the blockhouse near the broken staff. Then, right over the fort, right over the staff, and over the Spanish soldier’s head, the little ball of white cotton leaped into view. “Got him!” shouted the entire battery, as the bursting shrapnel wiped the man from the wall of the blockhouse as a sponge would wipe a slate. Still the Spaniards hung on. To one new to the grim game that was being played that day at El Caney it did not appear credible that men in their senses would endure and endure and endure, in those rifle pits, under the bursting shells. Had the fire been wild, had a few shells missed the mark, had there been a chance of escape, we should have marvelled less; but we knew — could, in fact, see — that of every six shells the battery fired, five went straight to the mark, exploding in the very trenches themselves. We shall remember these Spanish soldiers of El Caney, for not until late in the afternoon, after ten hours of intermittent shelling, did they finally consent to leave — what was left of them.

  Meanwhile the battle went forward. Again and again we searched the valley with our field glasses for moving troops, but all to no effect. The enemy was close within his fort and blockhouses; our brigades kept under cover. The valley was empty of life. Toward high noon and the heat of the day the unexpected happened. The fire slackened and ceased. It was time for lunch, and for upward of two hours the fight waited on the camp fire. The men would fight; also they must be fed.

  It was along toward three in the afternoon that we first made out our troops — a part of Ludlow’s brigade, no doubt — a dozen tiny specks scattered out in an irregular line in a grain field, moving across it by degrees, stopping now and then to fire. They were far off and were soon gone from view, but the sight of them sent the blood galloping through the veins and made us draw our breath more quickly. Then, far to the left, more specks in an opening between the trees, running about like excited ants, advancing always, while the sputtering came suddenly to a great climax and ran from end to end of our lines, from right and left and back again, like the current over a live wire. The battery held its fire now; our men were too close to the enemy. The end was beginning, and the lines that all day long had been moving in toward Caney and its fort began suddenly to concentrate.

  The crowd on the hill around the battery was beyond all control now. It surged forward to the crest of the hill, swarming over cannon and caisson, taking possession of every elevation, eager to see the last move in the game, and it shouted and talked aloud regardless of answer. A German count, an attache of legation, wrangled with a company cook over a question of distance; a brigade commander asked meek questions of a private standing on an upturned cracker box; colonels, majors, correspondents, soldiers, Cubans, photographers, crowded together, rubbing elbows, gesticulating, advancing opinions, contradicting one another, all beside themselves in the tension of the moment.

  Then suddenly the charge began, full in view now, far off at the base of the sugar-loaf hill with its battered, shrapnel-shattered blockhouse. There they were, our soldiers, our men, crowding forward, crowding upward, the moving specks converging into a mass, a great wedge-shaped mass that pushed up and up and up the slope of the hill. We could hear them cheering, so at least we thought, and we ourselves cheered — no, it was not cheering; we yelled inarticulately, just a primitive bellow of exultation, an echo of the stone age!

  The blockhouse was taken by the assault, but the town still held on, and far to the left the rifles were yet talking. At once the battery moved forward, followed by its supporting regiment. But I went on ahead as fast as my little horse could carry me, left him with the Cuban guide in a grove of coconut palms, and following in the wake of the charge, climbed the sugar-loaf hill and gained the blockhouse and its lines of rifle pits. The blockhouse was a horror, the trenches beyond description. The first Spaniard I saw was lying at the bottom of a trench. He was a young fellow — they were all young fellows — his face the colour of wax; one poor, dirty hand looked like a buzzard’s claw; his arm was doubled under him, and — but the rest is not for words. A bullet wound is one thing, but shrapnel smashes its man, flings him down, and drives and dints him into the dirt. The dead were everywhere; they were in the trenches, in the fields of pineapple, in corners of the blockhouse, and in grisly postures halfway down the slope of the hill. The air was full of smells — the smell of stale powder, of smoke, of a horse’s carcass two days unburied, of shattered lime and plaster in the blockhouse, and the strange, acrid, salty smell of blood. Our soldiers set about burying the dead and carrying off the wounded, and we turned our attention to the town.

  El Caney lay, a spread of red-tiled, fluted roofs, surmounted by a cathedral tower just on the other side of a deep gully where ran a stream. On its outskirts there was a blockhouse or two. At first glance the town looked deserted; a solitary, unperturbed white mule nosed calmly in his fodder in a courtyard by the church. But while we looked, a woman and two men, not soldiers, came to the door of one of the cottages. At that time I stood on the slope of the hill below the blockhouse with a corporal, five enlisted men, and a San Francisco correspondent. We called to these people of the town to come out and come over to us; and, in what little Spanish we knew, told them we were amigos. They came hesitatingly, stopping and calling every five steps, then, gaining confidence, came boldly out of the town, the woman carry
ing a bundle on her head. In five minutes the town was alive with people, men, women, and little naked pot-bellied children, who came pouring out from every door and every street, forming in one long line and filing up toward us upon the hillside. Most of them were women trembling on the verge of hysteria. Such as were not half crazed were stupefied, gazing slowly about them with unseeing eyes, permitting themselves to be herded like so many sheep. Some few were crying; one, who was choking with sobs, was at the same time eating sardines from a tin as fast as she could handle the fork, and with no consciousness of what she was doing. The children were for the most part intensely amused, excited, but very interested and pleased. For them it was a new kind of picnic. But there was plenty of misery among these people. A beautiful woman, whose husband, a Cuban, had been killed by one of our shells, was filling the air with her cries, sobbing and groaning and biting her hands in her excess of grief, till it broke one’s heart to listen to her. An old woman of sixty-five, hardly able to walk, was carrying, by means of her wrists drawn over her shoulders like the drawstrings of a grain sack, another woman of surely more than ninety, a woman so old as to be blind and deaf and all but senseless. She was in her sleeping gown, just as she had been hurried from her bed, which perhaps she had not left for years.

  We hurried on, crossed the gully and stream, and entered the town. The corporal was under orders to look for Spanish soldiers, wounded and otherwise, who might still be in hiding. It was not work that six men should have been detailed to do, and looking back upon the affair, I see that we correspondents were foolhardy in going along. We found the houses still intact; our batteries had shelled the trenches, but not the village. We cocked our revolvers and went through the narrow, deserted lanes and streets and into the larger houses, the jail, the hospital, the church, the mayor’s residence, and into most of the houses on the plaza. It was uncanny work to let one’s self unbidden into these houses, pushing open the street door and entering the dark and silent interiors, with unfamiliar furnishings and strange smells, never knowing what we should find across the next threshold. In the mayor’s house I came suddenly upon the body of a plain-looking girl, lying on the floor, her hair across her face like a drift of seaweed. She had not been shot; she had been stabbed! Some dead we found, men who had crawled away in corners to die. In one of the larger buildings on the plaza we found some forty wounded men with no fight left in them, one of them a most pitiable object. Two Spanish soldiers in a blockhouse, and unhurt, gave themselves up to me, thinking perhaps that I was some sort of officer. I had them walk in front of me, and allowed myself a full breath only when I was once more under the cover of our own rifles. Afterward I saw one of them in the stockade of Siboney. We recognized each other simultaneously, and shook hands as old friends, across the barbed wire, genuinely glad to meet again.

  It was growing dark when we regained the blockhouse, and the brigades were on the move again. We were afraid lest we should miss our horses and the Cuban guide in the darkness and the crowd, and worked our way back to them. Then, in the twilight, we marched on through a wild confusion of regiments, companies, and brigades, and litter bearers carrying the dead and wounded, to join the regiment to which we had been assigned, and which had gone on three miles down the Santiago road.

  And then upon that day of many sensations a curious thing occurred. Our army had won a victory, had fought from dawn to dark and had defeated the enemy. It was the time for triumph, for exultation. Instead of that, a feeling of depression lay upon us, and upon the soldiers with whom we were marching. There was no great talk. It was a sorrowful army marching through the twilight after victory. At a turn of the road, just before it got very dark, I came upon a brigade adjutant. We knew each other only slightly, yet for some reason we gripped hands, so glad to see each other that the right words would not come, and standing in the mud of the road, talked until the marching troops, like an on-rushing current, forced us apart; even then we waved good-bye to each other across the maze of shouldered rifles. It was dark now. The army was moving to new positions; artillery was trundling heavily on the road; the clicking of cups and scabbards was like the chirp of a vast swarm of crickets. Somewhere off to the southward heavy guns were speaking at lazy intervals. It was ten o’clock at night when we again set our faces toward Santiago.

  Century, June, 1899.

  SANTIAGO’S SURRENDER

  For two days we had been at the headquarters of the Second Brigade (General McKibben’s), so blissfully contented because at last we had a real wooden and tiled roof over our heads that even the tarantulas — Archibald shook two of them from his blanket in one night — had no terrors for us.

  The headquarters were in an abandoned country seat, a little six-roomed villa, all on one floor, called the Hacienda San Pablo. To the left of us along the crest of hills, in a mighty crescent that reached almost to the sea, lay the army, panting from the effort of the first, second, and third days of the month, resting on its arms, its eyes to its sights, Maxim, Hotchkiss, and Krag-Jorgenson held ready, alert, watchful, straining at the leash, waiting the expiration of the last truce that had now been on for twenty-four hours.

  That night we sat up very late on the porch of the hacienda singing “The Spanish Cavalier” — if you will recollect the words, singularly appropriate— “The Star-Spangled Banner,” and —

  “’Tis a way we had at Caney, sir,

  ’Tis a way we had at Caney, sir,

  ’Tis a way we had at Caney, sir,

  To drive the Dons away” —

  an adaptation by one of the general’s aids which had a great success.

  Inside, the general himself lay on his spread blankets, his hands clasped under his head, a pipe in his teeth, feebly applauding us at intervals and trying to pretend that we sang out of tune. The night was fine and very still. The wonderful Cuban fireflies, that are like little electric lights gone somehow adrift, glowed and faded in the mango and bamboo trees, and after a while a whippoorwill began his lamentable little plaint somewhere in the branches of the gorgeous vermilion Flamboyana that overhung the hacienda.

  The air was heavy with smells — smells that inevitable afternoon downpours had distilled from the vast jungle of bush and vine and thicket all up and down the valley. In Cuba everything, the very mud and water, has a smell. After every rain, as soon as the red, hot sun is out again, vegetation reeks and smokes and sweats, and these smells steam off into the air all night, thick and stupefying like the interior of a cathedral after high mass.

  The orderly that brought the dispatch should have dashed up at a gallop, clicked his spurs, saluted, and begun with “The commanding general’s compliments, sir,” etc. Instead, he dragged a very tired horse up the trail, knee deep in mud, brought to, standing with a gasp of relief, and said, as he pushed his hat back from his forehead:

  “Say, is here where Gen. McKibben is?”

  We stopped singing and took our feet down from the railing of the veranda. In the room back of us we heard the general raise on an elbow and tell his orderly to light a candle. The orderly went inside, drawing a paper from his pocket, and the aids followed. Through the open window we could plainly hear what followed, and see, too, for that matter, by twisting a bit in our chairs.

  The general had mislaid his eyeglasses and so passed the dispatch to one of his aids, saying: “I’ll get you to read this for me, Nolan.” On one knee and holding the dispatch to the candlelight, Nolan read it aloud.

  It began tamely enough with the usual military formulas, and the first thirty words might have been part of any one of the many dispatches the general had been receiving during the last three days. And then —

  “.. To accompany the commanding general to a point midway Between the Spanish and American lines and there to receive the surrender of Gen. Toral. At noon precisely the American flag will be raised over the Governor’s palace in the city of Santiago. A salute of twenty-one guns will be fired from Capt. Capron’s battery. The regimental bands will play ‘The Star
-Spangled Banner,’ and the troops will cheer.”

  “SHAFTER.”

  There was a silence. The aid returned the paper to the general and straightened up, rubbing the dust from his knee. The general shifted his pipe to the other corner of his mouth. The little green parrot who lived in the premises trundled gravely across the brick floor, and for an instant we all watched her with the intensest attention.

  “Hum,” muttered the general reflectively between his teeth. “Hum. They’ve caved in. Well, you won’t have to make that little reconnoissance of yours down the railroad after all, Mr. Nolan.” And so it was that we first heard of the surrender of Santiago de Cuba.

  We were up betimes the next morning. By six o’clock the general had us all astir and searching in our blanket rolls and haversacks for “any kind of a black tie.” It was an article none of us possessed, and the general was more troubled over this lack of a black tie than the fact that he had neither vest nor blouse to do honour to the city’s capitulation.

  But we had our own troubles. The flag was to be raised over the city at noon. Some time during the morning the Spanish general would surrender to the American. The general — our general — and his aids, as well as all the division and brigade commanders, would ride out to be present at the ceremony — but how about the correspondents?

  Almost to a certainty they would be refused. Privileges extended to journalists and magazine writers had been few and very far between throughout the campaign. We would watch the affair through glasses from some hilltop, two miles, or three, maybe, to the rear. But for all that we saddled our horses, and when the general and his staff started to ride down to corps headquarters, fell in with the aids and resolved to keep up with the procession as far as our ingenuity and perseverance would make possible.

  It was early when we started, and the heat had not yet begun to be oppressive. All along and through the lines there were signs of the greatest activity. Overnight the men had been withdrawn from the trenches and were pitching their shelter tents on the higher and drier ground, and where our road crossed the road from Caney to Santiago we came upon hundreds of refugees returning to the city whence they had been driven a few days previous.