by John Sayles
“Don’t bother, fellas,” says one man with a bloody crease across his stubbled cheek. “They’re sittin up there where you can’t even see em, pourin it down on us. You won’t have no more show than we did.”
“Volunteers can’t see through their own smoke, is what,” says Sergeant Jacks flatly after the man has passed. “Got them old shit Winchesters. Black powder will draw enemy lead like bees to honey. Smart to get them off the field.”
Jacks sees another man moving toward them against the flow, a top sergeant like himself, with a sunburned face, holding one arm close to his body.
“What they dealing out?”
The sunburned sergeant stops ahead of them. “Maybe a couple Hotchkiss guns up there, Mausers.” He grabs his wounded arm by the wrist and raises it to display a small black stain on the bicep of his uniform shirt. “Put one right through me.”
Jacks cocks his head at the wound. “Mauser ball make a nice clean hole, don’t it?”
“We lost a boy in an ambuscade on the way, some of these guerillas up in the trees. Went in over the lung and come out his back the size of a fist.”
“That’d be a Winchester round. She’ll tear the hell out of you.”
Royal wonders if he is saying this for effect, trying to scare the greenhorns like the other veterans do. The two sergeants could be talking about fishing.
“You like a bullet to stay in one piece when it hits you,” adds Jacks.
The white soldier shakes his head. “Don’t know what they think a man can do,” he says. “Aint nobody going to take that hill.”
They continue to move forward, the men watching the treetops now. On the third day ashore they saw a few of the guerillas, hacked dead with machete blows and laid out on the side of the road, already stripped of equipment and some of their clothes. Cubans who fought on the Spanish side of this mess, but not looking any different from the insurrectos.
“Why would a man want to fight against his own people?” Junior wanted to know.
“We used the Crows to track the Sioux,” said Achille, who did a stretch in the 9th Cavalry when he was a young man. “Used the Tonkawa to fight the Comanches. But to a man outside they all just Indians.”
They march past a dead American, sitting propped at the base of a huge ceiba tree bordering another canefield. His whole middle is wet with blood, and there are a half dozen vultures circling in the sky. If the man’s head was at a normal angle it would look like he was resting.
“There’s the music,” says Bevill ahead of Royal and yes, he can hear it now, very light and distant but lots of it, no break between gunshots, just louder ones and softer ones.
They cross the field and fall out under the shade of the mango trees by a big plantation house. Men hurry their fixings out, rolling smokes, Too Tall cutting open a green cigar he has bought from some roadside muchacho and wadding the tobacco into his pipe. Royal drinks, realizes his canteen is already half empty. It is a beautiful spot. It is all beautiful country but for the heat and if you had the right clothes and nothing much to do and nobody was shooting at you it would be a paradise. Royal’s stomach is still not right from the green mangoes they boiled down for dinner last night, smelled like turpentine but tasted sweet. His stomach hasn’t been right, in fact, since the trip over on the Concho, the drinking water warm and brownish, the food no better than usual and all that rolling in the hold, sick even at night and having to take turns for time up on deck.
“Somebody’s catching hell,” says Gamble. “That firing aint let up once.”
The men listen. Birds are still singing, the high-pitched frogs are awake and throbbing, and through it they can hear the rattle and roll of rifle fire punctuated with an infrequent bass note of artillery.
Junior points. “Over there.”
They look and can see a cloud of white smoke rising above the jungle canopy to the right, maybe a half-mile away.
“That’ll be our battery,” says Sergeant Jacks. “Four pieces. Working kind of slow.”
They listen awhile, then lose interest, some men unhitching their loads and lying back on the ground, some talking quietly, most sitting alone with their own thoughts.
“Insurrectos say they cut the Spaniards’ heads off if they catch em,” muses Achille. “Say the Spanish do the same, put em out on a stake.”
“What that mean to us?” asks Coop, who lays back with his eyes closed and his hands folded on his chest.
“Means maybe some of them Spanish boys been wanting to surrender, get sent back home. Now they got us to give up to.”
“Don’t sound like nobody surrenderin to nobody up there.”
“They got their officers behind em, stick em with a sword they don’t keep fighting.”
“So alls we got to do is kill all their officers.”
“That would do it.”
“Good,” says Coop. “I keep that in mind.”
Sergeant Jacks comes by to inspect rifles, just the rookies, and Royal pulls out the oiled rag he keeps stuffed down the muzzle.
“There’s a village called Caney,” says the sergeant as he handles the Krag, “behind a fort on a hill. We sposed to take that, then swing over and help the main force at San Juan.” He has never volunteered this kind of information before, never explained, and Royal wonders why he wants them to know this now. “We get into the shit, you just do what you see everybody else doing.”
The sun is directly overhead when they are formed up again and marched toward the gunfire. Royal is out off the path as a flanker with Junior, struggling through the brush, when they come to a man hanging upside-down from a tree, a rope tied to his ankle. Another Cuban, a guerilla, with palm fronds fastened around his body. Blood has run from the hole where his eye used to be to collect in his hair and spatter down onto the broad-leaved plants below.
“Sniper,” says Junior, pausing to look up into the nearby treetops. “No telling how many of ours he killed.”
The battle is louder now, flankers called in as they approach the end of the cover. Now and again there is the whine of a closer bullet, leaves and palm branches fluttering down from above, snipped by the spillover from the fighting in front of them. A sharp crack here and there and wood chips flying. The men strip off the load of bedrolls and haversacks, jettison everything but rifle, rounds, and canteen. Royal imagines he is dead.
If he is dead they can’t kill him.
He crouches with the others at the end of the woods and looks through the trees at what is waiting. A rugged stretch of mostly open ground, green-brown chaparral with a few spindly trees leading to a steep hill crowned by a stone fort. There are wooden blockhouses stretching off to the left of it, and then, on another hill slightly behind, a village with a tall stone church. Royal imagines his mother at her table, quiet and all cried out. He imagines Jessie with a black armband over her white shirtwaist sleeve, wearing it for him, solemn for a year, maybe more. Being dead is nothing, exactly that, nothing, so much better than being afraid, being injured, in pain, maimed.
He is dead and whatever happens next cannot hurt him.
Lieutenant Caldwell strolls in front of them, still inside the first line of trees, shouting to be heard over the gunfire that seems to be mostly off to the right of the hill.
“We will need to step into the open to form ranks,” says the lieutenant. “And we will advance in extended order at once. We are part of a larger maneuver—people are counting on us and we cannot fail them. Sergeants!”
They step out and form a firing line then, sergeants trotting parallel and shouting, getting the intervals right while the volleys from the fort swing their way. There is nothing to hide behind, and though most of the rounds sing over their heads a few men fall and soldiers sidestep to fill in the gaps. G and H Companies are out front in the firing line, Royal near the far left, with C and D to follow a hundred yards back in support, the rest crouching back in reserve. Royal sees the 4th Infantry, who had been with them on the Concho, whites to port and blacks to star
board, step out to form on their left flank. There had been lots of jokes across the bowline stretched between them about who was being protected from who.
“Firing line, forward—march!”
Kid Mabley blows the order and they quickstep ahead.
The idea seems to be to keep moving forward and hope all of them are not dead by the time they reach the top. Royal checks to each side to be sure he is not getting out front too far and sees that more men are falling. He feels the bullets singing past as much as he hears them and keeps walking through the chaparral, everything very bright, very clear and thinking he should be firing like some of the others but there is nothing, nobody up there visible to shoot at. The line reaches some small trees and there is barbed wire stretched between them, a half dozen strands of it and posts every three feet to kick and club through, something to concentrate on furiously as chunks of wood crack into splinters and more men fall. Somebody is screaming behind him. The line is scattered when he comes into the clear again, Royal trotting with the few left on either side of Sergeant Jacks.
“In rushes!” shouts the sergeant. “Keep moving!”
There are whistles and bugle calls behind but now it is just rush and flop, rush and flop, desperate lunging forward then extending the Krag and diving to the ground. It’s a wildly uneven field with spiky pineapples in rows upon the churned earth and hard to navigate without tripping. Royal flops in a furrow and fires his first shot, not really using his sight but just pointing at the fort and pulling the trigger. Others are firing and the sergeant said to do whatever they did. The thick spat of a bullet near him and there is hot sticky fruit on his cheek and he is up and rushing forward again.
He can see something at the top of the hill, movement, behind the line of barbed wire staked in front of the rifle pits before the fort, and he fires again, trying to aim this time, if not at a person then at a spot a person might be in. The hill is steep, steeper than the sand dunes back in Tampa, Royal holding his rifle in one hand and using the other to grab roots, plants, anything to help haul himself up and something sprays his face again, not a pineapple this time but somebody, a wet part of somebody, men dropping, men stopping movement around him but he climbs upward, upward till he is exhausted and needs to lie with his face on the hot ground a moment, then roll on his back and let his lungs work. The dead can be exhausted, they can be thirsty, but they are never afraid. Royal drinks from his canteen and sees down the hill to the second line coming up past the bodies of the first, sees D Company double-timing forward on the right as flankers, then rolls and struggles upward again.
He reaches a little dip, a depression running across the hill for several yards in which Jacks and half a platoon are lying, and falls down beside them. The artillery has been firing from behind them all this time and finally it seems to have found the range, one shell blowing a breach in the barbed-wire fencing and the next blasting the front of the fort itself, snapping the flagpole off and sending the Spanish colors tumbling to the ground. The men around him cheer. Royal is heaving for breath and drenched in his own liquid and he burns his hand on the barrel of the Krag, hot only from the sun and not his few random shots and he drinks again as more men reach the dip and flop down. They are only a hundred yards from the first of the trenches now and the Mausers are cracking, bullets spanging off rocks and flicking up dirt in front of their faces and it is unthinkable that he will have to stand and go forward.
“Sharpshooters!” yells Jacks, who seems to be the ranking officer on this part of the hill. “Articulate fire! Get those loopholes in the fort, get those bastards in the pits!”
Sharpshooters have been designated back in Tampa and Royal is not one of them. He looks down the ragged line of soldiers, sees men pushing up on their elbows to sight and fire, some rising on a knee, pulling the trigger, working the bolt, rolling on their sides to reload. It is methodical, hot work, and he is suddenly filled with awe for these men and hopes some of them will survive.
Coop aims at the spot where the white hat had just been. Fuck em. Kill em. The hat reappears and he fires and it drops out of sight. He cranks the empty out and pans down the trench line searching for another. Take your time. Sons of bitches have been trying to shoot him all the way up the fucking hill, had hours to get the job done and here he still is so fuck them, kill them, blow their damn brains out. He empties his magazine once, twice, three times—yes they’re shooting back still but they better not pause to aim or he’ll put one in their Dago skull. He stops once to refill his cartridge belt, slow and steady, not dropping a round, and when the corporal beside him gets it he slithers over to use the body for cover, propping the Krag barrel on the dead man’s hip. They are taking fire from the left, from the blockhouses and the village and whatever passes high over the 4th is hitting them but that will have to come later. Now it is the fort, bullets pocking the stone front like hard rain on dusty ground, the fort that has to be taken before the men inside it can kill him.
The little ditch isn’t much cover, not with the crossfire from the blockhouses, and it’s Sergeant Cade who jumps up to scream Let’s go and all of them rise at once, up, screaming their Comanche yell, scrabbling up the last steep pitch of the hill through corn stubble, the 4th still pinned down but Company C filling in to the left, Coop firing and running and firing and running till he flops again just short of the first of the trenches and jams his barrel through the barbed wire to fire down into it. A man steps out into the doorway of the fort with a white flag and Coop drops him, then another picks it up and is torn apart by several shots down the line then the sergeants are screaming to cease fire. No fire from the fort now, though still from the blockhouses and the village to the left. Another rush comes up behind him, men yelling Let’s take it and Coop stands to join but is banged from behind into the barbed wire, wrapped by it, kicking and chopping with his Krag till he tears his skin away and rolls untangled into the firing pit on top of a carpet of dead men. All of them lying in their blue-striped, mattress-ticking uniforms with holes in their foreheads, jumbled on top of each other. Coop gets hold of his rifle and squirms to his knees and sees one still alive, weeping, sitting on top of the others with no weapon in hand. Coop jumps out of the pit and dashes to the fort.
There are dead men lying in the way and he runs over their bodies and slams hard against the front wall, then joins the others who have made it, firing a few rounds into the loopholes cut in the wooden window plugs then rushing for the doorway. He loses his feet just inside, hip cracking hard on the blood-slick floor, then stands and steadies himself. Bodies everywhere and a few on their knees begging not to be shot. Fuck them, Coop thinks, kill them, but he is out of ammunition.
Men from the 12th have come up behind the fort on the right and Sergeant Jacks waves at them to keep down, heavy fire sweeping across from the blockhouses now. The firing pits are filled with dead and more lie dead and dying amid chunks of stone blown off from the fort. A black-bearded civilian in a long coat, maybe a newspaper man, sits on the ground beside him with a hole in his shoulder and the dust-covered Spanish flag in a pile in his lap.
“I did it,” says the bearded man, looking dazed at the red and yellow cloth. “I did it for the Journal.”
Jacks scurries, bent low, a quick lap around the hilltop to see what’s left. He saw Lieutenant McCorkle get it at the beginning, saw Bevill go down in the pineapples and Gilbert knocked backward on the hill, but there are a lot of blue shirts up here and some of his people who have stripped to the waist in the heat. They’re taking heavy fire from the blockhouses and the town but the bulk of the firing line has made it and the 12th is here and the 4th and their own reserve companies hustling up and they hold the high ground now, can swing even higher and shoot down through the roof of the nearest blockhouse. No officer up yet, no telling what is happening with the main force at the San Juan Heights, no orders. He sees one of the rookies, Scott, crouching behind the fort wall next to another who is holding the side of his neck with a bloody hand and h
aving a hard time breathing. The rookie’s cartridge belt is full.
“Take him back,” he yells to Scott, who is shaking hard but seems to understand. “If he can stand take him back down where they can do something.”
The rookie gives him a searching look. “Where do I take him?”
“Back the way we came. Somebody will know where the field hospital is.” The other one is shaking too, his eyes starting to glaze over.
“Get him as far as he’ll go,” says Jacks, “then get your ass back up here. Move!”
They just be in the way, both of them, and there is work left to do.
A captain from the 12th strides past trying to separate his white boys from the 25th. “Form up!” he is calling. “Form companies!” He is walking upright and stiff-legged, feigning disregard for the bullets still chipping away at the stone walls, but the men on the hilltop are too busy to be inspired. The rookie helps his friend up and they stagger away together.
The artillery has been hopeless all day long, the little battery still a half-mile back in the jungle, and if the Spanish send reinforcements over from Santiago the hilltop will be impossible to hold. Jacks curses, then rises and runs, tapping men splayed out on the ground as he goes, calling them to follow. He makes it into the trench on the west side of the fort, facing the village, and a dozen men pile in after.
“We take the blockhouses one at a time,” he tells them, “then go get that fucking church.”
They lift the bodies of the dead Spaniards up then, and add them to the breastworks behind the barbed-wire fence.
The shaking seemed to catch up with Royal, chasing him all the way up the slope and over the wire and the bloody pit and overtaking him only when he was safe and solid against the stone wall of the fort, catching him like a chill hand at the back of his neck and then down through the rest of his body and now only movement will mask it. Royal leads Little Earl back down the hill, passing much of C and D Company still struggling up, sidestepping down and reaching back to support his friend when it gets too steep.