My fatigue may have contributed to my acquiescence. Our transit from Shafter’s headquarters back to García’s had taken much longer than I’d anticipated. I’d had to persist in my arguments late into the night with various staff officers, finally reaching the colonel in charge of the depot. He explained there was nothing more allocated for the Cubans, and no transport to get it to them if there had been. I came away empty-handed and in a foul mood. I was also operating without so much as an hour’s rest.
Under these circumstances Theodore’s suggestion seemed to make sense. The best way to get back to García was to move forward with Roosevelt’s regiment, which was heading obliquely in that direction. Once we were across the river, I should meet up with García in a few more hours. For a fleeting, magnificent moment, I imagined the Cuban general and me entering Santiago together in victory.
“All right, Theodore. We’ll do just that.”
“Good! I feel much better having veterans like you and Rork with us.” He spun around, waving a hand toward the east. “I say, this is a glorious morning, isn’t it? What a vista!”
He was right. Viewed from our perch on El Pozo Hill, the dawn certainly was glorious. Above the milling mass of men waiting to kill the enemy, the powder blue sky was incongruously peaceful. Fluffy white clouds tinged with rose and lemon serenely floated ashore from the Caribbean several miles to the south. The sea was just visible from the top of the hill—an endless cerulean horizon. Periodically I saw the men look to it for reassurance, for it was our escape route from Cuba if things went badly. But escape was all it could provide, for we were too damned far inland for our warships to provide gunfire support for the attack.
Behind me, the sun peeked over the massive shoulder of Gran Piedra Mountain. Its rays reached out through the mountain mists to the west, illuminating the silver spires and gilded dome of the cathedral in the center of Santiago de Cuba, the original capital of Cuba and the ancient symbol of Spain’s empire in the New World. The wind shifted a bit to the west-southwest, bringing the familiar scent of a real breakfast from the Spanish cooking fires. I was instantly hungry.
The growing sunlight brought to mind José Martí’s comment to me at dinner one night back in early 1895. The conversation had been about the coming uprising and full-scale war to liberate Cuba from Spain. We had been discussing fate and what we would like ours to be.
“I am a good man, Peter,” Martí had said. “And as a good man, I must and will die facing the sun.”
It was the statement of a man facing combat for the first time, for he was about to embark for the Caribbean and eventually land in Cuba. He died in battle at Dos Rios, about thirty-five miles from where I now stood, only a month after he joined the war. I knew if he’d been standing there with me overlooking Santiago that morning he would’ve waxed poetic about the beauty of the scene. I missed my Cuban friend. He had the artist’s gift for vivid description by way of evocative metaphor. If only he had lived, things would be different. He had power and influence. The Americans would have listened to him instead of disregarding the Cubans’ advice.
My reverie was interrupted when Rork, standing between Roosevelt and me, grew philosophical in his own way. He motioned to the nervous officers from the cavalry brigade staff who had gathered closer to us. Then he pointed to the city.
“Aye, now just lookee there,” he said, forgetting that all of them outranked him. “Best fancy it while ye can boyos, for our next view o’ those distant hills’ll be pretty damned miserable once this donnybrook starts an’ them Spaniardos start slingin’ Mauser an’ Krupp lead our way. Then we’ll see who’s what among us.”
The Army officers pursed their lips at his impertinence without deigning to look at him. Then, executing a perfect half-right, they marched off in unison to look important somewhere else. Rork, having turned his gaze to the distant sea, didn’t even notice their departure.
Theodore swiveled his head around and slapped Rork on the shoulder. “Spot on, my dear man. I thought those useless hangers-on would never leave!”
Rork suddenly realized his breach of military etiquette and glanced at me with embarrassment. “Sorry, sir. Wished no disrespect, me bein’ only enlisted an’ all. Was just thinkin’ aloud.”
“Actually, I thought it on target and rather profound,” I replied. “And all said without a drop of rum to facilitate your tongue. I am correct in believing that, am I not?”
“Nay, nary a drop, an’ right about now I could use one. As for me philosophizin’, well, you know ’tis only the Gaelic versifier in me burstin’ forth.” He gave a flamboyant shrug that would have made a Frenchman jealous. “Aye, sir, ’tis an Irishman’s great blessin’ an’ also his curse, to have such a thing wellin’ inside him.”
“Yes, well, back to the war, Rork.” I pointed to a far hill. “Can that artillery hit us here?”
“Ooh, nay. We’re out o’ those fellows’ range by five hundred yards.” He added with raised finger, “O’ course, once we commence crossin’ that valley an’ get closer to those bastards, they’ll open up on us with grapeshot like a hurricane in hell. Aye, an’ then we’ll be as uncomfortable as a Friday night tart in Sunday church.”
Roosevelt declared, “That is uncomfortable indeed, Rork. Look there, Peter, I do believe the Spanish will have the perfect flanking enfilade on us. We will have to move fast getting to that far hill.”
“We won’t be able to move fast, though,” I muttered as I looked at the mass confusion around us. “This whole attack is moving far too slowly already. The sun is up. We should have been attacking their lines by now.”
To Rork I confided, “I’ve got a bad feeling on this one.”
Rork put his false left hand on my shoulder, its metallic weight reinforcing his solemn expression. “Aye, it’ll be dicey, for certain, sir. But we’ve heard the banshees callin’ out our names before—an’ they were always wrong. So just ignore the bloody devils when they whisper in your ear this morn. They’ll not have us today.”
Banshees. I chuckled at the wonder of his imagination. “You’re entirely right, Rork. I shall ignore all Irish banshee whispers and concentrate on those damned whispering Mausers instead.”
I turned my attention to the enemy spread before us across the length of San Juan Heights. Wispy dark green coconut palms and light green farm fields formed a bucolic milieu for the long columns of Spanish soldiers marching out of the city in uniforms of light blue pin-striped rayadillo cotton heading for their defensive positions. The red-and-yellow regimental flags, flashing steel bayonets, gray blockhouses, and long trenches of terracotta earth created a colorful montage of the enemy menace.
Closer still, a mere mile from us, ominous brown rows of rusty barbed wire snaked across the front of a smaller hill, atop which sat an old farm building. The hill and the building were clearly fortified, manned, and ready for us. The Spaniards’ obvious intention was to slow our forward progress enough to enable the Krupp cannon and Maxim machine guns on the heights behind them to kill us before we got close enough to fire our own weapons. It was a sobering sight.
And yet, the whole scene was somehow tempting. The 380-year-old medieval city, romantically shining in the morning light, was right there for the taking. Once inside, we would have shelter, food, comforts, and rest. All we had to do was get past the Spaniards’ systematic array of mechanically efficient death.
Standing beside me, Roosevelt took it all in through his Zeiss binoculars. Inserting them carefully back in their case, he threw the Spanish one more defiant look. Then he mounted his horse, Little Texas, and trotted over to his regiment, part of the long column of troops that stretched back more than a mile to the east.
The soldiers at the front of the column began heading forward, down the hill. Then the regiment before Roosevelt’s started moving. Calling over his shoulder, he declared to us, “Follow me, gentlemen. It is time to advance to the enemy.”
We trailed him on foot. Fortuna crossed himself. From our conversations,
I knew he’d followed self-confident officers against Spanish fortifications before, usually with disastrous results. So had old Noveno, who padded over to walk behind his superior, his watery eyes accepting this latest ordeal to be suffered in a long life of them. Our Marine, Lieutenant Law, simply stared at the impressive sight of the enemy host spread out before us as he marched along.
Rork sputtered a profanity under his breath, then said aloud, I think mainly for Law’s benefit, “Aye, the hell with it. Let’s get the grisly deed done an’ go home, me lads. One way or t’other, today’s the day for God to make his choices among us. An’ the Devil’ll take the leftovers.”
As if on cue, three American field artillery pieces near us on the hill blasted a salvo, hurling the initial shots of the battle. A thick bank of acrid gun smoke swept over us, burning our eyes. We strained to see the target area, the solitary mound with the fortified house between the two watercourses that trisected the battlefield. Plumes of red earth and black smoke erupted where the triangle of rounds impacted. But there was no spectacular secondary explosion of Spanish munitions, just dirt.
The enemy’s battery on the far hill, the one I had asked about earlier, fired back, showing little flicks of light seconds before we heard the echoing boom. There was no smoke from the Spanish guns. The Spaniards’ ammunition was more modern than ours. The rounds fell short of us by a quarter mile, just as Rork predicted.
All eyes turned appreciatively to the boatswain, who commented, “Hell’s bells, me hearties, the silly sods just wasted three rounds. Guess they’re not so smart after all!”
It was pure morale-building bravado, of course, and damned if it didn’t work, for everyone around us laughed. The tension was broken. Joining in with Roosevelt’s regiment, we became part of the long procession of Americans slowly moving west down into the valley. As we descended, the joking faded. Everyone’s mind was on those guns. We were in range now.
The military term is succinct and brutal. We were entering “the killing ground.”
24
The Killing Ground
San Juan River, Cuba
Friday, 1 July 1898
THE ATTACK PLAN HAD sounded feasible enough when I’d heard it at Shafter’s headquarters the day before—if you ignored the supply, artillery, terrain, signals, and movement factors. As he briefed the generals, I could see Shafter was doing his best to show confidence in his decision. This performance was in spite of his illness, which was now greatly aggravated and apparent to all.
The strategy was deceptively simple. It would begin with an easy victory on the far right at El Caney Hill to capture the Spanish fort there and secure the right flank. Then there would be a combined rush to penetrate the main enemy defenses at San Juan Heights, which stretched for miles across our front. The center and right of the enemy line would disintegrate into a rout, enabling the Americans to enter the city. At that point the Spanish fleet, trapped in the bay, would surrender. The war in eastern Cuba would be over.
I remembered all that as we trudged down into the valley from El Pozo Hill. The sound of fighting three miles to our right at El Caney rolled over the hills as a continual roar of popping rifle fire punctuated by thuds from field artillery. It had been going on for hours, and now the din intensified into a constant thunder as more artillery opened up. Like an onrushing storm, the sound grew stronger and stronger as both sides introduced more batteries.
Fully six thousand men of Lawton’s infantry division, supported by three thousand of García’s Cuban soldiers, were attacking the six hundred Spanish infantry defending El Caney. At the prebattle meeting of generals, Lawton had estimated it would take only two hours to capture the hilltop and consolidate the victory, eliminating the threat to the allied right flank. Once that was accomplished, Lawton would lead his American-Cuban force four miles to the southwest to join the right side of the main U.S. assault on the enemy lines dug into San Juan Heights. The entire strategy depended on Lawton’s forces joining ours in midmorning, building an unstoppable phalanx that would roll up the Spanish defenses in front of the city.
But Lawton’s prediction was dead wrong. He accurately estimated the Spanish numbers at El Caney but grossly underestimated their courage and skill. Outnumbered more than eleven to one, their situation seemed impossible, but they were under the command of General Vara del Rey, a true warrior of the old school. We could hear them fighting like tigers, successfully delaying the American advance on the right side. Lawton’s men bogged down on the slopes of El Caney and never made it for the midmorning fight at San Juan Heights.
This meant the right flank of the attack on San Juan Heights would fall to the dismounted cavalry division alone. But before we could even get into position to assault the heights we had to capture that small hill right in front—the one covered with trenches and barbed wire and topped by the fortified building.
The farm fields became scrub woods as we went downhill. In the valley’s broad bottom the terrain became dense jungle. Somewhere ahead were two streams that flowed from right to left in front of the hill. The lesser one, the Aguadores River, was our first obstacle. The San Juan River, the second stream, was larger. They merged just to the left, or southeast, of the small hill where the Spanish awaited us. Buried in the thick trees, we couldn’t see any of that. All we could see was the terrain directly around us.
I knew the muddy road led to crude bridges, ruined by gunfire, across both rivers. They would be bottlenecks for the advance—death traps certainly already registered in advance by the Spanish artillery. I asked Roosevelt if he knew about any fordable areas away from those bridges. He didn’t but said he had scouts out looking.
In the entire cavalry division, only a few of the senior officers had gotten their horses ashore. General Sumner, who took command of the division when Wheeler fell ill, rode by us with a couple of his aides. His grim visage softened a bit when he saw Roosevelt, to whom he tossed a jaunty wave as he forced his way through the men on foot to the front of the column, presumably to gain control of the forward progress, which was almost completely halted by confusion.
Ahead of us on the road were the regiments of the 1st Brigade. We in the 2nd Brigade were to support the 1st in the great assault. There were soldiers from infantry regiments on a trail to the left who ended up mixed in with us also, separated from their comrades and plodding forward through the mud like the rest of us.
Even the newest volunteer could see that our army’s line of approach was less than militarily sound. The sole road—jungle canopied, shadowy, airless, and mired in several feet of muck from the previous night’s rain—was packed with soldiers. Many were already on the verge of heat exhaustion, and it was only midmorning. Regiments comingled, degrading their officers’ ability for tactical command and maneuver. The column moved in fits and starts—forward for a few minutes, then at a standstill, then forward again. This went on for quite a while. Comments from the ranks turned from nervous humor to angry derision. Sergeants yelled at them to shut up. Officers exchanged worried glances.
As if the situation wasn’t bad enough, a giant Signal Corps observation balloon floated up in the air just behind us. They’d been fiddling with it on the top of El Pozo Hill all morning and finally had it aloft. I’d thought it would stay back at the hill, but instead it bobbed along behind us like an eager puppy, serving as an excellent confirmation to the enemy gunners of our exact location on the tree-shaded road.
Rork shook his head in disgust but said nothing. He didn’t have to. We both knew this was exactly how not to conduct the line of approach to a frontal assault. The Spanish weren’t fools. Our column presented an irresistible target, and I felt like an old, fat pig being led to the slaughter as I waited for the barrage.
The first casualties came a moment later, when we were still almost a mile away from the nearest enemy trench. Men suddenly began dropping—dead or mortally wounded—but not from the artillery fire. Sharpshooters camouflaged in the trees and using smokeless ammunition t
ook them down one by one. The only clue to their existence was the zing of a Mauser bullet and the red spot on a soldier’s shirt or forehead as he went down.
Officers initially had urged their men forward with gallant phrases, but it didn’t take long for those to lose their effect. Soon, only desperate epithets kept everyone moving. Fatalistically, the soldiers continued toward the Spanish defenders entrenched somewhere to the west, helping each other through the deepening mud. Here and there another man fell, a victim of bullet or heat, to be dragged off to somewhat higher ground off to the side of the road and left there for the medical attendants who were supposed to come later.
Everything about the situation affronted my senses, and I grew angrier by the second. The green tangle of bushes, vines, and trees reduced visibility to a claustrophobic twenty feet. The racket of clanking canteens and rifles and cursing formed the background for the relentless whine of rifle fire and concussion of distant cannons. The stench of rotting vegetation, death, mud, manure, and filthy men filled the air. The entire place stifled rational thought, taking men to the edge of panic even before they could see the enemy.
When the head of the column got close to the Aguadores, the order was passed back to hold in position on the road so that Kent’s infantry division, which had advanced along a small path roughly parallel on our left, could form for the attack. Our troopers crowded up to the front of the column, staying to the right side of the road where there was a gap in the trees. We peered to the north. Lawton’s infantry regiments, supposedly coming from El Caney on our right, were nowhere in sight. They were still enmeshed with the Spanish on that distant hill.
Honoring the Enemy Page 15