by John Jakes
He studied the two frames showing the harbor and the lady of Liberty with her torch raised high. How many hopes that picture represented. Hopes, and bitter defeats. Some of the bitterest of his life.
Joe Junior had once called him naive about America. Well, it was so. In the persons of Wex and Shadow, America had given him a wonderful new craft; a lifelong profession that could take him to all those places he’d wanted to see since he was little. But that could never compensate for the loss of his family, and the girl he loved.
Now another place beckoned him. Not a new home; he was through with that stupid child’s dream, he hadn’t any home. Rather, he’d have a roving commission, a base in Europe, to help him forget all he’d yearned for and lost. Forget at least occasionally. Never would he be completely rid of the pain.
Paul was holding the stereopticon card delicately, its edges against his palms.
Think about it!
He tore the card in two and dropped the right half overside. An updraft caught it, whirled it high a few seconds, then flung it to the water. It was instantly gone in the foaming bow wake.
He slipped the other half of the card into his shirt pocket. No more symbolism; just another souvenir.
He turned his back to the wind and lit a cigar. While life was far from perfect, and the anguish of failure in America, the loss of Julie, would never leave, he could begin to look forward to the future again.
Assuming—Michael’s words—we all get out of the bloody Cuban jungles alive.
Part Nine
War
1898
Our war for humanity has unmasked itself as a war for coaling stations, and we are going to keep our booty to punish Spain for putting us to the trouble of using violence in robbing her.
1898
WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS, author and critic
It has been a splendid little war; begun with the highest motives, carried out with magnificent intelligence and spirit, favored by that fortune which loves the brave.
1899
JOHN HAY, United States Ambassador to England
100
The General
THIRTY-TWO BLACK TRANSPORTS sailed for Cuba, steaming a thousand yards apart in three long lines. The voyage was expected to take three days; very soon it was clear that it would require five, or more, because the slowest vessels—transports towing a pair of multidecked barges and a schooner carrying large water tanks—set the pace for the rest.
As it turned out, Joe Crown traveled not on Segurança, the headquarters ship, but on a smaller one, Allegheny, the command ship for Wheeler’s cavalry division.
It was irksome to be isolated from the high command aboard Segurança; Wheeler complained loudly and often that he and his officers knew nothing about their objective, though many bets were laid on Santiago, the fortified harbor on Cuba’s southeast coast. A large part of the expeditionary force had remained behind in Georgia and Florida, to train during the summer. Presumably those units would make an assault on Havana later. But no one knew for certain.
On Segurança deal tables were set up for the clerks in the first-class saloon and a pair of typewriters clattered all day long, spewing out lists of materiel and the order of debarkation. On the fore and aft decks, troopers lounged in the tropical sun. On a web of laundry lines, khaki shirts waved and snapped in the ocean breeze, along with heavy half sections of shelter tents washed and hung out to dry.
Rations for officers and men consisted of army hardtack, bacon, canned tomatoes, beans, and that vile “canned fresh beef,” which Wheeler, Joe Crown, and most of the others refused to eat. The only thing that tasted good was the strong morning coffee.
Just before sunset on Wednesday, a smudge of land appeared off the port side. Corporal Willie Terrill, Joe’s orderly, identified it for him, using one of several maps bought in Tampa. “Cape Romano, sir. We should clear the Keys sometime tomorrow and be headed east above Cuba.”
Next morning Joe awoke to find the sea ahead thick with new arrivals. Fourteen gray Navy warships out of Key West, sent to surround and guard the convoy. By now the transports were strung out for twelve or fifteen miles. All day long, in tranquil seas, cutters and torpedo boats raced back and forth with orders to the captains to close up.
Late in the afternoon Allegheny’s starboard rail filled up with excited men pointing to the south. Joe had his first look at a thin blur of land where sea and sky joined. That was Cuba. An involuntary shiver of dread prickled his spine.
Shortly before midnight Joe and Wheeler strolled the deck together. Occasional pinprick lights flashed on the Cuban coast. “Heliograph signals,” Wheeler said.
“Not lighthouses?” Joe said.
“No. The government maintains lighthouses along that coast, all right. But my adjutant mapped the locations—they’re all dark. Which means the enemy is getting ready for us.”
“Do you think it’ll be a long and costly war, sir?”
“Long, I don’t know about. But any war is costly for its victims. You know it only takes one small bullet to send a man down for eternity. To that man, and his loved ones, a war is costly even if it lasts but five minutes.” Wheeler yawned. “I think I’m ready for bed. The motion of the sea is lulling. Enjoy it while you can, Joe. There won’t be much rest for us on shore, I reckon. Good night.”
“Good night, General.”
Wheeler loped away and disappeared down a lighted stair. Joe stayed on deck, watching the heliographs flash and thinking of his own mortality. Thinking, too, of many things Estella Rivera said during that long, strange night of confession and revelation in the Tampa Bay Hotel.
On Sunday morning, June 19, Joe attended the nondenominational church service on the afterdeck. As he sat with head bowed during the long prayer, his mind turned back to Wheeler’s words about a single small bullet. What if such a bullet sent him down to the dark? Were his business affairs in order? Yes, reasonably so, although there was no one chosen, or trained, to run Crown’s.
That concern was quickly swept aside in favor of the more important one, his family. He’d made a wretched botch of his relations with practically every one of them. And he’d even come perilously close to violating the marriage vows he’d respected since the day he spoke them. Not committing that sin was more a tribute to Estella Rivera’s perceptions, and her strong morality, than to anything he’d done.
Joe Crown had always been a regular churchgoer. But in the privacy of his heart and intellect—and with a fair degree of guilt—he had long ago admitted that he couldn’t accept portions of the Scriptures literally. He doubted that the various biblical personages had undergone supernatural experiences. Angels descending on beams of light. Bushes turning to fire … God Himself speaking from the flames. The miraculous life of Christ was such a difficult issue in this regard, Joe refused to think about it.
And yet, with Estella, he had gone through something akin to a religious experience. He’d had a kind of vision, revelation—a dazzling light-burst of truth that illuminated the wrong path he’d taken as he followed the god he’d worshiped for so many years. Ordnung.
Oh, he still believed in the worth of order as a productive force in human endeavor. But order, authority, control—those were merely desirable ends, not deities to whom a man had to offer human sacrifices from his own family. Estella had shown him that, and much more.
While the chaplain droned on, Joe prayed that he’d live through the coming war. He prayed for time and the opportunity to rectify his worst mistakes, as Estella said he must. At the end of the prayer, his “Amen” was soft but fervent.
The armada rounded Cape Maisí on the eastern tip of Cuba late that day. Speed was again reduced. At dusk, search-lights from the warships began to rake the coastline. A cutter bore General Wheeler over to Segurança and a meeting with Shafter. At half past ten he was back, reporting to his officers in the first-class saloon.
“General Calixto García came out from shore with an armed escort. He’s a handsome old bird, f
orehead wound and all. Here’s the upshot. Admiral Sampson wants a direct assault on Santiago, the harbor and the town. But it’s a mighty flinty objective.”
One of Wheeler’s aides unrolled a map of the southeast coast.
“Take a look at the position of the town. Notice it is secluded inland, almost five miles from the harbor mouth. They say Santiago’s one of three places Christopher Columbus may have landed when he thought he found the Indies. That landing would have been a Methodist picnic compared with what we’re up against.”
Wheeler tapped the map. “The harbor entrance is protected on both sides. Here, by a strong battery in the Morro fortress—here, by the Socapa heights battery. If that isn’t enough, Cuban intelligence says the channel’s thick with mines wired up to firing switches inside the Morro. General Shafter’s dead set against a direct attack, he read in some book about a British campaign against this same place a hundred years ago. The British were slaughtered. Shafter doesn’t want any part of an assault up cliffs two hundred feet high, and I can’t say I blame him. He and Sampson will meet García on shore tomorrow to discuss it further.”
Joe raised his hand. “Sir, do we have any say about these plans?”
“Not so far. I don’t like it much, but I’m hamstrung. This is Shafter’s game. Let’s hope he knows how to play it right.”
On Tuesday, June 21, the convoy was still steaming sluggishly westward off the south coast of Cuba. Allegheny passed the entrance to the Bay of Guantánamo, which six hundred and fifty men of the 1st Marines had stormed and secured ten days before. Somewhere back in the bay, Joe presumed the Stars and Stripes were flying.
Santiago was now about forty miles ahead. With a telescope, Joe scanned a shoreline that was both breathtaking and daunting. White waves rolled and crashed, driven by winds that grew steadily stronger through the morning. He’d been told that prevailing onshore winds created a rough surf every day.
Above the breaking waves rose sheer limestone cliffs, and behind them, heavily forested hills that reached still higher to become a striking mountain range, the Sierra Maestra. Misty gray clouds hung on the tops of the mountains. The dark green forest below looked thick and wet, with here and there a bit of a narrow trail showing. It was a beautiful, desolate scene. And a difficult place to land, and march, and fight.
And what of the Spaniards? Supposedly as many as twelve thousand were assigned to defend this southeast coast. Where were they hiding? They could be lying in wait within the range of his telescope, totally concealed by the dark, wet jungle. And it could be assumed that they knew much more about fighting in the tropics than did Arizona cowhands, Harvard sprinters, or colored men who’d been stationed on the treeless Great Plains. He couldn’t rid his mind of Wheeler’s remark.
It only takes one small bullet …
The convoy anchored well offshore as the sea grew steadily rougher. The warships were farther out, steaming in line and spreading themselves in preparation for a bombardment. During the afternoon, Wheeler took a hundred turns around the deck, and then a hundred more, impatient and angry because he’d found out that another strategy conference was going forward without him, this one at a little inland village called Palma.
Around four o’clock a lookout spotted signal pennons flying on the headquarters ship. Wheeler threw on his linen duster, dress sword, and old black hat. “We’re ordered to Segurança, boys. This may be it.”
A cutter bore Wheeler, Joe Crown, the other senior officers and their aides to the black-painted vessel. General Shafter convened his meeting in the main saloon, under electric lights that made the sweat on his face glisten. Shafter had taken off his blue frock coat. His shirt was tentlike, his suspenders stretched tight over his enormous belly. He seemed more elephantine than ever, and pale, and tired, as he sat waiting in his special oversize chair while his aides set up a map stand.
Joe took a seat in the last row, in a cloud of cigarette smoke generated by the German attaché. The man had grown tiresome with his Prussian hauteur and his boasts about a farseeing German war plan whose essentials were already formulated. He said the vaunted “Schlieffen Plan” was so carefully thought out and so meticulously reviewed and revised whenever European alliances shifted, not even the most formidable military powers—Russia, England, the hated French—would be able to stand against it in the event of war. Finding himself seated beside the attaché, Joe tried to set aside his irritation and be cordial. For his part, von Rike had the good manners to shift his cigarette to his other hand.
While they were waiting, Joe asked, “Did you go to the conference on shore?”
“Jawohl. By muleback!” Von Rike rolled his eyes. He kept his voice low. “The site was a thatched hut. There were a few Cuban troops standing about. They have rifles but no shoes. A mongrel lot—Neger and mulattoes—I saw not one white face. When our group arrived, they laughed openly at the sight of the general in chief. You should have seen him trying to dismount. A ship’s hoist would have helped.” He threw his cigarette on the deck and twisted his boot heel on it. “One really wonders if he can survive the heat and the terrain.”
General Shafter tore loose his metal collar button and dropped it on the small field desk beside his chair. He rolled to his feet with a wheeze of effort. “Gentlemen, tomorrow morning, as soon after daylight as practicable, we will invade the island of Cuba.”
There was an excited ripple of approval. Joe sat up very straight, every nerve alert. Shafter lumbered to the map. He looked more like a disheveled tavern keeper than a soldier. He took a wooden pointer from his principal aide, Lieutenant Miley.
“This afternoon at Palma, speaking to Admiral Sampson and General García, I outlined what I consider the only acceptable strategy. We must take Santiago, but not by direct attack. The cliffs around the harbor argue most forcefully against that. We are a long, long way from the Civil War. Heavy casualties are not expected by the public and, in my view, won’t be tolerated. Therefore I propose to position the Army around Santiago”—his pointer touched crosshatching on the northeastern shore of the bay—“strike hard to break through enemy lines, overcome the string of Spanish blockhouses which protect the town, then press quickly for a surrender. If I must put the strategy in one word, the word is ‘rush.’ Rush! American soldiers can no more fight a protracted campaign in this climate, at this season of the year, than they can put hands into a bonfire without burning themselves.”
Like some angry buffalo, Shafter lowered his shaggy head and peered at his senior staff from under his thick eyebrows as he described alternative landing sites that had been considered. There were three, where natural breaks or notches occurred in the limestone cliff barrier at the shore. He pointed out the Aguadores Ravine, four miles east of Santiago. The hamlet of Siboney, eleven miles farther. And seven miles east of that, a site identified as Daiquirí.
“Tomorrow, gentlemen, we will commence our landing here—” He struck the map with the pointer, nearly toppling the stand. “Daiquirí. Lieutenant Miley has prepared notes on what we may expect to find. John?”
Young Miley covered it quickly, reading from a notebook. Daiquirí was a settlement named for a nearby river. It had been the headquarters for the Spanish-American Iron Company, but the war had suspended operations, and the American mining engineers were gone. “What we’ll find there are some zinc huts, palm-leaf cottages, machine shops, and a roundhouse at the end of a rail spur which goes inland. If the line is still intact, we will be able to transport men and horses to Siboney.”
“From there,” Shafter said from his chair, “we’ll strike northwest, over the trails, and invest and capture Santiago.”
“John.” The peremptory voice belonged to Brigadier S. S. Sumner, Joe’s opposite number in command of the 1st Brigade.
“Sam?”
“Is there a good beach where we propose to land?”
Miley looked uncomfortable. “There is a beach, but it’s small. We hope it will be adequate for an operation of this size. Luckily the
re’s also a long pier, used to unload ore hoppers into lighters that tied up there. The pier stands high above the water—thirty feet or more.” Joe heard some groans.
And Sam Sumner wasn’t satisfied. “The winds are pretty damn strong on this coast. And the later in the day it is, the rougher the surf. Happens without fail.”
“We must take our chances, General. Orders will be typed and distributed within two hours. The order of landing is as follows. First to go in will be General Lawton with the 2d Division, and the four Gatling guns. General Bates next with his independent brigade, and then General Wheeler’s cavalry.” Fighting Joe made no attempt to hide his displeasure at being last.
“Shortly after daylight, Admiral Sampson’s fleet will begin diversionary bombardments along a twenty-mile sector of the coast. Each soldier is to carry his blanket roll, canteen, field rations for three days, and a hundred rounds of ammunition. After we land all the men, we will land the mules and horses.”
Colonel Leonard Wood of the 1st Volunteer Cavalry stood. He was about Roosevelt’s age; a Harvard medical school graduate who’d joined up years ago as a contract surgeon and found he liked Army life. He had close-cropped blond hair, blue eyes, burly shoulders, hands that were large and callused. Joe found him an unlikely combat soldier, like so many in this expedition. Including himself.
Wood asked, “Is there a hoist of any kind on the pier?”
“No, Colonel, there is not.”
“Then how do the animals land?”
“You will swing them off the ship in slings and let them swim.”
Wood turned pale. Again Joe heard murmurs of discontent. The landing was beginning to seem improvised; dangerously so.
Joe Wheeler bounced to his feet, plucking at his white beard. “Sir!” Shafter recognized him courteously. “When we land, do we know what to expect in the way of resistance?”