by John Jakes
Shafter hooked his thumbs in his suspenders. His eyes darted nervously. “General García’s scouts have provided us with good information on fortifications in the area. There are earthworks, breastworks, trenches, and rifle pits. There is a Spanish blockhouse on the heights.”
“But how many soldiers waiting for us?”
Gloomily, Shafter said, “We don’t know.”
Wednesday, June 22. Reveille sounded at half past three in the morning. Joe had packed his kit after supper, handed it to Corporal Willie Terrill, strolled a few minutes on deck, then crawled into his bunk, where he spent most of the night tossing and worrying.
Allegheny’s deck was packed with men before daybreak about five o’clock. Heavy mist lay on the mountains. The village of Daiquirí—what could be seen of it—looked dead as a graveyard. Through his telescope Joe watched a verminous yellow mutt running on the narrow beach. A string of empty ore cars stood on the high pier. A thread of smoke rose in front of a thatched cottage; someone had built a cook fire, then gone away.
Already the wind was blowing hard onto the shore. Already little crests of white water showed. A hundred and fifty boats would be used to ferry the troops. There were steam launches, each with a chain of longboats tied behind it; the launches began to position themselves around the transports as the sky brightened and the mist on the mountains grew luminous. Joe had donned his frock coat and dress sword. He could remember few times when he’d been so hot and sticky.
Distantly, toward Santiago, a series of rolling explosions brought a cheer from the crowded decks of the transports. Sampson’s squadron had begun its diversionary shelling. The warships assigned to the landing maneuvered into line—Wasp and Hornet, Scorpion and Vixen and New Orleans. Shortly after nine-thirty, the first gun turret boomed and spewed white smoke. High on a hillside behind Daiquirí, a great geyser of earth and debris erupted. The second salvo blew up a cottage close to the beach. More cheering …
The bombardment continued for half an hour. Wheeler paced up and down near Joe, muttering uncharacteristic profanities. He didn’t like the high swells breaking with a roar on the narrow strip of beach and crashing against the iron pilings of the pier. You had only to glance overside and watch a longboat rise on the crest of a wave, then crash like an elevator car with its cable cut, to know it was a dangerous sea.
Excited cries whipped Joe’s attention toward the shore. A bare-chested man with black hair ran to the end of the pier waving a pole with a square of white cloth tied on. Some straw-hatted horsemen came galloping through the village, brandishing a Cuban flag and hallooing to the ships. Wheeler said, “By damn. The Spaniards must’ve pulled out during the night. Those boys are on our side.”
The shelling stopped. Palm huts burned throughout the village, sending black smoke upward. A large circular structure—the roundhouse?—was also burning. The rising smoke mingled with the mountain mist.
Gangway doors were opened in the hulls of the transports, near the waterline. Rope ladders were let down. At half past ten the first men climbed down the ladders toward the longboats. Tensely, Joe watched a man miss a heaving boat and crash into the water. Burdened by his rifle and cartridge belt and blanket roll, he sank. He bobbed up again, yelling, and was dragged into the boat.
One launch after another pulled its crowded longboats alongside the pier. When an incoming wave lifted one or more boats high enough, the men jumped for it. Around noon, two black troopers from the 10th Cavalry made the jump, missed the pier, and landed in the water. From the deck of Allegheny Joe could hear their terrified cries. A Rough Rider officer on the pier threw his hat aside and dove in, to no purpose. The troopers were trapped as the waves hurled their boat against the pier, then flung it away. On the piling Joe saw patches of blood. In the water, a campaign hat floated.
The two black soldiers were the first fatalities. Those who rode the longboats near the beach, then jumped out and waded ashore, had an easier time of it.
By afternoon, the waters off Daiquirí resounded with the neighs and brays of horses and mules dropped over the side from slings on davits. Most swam to the beach, but some were too frightened or not strong enough. Finally heading ashore in a longboat, Joe counted nine dead animals floating. Roosevelt was on the pier, screaming and gesturing with his hat. Had he lost a mount?
The surf foaming onto the beach swarmed with men, some of them civilians. One, a man in a wide-brimmed straw hat, was wading ashore with a moving picture camera and tripod on his shoulder. A second man wearing a derby slogged behind him carrying a large canvas bag. At long distance, Joe couldn’t identify either man, but he supposed one was the camera operator he’d met, Bitzer.
In the buffeting wind, Joe’s longboat convoy neared the pier. General Wheeler, very agile, had no trouble leaping from the boat to grasp the hands of two enlisted men. “You’re next, General,” Corporal Willie Terrill said as the longboat dropped again. Joe stepped up on the thwart.
The longboat rose swiftly. When the orderly shouted, “Now, sir,” Joe leaped. His right foot hit the pier firmly, yet somehow he slipped. He windmilled his arms, toppling backward toward the boat still high on the wave crest. He heard Corporal Willie Trees shout. Willie’s big hard hands hit the small of his back and threw him forward. He landed on his chest, scraping his jaw. His legs dangled over the water. He dragged himself forward, pushed up on hands and knees, his heart pounding.
He stood up and dusted off, acutely embarrassed to have arrived on enemy soil in such an undignified and unmilitary way.
Six thousand men landed at Daiquirí by the day’s end. Since Wheeler and his staff had to wait for their horses to be brought up, they went on a walking tour of the shelled village. Wheeler had already announced his intention to ride inland for a personal reconnaissance before dark.
Daiquirí was mud streets, smoldering huts, and damaged buildings. The officers hurried toward the round-house. Greasy smoke billowed from its shot-out windows, making the eyes smart and racking Joe with a fit of coughing. Half the roundhouse roof had caved in. A crowd of about fifty Cuban soldiers—black, tan, and many shades between—came running toward the officers, screaming “Viva los americanos!” A couple of the Americans brandished their swords and returned cries of “Viva Cuba libre!” Joe didn’t join in; he wasn’t impressed by the shoeless, shirtless rebels, several of whom fell in step and held out their hands, pleading for money. One man plucked at Joe’s shoulder strap as if he wanted it for a souvenir. Joe knocked the hand away. The man spat a curse in Spanish and ran off.
General Wheeler had already loped off to the other side of the building. Joe and the rest hurried after him and found the single railroad track running into the jungle. It was a sight he’d seen many times on the march through Georgia and Carolina. Cross ties broken; rails pried up and bent after being heated. In the war, rails twisted like that were “Sherman’s Hairpins.”
Wheeler slapped his old black hat against his leg. “We’ll transport no men on this line. Joe, find out where they’ve got to with those damn horses. I want to go inland before Shafter tells me I can’t.”
“Sir,” Joe said with a fast salute. He and his aide, Tyree Bates, walked swiftly through the village. They located their mounts on the beach and Joe yelled at the wranglers to get them moving. Following the horses on foot, he was pulled up short by a sight that confused him. Two weary men were unloading a camera and tripod from a longboat. Tied behind it was a second longboat holding three large wooden crates and riding much lower in the water.
Lieutenant Bates stopped. “Something wrong, General?”
Joe heard an insect whining at his ear. He slapped it, then wiped the mosquito’s bloody remains from his fingers. “I just want to ask a question of those men. I’ll catch up.”
Bates hurried away. Joe waded into the surf as the men hoisted their camera to bring it ashore; it was twice as large as the one he’d seen earlier. The young man giving orders wore a houndstooth cap and a natty but water-soaked jacket. Joe
knew him.
“Hello, Bitzer. I thought I saw you come in some time ago.”
“Not us,” Bitzer said, unhappily. “Shafter wouldn’t allow any civilians off the headquarters ship till now. Davis is ready to crucify him. Maybe you saw one of the other crews, Paley’s, or the one traveling on Yucatan.”
“Where are they from?”
“Bill Paley’s out of New York, on assignment from Edison. The other two work for American Luxograph in Chicago. One of ’em I don’t like, but the chief operator’s a good egg.”
“What’s his name?”
Bitzer’s eyes had a curious, evasive look. His assistant walked up at that moment and noticed his partner hesitating, as if he couldn’t remember. The assistant said, “Crown. I think his first name’s Paul, but everybody calls him Dutch.”
101
Rose
ON THE AFTERNOON BEFORE the Daiquirí landing, in a pawnshop on Fourteenth Street, Rose French pointed into a display case.
“Let me see that one.”
The pawnbroker, a genial Irishman with thinning red hair and dainty freckled hands, unlocked the back of the case and reached in for a small silver-plated hideout pistol. It had over-and-under barrels, a stub trigger, fancy crosshatched walnut grips. He laid the weapon in his left palm and presented it with a flourish.
“Very fine piece, my girl. Is it for yourself?”
“Oh, yes,” she said. Even after so many days, her left eye remained swollen. Purple and yellow bruises marked the places Elstree had savaged her. The pawnbroker was studying the damage in a speculative way. “Recently I was assaulted in broad daylight. Assaulted and robbed,” she added quickly.
“I can see.” The Irishman gave a cluck of sympathy.
Rose tested the weight of the piece. Light. “Is this well made?”
“Remington is one of our finest marks.”
“Is it powerful?”
The man leaned over the case and pointed down to an even smaller derringer. “The Vest Pocket .22 caliber is the weapon usually preferred by ladies. But I’d not call it powerful compared with the one you’re considering. The piece in your hand is a two-shot .41 caliber. At fifty feet, it’s dangerous. At ten to twenty, it will drop any assailant, even a brute who preys on women. Put it in his face at three to five feet, his sainted mother won’t recognize him.”
“Well,” Rose said with a musing smile. Her tongue crept over her puffed and discolored lower lip. One of Elstree’s blows had driven it against her teeth, tearing it open on the inside. Her mouth had bled for days. She handed the weapon to the pawnbroker.
“It sounds ideal. I’ll take it.”
102
Dutch
AT FIVE O’CLOCK IN the afternoon, General Wheeler ordered men to the abandoned blockhouse on the knobby hill above Daiquirí. One carried a folded flag.
Paul looked for Jimmy. He was nowhere to be found—the second time he’d absented himself since they came ashore. Annoyed, Paul dropped his grip, lowered the camera from his shoulder and checked the meter. Fifty feet left. That was lucky; along with his own small suitcase, Jimmy was carrying the canvas bag with the fresh and exposed magazines.
Paul knelt in the mud to shorten one tripod leg. Then he took off his straw hat and fanned himself. Sadly, he saw that spatters of mud had stained the fancy blue hatband.
High above, men appeared on the blockhouse rampart. Paul checked the lens. It had steamed over. From his shirt pocket he took the folded polka-dot bandanna from the Rough Riders and gently wiped the curved optical glass. Just in time, too. The Stars and Stripes ran up the blockhouse pole. Paul started cranking. It would be a grand finish to his footage of the longboats, the men wading in, the smoking ruins of Daiquirí.
A thundering yell from hundreds of throats greeted the flag. Offshore, a ship’s whistle bellowed, then another, then a chorus of them. Paul was pensive a moment; how he’d hoped, once, that it would be his flag. Perhaps that was just another of the naive dreams his cousin Joe had scorned.
All at once Jimmy sauntered out of the drifting smoke, suitcase and canvas bag clutched in his left hand. In his right he had one of the long, wicked bush knives called machetes.
“Where did you get that knife?” Paul asked.
“Took it. Never mind where.”
Paul held his temper. “We need to find a campsite. Let’s look for Colonel Wood’s regiment. I saw them moving inland.” He hoisted camera and tripod to his shoulder and picked up his grip with his other hand. The backs of his calves and thighs ached from the day’s labor. “When we’re settled, I have to search for a friend. I want to be sure he wasn’t one of the two men who drowned.”
Jimmy fanned himself with his derby. “Those were niggers.”
“Black men. Yes.” Jimmy looked mystified. “Also, I need to load a new magazine.”
“Sure, but I bet it’s a waste of time. Film’s probably rotting in this heat.”
The same thought had occurred to Paul. He didn’t like to dwell on it.
Behind Daiquirí, a large grassy flat stretched away to a lush green wall of jungle. In the open area, the 1st Volunteer Cavalry was encamping for the night.
To the right as they approached was a lagoon crusted with yellow scum. On the left, well away from the lagoon, they found space to put down their gear. They had one rubber ground cloth packed in the canvas bag. Paul knew Jimmy would want it. He didn’t propose to argue. It would be a long, soggy night.
At the headquarters tent he found Lieutenant Colonel Roosevelt, whom he asked about the 10th Cavalry. Roosevelt said the 10th had begun a late afternoon advance toward the village of Siboney, seven miles away.
“I’m going that way to hunt for my friend,” Paul told Jimmy. “See if the regiment can spare some beans and hardtack. Also, we need water. I heard there’s fresh water in the mining company tanks. You can fill the canteen while I’m gone.” Jimmy stared at him, idly swinging the machete. Paul said, “I will be back.”
“Yeah, be sure to hurry, I wouldn’t know how to get along without all your advice and orders.”
When is it all going to explode? Paul thought as he left. He was afraid the answer was, soon.
The road to Siboney was misnamed. It wasn’t a decent wagon road, but a hilly trail snaking overland between the limestone cliffs along the coast and the rail line the Spaniards had torn up during their retreat. The trail had been hacked from a tropical forest of cactus, Spanish bayonet plants, thornbushes, and coconut palms. It was narrow, barely able to accommodate a six-hitch freight wagon, and murkily dark. Thousands of trailing vines made the surrounding tropical forest all but impenetrable.
The advance of men and animals on the road had slowed to a walk. By the time Paul found black soldiers, it was stopped. The troopers of the 10th had fallen out to smoke and rest on their muddy blanket rolls. Paul approached a white first lieutenant with a day’s growth of beard and a shirt sweated through front and back.
“Person?” the lieutenant snarled. “Of course he’s alive for Christ’s sake, why wouldn’t he be? He’s up the line somewhere.”
Paul rushed ahead, avoiding outstretched legs for another half mile, and suddenly spied Ott Person’s homely face. “Ott. You’re all right!” he cried as he ran up. The black soldier scrambled to his feet.
“Hey, Heine, what you doing here?”
“I heard that two men from your regiment were drowned at the pier. I was afraid—”
“That it might be old Ott? I’m too mean and ornery to go like that. You was worried about me, huh?”
“I always worry about friends.”
“I’m pleased to know I fit in that company. You’re my friend too. Here, squat down, rest yourself. You ever feel such heat before? I don’t need to go to hell when I die, I already know what it feels like.” From the pocket of his sweated khaki shirt he took a tobacco sack and packet of papers. “Fix yourself a smoke.”
“Thanks, I have a cigar.” It was his last from Tampa. He cut the end with his clasp
knife and bent forward to the match in Ott’s hand. Farther up the trail, a black trooper with a harmonica began to play “The Stars and Stripes Forever” in a slow, almost melancholy way. It was appropriate music for the end of an exhausting day.
“I mean to tell you, I don’t like this here place,” Ott said as they smoked. “I want to get out an’ go back to the States. What d’you figure to do when this war’s over?”
“Take my pictures back to Chicago, if I get any good ones. After that, I think I am going to look for a job in England.”
“Hoo-eee. That’s clean across the ocean, ain’t it? What’s wrong, you don’t like the U.S. of A.?”
“Some things about America are good. But not all. I think I expected too much from your country. Others have told me that. When I landed at Ellis Island, I had every hope that America would be my home forever. But I don’t belong there. I think it’s time to try another place.”
“Heine, don’t do that. You’re a good man. Our country needs folks like you. Don’t run off and leave everything to the mean ones, that fat-faced sarge in Tampa and bastards like him. We got ’nough of them already. Ain’t there nothin’ would make you stay?”
“There was a girl. If I could have had a home with her. But it’s impossible, she’s gone.”
“They’s lots of nice handsome white girls in America. I bet plenty of ’em could make you happy.”
“No, Ott. But thank you for your kind words. I’d better go now, it’s a long way back to my partner and the equipment. Please take care of yourself.”
“Sure enough will, Heine, you do the same. And don’t you leave too soon, I got to pay my debt.”
The harmonica sang its strangely sad tune as Paul waved and took the trail to Daiquirí.
A sickle moon shed a wan light on the camp. Paul gave the rubber ground cloth to Jimmy, then rolled on his side in the damp grass, put the straw hat over his cheek and his eye and vowed he’d sleep in spite of everything conspiring to prevent it.
There was a lot. A rusty light pulsed in the sky above Daiquirí; the mine company’s machine shops were still afire. Offshore, the warships played their searchlights over the shelled village, the jungle, the mountains rising steeply four or five miles inland. In the distance, the rebel troops of a general named Demetrio Castillo sang Spanish songs. Nearer, sentries called out regularly. Insects droned. In Paul’s very gut there was noise; he was famished. Jimmy had brought back a canteen of fresh water and one skimpy ration of tinned beans and hardtack, which they’d divided.