The Crowded Hour

by Clay Risen

  Down below, in the valley, the 470 men assigned to this main column, commanded by General Young, were as silent as the land around them. “No sound broke upon the still morning air,” wrote the journalist Caspar Whitney, who traveled with them, “save the squash of feet in the mud and the occasional rattle of a canteen as it swung against the metal bayonet scabbard at the soldier’s hip.”9

  Not so up on the ridge. The Rough Riders “wound along this narrow, winding path, babbling, joyously arguing, recounting, laughing; making more noise than a train going through a tunnel,” wrote Stephen Crane. “Anyone could tell from the conformation of the country when we were liable to strike the enemy’s outposts, but the clatter of tongues did not cease.” Around them, birds cooed unseen, off in the woods. At one point they passed an abandoned Spanish blockhouse; inside, on the whitewashed walls, was a charcoal cartoon of a giant Uncle Sam with a long goatee running away from a smaller Spanish soldier who was poking him with a bayonet. The artist had signed his name “Jose Cuenpagos.”10

  The day was growing hot. Several men later estimated it was well over 100 degrees by mid-morning. The entire regiment stopped to rest twice. Even then, within an hour of leaving Siboney, about seventy-five had dropped out, struck down by heat exhaustion and left to gather their wits by the side of the trail. Some caught up later, but most straggled back to Siboney. By the time the regiment closed in on the suspected Spanish position, there were fewer than 500 Rough Riders in the column, down from just over 600 who had landed two days before.11

  After an hour and a half of marching, which put them about two miles beyond Siboney, Capron came running down the path toward Wood and Roosevelt. Fish’s team, way out in front, had found a dead Cuban soldier in the path, his face already picked apart by land crabs. Relying on a bit of amateur forensic science, they concluded that this must be one of Duany’s men, who had been killed in the engagement the day before—meaning the Spanish might still be close by. It was 7:10 a.m.12

  Wood stopped the column, then rode up the trail to confer with his other officers. The rest of the men collapsed where they stood. They chewed grass and talked about their favorite things—beer, dogs—and their least—at the moment, the ill-fitting shoes they had spent a day and a half walking and standing in. They took off their slouch hats and fanned their faces. One man blew spit balls at his neighbors. Roosevelt turned to Marshall, the reporter, and chatted casually about the last time they’d seen each other, at a lunch with William Randolph Hearst at Astor House, in New York. Likely most of the men agreed with Davis’s belief that the Spanish had probably already withdrawn: “I doubted that there were any Spaniards nearer than Santiago,” he wrote.13

  The trail to Las Guasimas ran along the side of the ridge. To the right, the forest was thinner, but sloped steeply downward. Beyond ran a barbed wire fence to the left, and a field rising gently upward toward a line of trees, “carpeted with grass almost as soft as the turf in the garden of an old English country house,” Marshall wrote. Up ahead the trail turned sharply left, and disappeared back into the woods.14

  Roosevelt, in between bits of conversation with Marshall, looked over at the barbed wire, the residue of an abandoned plantation. Something was off about it. He dismounted to get a closer look. “This wire has been cut today,” he said.

  “What makes you think so?” Marshall replied.

  “The end is bright and there has been enough dew, even since sunrise, to put a light rust on it, had it not been lately cut.”15

  Up ahead, Capron told Wood he had a feeling that there were Spanish troops nearby. He asked permission to reconnoiter; Wood nodded. The colonel went back to the column and told Roosevelt to pass down the word: silence. Roosevelt took the opportunity to mention the rapid attrition of men from the heat. “Doctor La Motte reports that the pace is too fast for the men, and that over fifty have fallen out from exhaustion,” he told Wood.

  “I have no time to bother with sick men now,” Wood replied.

  “I merely repeated what the surgeon reported to me.”

  “I have no time for them now; I mean that we are in sight of the enemy.”16

  Most of the officers tied their horses to fence posts and ordered their men to ready their rifles. The line clicked with the sound of rounds being chambered. After about ten minutes, Wood ordered the men to spread out in a line. He sent three troops, under Roosevelt, down the hill to the right, to connect with Young’s men in the column marching along the valley. Three more troops, under Major Brodie, spread to the left, over the fence and into the meadow beyond it. The rest would hold the center or stay in reserve.

  As the troops were fanning out into their line, they heard the crack of a rifle. Tom Isbell, a trooper in Capron’s L Troop who was on point with Hamilton Fish, had seen a Spanish soldier. He crept within sixty yards, and dropped him with a single shot. Isbell took the spent casing and put it in his pocket, as a keepsake. Seconds later, a line of Spanish rifles returned fire. Isbell was hit instantly; through the course of the fight he was shot six more times, and somehow managed to survive. “I don’t know how many shots were fired at me,” he later said, “but it seemed to me the entire Spanish army was shooting right at me.”17

  The sound of the Spanish bullets was very different from what the Rough Riders were used to—though many of them were not used to the sound of any rifle fire at all. The Spanish carried, as their standard rifle, the M1893 Mauser, developed specifically for the Spanish army by a German weapons manufacturer. Unlike the lower-velocity fire of a Remington or Krag-Jorgensen carbine rifle, which the Rough Riders used, a Mauser bullet flew fast and straight, some 300 feet per second, making a high-pitched PHEWWW, rising and then falling in pitch as it sped past the ear, “like the sound of a very petty and mean person turned into sound,” wrote Marshall. Roosevelt described it as “the humming of telephone wires.”18

  Back in the main column, Theodore Miller heard a few stray shots, then suddenly “volley after volley.” Nine Rough Riders went down in the first nine minutes. Fire was coming in from up ahead, and over to the right. The Spanish had arranged about 1,000 men in a V-shaped formation and cut down trees to create fire fields through the woods, the source of the sounds that Captain Nicholls had heard the previous night. Later, Roosevelt and other Rough Riders concluded that the birds they thought they had heard cooing a few hours earlier were probably Spanish scouts, sending signals back to their line that the Americans were approaching.19

  It was like the forest up ahead had exploded. “Bullets fell around me like hail stones,” wrote one trooper. Leaves and bits of tree bark, spun off by bullets whizzing by, fell like snow across the battlefield. When the bullets hit a man’s body, they made a flat, low “chug”—“not a pleasant sound,” Marshall wrote, “for after one has heard it once, its significance becomes gruesome. It is not unlike the noise made by a stick when it strikes a carpet which is being beaten.” The men fell silently. It is a myth that soldiers, when struck on the battlefield, always cry out. The shock and immediacy of the impact is often too quick to allow that; only later, when the pain sets in, do they find their voice. Instead, the only sound the falling Rough Riders made was a dull thud when hitting the ground, accompanied by a rustle of grass and the jingle of canteens hitting the metal of their guns.20

  Colonel Wood had arranged the regiment so that most of the soldiers were arrayed along a long, thin line, perpendicular and mostly to the left of the trail; to the right the hill was steep and thick with trees. Wood stood in the middle of the line, walking up and down, not flinching, leading his horse and yelling at his men to keep firing. One of the men from Capron’s scouts, who were out ahead of the main line of American soldiers, came back, his face bloody and teary from a cartridge exploding prematurely in his rifle. He had been nearly blinded, and cursed and screamed as he looked for help. Wood marched up to him, put a hand on his shoulder and said, “Stop that swearing. I don’t want to hear any cursing today.” If Wood was concerned about how thin he had sprea
d his line, he didn’t show it. But he was taking a risk: He wanted to block any attempt by the Spanish to make an end run around the edge of the Rough Riders’ line and attack them from the rear. Wood’s gambit was the sort of gutsy move, taken without hesitation or fear, that earned him the nickname “the Ice Box.”21

  William Tiffany, one of the wealthiest men in the regiment, had taken care the night before to arrange for a mule team that could carry one of the regiment’s Colt machine guns, which he had helped buy, up the hill. It would have come in handy, had the packer who was in charge of leading the animals not decided to flee the scene, taking with him one of the animals that happened to carry ammunition and part of the gun; without a human master nearby, the rest of the mules did as mules do and wandered away from the gunfire.22

  The Spanish line was about 1,000 yards long and about 300 yards in front of the Americans. By now all the Americans had dismounted, but the officers mostly kept their horses close by. Roosevelt, leading Little Texas and his troops, moved to the right of the main line, into the woods; Wood had ordered him to support Capron’s men, who were still out in front, and to make visual contact with the left wing of Young’s forces, down in the valley. Davis ran after them, trying to keep up on foot. As they moved forward, the Spanish fire grew heavier. At one point a bullet hit a palm tree next to Roosevelt, sending splinters into his face. The oncoming fire did not faze him; Roosevelt seemed, to those around him, suddenly transformed into “the most magnificent soldier I have ever seen,” wrote Marshall. “It was as if that barbed-wire strand had formed a dividing line in his life, and that when he stepped across it he left behind him in the bridle path all those unadmirable and conspicuous traits which have so often caused him to be justly criticized in civic life, and found on the other side of it, in that Cuban thicket, the coolness, the calm judgment, the towering heroism, which made him, perhaps, the most admired and best beloved of all Americans in Cuba.”23

  Meanwhile Major Brodie had led his troops over the barbed wire fence and into the field to the left of the trail, to extend the American line as far as possible. Men began to fall almost immediately, and in rapid succession. The Spanish fired in volleys, “the most perfectly executed that I ever heard,” said trooper Royal Prentice, and at each volley another clutch of men fell, disappearing into the tall grass. “We had evidently stirred up a hornet’s nest of a persistent mind not in accord with the then popular conception of Spanish quality in battle,” wrote Caspar Whitney, the reporter, who was also following the regiment. At one point a bullet scorched Wood’s wrist. He looked and saw two golden beans on the ground. Bending down, then looking at his sleeve, he realized they were irregular halves of a cuff link—split in two by a Spanish round.24

  Davis, who had trailed Roosevelt, approached the lieutenant colonel with a pair of binoculars. He pointed out a row of Spanish slouch hats, several hundred yards away. “I can see them near that glade,” he said. Roosevelt and Davis stood on the edge of a ravine. Down below, they could hear General Young’s Hotchkiss machine gun, and two Spanish machine guns firing in response. The soldiers down in the valley had obviously joined the fight.25

  Roosevelt took the binoculars and stared across. “It was Richard Harding Davis who gave us our first opportunity to shoot back with effect,” he later wrote, full of praise for the reporter he had long disdained. “He was behaving precisely like my officers, being on the extreme front of the line, and taking every opportunity to study with his glasses the ground where we thought the Spanish were.” Roosevelt called forward “three or four of our best shots” and ordered them to fire at the Spanish line. The first rounds were low, but soon they got the range, and the Spanish dashed out of their position.26

  Roosevelt could see a much larger group of Spanish further on, and he called up the rest of his troops. They advanced haltingly; stopping to fire and take cover against the Spanish volleys. “To keep men from firing was almost impossible in the excitement, but it was amazing to see how cool our raw volunteers were,” Theodore Miller wrote in his diary. Still, men fell. Roosevelt ordered the rest to keep moving, to leave their comrades behind. “It was hard to leave them there in the jungle, where they might not be found again until the vultures and land-crabs came, but war is a grim game and there was no choice,” Roosevelt wrote in his memoir. One man who was shot, a trooper named Harry Heffner, asked his comrades to prop him up against a tree with his canteen and his rifle, so he could keep fighting. They did as he asked. When they returned after the fight, he was dead.27

  As the Spanish left wing, opposite Roosevelt, disintegrated and the men melted back into the jungle, the scene became increasingly confused. Twice Roosevelt saw groups of men moving in the distance, but he could not tell if they were Spanish or American. Worried that they were friendly—and that they might fire at his men in the confusion—Roosevelt ordered a soldier to climb a nearby tree with the regiment’s guidon, or pennant, to identify themselves. It was a dangerous task, but the man didn’t hesitate. It worked: He waved the guidon; the men in Young’s detachments waved theirs back. The right wing of the Rough Riders and the left wing of the soldiers in the valley were finally in contact.28

  • • •

  As Roosevelt and his men advanced, Davis fell behind, and suddenly found himself alone. He could hear the firing, and the shouting, but finding his way around the woods was “like breaking through the walls of a maze.” He came across one soldier, already dead from a gunshot to the head. When he returned to the body two hours later, vultures had torn off the man’s lips and plucked out his eyeballs. Davis then moved back, away from the danger, until he came to the spot where the regiment had first halted. It had since become the dressing station. A tall, thin young man was hurrying around the wounded, quickly tending to those he could save. “His head was bent, and by some surgeon’s trick he was advancing rapidly with great strides, and at the same time carrying a wounded man much heavier than himself across his shoulders,” Davis observed. “As I stepped out of the trail he raised his head, and smiled and nodded, and left me wondering where I had seen him before, smiling in the same cheery, confident way and moving in that same position.”29

  The man, who looked “like a kid who had gotten his hands and arms into a bucket of thick red paint, and had slopped it all over himself,” wrote trooper Arthur Cosby, laid his charges in rough rows in the grassy field, and when he wasn’t out collecting the freshly wounded, he was running among his charges, applying tourniquets. He was less punctilious about swearing than Wood was; they could curse all they wanted, he told the wounded men, as long as they didn’t set the grass on fire. Davis finally realized who it was: James Church, the assistant surgeon. Davis had last seen him playing football at Princeton. Church was the same man who had presented himself at Roosevelt’s house in Washington with the wild hopes of joining the regiment; now, with La Motte having stayed behind at Siboney, he was the only medical officer on the battlefield. “That so few of them died is greatly due to this young man who went down into the firing line and pulled them from it,” Davis wrote. (Church received the Medal of Honor for his actions at Las Guasimas.)30

  As Davis stood watching Church, a steward grabbed his arm and asked for help carrying a wounded trooper, Lieutenant John Thomas, of L Troop. The lieutenant had been shot through the lower leg, and despite a tourniquet, was losing blood rapidly, too rapidly to risk moving him back down the trail to the field hospital at Siboney. As Davis reached down to help lift him, Thomas shouted, “You’re taking me to the front, aren’t you? You said you would. They’ve killed my captain. Don’t you understand? They’ve killed Captain Capron.”31

  It seemed impossible, Capron dead, but Davis knew instantly that it was true. He headed back up the trail until he saw Church, on his knees under a tree, with Capron’s head propped on his lap. Church was tearing at Capron’s tunic with a knife, trying to get to the hole in his chest. But he was already lost. “The skin, as white as a girl’s, and the black open wound against it made the
yellow stripes and the brass insignia of rank seem strangely mean and tawdry,” Davis wrote.32

  Capron’s last words, according to another reporter, were, “How are the boys fighting?” Fred Beal, a trooper standing nearby, replied, “Like hell.”

  “Very well,” Capron said. “I’m going to see this out.” He closed his eyes, and was no more. It was his twenty-seventh birthday.33

  Davis moved on. All around him, men were shooting, and crouching, and running, and dying. The air cracked with gunshots and screams; gun smoke mixed with the humid air to create a sticky, odorous haze. Though most men stuck to the line, others, wounded or dazed, stumbled about the battlefield. A few paces ahead of Capron, Davis found another soldier, mortally wounded; he had a bullet hole between his eyes, but somehow he was still breathing, short rapid pulls of air, his gaze already elsewhere. Davis lifted his head and tried to pour water into his mouth, but his teeth were clenched and it ran down his cheeks. In the man’s breast pocket he found a small copy of the New Testament, inscribed with the name “Fielder Dawson, Nevada, Missouri.” Just then another soldier, looking no older than fifteen, sat down on a rock next to Davis. “It is no use, the surgeon has seen him, he says he is just the same as dead,” the young soldier said. “He is my bunkie, we only met two weeks ago at San Antonio, but he and me had got to be such good friends. But there’s nothing I can do now.”34

  Up ahead Davis saw yet another body, in a sergeant’s uniform, lying in the path. It was Hamilton Fish. He had been shot through the heart. A giant in life, to Davis he seemed, in death, to have shrunk, so that his uniform bulked around him, like a ready-made funeral shroud. Davis pulled out Fish’s pocket watch. On it was inscribed “God Gives,” the Fish family motto.35

  Perhaps the sight of Fish’s inert form made something click inside Davis. Ever since his public embarrassment at the hands of William Randolph Hearst, he had sought redemption. Compounding his shame and ambition was his deeply conflicted relationship with the war itself: Having encouraged America to begin it, Davis had struggled with his status as a noncombatant in America’s first overseas war. Though war reporting was fast becoming a specialty among the world’s correspondents, professional standards of objectivity and nonintervention were not quite where they would be a generation later. He grabbed a rifle from a wounded soldier and found L Troop. As they advanced toward the Spanish, Davis began to fire. “I knew every one of them, had played football, and all that sort of thing, with them,” he wrote, “so I thought as an American I ought to help.” In Davis’s account, his firing was conservative; one might assume, in his telling, that the weapon was more for self-protection. Other accounts differ: Marshall, for example, says that Davis “was pumping wildly at the Spanish with a carbine.” Davis made no mention, in his dispatches or later books, of the awkwardness of a correspondent fighting alongside soldiers while also reporting the scene.36