The Crowded Hour

by Clay Risen

  The next morning the regiment gathered around the distillery site. Henry Alfred Brown, the regimental chaplain, led the service. The remaining seven bodies lay beside a long trench. Trooper Frank Hayes wrote a few lines on a sheet of paper and slipped it into Fish’s pocket. The paper read: “On Fame’s eternal camping ground/their silent tents are spread,/and glory guards with solemn round/the bivouac of the dead”—lines from the poem “Bivouac of the Dead,” written by the poet Theodore O’Hara to memorialize the fallen during the Mexican-American War. The men, heads bared, sang “Rock of Ages” and “Nearer My God to Thee,” while Chaplain Brown led the Episcopalian burial service. While everyone’s head was bowed, Roosevelt looked up and saw a swarm of vultures circling in the blue sky overhead. Each body was wrapped in a blanket with a name tag and placed in the trench. “There could be no more honorable burial than that of these men in a common grave—Indian and cow-boy, miner, packer, and college athlete—the man of unknown ancestry from the lonely Western plains, and the man who carried on his watch the crest of the Stuyvesants and the Fishes,” Roosevelt wrote. Once the trench was shoveled full with dirt, a pair of Rough Riders built a small cairn to mark each body. “The bugle was blown as a parting salute, instead of firing, and the troops were dismounted,” Theodore Miller wrote.58

  • • •

  At Siboney, the men who had accompanied Capron’s body constructed a crude coffin out of spare wood slats they found up against one of the houses. They sent word to Capron’s father, also named Allyn, but he was busy landing cannons at Daiquirí, where a few ships were still unloading. When he was finally located, he came hurrying to Siboney, though his son was already in the earth.

  “Tell me about the boy’s death,” Allyn Capron Sr. asked one of the doctors at the field hospital. “I’ve heard nothing definite. How many times was he shot?”

  “Twice,” came the reply.

  “He kept on, didn’t he? He didn’t quit after the first one, did he?”

  “No! It was the second one!”

  “That’s good! That’s good! I knew he’d die right.”59

  Nearby, at the field hospital, Marshall lay out in the open among dozens of men in various states of injury—some simply dehydrated or suffering heat exhaustion, while others had one or more Mauser holes blown into their bodies. Behind him lay McClintock, the officer and former journalist from California, whose leg had been shattered by a bullet. Surgeons, blood-spattered, moved among them, amputating limbs liberally. Land crabs crawled among them too, picking at bloody rags and occasionally pinching recumbent bodies. Marshall was paralyzed from the neck down; he recovered slightly, but later had a leg amputated. As he contemplated his compromised future, he heard a low, off-key voice begin to sing: “My country ’tis of the, sweet land of liberty . . .” The voice sputtered and coughed, but then another picked up the verse. “. . . Of thee I sing.” Then others joined in, until, within a few minutes, it seemed like the entire hospital there on the rocky Cuban shore was wheezing out: “From ev-er-ee mountain-side, le-et freedom ring.”60

  CHAPTER 10

  “THE MONOTONY OF CONTINUOUS BACON”

  On Saturday, June 25, the day after the engagement at Las Guasimas, Roosevelt wrote just one word in his diary: “Rested.”1

  Following the burial service for Capron, Fish, and the rest, the men dispersed, mostly to find clean water for a bath and a shave—their first since leaving Tampa. Roosevelt’s pack finally arrived from the Yucatan, and he was able to put on a change of clothes. Theodore Miller went back to the battlefield to find his gear, which he had dropped in the early stages of the fight; he recovered everything except his blanket and gloves. Almost alone among the regiment, Miller was in good spirits—after locating his equipment, he persuaded a grumpy Bob Wrenn to go swimming in a nearby pond. “He had talked me into so cheerful a frame of mind that I looked back on that afternoon as one of my pleasantest in Cuba,” the tennis champ wrote in a letter to Miller’s parents. When Miller got back to the campsite at Las Guasimas, he found Burke, his sick friend, asleep in a dog tent. Somehow, in the grip of a fever, he had made his way from Siboney to the front.2

  The fight at Las Guasimas was not, technically, the first land battle of the Spanish-American War—that honor went to the Marines who had captured Guantánamo Bay on June 6. Nevertheless, it was significant: It solidified the American beachhead at Siboney and opened the path to Santiago. It gave the Americans a taste of victory, and the Rough Riders the confidence of more experienced soldiers. But instead of pressing his advantage, Shafter dawdled. Aside from his brief visit with General García at Aserradero, he had stayed on his ship, the Seguranca, ostensibly directing the unloading process, but leaving his divisional generals, Wheeler and Lawton, to manage on their own (General Jacob Kent, in charge of the First Division, was still unloading at Siboney). Wheeler was, technically, the ranking officer, but Lawton was the more experienced, and likely resented being told what to do by a man who had shed his uniform thirty-three years before—and a Confederate uniform, at that. To compound the insult, Wheeler’s men, bereft of their horses, were essentially just another infantry division, duplicative of, and competitive with, Lawton’s own. Because Las Guasimas was a victory, Lawton had little room to criticize the white-bearded cavalryman; still, he threatened to resign if Wheeler went off on his own again.3

  Over the next several days most of the nearly 17,000 men in the invasion force were ordered forward, to a position near Sevilla, roughly seven miles east of Santiago, where they would organize for an assault on the city. Sevilla sat on a sandy tableland behind a low range of hills, with expanses of guinea grass sliced through with tributaries of the San Juan River and pocked, here and there like outsize landmines, with Spanish bayonet and cacti of various shapes and sizes. The movement toward Santiago, and the selection of Sevilla as a staging point, was not a decision born of extensive analysis or thorough intelligence gathering; Shafter either did not think reconnaissance was necessary, or did not remember to consider it. He did not know how many Spanish troops were inside Santiago, how well armed they were, or how they were arrayed to defend against attack. He simply drew a line from Las Guasimas to Santiago, and ordered his men to march along it.

  The next morning, the Rough Riders rose early, observed a brief Sunday service, and prepared to move to their new camp. Before they left, Miller took Burke to La Motte, the regimental surgeon, who diagnosed him with typhoid fever and ordered him back to Siboney. Though the rest of the regiment was headed west, Miller walked with his friend in the other direction, to the beach. When they arrived Miller found some bacon, hardtack, beans, and coffee, and made the two of them a proper meal, or as proper as one could get with cold, old rations. As they ate, they watched the thousands of men still disembarking from the ships, running their boats up to shore and unloading—without a dock at Siboney, the regiments were limited to whatever equipment they could fit in the launches, and whatever they could lift out of them. That meant no cannons, no wagons; all of that would have to wait until engineers could build a proper pier. The houses at Siboney were filling up, being converted into storehouses and hospital wards and headquarters, despite the proscription against entering them. Those men who weren’t working were playing—swimming naked in the surf, lying on the rocky shore, as if Miller and the Rough Riders had not just fought and died in the first engagement of the campaign, barely two miles away. Miller was stunned, and jealous, and sad. He left Burke at the field hospital and marched toward the front.4

  This time, marching through the valley instead of up along the ridge, it took Miller just an hour and fifteen minutes to get from Siboney to a point well past Las Guasimas, to where the Rough Riders had made camp. He had no want for company on this trip. Other regiments were streaming inland, up along the Camino Real. The “royal road” was just a cattle path, not wide enough for two wagons to pass each other, and in the heavy, cold rains that pelted Cuba every afternoon they became rivers of mud—“a simple stream of mud,
with a spattering of huge rocks,” Miller wrote. Later, soldiers and teamsters would try to improve the roads by throwing branches and logs across them as a rude corduroy, to tamp down the mud and give mules and wheels a purchase, but they usually just made the going tougher. Miller was spared the rain that afternoon, though. He found his regiment camped on a grassy plain just off the road, with a good breeze and a clear stream, the Aguadores River, alongside it. Apparently La Motte, the surgeon, had spread the word about Miller’s selflessness in helping his sick friend back to camp, because Roosevelt bounded up to him as soon as he arrived, clapped him on the back, and said thank you.5

  Life in Sevilla fell into a routine. The days were almost unbearably hot, even in the Rough Riders’ camp, with its cross breeze and shade trees. And it rained, rain like nothing the men had ever seen—hard, piercing, painful rain, like the drops were not falling so much as being shot from a gun. “I never saw it rain harder for two hours consecutively,” Miller wrote, though he added, “Perhaps that is exaggerated, considering our Chautauqua rains.” The clouds passed quickly, and the nights were clear and cool. Those who stayed up late—not by choice, but usually because they pulled guard duty—counted the constellations that they had only read about in books: Scorpius, the Southern Cross. “The nights are beautiful, and I had the full benefit of their charm between one and three on this night,” Miller wrote, peevishly, after a graveyard shift on guard.6

  In their spare time, the men tried to write home, though they had to get creative with their writing implements and material. Especially paper—there was none to be had. Some took to writing on empty boxes of quinine pills. Others used the margins of the four-page daily newspaper that William Randolph Hearst, who had arrived in Siboney a few days earlier, distributed off a printing press he had brought with him on the Sylvia, his yacht. Lacking envelopes, the men sewed their letters shut and gave them to correspondents to mail from a temporary post office at Siboney, or to courier back home. “The letters could be considered curios in a dime museum from the ingenuity displayed,” one correspondent wrote.7

  There were other pleasures to being suddenly sedentary, but generally, the men suffered. Their tents provided only partial protection from the rain; they were not long enough to cover an average-size man’s head and feet, and they had no floors, so the water that did not fall on them ran under them, and into the occupants’ blanket and kit. As a defense against the torrents, the men dug trenches around their tents, but rarely deep enough. After an hour or so of deluge, dozens of men would be out in the rain, naked, frantically digging with whatever implements they had with them. Often they just used their hands, since their gear, aside from the officers’, was still sitting at Siboney.

  The men could not decide which was worse: the rain, or the wildlife of various sizes and aggression that came out when the rain stopped. There were, of course, the ubiquitous land crabs, “some of which are almost as big as rabbits,” Roosevelt recorded. There were also tarantulas everywhere—Church, the assistant surgeon, made it his job to squash as many as he could find with his boot, pacing the camp in an undershirt and trousers. Men would wake up in their tents to find spiders, bigger than their hands, crawling on their chests. “I woke up the other morning with one seven inches long and as hairy as your head reposing on my pillow,” Davis wrote to his father.8

  Thomas J. Vivian, a journalist for Hearst, summed up a day in the camp life that summer:

  The sultry air grew still sultrier. From the trampled, beaten, crushed, tropical undergrowth rose sickening odors and heavy miasmatic mists. As the heat grew fiercer, the odors and mists grew heavier. Every life-giving quality of the air seemed to be squeezed out of it, and even the myriad insects and crawling reptiles were quieted. Then, just as the sizzling heat reached a spot where it apparently could go no further and be bearable, a zigzag flash, a thunderclap, and a cataract of ice-cold rain came simultaneously, and every man was soaked and shivering. If the men were marching, they found themselves suddenly wading through swift running streams of cold muddy water. . . . If the men were in camp or the trenches, their fires were put out and every ditch became a mud pool. For two or three hours the icy mass of mud and leaves, and the muddy water in the trails had risen from sole to ankle and from ankle to legging top. Then, as suddenly as it had begun, the storm would come to an end, the sun came out hotter than ever, the wet ground steamed; horrible crawling, flying things filled the muggy air, and from shivering the men passed to gasping.9

  Naturally, hygiene was a problem. Though the Aguadores River ran alongside the camp, it had to be kept clean for drinking water, and the men were forbidden to bathe or clean their clothes in it. They could either hike to another river, much further away, or devise makeshift baths by digging a hole, lining it with a poncho or raincoat, and filling it with water. Rations were an issue, too. Because the unloading process at Siboney was going so slowly, and because there were only a few mule teams to pull a few wagons on the slow trip to the front, food that wasn’t hardtack or bacon or beans was difficult to come by. At one point the men in camp saw four loaded six-mule wagons coming up the road; their minds went immediately to beans, rice, and meat, “to break the monotony of continuous bacon,” Caspar Whitney wrote. But instead the wagon carried the deflated sac of an observation balloon.10

  As with the thick blue wool uniforms the regular troopers wore, the commissary bureau had not planned for what a soldier in Cuba might want to eat. Heavy, fatty foods like salt pork, bacon, and hardtack were most likely not high on the list—“fitter for the Klondike than for Cuba,” Roosevelt complained. The men did what they could to supplement their fatty diet with whatever they could scrounge locally. With the farms long abandoned, livestock and poultry were just a dream, but they had more than they could handle of coconuts, mangoes, and limes. Doctors had warned them not to eat coconuts or mangoes, believing that they would upset the stomachs of men raised on temperate-climate foods, but the soldiers did anyway—either straight from the tree or, in the case of mangoes, boiled and mashed with sugar into a sweet gruel. Trooper Allen McCurdy, whose brother was also in the regiment, became something of a specialist in preparing mangoes; he preferred to boil them down to a jelly, then either fry it or use it as a spread. (McCurdy, at least, loved the camp: “This is the garden spot of Cuba and a finer country I never saw.”)11

  Not only were the rations skimpy, but there wasn’t much to prepare them with—no pots, few pans, and no utensils other than what the men carried. They had coffee, but the beans were whole, and green. George Hamner became one of the more popular men in the Rough Riders’ camp after he devised a mortar and pestle out of an empty coconut shell, in which he ground up roasted beans. Missing among the rations was tobacco, which the men needed to calm nerves and sate hunger. Without it, they turned to less palatable alternatives: grass, roots, tea, even dried horse manure. For men raised in a rapidly growing, materially abundant society, this sudden deprivation was a shock. “In general, our army operated under Civil War conditions,” Arthur Cosby wrote.12

  After a few days, Roosevelt rounded up a squad of forty men, dragooned a wagon, and marched back to Siboney, where he found a clerk registering shipments of food. Roosevelt had heard that the commissary had large stocks of beans, and he wanted 1,100 pounds of them. “I’m sorry sir,” the clerk replied, citing an obscure regulation stating that beans were for officers only. Roosevelt stormed out. But he returned a minute later and said he wanted 1,100 pounds of beans—for his officers.

  “But your officers cannot eat eleven hundred pounds of beans,” the clerk said.

  “You don’t know what appetites my officers have,” Roosevelt replied.

  He and his men returned to camp with the beans, and with a load of canned tomatoes, too. For most, it was the best meal of their lives.13

  • • •

  After his experiences at Las Guasimas, Richard Harding Davis was spending even more time with the Rough Riders. He probably felt a sort of soldierly comradeship w
ith them, but he also saw them as a phenomenal news story in the making. Whatever might happen at Santiago, they were already great copy. Though Roosevelt had not yet followed through on his promise to make Davis an honorary member of the regiment, the reporter had insinuated himself deep into its routine—coming by at meals, chatting with the men about the campaign (and, depending on the man, about various social and athletic matters back in New York), taking notes all the while. Shafter had refused to offer billeting for the journalists, insisting that if they were resourceful enough as reporters, they should be able to scrounge food and shelter from a friendly regiment. Most units were happy to oblige. “We are very welcome,” Davis wrote home, and by all accounts they were—Roosevelt wasn’t the only member of the regiment to appreciate the sort of positive press that a reporter of Davis’s stature could bestow on them, and what that press might bring. He was “our friend,” wrote trooper Sam Weller, “so his accounts will do us full justice.”14

  Davis saw himself as a reporter above the fray—a “correspondent,” he preferred to call himself. He had nothing but criticism for most of his fellow journalists: “The fault lies with the army people at Washington who give credentials to anyone who asks—to the independents and other periodicals—in no sense newspapers, and they give seven to one paper; consequently, we as a class are a pest to the officers and to each other.” Davis reveled in his unparalleled access to Roosevelt and his regiment—at the top of one letter to his father, written on June 29, are the words “Headquarters, Wood’s Rough Riders,” a meaningless detail for the postal system, but a great point of pride for the writer. And he couldn’t get enough of the regiment’s comic mix of high and low, of seeing the sons of the elite roughing it on the front lines. He wrote home about seeing a sentry reading As You Like It while on duty. “It is very funny,” he wrote to his father, “to see Larned the tennis champion, whose every movement at Newport was applauded by hundreds of young women, marching up and down in the wet grass.”15