The Crowded Hour
Page 22
Davis was enough one of the boys to be an object of their occasional derision, too. Among Theodore Miller’s duties at Sevilla was to build a new bench for the officers’ mess. The next day around noon, Davis stopped by. When he saw the officers eating, he pulled out a plate and cup and sat down, “with a comfortable relaxation,” as if he were just another major. Suddenly the bench collapsed under his weight. The officers laughed; Miller did not record Davis’s reaction.16
It was little moments like this that helped the men forget what they had just been through, at Las Guasimas, and gird themselves for what might come. “I had felt great the last few days, in fact, never better in my life,” Miller wrote. “Things to-day looked as though we were to stay here for weeks to come.” Around a campfire one night, Buckey O’Neill, his coat off and his shirt unbuttoned, leaned back on his blanket roll and told his neighbor, “Anyone who wants to go back to the United States when this cruel war is over can go; for my, part, I plan to stay.” Where others saw only destruction and poverty, he saw opportunity in Cuba’s metal-ore mines and fertile fields. “We are going to have a new set of millionaires,” O’Neill said, “and I am going to be one of them.”17
• • •
Out on the water, General Shafter still sat on the Seguranca, even after most of his men had landed. The ship, like the others in the American fleet, did not use a stern anchor, so it swung back and forth in the tide and current, bumping against other ships. The situation was particularly fraught on June 27, when the Seguranca swung a little too closely between two other ships. The ship’s master decided to move out to sea, but he forgot to raise the anchor; as the Seguranca steamed away at full speed, the cable drew taut and ripped out the windlass and riding bitts—the winch and posts at the other end of the cable. Now, bereft of an anchoring system, the Seguranca was forced to float several miles out at sea. Without any way to communicate easily with shore, Shafter decided, finally, to join his men.18
For over a century, historians of the Spanish-American War have debated Shafter’s merits as a general. He was certainly the most despised officer in Cuba, by his men but even more so by the correspondents and foreign attachés who observed him, and felt free to condemn him widely and vociferously. Davis in particular disliked him: “His self complacency was so great that in spite of blunder after blunder, folly upon folly, and mistake upon mistake, he still believed himself infallible, still bullied his inferior officers, and still cursed from his cot.” Not everyone demeaned Shafter. A reporter for the New York Sun wrote, “It is not hard to describe General Shafter: Bold, lion-headed, hero-eyed, massive as to body, a sort of human fortress in blue coat and flannel shirt.” As historian J. P. Clark wrote, “It is a telling indicator of the state of the army in 1898 that historians can plausibly argue that Shafter was selected because he was either among the best or the worst of the available generals.”19
The truth lay in the middle. Shafter possessed a keen mind and a tenacious temperament; he had demonstrated as much during his decades in the Indian Wars. He did not push for the Santiago campaign. When he accepted command at Tampa, it was to lead a small force into northern Cuba to deliver supplies to the rebels, or at most to capture coastal defenses that might otherwise threaten the naval blockade around the island. But like the rest of the country, Shafter had been swept up in the patriotic momentum. Dewey’s victory at Manila demanded swift action in the Caribbean, and he would gladly deliver it.
But the fact remains: Shafter was utterly incapable of leading the Santiago campaign. He failed to empower officers to wrangle the chaos at Tampa, just as he failed to appoint someone to oversee the loading and unloading of his armada. He did not pack enough artillery, let alone the means to transport what he did have after landing in Cuba (later, he tried to pass off his mistake as wisdom, saying that artillery would have been useless at Santiago). And he refused to move decisively after landing at Siboney, let alone after the victory at Las Guasimas. He later failed to encircle Santiago, while his prejudice and pride prevented him from using the thousands of Cuban rebels at his service effectively.
But Shafter’s litany of failures is as much an indictment of the American military culture from which he came as it is of the man himself. Like the Army, after decades fighting the Indian Wars, far from the public spotlight, Shafter was suddenly thrust into it. Lacking firm leadership at home, he could only think of the domestic consequences of bloodshed or defeat. Like many of the general officers in the Army of 1898, men at the end of a career that began in the cauldron of the Civil War and was forged in sporadic, small-unit combat on the Great Plains and in the Southwest, he was an anachronism: fundamentally conservative, averse to risks and bold moves, but also incapable of managing his large forces so that, when the moment arrived, he could strike. If it were not for his fear of the oncoming malarial season, Shafter might have sat outside Santiago all summer, dawdling like McClellan after Antietam.
By June 27, the ships at Siboney and Daiquirí were unloaded, and the rest of the regiments began to move toward the burgeoning camp. The mule trains grew longer; some counted 100 animals pulling a dozen or more wagons. On more than one occasion, the rains and flash flooding were so severe that a pack train was stuck for the night along the way. Still, by June 29 the fields around Sevilla were full of soldiers, and several regiments were forced to camp along the Camino Real itself, even though, at that point, it was only about ten to twenty feet from one green-forested side to the other. “It was as though fifteen regiments were encamped along the sidewalks of Fifth Avenue,” Davis wrote. “If Fifth Avenue were ten feet wide, one can imagine the confusion.” In the mornings, the lifting mists were accompanied by the sound of trumpets blaring reveille and some 16,000 men clattering into shape; at night, the noise stopped abruptly at the sound of taps and “The Star-Spangled Banner.”20
• • •
Every day columns of Cubans marched past the camp, their ranks of rags interspersed with bits of American-issued kit—a blue jacket, a canteen, a haversack, items they had either been given or simply taken from the battlefield. Whether they felt sympathy or disgust for the Cubans, the one thing most of the Americans did not do was talk to them—even though many of the men from New Mexico and Arizona spoke Spanish. If they had tried, they might have learned that the Cubans were not, in fact, overjoyed to see Shafter’s army. The Cubans had always been clear that what they wanted was American political recognition and military assistance in the form of guns, money, and above all ammunition—not an invasion.
Even after war was declared, the Cuban rebel leadership had assumed, based on communications with Washington, that the Americans would attack Puerto Rico, which was less well-defended, in order to relieve pressure on them. Naive, perhaps—but the Cubans were not the last group of freedom fighters to assume that Americans, arriving under the banner of humanitarian intervention, would let them set the terms of their own liberation. In fact, throughout the buildup to war and then the war itself, actual Cubans were almost completely absent from the American public eye. In their place came a series of caricatures that spoke volumes about America’s ignorance of Cuba, and about its own self-image. Cuba, in the American mind, was a nation-as-damsel-in-distress, a place where all women were virtuous and virginal, and all men were chivalrous and self-sacrificing. For a country like the United States, and especially for a younger, wealthy, self-satisfied generation obsessed with finding ways to prove its manhood, the temptation to “rescue” Cuba was irresistible. “A failure to intervene,” wrote historian Kristin L. Hoganson, “would reveal a lack of chivalry in American men.” Those stereotypes flipped once the war began, though, and the realities of dealing with a nonwhite nation became clear. The Cuban rebels, suddenly, were written off as lazy and untrustworthy, and useless as soldiers. “It is now definitely known that little or no assistance from the vaunted ‘armies of liberation’ need be expected,” wrote the New York Tribune on May 22.21
The Cubans, though wary of the arriving American
forces, were also pragmatic, and welcomed them once their ships arrived off Daiquirí. General García, in a letter to General Nelson Miles in Washington in early June, pledged his complete support: “Your wishes are a command which I obey with great pleasure,” he wrote, and offered to gather all his soldiers in eastern Cuba to place at General Shafter’s disposal. In García’s mind, he and his men would storm Santiago alongside the Americans.22
Shafter had other plans. The Cubans, where they were needed, would be used to dig trenches and carry equipment. Shafter did order several thousand Cuban soldiers to block the road north from Santiago, to interdict any Spanish relief columns (which they did, effectively if not completely; they blocked one swift-moving, so-called flying column, comprised of 5,000 men under General Luis Manuel de Pando y Sánchez, and delayed another, smaller force under Colonel Federico Escario). But as far as the Cuban forces camped alongside the Americans east of Santiago, they were to be “pack mules,” as García complained, and nothing more.23
Shafter’s neglect set off a downward spiral: Left with nothing to do, the Cubans sat around, which led American officers to assume they were lazy and undisciplined, which made it even less likely that they would be assigned any meaningful role in the campaign. “All day they sit in the shade of their palm-thatched camps and at night they smoke cigarettes and gorge on Uncle Sam’s rations,” wrote a correspondent for the Associated Press, “while in sight of them Uncle Sam’s boys, with empty stomachs and not a bit of tobacco for their pipes, build roads all day under the blazing sun and sleep on their rifles under the starlight sky at night.” Worse, in the press’s eyes, the Cubans were savages—correspondents’ accounts and soldiers’ letters bubble with lurid stories of rebels taking command of captured Spanish soldiers and summarily beheading them with swift chops of their machetes.24
Some of this is undoubtedly true. Lacking any role in the campaign and facing deep distrust from their American “saviors,” Cuban rebels probably did sit around, waiting for a task. Desperately poor and hungry, a few of them probably did occasionally swipe a ration or a canteen. And after three years of genocidal repression, it would be surprising if a Cuban rebel had not taken revenge on a Spanish soldier. The point is that no American, be it a soldier or a correspondent, ever stopped to wonder why.
• • •
If the Americans gave little thought to the Cubans, they were completely ignorant of the Spanish. Derogatory stereotypes ran rampant, as they always do in war—fed, in this conflict, by the long history of American anti-Catholic bigotry. The depiction of Spain, and especially its soldiers, as uniquely cruel, lazy, and intolerant, was prevalent across Europe and North America since at least the sixteenth century. Every Spanish soldier was a smaller, nastier version of “Butcher” Weyler—a serial rapist and child murderer. The disaster of the Maine, assumed by most soldiers to be the work of Spanish agents, if not the Spanish government itself, only reinforced this impression of diabolical deviance. A writer for the Chicago Times-Herald, in calling for American intervention, said that without it the war would continue until every Cuban was dead, because nothing else would sate “the thirst for blood inherent in the bull-fighting citizens of Spain.” Representative Alexander Hardy, a Republican from Indiana, told his colleagues: “The Spanish soldiery at home and abroad have never hesitated to snatch the sucking babe from its mother’s breast, dash its brains out, and then outrage the shrieking mother.”25
Shafter and his officers onshore seemed little interested in learning much about the Spanish forces arrayed against them, or the conditions within Santiago—critical questions, one would think, for an army intent on laying siege to a large city. Even at the level of official intelligence, there was no assessment of the Spanish forces, no thought given to trying to understand their disposition, morale, motivation—anything that might help generals plan, the sort of questions that even a few decades later would be set upon by a large staff of clever young officers. A few competent officers, like Henry Lawton, the general in charge of the Second Division, sent out their own troops to reconnoiter the front. But there was no way for them to share that information with the rest of the corps, and no apparent interest from Shafter’s staff in having them make the effort. Even after all the after-action reports and congressional investigations and books and magazine articles, it is hard to know exactly what Shafter expected to happen when he got to Santiago. Did he think the Spanish would simply surrender? If he drove at the city, would they part like curtains, or fight like demons?
What he did not know was that Santiago was living on borrowed time. Long before the Americans arrived on its outskirts, it was a city cut off from the rest of Cuba. Home to about 30,000 people, it was the largest on the island outside of Havana. It sits on the eastern side of a long narrow bay, along a slope that rises, often quite steeply, from the eastern waterfront to a series of ridges, which in turn are encircled by a line of hills, which are then hemmed in by the Sierra Maestra—a bowl within a bowl within a bowl. The blockade prevented most ships, of any nationality, from entering or leaving the harbor, while Cuban rebels had closed off the major roads leading out of the city. Even without an enemy at the gates, it was several days’ march to the nearest city of any size, and the ravaged farmlands nearby had long since ceased to provide any sort of material sustenance. Already in late May, the Spanish army was growing desperate for food; on June 26, Frederick Ramsden, the British consul in Santiago, recorded that “to-day the military have taken possession of all the flour in town, and none will be left for the public; therefore, in another week, there will be no bread to be had, and the bakeries will be closed.” Throughout June, those who could leave, did—but it was a long journey to the nearest town, and would-be refugees had to calculate whether the meager food they could scrape together would last them long enough to find shelter elsewhere. For most, staying put was the best option, best being relative: On June 18, Ramsden wrote: “People are now beginning to die in the streets of hunger, and the misery is frightful in spite of so many having gone to the woods.” Plantains, wheat flour, and potatoes were all long gone. They had corn, and some rice; by grinding the two grains, Santiagoans could make a kind of bread, but it came out flat and hard as rock. “Living became almost impossible,” wrote José Müller y Tejeiro, a Spanish officer in Santiago who later compiled an invaluable history of the campaign from the Spanish perspective. “Horses, dogs and other animals were dying from hunger in the streets and public places and the worst thing was that their carcasses were not removed.”26
After the starvation came the bombardments. To soften up the city for Shafter’s attack, the American Navy took to shelling the city several times a day—almost always without causing much damage, but adding to the general chaos and severe dislocation among Santiago’s civilian population. As Müller y Tejeiro related,
There was hardly a day when gunshots were not heard at a greater or less distance, people were hearing them all the time; the falling of a chair, the closing of a door or window, the noise of carriage wheels in the distance, the crying of a child—everything was taken for gunshots, and gunshots was all that was being talked about. When they finally ceased, Santiago had become so identified with them that people almost missed them and were surprised to hear them no longer.27
The Spanish officer in charge at Santiago, Lieutenant General Arsenio Linares y Pombo, was in an impossible position. Like Shafter, he had failed to do much reconnaissance; he had simply no idea how many Americans there were coming from the east. And like the Americans, he shared with his men a cartoonish impression of the enemy—they were, in the words of a Spanish pamphleteer, “composed of the world’s refuse . . . an immense agglomeration of men who had no military discipline, no love of the military, nor any love or respect for those who command.” Linares, a proud patrician, could not even conceive of surrendering to such a force—even if, as it became increasingly clear, that force was much more powerful and disciplined than he thought.28
Linares had abo
ut 13,000 men under him in Santiago, though only about 9,000 of these were regular soldiers, the rest being a combination of volunteers, guerrillas, and sailors from the Spanish fleet bottled up in Santiago Harbor, whom Linares had demanded be disembarked and armed to defend the city. As for artillery, he was even worse off than Shafter—just six modern breech-loading guns; the rest were bronze and iron muzzleloaders, some over 100 years old, and most deployed at the Morro castle. Linares could also call on Cervera’s fleet, anchored in the harbor, to lob shells at the Americans, but it was dangerous—it meant firing blindly over the city and the ridge, defended by Spanish troops, with the risk that an errant shot could fall into their own trenches, or hit a house. Even at the height of the American assault, Linares declined the opportunity (though rumors circulated around the city that, if the Americans got too close, he would have Admiral Cervera turn the fleets’ guns on Santiago itself, destroying it instead of allowing the enemy to capture it).29
A brash rising nation like America, one that was asserting its newfound power abroad arrayed in the cloak of liberty and humanitarianism, could not have found a better enemy—both as a caricature to match its own self-mythologizing, and as a declining empire that, in its centuries-long claim to Cuba, much longer than white settlers could claim North America, revealed the artifice that underlay the oncoming American century. Spain was not evil, any more than America was good; its soldiers were not the infidels defending a Jerusalem on the Caribbean from the American crusaders. Spain and America were simply global powers in passing, one on the way up, blinded by its own future, and one on the decline, gripping tenaciously its last vestiges of imperial property but knowing, all the while, it was doomed.