The Crowded Hour

by Clay Risen

  • • •

  Around noon on June 30, General Shafter, who had made his way ashore and up to the front two days earlier, called a council of war. Sick with malaria and gout, he was carried to the front on a much suffering donkey, with a swollen foot wrapped in a gunny sack. They would attack the next day, he told his generals. The Second Division, led by General Lawton, backed by an artillery detachment, would move several miles north that night and, first thing in the morning, capture the small town of El Caney, where 500 Spanish soldiers were entrenched. Until the town was reduced, those Spanish troops presented a threat to the main assault against San Juan Heights, west of Sevilla, across a narrow river plain. Meanwhile, the 34th Michigan Volunteer Infantry Regiment would head south and make a “demonstration” of an attack at the village of Aguadores, near the coast, to throw off the Spanish. Once Lawton’s men had engaged in fighting with the defenders at El Caney, the other two divisions—the First Division, under General Jacob Kent, and Wheeler’s cavalry division—would emerge from a single trail leading down out of the jungle, ford the San Juan River, and assault the Spanish defenses arrayed along the heights. Throwing so many men at the defenses might result in a high casualty count, Shafter recognized, but it was preferable to watching them get sick and die in the squalid camps. Having waited this long, he had a new mantra: “To do it quick.”30

  There was another development: General Wheeler, in charge of the cavalry, and Samuel Young, in charge of Wheeler’s Second Cavalry Brigade, were both sick. Samuel Sumner, Wheeler’s second in command, was moved up to fill his place at the head of the cavalry division, and Wood took Young’s place. That left Roosevelt in charge of the Rough Riders. The position he had been offered by Secretary of War Alger in April, and rejected, was finally his.31

  At around three in the afternoon, just after a particularly heavy downpour, Roosevelt and his men received orders to break camp and move to the front. They were told to take their rifles, ammunition belts, and three days’ worth of rations; everything else in their meager kit was to stay at their camp along the Aguadores River. They got on the move two hours later, and marched two and a half miles toward Santiago. Once again, confusion reigned. All that afternoon lines of men, hundreds long, jostled along the narrow Camino Real; one line would cut into the other, and men would suddenly find themselves marching in the wrong regiment, and have to double back. “Occasionally we came to gaps or open spaces, where some regiment was camped, and now and then one of these regiments, which apparently had been left out of its proper place, would file into the road, breaking up our line of march,” Roosevelt wrote. “Once or twice we had to wade streams. Darkness came on, but we still had to march.”32

  “You could almost envy the ease with which the orange ball crossed the sky. It was all we could do to lift our muddy shoes,” recalled trooper Arthur Crosby. The regiment arrived around 10 p.m., the night air cooling rapidly, the faint glow of the city haloing a far hill. They set up camp around an old building, with whitewashed walls and a red-tiled roof; it was, several of them surmised, an old monastery. It wasn’t until nearly midnight that the various regiments were in place, and the thousands of American soldiers were bunked down, trying to get a few hours rest.33

  The building sat on the slope of a squat, low elevation called El Poso. From the top, one could see a line of hills across the river valley and, beyond it, glimpses of Santiago itself. On June 27, Davis and a few Rough Riders had ventured up there to size up the Spanish defenses. What they saw shocked them: The Spanish, allegedly indolent and ignorant, were busy carving up the hills into defensive works, adding blockhouses, strips of barbed wire, and trenches like long yellow scars across the green landscape. By the time Shafter decided to begin an assault on Santiago’s eastern defenses, the Spanish had dug over 4,000 yards of trenches, often three lines deep, interspersed, on the hilltops, with large blockhouses. Through his binoculars, Davis could see sombreros bobbing up and down, digging. “Rifle-pits were growing in length and in number, and in plain sight from the hill of El Poso,” he wrote. “But no artillery was sent to El Poso hill to drop a shell among the busy men at work among the trenches.” Worse, the Spanish had a good sense of where the Americans would attack—the trails that descended from around El Poso onto the riverine plain between the two lines of hills—and had aimed their cannons and machine guns on them. “Of course the enemy knows where those two trails leave the wood,” General Sumner, now in charge of the entire cavalry division, including the Rough Riders, told Davis on the night of June 30. “If our men leave the cover and reach the plain from those trails alone they will be piled up so high that they will block the road.”34

  Roosevelt and Wood, sticking close together despite their new, separated roles, camped with the Rough Riders, lying under their raincoats and over their saddle blankets. Davis was alongside them. After most of the regiment had fallen asleep, he got up and looked west from El Poso. “The attack on Santiago is to begin in a few hours—at 4 o’clock tomorrow,” he wrote. “From this ridge we can see the lights of the city—street lamps shining across a sea of mist two miles wide and two miles long, which looks in the moonlight like a great lake in the basin of the hills.” Another soldier—not a Rough Rider, but the author of an insightful memoir of the campaign—who went by the pseudonym Private St. Louis, said that the scene below El Poso looked “very similar to the floor of a theater, looking from the stage toward the back of the house.” The next morning, the show would begin.35

  CHAPTER 11

  “AN AMPHITHEATER FOR THE BATTLE”

  At about 4 a.m. on July 1, the nearly 17,000 men who comprised General Shafter’s Fifth Corps crawled from under their blankets and out of their tents. There had been no bugle blasting reveille, so as not to warn the Spanish. Instead, sergeants went from man to man, shaking them awake. More than 10,000 soldiers were encamped around El Poso and Sevilla; the rest were already a few miles north, preparing for the assault on El Caney. If the men climbed the slopes of El Poso and peered hard enough, they could see the glow of central Santiago, seven miles away, framing San Juan Hill like a halo. Where they had time and inclination, they set small fires to boil coffee or fry some bacon. Most just ate a few pieces of hardtack and called it breakfast. No one spoke. Few had any illusion about what the day had in store for them. The night before, word had passed down—that morning, they were going to take the heights.1

  On paper, the battle that unfolded that day paled in every way to the major engagements of the Civil War—Antietam and Gettysburg, of course, but also fights that have receded from common memory, like Malvern Hill and Perryville. And it was nothing like the weeks-long battles that would follow it in the twentieth century, like Belleau Wood and Iwo Jima and Hue. It was a one-day assault on the outer defenses of a provincial capital in the Caribbean, with a few hundred deaths on both sides. The Spanish defenses were formidable, but the landscape could not compare with the imposing escarpments that Union soldiers scaled at the Battle of Lookout Mountain, in 1863, or that Army Rangers climbed at Pointe du Hoc, on D-day.

  And yet the Battle of San Juan Heights remains among the most important, celebrated, and contested engagements in American history. Numbers and topography tell us little about why the soldiers that morning, from Shafter to Roosevelt to the greenest volunteer private, felt in their bones the extraordinary significance of what they were about to undertake. For many it was to be their first experience of combat, and for most, their last. They were right to be afraid; by the end of the day, one out of every six of them would be dead or wounded. But there was something else, something collective and energizing and, in a way, much more daunting than the prospect of being shot by a Mauser bullet. If they carried the day, they would declare to the world that the United States Army could beat a European military power. And they were not just any army, but a small, untested force of enlisted regulars and barely trained volunteers, a force that most Europeans would dismiss as hardly an army at all.

  Few Americans
paused to think that Spain had long ceased being a first-rate empire, or that the soldiers arrayed against them had been dragooned into service, then physically weakened and emotionally demoralized by three years of counterinsurgency warfare. Few of the men in the invasion force considered that the numbers were in their favor, since General Arsenio Linares, in charge of the Spanish defenses, had deployed too many of his men on the city’s northern and western sides, far away from Shafter’s forces, resulting in nearly a 10-to-1 ratio in the Americans’ favor along the eastern lines. (Nor, for that matter, did the rank and file grasp how many mistakes Shafter had made, and how those mistakes would come close to erasing whatever advantages the Americans held at the outset.) No one understood what would come next, if they won, or how they would recover, if they lost. Outside Shafter’s inner circle, it is unlikely that anyone realized that, in either instance, there was no plan—no plan for victory, and no plan for defeat. One thing was sure, though: With dozens of correspondents and foreign attachés watching, news of their fight would spread around the world in nearly an instant, thanks to the telegraph and the presence of William Randolph Hearst, in person, watching the battle unfold from a nearby hill. That morning around the campfires, as the mists rose above El Poso and the San Juan River plain below them, there was only this: this valley, this hill, this fight.

  Strictly speaking, there is no single San Juan Hill. It is merely one rise among many along a ridge that stood between the American forces and Santiago. The Spanish called it Los Cerros del Río San Juan; the locals called it Cerro Gordo or Cerro Alto. During peacetime, the slopes, long shorn of trees, were pastures for cattle and sheep. That morning the sheep were gone, and in their place ran rows of barbed wire and trenches, filled with soldiers in wide-brimmed sombreros. At the top was a stout blockhouse, with a ground floor studded with gun ports and a second, half-open floor that offered commanding views of the valley. In peacetime, no one would think much of the ridge; in battle, with the Spanish well-entrenched, to charge it was close to suicide.

  On the eastern slope of El Poso, Roosevelt had already been awake for almost an hour. Arthur Cosby recalled that the first thing he saw, when he woke, was the new leader of the Rough Riders lathering his face with soap, for a shave. “It was a strangely reassuring sight,” Cosby wrote. Roosevelt had dressed especially for the occasion: Along with his tan Rough Rider uniform, he wore bright yellow suspenders fastened with silver leaves, a blue polka-dot scarf tied around his sombrero, and a stand-up collar with the volunteer insignia on each point. He joined Colonel Wood for breakfast, and ate quickly—beans, bacon, hardtack, and coffee—and walked among the men who were still sleeping, prodding them awake with his boot. Then he summited the hill and scanned the field below. The sky was cloudless and deep blue. Like others, he found that the bowl-shaped valley lent a dramaturgical sheen to the day’s coming events. “The lofty and beautiful mountains hemmed in the Santiago plain, making it an amphitheater for the battle,” Roosevelt wrote.2

  While the Rough Riders were still waking up, they heard a sound of squeaking wheels and of horses and mules and of men driving them. It was an artillery battery being pulled by a long team of horses, struggling along a rutted path toward the top of El Poso hill. Frederic Remington, standing nearby, sketched the scene, which he later painted as part of a pictorial history of the war for Harper’s. “It was a fine sight to see the great horses straining under the lash as they whirled the guns up the hill and into position,” Roosevelt wrote. That’s putting a gloss on it: The weapons were pitifully insufficient for the task at hand, and far too few. The four pieces were all three-inch cannons, modern but small-bore weapons, capable of firing shells several thousand yards but using, that day, black powder, which would quickly give away their location. “They might as sensibly have been ordered to paint the rings in a target while a company was firing at a bull’s eye,” Davis wrote. Worse, there were only eight such artillery pieces available to the Americans that morning on the island—four at El Poso, four at El Caney—and a dozen or so more back at Siboney, fresh off the transports. Sixty more had been left at Tampa for lack of space on the ships. The only other thing larger than a rifle that day was a detachment of Gatling guns.3

  The journalists and foreign attachés were given free rein of the American lines. To the latter, especially, Shafter’s plan was madness. It ran against all the conventional wisdom they had learned in their careers, in much larger and better-trained armies than this one. A direct assault on entrenched troops along a ridge with barely any artillery support was sure to result in slaughter, and failure. Not only was Shafter throwing thousands of men against a well-defended position, but he had no idea how the Spanish might respond—for example, by flanking the Americans once the assault began. “It is scarcely conceivable, but none the less a fact,” wrote Arthur Lee, the British attaché, that Shafter’s forces “moved into this terra incognito without an advance guard, without flanking detachments, and with no military precautions save a ‘point,’ 100 yards in advance.”4

  Technically, it was no longer Shafter’s battle to lead. At three o’clock that morning, his adjutant, Lieutenant Colonel E. J. McClernand, entered his tent to find the commander prostrate but awake, and groaning. Shafter said that he was ill from his exertions the previous day, having moved about on foot for hours in the hot sun, and that he would be unable to get up to El Poso in time for the attack. “He then asked if the staff officers understood the plan of battle, and upon being assured they did he directed me to establish Battle Headquarters at the El Pozo [sic] House and Hill, and said he would send staff officers to carry orders,” McClernand recalled. Shafter would watch the battle from his camp on a hill a mile further east of El Poso. Though he kept in touch with McClernand via a telephone wire, the American side in the Battle of San Juan Heights would effectively be fought without a general.5

  • • •

  About 5,400 men from the Second Division, under General Lawton, had marched the five miles north to El Caney the previous evening, and had gotten little rest before the attack (the remainder of the division had been kept back as a reserve). The village had been a summer retreat for Santiago’s wealthier classes, who craved its slightly higher elevation and the way it caught the sea breeze heading inland. Several consuls, including the French, had homes there, but the residents were long gone. In their place were Spanish soldiers. There were only 520 men defending the town, either crouching in trenches arrayed in front of a steep-walled stone fort or huddled inside one of four log blockhouses, or in the steeple of the church that rose at the town center. At their head stood Joaquín Vara del Rey y Rubio, like General Weyler a veteran of the Carlist Wars and various regional uprisings in Spain. Lawton, backed by a four-cannon battery under Allyn Capron Sr., expected to have the town in American hands within two hours, and to meet up with the right flank of the main assault by noon.6

  James Creelman, a correspondent for Hearst at the Journal, had crept up ahead of Lawton’s front line, where he hid behind a strategically placed boulder to watch the battle play out. He could see the lines of American uniforms unspooling through the creek beds and tall grass at the foot of the hill. For almost half an hour, he watched as shells from Capron’s battery slammed into the walls of the fort, after which the commanders of the Spanish would pop their heads up and, through field glasses, scan the tree line for an attack. Somehow, even in the middle of a barrage, a black hen poked its way around the front of the fort, oblivious.7

  Just before 7 a.m., the assault began. Lines of men in blue plowed forward, then fell and fired, then ran a bit more, then fell and fired. In between shots, the Spanish responded, and every American surge forward included fewer men. Lieutenant General Adna Chaffee, a veteran of the Civil War and the Indian Wars who was in command of two regiments at El Caney that morning, ran up and down the line behind them, shouting, “Don’t mind their fire, that’s what you’re here for. Keep her going!” Chaffee was remorseless; when one soldier was shot and fell, rolli
ng down to crash into Chaffee’s feet, he yelled, “Here! Someone! Take this man’s rifle and get in on the line!” The hen, no longer able to ignore the shooting, dashed back and forth, flapping its wings in terror. “Poor creature!” Creelman wrote. “She escaped ten thousand bullets only to have her neck wrung by a hungry soldier that night.”8

  Chaffee and the hen were the only things doing much moving. After an hour of effort, the Americans had hardly advanced. The Spanish were too entrenched, too motivated, too well-trained to budge. Chafee tried to flank the main Spanish trench, but failed. Creelman, having temporarily abandoned his status as a correspondent, had picked up a gun and was moving forward with the soldiers. A few minutes later, he was hit. As he lay waiting for help, he could sense, through his pain-induced semiconsciousness, a figure standing over him. He opened his eyes to see his boss, Hearst himself, peering down, a straw hat on his head, a pistol on his belt, and a notebook and pen in his hand. “I’m sorry you’re hurt,” he said. “Wasn’t it a splendid fight?” And then he dashed off to his boat, the Sylvia, to file a dispatch. Hearst, it seemed, had gotten his war. But Shafter’s plan was unraveling.9

  • • •

  At 8 a.m., sure that the assault on El Caney was under way, McClernand ordered the battery of four cannons at El Poso to fire, and for the day’s main event to begin. A voice rang out: “Number One, Load! Prime! Fire!” The first cannon jumped back eight feet. “Number Two, Load! Prime! Fire! Number Three, Load! Prime! Fire! Number Four, Load! Prime! Fire!” A cloud of white smoke soon drifted across the top of the hill, engulfing the Rough Riders who stood just behind the battery with a troop of Cuban soldiers to their left. Field glasses came out among the officers arrayed around the battery, and they watched for the shells to hit. The first landed far to the west. Wood, sitting next to Roosevelt nearby, leaned over and said that he wished the brigade had been ordered to wait somewhere else, away from the battery. The artillery men adjusted their range, and were preparing to fire again when they heard cracking sounds from across the valley. The Spanish were already returning fire. “Here it comes!” someone shouted.10