by Clay Risen
The Rough Riders heard a whistling crescendo, “like a bevy of quail rising,” recalled La Motte, the surgeon. Several dozen soldiers were waiting for their orders in the yard of the monastery behind the cannons at El Poso. The first Spanish shell exploded in their midst; dozens were wounded, one had his leg blown off. Another shell hit the monastery. It collapsed the roof and blew men, mostly Cubans, out the windows. Two were killed in the Spanish counterfire, and more than a dozen wounded. Norman Trump, who had been assigned as a cook for one of the troops, was hit in the back and flew, face forward and arms outstretched as in a swan dive, onto the trail. Everyone thought he was dead. Then he stood, his back bruised and his tunic torn, but he was unbloodied, thanks to the backpack full of cooking gear he carried. Shrapnel from one of the shells hit Roosevelt in the hand, leaving a welt the size of a hickory nut. To make things worse, the Spanish cannons used smokeless powder, making it near impossible to pinpoint where that firing was coming from. “These casualties were utterly unnecessary,” Davis wrote, “and were due to the stupidity of whoever placed the men within fifty yards of guns in action.”11
The rapid return fire caught the Rough Riders by surprise. “I was quietly writing a few notes and thinking what a fine place I had to protect myself,” reported Benjamin Colbert, who was sitting near the house. “I was just thinking ‘just watch us lick ’em’ when bang went a shell just over us.” There was no doubt: The Spanish knew where the American forces were arrayed, and had their range. Chances were good, too, that the Spanish understood exactly where Shafter’s regiments would deploy, knew about the narrow path out of the woods through which thousands of them would debouch—and had hundreds of guns trained on that spot.12
While the artillery detachment struggled with their cannons, McClernand gave the order to send forth the regiments. According to Shafter’s orders, he was supposed to wait until word came that Lawton had captured El Caney. But after an hour, then two, nothing came. With the battle already engaged to the right, McClernand decided not to waste time.13
The American order of battle at San Juan Heights was comprised of two divisions: the First Division, made up of infantry, under General Jacob Kent, and Wheeler’s (now Sumner’s) division, made up of dismounted cavalry. The latter included two brigades, the First, under Colonel Henry Carroll (who had replaced Sumner), and the Second, now under Wood’s command, which included the segregated 10th Cavalry, and, confusingly, both the First United States Cavalry and the First United States Volunteer Cavalry—the latter, of course, being better known as the Rough Riders. All told nearly 7,000 men were ordered forward (the rest were held in reserve).14
Despite the traffic jams the night before, no one had tried to address the fact that more than a dozen regiments were being directed to proceed along a jungle path barely ten feet wide. It took the regiments nearly three hours to mobilize, organize, and move down the trail. The disorder was obvious, but so, too, was the enormity of the undertaking. “It seemed as though every man in the United States was under arms and stumbling and slipping down the trail,” Richard Harding Davis recalled. It wasn’t until around 10 a.m. that Wood ordered Roosevelt to lead his regiment at the head of the Second Brigade, and directly behind the First Brigade, as it headed down the path, in columns of four. As the orders passed down the line to the Rough Riders, Theodore Miller wrote one last entry in his diary: “After constant bombardment, a skirmish took place. Must stop now. In line. Goodbye.”15
As they moved along the wooded path past El Poso and toward the opening at the river, the men saw an oblong mass floating fifty feet above them. It was the observation balloon, which had been brought forward a few days before, now inflated and aloft, occupied by two intrepid observers. “It looked as though there might be a circus behind it,” Cosby wrote. Such balloons had been a part of the American arsenal since the Civil War, and had made an appearance in European conflicts in the intervening years. But they were of limited use—good as an elevated platform of sorts well behind the lines and looking out toward a flat, treeless plain. But as mobile observation decks at the very front of a column in a hilly jungle, they were untested. Logic dictated that a fat target like an observation balloon would draw enemy fire, especially if the Spanish suspected, rightly, that its forward motion tracked with an advancing column of infantry below it.16
Shafter had ordered the regiments to divide up into two groups as they left the trail in front of San Juan Heights, infantry to the left and cavalry to the right. “Our orders had been of the vaguest kind, being simply to march to the right and connect with Lawton—with whom, of course, there was no chance of our connecting,” Roosevelt said. They almost immediately had to ford the San Juan River, a broad, shallow stream that ran perpendicular to the trail. With the enemy beginning to open fire, the men made fast for the other side. “Close in to the right, men, at the next rush,” shouted Buckey O’Neill to the men in his troop. “You will have a better chance there.” It was too late for some—men fell almost as soon as they emerged from the water. A trooper named Henry Haywood, who had been a police officer in New York under Roosevelt, was just fifty feet ahead of Jesse Langdon when he was shot in the chest; Langdon recalled that “when he was hit it sounded like you hit your fist into a pillow.” Surgeons and their assistants trudged through the muddy water, pulling wounded men off the banks and then, cradling them, hurried them to the other side. The location, as long as a city block, became known as the “Bloody Ford.”17
Not long after fording the river, Roosevelt and his men looked up again at the balloon. At first, it had been pulled along on the ground by a wagon. But the road was too rough, and a gang of soldiers had taken over. It was already drawing fire from the Spanish cannons and rifles. A shell tore a hole in the side, then another flew through its middle. “The front had burst out with a roar like a brushfire,” wrote Stephen Crane, who was observing from El Poso and later incorporated the scene into his short story “The Price of the Harness”: “The balloon was dying, dying a gigantic public death before the eyes of two armies.” It was not a total waste: while aloft the two men slung in a basket beneath it had spotted a hidden trail off to the left, and relayed their discovery to General Kent, at the head of the First Division, who immediately diverted his regiments along it, thereby relieving the congestion along the main path. But the discovery came at a high price: The balloon settled like a net in the tree branches along the Aguadores River, alongside the point where the path disgorged into the valley below the San Juan Heights. It became a giant marker for where the American troops were pouring onto the battlefield.18
McClernand had ordered the divisions to advance, but told them not to shoot until he gave a signal; as a result, the men waited nearly an hour under withering fire. They hid the best they could among the reeds and river brush along the banks. Some, in a daze, lapped up water from the river to sate their thirst. Some crept forward, to find shelter from Spanish fire along the sunken roads and earthen berms that striped the land around the river valley. But the grass was thick and high and blocked any possible breeze. Some men felt like they were suffocating and stood up, only to be cut down. The fire was coming in so hot and so relentless that a man couldn’t put his finger in the air without getting it shot off, said one general. “I could hear the bullets whizzing through the grass as if they were mowing it down in front of us,” wrote the Rough Rider Billy McGinty. “When I looked up I didn’t find any grass missing, but some of the boys were.” Enemy fire came from ahead, on the hill, but also occasionally from the side and even behind them: Spanish guerrillas had crept into the forest the night before and hid in trees, armed with their rifles, a bag of bullets, and a canteen. The casualty rates soared. Within ten minutes one regiment, the Sixth Infantry, had lost a quarter of its men. “There was not a single yard of ground for a mile to the rear, which was not inside the zone of fire,” Davis said. “For a time it seemed as though every second man was either killed or wounded.”19
Within minutes, casualties w
ere pouring into the dressing station, located back up the trail. The surgeons in charge did their best to find places to shelter the wounded, but there was little solace, even in the forest, and on multiple occasions men came in limping, or carried by two comrades, only to fall dead from a new bullet hole in their back. Crane, wandering among the wounded, looked down to find, staring up at him, the familiar eyes of a former college classmate. “I had looked upon five hundred men with stolidity, or with a conscious indifference which filled me with amazement,” he wrote. “But the apparition of Reuben McNab, the schoolmate, lying there in the mud, with a hole through his lung, awed me into stutterings, set me trembling with a sense of terrible intimacy with this war which heretofore I could have believed was a dream—almost.”20
In their memoirs, men like Roosevelt painted pictures of their fellow soldiers as fearless Spartans. When they were shot, they fell silently, and gallantly. Davis had a different impression. They acted as soldiers, which is to say bravely and gallantly, but also nervously and afraid—often the same man went through the full range of emotions, torn in different directions by different instincts. “It was interesting to observe the pressure which men put upon their nerves suddenly slip from them, and to see them flying panic-stricken for a tree, or dropping on their knees and sliding along the ground,” Davis wrote. He observed one soldier who, whenever he would hear a shot nearby, “his nerves would refuse to support the strain any longer, and he would jump for the bushes and would sit there breathing heavily.” Edward Marshall wrote that men “never failed to fall in little heaps with instantaneous flaccidity of muscles. There were no gradual droppings of one knee, no men who slowly fell while struggling to keep standing. There were no cries. The injured ones did not throw hands up and fall dramatically backward with strident cries and stiffened legs, as wounded heroes fall upon the stage. They fell like clods.”21
The Rough Riders deployed near the far right of the American line, adjacent to the First Cavalry and the 10th Cavalry, the two other regiments in the Second Brigade. As they moved into position, they passed the 71st New York, the regiment that, were it not for the intercession of Russell Alger, the secretary of war, Roosevelt might yet be commanding. They cheered him along, to which he replied, “Don’t cheer, but fight, now’s the time to fight.” That was easy to say, and harder to do—the 71st were volunteers, practically untrained, and armed with antiquated Remington rifles. Though they played no important part in the battle that day, the regiment had one of the highest casualty rates of the battle.22
Even the most veteran regular troops, however, lacked the sort of training in coordinated, large-scale combat that a battle like that day’s required. Many of them, until then, had only rarely seen their entire regiment at once, let alone fought with it, having been deployed in smaller units at small, far-flung forts across the West. In Tampa they had trained together, finally, but even then their colonels and generals did a poor job of keeping order in a crowd, or communicating with other colonels and generals. And so, predictably, at the foot of San Juan Hill, with bullets and shells crashing around them, the men crouched and maneuvered for cover; the regiments mixed together, so that white and black, regular and volunteer soldiers came to compose one general mass of men.
The heat was almost as dangerous as the Spanish rifles. After a few hours, with the thermometer near 100 degrees and their canteens long since empty, soldiers began to pass out from dehydration and heat stroke. “Men gasped on their backs, like fishes in the bottom of a boat, their heads burning inside and out, their limbs too heavy to move,” Davis wrote. “They had been rushed here and there wet with sweat and wet with fording the streams, under a sun that would have made moving a fan an effort.”23
Frank Knox, the Michigan boy who had joined the Rough Riders at Tampa and befriended Theodore Miller, later wrote about the battle to his parents: “It is hard enough to face those ugly bullets with your own carbine smoking in your hand, but it becomes doubly hard when you lay under a hell of fire and can’t fire a shot to reply.” To keep his men calm, Buckey O’Neill was pacing above them as they crouched behind whatever cover they could find, smoking a cigarette and trying to act as unperturbed by the winging bullets as possible. Like Colonel Wood at Las Guasimas, he seemed to believe that it was his obligation as an officer to not show fear, even to invite death. His men begged O’Neill to get down, but he took the cigarette out of his mouth, blew a puff of smoke, looked down at one of them, and replied, “Sergeant, the Spanish bullet has not been made that will kill me.” A moment later, a Spanish bullet hit O’Neill in the mouth, exiting the back of his head. There was very little blood, just a small spattering from his mouth. One of his men, Frank Frantz, ran over to help him, but he was too late. O’Neill was dead before he hit the ground.24
• • •
Most of the journalists and foreign attachés stayed at El Poso, where they could watch the battle unfold from relative safety. What they saw was a disaster in the making. “It was thoroughly evident that the Spaniards had the range of everything in the country,” wrote Frederic Remington. Without sufficient artillery support, the men were pinned—it was, Davis wrote, “like going to a fire with a hook and ladder company and leaving the hose and the steam-engines in the engine house.” The situation was growing desperate. There was no way to retreat, because thousands of men still clogged the trail, but without orders to attack, there was nothing any one man could do to relieve his situation. Charging the hill, if undertaken by a single regiment, would have been suicide against an entrenched enemy with modern weapons.25
It was now past noon, and Shafter, or his surrogates, had yet to order any sort of forward movement. Roosevelt sent back messengers to his commanders, seeking further orders. Finally a lieutenant colonel rode up with orders to “move forward and support the regulars in the assault on the hills in front.” It was what Roosevelt had been waiting to hear. They were now to be in the first wave of the assault. “The instant I received the order I sprang on my horse,” he wrote, “and my ‘crowded hour’ began.”26
Roosevelt, still on horseback, rode down the line of Rough Riders, ordering them up and into a skirmish line. “Boys, this is the day we repeat what we have done before,” he yelled from atop Little Texas. “You know we are surrounded by the regulars. They are around us thick and heavy.” Ahead was a hill, slightly smaller and to the northeast of San Juan Hill, upon which sat a few small buildings and an immense iron pot, likely used to boil cane juice. The Americans called it Kettle Hill.27
Most of the men sprang up, but one Rough Rider, lying behind a bush, hesitated. The man, whose name went unrecorded, looked at Roosevelt confusedly, perhaps already suffering shell shock. Roosevelt urged him up, saying, “Are you afraid to stand up when I am on horseback?” As the man finally got on his knees to rise, he pitched forward on his face—a bullet had hit him in the head, and passed through him lengthwise. “I suppose the bullet had been aimed at me,” Roosevelt said, “at any rate, I, who was on horseback in the open was unhurt, and the man lying flat on the ground in the cover was killed.”28
• • •
Slowly, the mass of men around Roosevelt began to move forward. When the color sergeant from the Third Infantry Regiment was shot, a black soldier named George Berry, who carried the flag of the 10th Cavalry, stopped to pick up the guidon of the Third as well. “Dress on the colors, boys!” Berry yelled as they charged, calling on them to follow the flag. “Dress on the colors!”29
At first, Roosevelt stuck to the back of the regiment as it organized for its assault. But to get them moving, he rallied a group of nearby troopers, and a few men from other troops gathered beside them, and began to lead them forward, through the mass of soldiers. He then rode up to a captain from the Ninth Cavalry Regiment, Eugene Dimmick, whose men were taking cover behind a line of trees and barbed wire. Roosevelt said the Rough Riders had been ordered to join the battle in support of the regular regiments, and to let them pass. But Dimmick, fifty-seven years old and
a veteran of the Civil War, said he’d been told to stay by his colonel. Where is he? Roosevelt asked. I don’t know, Dimmick replied. “Then I am the ranking officer here, and I give the order to charge.” Dimmick had no choice; two of his men even volunteered to hold down the barbed wire so that Roosevelt could ride over it. Little Texas leapt over, and Roosevelt looked back at his men, waving his hat, and gave the order to charge.30
Back on El Poso, Richard Harding Davis heard someone shout and point to the right. “See those men rushing across that field?” the man yelled. “Look! Wheeler’s brigade is charging that hill. There are the Stars and Stripes!” He watched as the cavalry regiments coursed up, fording another small river and then around a pond, some cutting left, while others, following Roosevelt’s lead, went to the right. Davis recorded how “Roosevelt, mounted high on horseback, and charging the rifle-pits at a gallop and quite alone, made you feel that you would like to cheer. . . . It looked like foolhardiness, but as a matter of fact, he set the pace with his horse and inspired the men to follow.”31
In a painting by Remington, who was watching the battle nearby, the Rough Riders run up the hill in an organized line, the force of their charge apparent in the strength of their stride and the determined look on their faces. The reporter Stephen Bonsal compared it to “a great wave sweeping slowly in from the sea.” It is a testament to the errant power of collective memory that Remington and Bonsal, both correspondents, recalled a fact in great detail that is so far from the truth. The charge was not heroic, at least to watch it unfold. The men would run a bit, then take cover, or take aim, then run a little more. “We ran a few feet, fell flat, jumped up, ran, fell flat,” Arthur Cosby recalled. Halfway up the hill he was hit; he was able to walk, so he made his way back to a first-aid station. The shot lodged in Cosby’s chest but somehow missed his organs, and the bullet remained there the rest of his life.32