The Crowded Hour

by Clay Risen

  Almost instantly, the conversation back home turned from what America had done at San Juan Heights to what it would do now, with everything it has won—first the Philippines and now, it seemed, Cuba as well. The country was drunk on its feelings of national pride. “The flags flying everywhere and the extra newspapers issued every hour or oftener remind us continually of the war, but in New York City the question of ‘what will we do with this and that island when captured’ seems to attract even more attention than the war,” wrote one reporter.55

  But of course the Americans had not yet won the war, or even the campaign. Santiago remained to be captured, and with it the Spanish fleet. Yet even this first major victory had come at significant cost. And so, in the coming weeks a backlash against Shafter began to form. Shafter had chosen to alienate reporters, and his mistake was a costly one. The casualty rate was unacceptable—overall 1,240 American soldiers had been killed, wounded, or gone missing, against 480 Spanish. Even more than the Spanish themselves, in the American press Shafter was the bad guy, and soon, by extension, were many of the other generals and civilian staff in Washington. Up until then, press coverage, and even personal reports from the front, were generally positive. But after the capture of San Juan Heights, a new twist emerged. The men and the line officers had won the fight—but in spite of, and not because of, the general officers’ leadership. Davis and others were quick to blame Shafter for refusing to transfer command, because he was much too sick to be at the front. “So great the vanity and self-confidence of the man, that . . . he did not ask to be relieved of his command,” Davis wrote. “It was not on account of Shafter, but in spite of Shafter, that the hills were taken.”56

  Roosevelt expressed similar sentiments in his correspondence. “Not since the campaign of Crassus against the Parthians has there been so criminally incompetent a General as Shafter,” he wrote to Lodge four days later, “and not since the expedition against Walcheren has there been grosser mismanagement than in this. The battle simply fought itself.” And whatever one thinks about Shafter’s leadership up to that point, there’s no debate that Davis and Roosevelt were right: Once the battle was joined, Shafter and his top generals left the stage, and the critical decisions about how and when to attack and maneuver on the field fell to the regimental officers. The nation’s martial genius lay not in the generals or the planners in Washington, but in the troops at the front, the Everymen who made up in pluck and courage what they lacked in discipline. Said one general to Davis: “We had as little to do as the referee at a prize-fight who calls ‘time.’ We called ‘time’ and they did the fighting.”57

  There was one final question, which arose immediately and dogged Roosevelt for the rest of his life. Perhaps out of confusion, or just in search of good copy, the press back home conflated the sequence and arrangement of events during the assault, and within a few days it was an accepted consensus, among large swaths of the public, that Theodore Roosevelt had led the charge up San Juan Hill, and not just Kettle Hill. The fact that Roosevelt himself never made this claim mattered very little. Some of the blame rests with Davis, who later merged the two in his reporting. In any event, every so often during Roosevelt’s political career in Albany, as governor, and then the presidency—and especially during the 1904 presidential campaign—some self-identified muckraking journalist would revisit the question, and declare that Roosevelt had lied about the whole thing. Had that person examined the record, and then looked at the facts of the charge up Kettle Hill, he would have seen that Roosevelt had nothing to lie about. The assault he did lead was more than enough glory for one man.

  • • •

  By the afternoon, the Americans were in command of San Juan Heights, and Shafter, who was feeling well enough to issue orders, decided to pause, rather than push on to Santiago. Even if Shafter had ordered the assault to continue, it is doubtful the men could have followed through. The day’s fighting followed a week of debilitating, sweaty, malarial camp life, capped by an afternoon and evening and, for some, a late night of marching. Many men had eaten but a single piece of hardtack since waking up that morning. Most of them, even most of the regulars, had never experienced combat, let alone sustained, intense fighting like this. With the hilltops secured, the American soldiers regrouped their regiments, ferried the wounded back to dressing stations, ate what food they had, and began to dig in. That evening, just a few hundred men held the defenses at San Juan Heights. When darkness fell and the battlefield was quiet once again, one Rough Rider said, “never was night more welcome.”58

  CHAPTER 12

  “HUMPTY-DUMPTY ON THE WALL”

  On the afternoon of July 1, with the Spanish in retreat and the fighting at a lull, the American soldiers could pause to assess their position. Despite routing the Spanish from the San Juan Heights, their hold, Richard Harding Davis wrote, was “painfully suggestive of Humpty-Dumpty on the wall.” Precious few soldiers faced thousands of Spanish still in Santiago, presumably planning a counterattack. There was no single American line; instead, clumps of soldiers crouched here and there, separated by as much as 200 yards of empty space. “They were so few in number,” Davis added, “so utterly inadequate to the extent of the hills they had captured and were supposed to hold that their position was like that of a man clinging to a church steeple and unable, without breaking his neck, to slip down on any side; but who still proclaimed to the air about him, ‘See how I hold this steeple!’ ” As Davis kneeled alongside them, Stephen Crane came crab-walking up to the front, sat down, sweating, and said, “Well, here we are.”1

  The Americans had not planned on laying siege to Santiago; in fact, they had not made any plans at all for what to do after taking the San Juan Heights. Shafter seems to have intended to capture the city in a single, massive assault, but if so he never explained how he meant to achieve it—where the Spanish weak spots were, where the best angles of attack on the city lay. Having not conducted the necessary reconnaissance, he and his officers would not have known where to start. At the same time, Shafter had made no plans for a siege—he left most of his heavy cannons in Tampa, and he did not bring enough shovels, telegraph cable, and other necessities for a long-term investment of a city the size of Santiago. But with thousands of Spanish troops well-defended inside the city, he had little choice.

  Shafter did not receive much help from Washington. During the course of the siege, President McKinley, Secretary Alger, and General Miles would sour on General Shafter, but they offered no plan of their own—no plan for how to take Santiago, and no plan for how to move on from there to capture the rest of the island from the Spanish, who still controlled Cuba’s major cities. And so, for much of July, the American campaign against Santiago became a siege by default, and a race against the heat and tropical diseases that were already eroding the American forces.

  Of all the regiments, the Rough Riders’ position was the most perilous. When Roosevelt halted his charge on San Juan Hill on July 1, he and about ninety men were 500 yards ahead of the main line of American troops along the heights, a skinny salient that would undoubtedly be the first point of assault when the Spanish counterattack began. They lay on the ground, propped on their elbows, panting, hungry. Almost immediately, Spanish artillery and small arms fire began to pour in from the second and third lines of trenches between the Americans and the city. One of the first artillery shots from the Spanish exploded directly over one of the Rough Riders’ newly dug rifle pits, killing two men and wounding three.2

  Shafter ordered Wheeler, who had recovered enough of his health to take nominal control of the cavalry division, to hold the hills at all cost. Roosevelt, with his 90 men out in front, was sandwiched between a complement of 10th Cavalry soldiers on the left and another band of Rough Riders to his right. Unwilling to wait for night to begin digging, he sent men to the Spanish blockhouses to look for entrenching tools. They returned with shovels, picks, and axes. Those without tools used empty cans, even their hands, to dig. They buried the dead Spani
sh in their east-facing trenches and spent the afternoon digging new ones, facing west toward Santiago. “Men who had never before handled pick or shovel, took hold with willing hands and labored side by side,” recalled one trooper.3

  While most of the regiment dug in, six men carried the wounded Theodore Miller toward the rear, in search of a field hospital. They improvised a stretcher by fastening a blanket between two poles. He winced with every movement and complained of the chills, despite the heat; they wrapped him in a blanket and kept moving. Miller’s injuries took his friends by surprise—unaccustomed, as many still were, to the reality of combat. “Only a few minutes before two others had been shot by my side and had gone to the rear,” one trooper recalled. “I thought his wound similar—not serious and I said ‘Miller, I will come to you in a minute.’ He replied in his kindly unselfish tone, ‘That is all right . . . don’t bother about me.’ ” The men eventually carried him all the way back to Siboney, nine miles on foot, unable to find a vehicle to take them. Wagons were in short supply, and the corps gave priority to moving supplies up to the toehold of a front that the Americans had won that day.4

  • • •

  That evening and all through the night the Rough Riders took turns digging and trying to sleep, if just for a few minutes. Joseph Crockett, a private, offered to make coffee for the regiment, and that evening doled out cup after cup of a strong brew he made from abandoned rations he found in one of the trenches. “All that night we worked like beavers digging rifle pits although we hadn’t had a bite to eat since daylight,” wrote trooper William Saunders. The men on the line had all left their gear at Sevilla or El Poso, and so most slept on the bare ground. A few found blankets in the blockhouses, including Henry Bardshar, Roosevelt’s orderly, who gave his discovery to his boss—who, in turn, shared it with Dade Goodrich.5

  At 3 a.m. there came the sound of a rifle shot, and the squeal of a dog, and then the Spanish line opened up. In the darkness, aim was nonexistent, on both sides. It was not until the morning that Roosevelt learned what had happened: A Rough Rider, seeing a dog but thinking it a lurking Spanish soldier, shot at it; he hit his mark, but gave away his position with his muzzle flash. The firing had lasted almost an hour, with little effect to either side except a loss of precious sleep.6

  Though the regiment took fewer casualties on July 2, it was in some ways a harder and more perilous day than the previous. It rained without end, torrential buckets of cold, piercing rain. The men had very little food, and their personal supplies, including their tents, were at Sevilla, where they had camped before the assault on the San Juan Heights. Still they dug, and watched, and dug some more—it was now a race to entrench before the real counterattack began. They didn’t have long to wait. Roosevelt was up early that morning, peering through his field glasses at the Spanish line. He saw movement among the Spanish soldiers, and seconds later they were shooting at him, and then the entire line was under fire from Spanish rifles and artillery. The American cannons, which had been brought up within 500 yards of the front the night before, began to fire in return, and in a moment thick clouds of white smoke hung over the heights, obscuring the regiments from each other. All morning and into the afternoon, the two sides traded shots and shells, but neither dared an assault. The Rough Riders, so far out front, were in a particularly tough spot—exposed to enemy fire in front, they also had to mind return fire from the other regiments behind them. Ten more were wounded that day, and four more killed.7

  The trenches provided cover, but only barely. A single night of digging wasn’t enough, and in most places they were just a few feet deep, forcing the men to crouch or curl or kneel for hours. “If anyone had discovered a more uncomfortable place to spend a hot day than in a four foot trench, I have yet to hear of it,” wrote Frank Knox. “Oh, the misery of those ten hours I put in there I shall never forget.” The situation was especially dire for about sixty Rough Riders who had been separated from the rest of the regiment during the fighting on July 1. The next morning Billy McGinty spotted them, near the Spanish line and crowded in a few shallow, hastily dug trenches. They were trying to crawl back, but they were pinned down. Roosevelt also saw them. “We’ve got to get them some food and drink,” he said. McGinty volunteered to act as courier. Roosevelt immediately stepped forward and said he would go too. McGinty stared back—was Roosevelt fearless or a fool? He was in charge of the regiment, not an expendable member of the rank and file. Finally another trooper, Woodbury Kane, said he’d go in Roosevelt’s place. “The whole regiment is depending on you, but no one is depending on us,” he said. The men grabbed pails of water and cans of tomatoes—all that was on hand—and made a dash for it. The Spanish poured fire on them, but they made it safely. The cans didn’t, though—the bundle in McGinty’s hands was leaking red juice down his leg.8

  By mid-afternoon the divisions had more or less re-formed, and arranged themselves on the line along San Juan Heights. General Jacob Kent’s First Division, to the left, and General Henry Lawton’s Second Division, which had hurried from El Caney overnight, to the right braced the cavalry division, of which the Rough Riders were the furthest out in front. Each regiment dug its own trenches and cossack posts—small pits in front of the line, large enough for a couple of men to act as an early-warning position against a Spanish attack—and maintained its own headquarters in the immediate rear, at the foot of San Juan Hill. Most, including the Rough Riders, didn’t have time to dig communications trenches, which meant that moving from the rear to the front, and back again, involved a mad dash across open ground, vulnerable to any Spanish soldier with a rifle and half-decent aim.

  Few correspondents ever take stock of a battlefield immediately after the fighting stops. Too often it is a cue for a writer to move to the abstract, to assess wins and losses. But what remains after the shooting also tells a story. While the Battle of San Juan Heights was undoubtedly an American victory, the cost was on full display in the roughly ten square miles between El Poso and the new American front line. Everything higher than a foot had a bullet hole in it, and most of the trees had been blown over by artillery. Small fires smoldered. Broad stains where men had bled out from their wounds darkened the soil. Armies of land crabs more numerous than the Fifth Corps clicked across the earth, and the sky was dark with vultures. Thousands of blanket rolls, canteens, cartridges, hats, boots, cups, half-eaten rations, empty cans, and tunics littered the ground. And the bodies—so many scattered around, many moving, others immobile and already bloating. One of the few to walk the battlefield afterward, the correspondent Caspar Whitney, wrote of “dead men lying beside the road, ghastly in their unstudied positions, men dying, men wounded, passing back to division hospital, some being carried, some limping, some sitting by the road-side, all strangely silent, bandaged and bloody.”9

  To handle the urgent cases, the corps had established a field hospital at the Aguadores River. Once stabilized, the wounded were sent to the rear, at Siboney. Set up for fifty men, the hospital soon had 400. Understaffed and undersupplied, it was more like a butcher’s shop: a handful of surgeons reverting to Civil War methods—mostly amputation, with better antiseptic but without even mild anesthetic—in the face of the endless flow of bloodied and battered men. “They stood at the operating tables, wholly without sleep, and almost without rest or food, for twenty-one consecutive hours,” wrote the correspondent George Kennan (uncle and namesake of the diplomat), who visited the hospital on July 2, “and yet, in spite of their tremendous exertions, hundreds of seriously or dangerously wounded men lay on the ground for hours.” The few tents the medical officers had erected were already overflowing, and by noon dozens of patients were splayed outside, under the sun. No attendants came by with water or shelter, and so they boiled, adding heat stroke and dehydration to their long list of battlefield traumas. And after their surgeries, back they went, to wait for many more hours in the sun, or the chilling night air, for transportation to Siboney. Kennan estimated that by midnight on the 2nd, s
ome 800 men lay in and around the field hospital. Many of those men would have died had it not been for Clara Barton and a team of Red Cross workers, who arrived that evening with blankets, tents, malted milk, and a nutrient-rich beverage they called “Red Cross Cider.”10

  That evening General Shafter called a war council. He was troubled. All day, reports had been coming in from officers on the front line, describing how tenuous their position was—one determined push from the Spanish, and it would collapse. The battle had been costlier than he’d expected, and there was now no chance of pressing on into the city, at least not for a few weeks, until fresh regiments and supplies arrived. At the same time, he guessed—wrongly—that Santiago was well-provisioned, with enough food, water, and ammunition to hold out until the rainy season, when tropical diseases would finish the job that the Spanish soldiers had begun on July 1. Shafter was still too weak to stand, or even sit; his aides found a wooden door and fashioned it into a bed on which he reclined, his generals arrayed around him. Shafter proposed that they withdraw from the line, to at least El Poso, and try again. There was murmuring of agreement, but also fierce dissent. General Wheeler, well on the mend from his illness or at least pretending to be, rose up and in all his five foot four inches of Southern indignation said he would rather die than see a single yard conceded. Some nodded their heads, but others stood resolute with Shafter. There were too few reinforcements; the men on the line were more or less all there was. Shafter said to give it a day, and dismissed the officers for the night.11