by Clay Risen
Hours later on July 2, lit by a bright moon, the Rough Riders came under a sudden barrage from the Spanish lines. The Spanish started by attacking one of the cossack posts, out in front of the line; the soldiers in the trenches behind it, convinced that they saw hordes of shadows advancing in the dark, opened fire. The enemy was haphazard and ill aimed in their shooting, and so was the return fire. Roosevelt, who had been down the hill in the Rough Rider camp, came running forward. He could see, in the distance, the flash of Spanish rifles, scores of them, but he could also tell that they were stationary. This was not an assault. He ran along the trenches, fully exposed to the enemy, yelling “Stop! Hold your fire!” The next day, with a short truce established for the Spanish to gather their dead, the Rough Riders watched as mules pulled away five cartloads. “Well boys,” Roosevelt said, “looks to me as though you hadn’t done so bad a job after all.”12
• • •
At the Executive Mansion in Washington, the war cabinet—President McKinley, Secretary Alger, and Secretary Long—waited in the second-floor war room for news from Shafter. The general had been silent since July 1, and they were getting much of their information from newspapers. One of the striking things about war is how it brings into focus a society’s most backward- and forward-looking qualities. In 1898, America was still fighting with a nineteenth-century mind-set, and in some cases with weapons and equipment held over from the Civil War. But it was also embracing technologies that would come to define the twentieth century: In New York, hundreds of automobiles already puttered down the street, frightening horses and pedestrians. The telegraph, though hardly new by 1898, enabled the transmission of information from the battlefield to Washington within minutes. Those men in the war room were now able to reach across thousands of miles, almost instantly, to communicate almost instantaneously with their officers in the field. Government officials were not the only ones using the undersea cables, which is why, in Shafter’s silence, the newspapers were better sources of current information than their own general.13
Early on the morning of July 3, Alger sent Shafter a message: “I waited with the President until 4 o’clock this morning for news from you relative to Saturday’s battle. Not a word was received, nor has there been up to this hour.” Finally, several minutes later, the telegraph machine began to chatter. It was not what they wanted to read: “I am seriously considering withdrawing about five miles, and taking up a new position on the high ground between the San Juan River and Siboney.” McKinley and, especially, Alger would have none of it. They wrote back insisting that Shafter stay in place.14
Unfortunately, word of Shafter’s plan leaked out to the front line on the San Juan Heights, and officers and soldiers started to mutter mutinous thoughts under their breath. They called him “Fall Back Shafter.” To mollify both Washington and the front line, later on July 3 Shafter sent an ultimatum to the Spanish, which he dictated to McClernand. It read: “I shall be obliged, unless you surrender, to shell Santiago de Cuba. Please inform the citizens of foreign countries, and all women and children, that they should leave the city before 10 o’clock to-morrow morning. Very respectfully, your obedient servant, William R. Shafter.”15
• • •
However sincere Shafter’s message, it was about to be rendered moot. “If I were to live a thousand years and a thousand centuries never should I forget that 3d day of July, 1898, nor do I believe that Spain will ever forget it,” wrote José Müller y Tejeiro, the officer and chronicler of the Spanish defense of Santiago. The day, a Sunday, began normally enough. On the heights, the men continued digging. In Siboney, the sick and wounded continued to straggle into the hospital. And out to sea, Admiral Sampson decided that the blockade was tight enough, and the Spanish fleet docile enough, that he could send two of his ships to Guantánamo to refuel. Then he directed his flagship, the New York, to sail for Daiquirí, where he would land and then travel to meet with General Shafter at the front and press the general to make a final assault on the city. Two Rough Riders, Alexander Brodie and James McClintock, had come down with malaria and managed to board the Olivette, which was serving as a hospital ship and was floating just to the east of the squadron.16
The blockade was not as tight as Sampson had imagined. The eight remaining warships formed a semicircle around the mouth of Santiago Harbor, about eight miles out, like cats around a mousehole. Several had shut down some of their engines, to save fuel, and had allowed the tide to push them out of position. Only the cruiser Oregon had steam in its boilers; the rest would take at least twenty minutes to get moving. After a month of blockade duty, the days had fallen into a routine, and no one imagined that this day could bring anything different.17
Then, at 9:31, the unimaginable happened. The Spanish cruiser Infanta María Teresa, Admiral Cervera’s flagship, its flags flying proudly, was coming out of the harbor mouth and steaming to the west. The day before, Cervera, after registering his formal opposition, had consented to Madrid’s commands to take the fleet out of the harbor and make a dash for safety. Failing that, they were to engage with the American ships, and do as much damage as possible before they were destroyed. Cervera had never wanted war, had never wanted to sail from Spain in the first place, but he did as he was ordered, even if it meant his likely death. He thought the entire war was suicide, so what was one more, final push? There was something fatalistically poetic about it that may have appealed to Cervera, too: The destruction of the fleet could only herald the end of Spanish control of Cuba, and if this was the end of Spanish rule, better to go out with a bang. As one of his captains said later, “It was the signal that the history of four centuries of grandeur was at an end and that Spain was becoming a nation of the fourth class. Poor Spain!”18
On paper, Cervera and his fleet actually stood a decent chance against the Americans. Most of his ships were faster than the Americans’, and he had the advantage of surprise. Had Cervera made a run for it at night or in a storm—as Sampson had feared he would—it might have worked, at least for the swiftest ships. But the Spanish hulls were fouled with barnacles, and their fastest ship, the Cristóbal Colón, was also the least armed. Their only hope was to slip through the space between the westernmost American ship, the Brooklyn, and the shore, before the blockade could get up steam.19
The Americans opened fire on the Infanta María Teresa immediately, even before their ships were in position. For ten brutal minutes, the cruiser was alone with the American fleet. Still stunned, the American ships followed a preset battle plan: As they engaged their engines they converged on the harbor mouth, even as the Infanta María Teresa slipped westward. And they continued to press toward the harbor even as three more ships, the Vizcaya, the Colón, and the Oquendo, followed out of the harbor. (Two more, the gunboats Plutón and Furor, proceeded a few minutes later.) Shots from the American ships occasionally went high, flying over the hills and landing in the water of Santiago Harbor, close enough for the men on San Juan Heights to see.20
Despite being caught by surprise, over the next hour, the American fleet made quick work of Cervera’s fleet. Eventually they tacked to the west, and gave pursuit of the fleeing Spanish. It became a running duel, with both sides firing rapid salvos, so much that the entire coastline, for miles out to sea, was blanketed with smoke. Temperatures inside the fire rooms rose far into the triple digits; men stripped to their underwear and still dozens were overcome with heatstroke. Remarkably, only one American died, a yeoman on board the Brooklyn named George H. Ellis. Ordered to visually estimate the range to the Vizcaya, he stood up on the forward deck and shouted “2,200 yards,” and a Spanish shell took off his head.21
One by one Cervera’s ships caught fire and, to save themselves from sinking, ran aground on the beaches west of Santiago. The Infanta María Teresa was out of commission within forty minutes of leaving the harbor. Fifteen minutes later the Oquendo, its decks aflame, beached as well. The Vizcaya went aground at Aserradero, where Shafter and Sampson had first gone ashore to me
et García, not a month prior. The Plutón and the Furor, outgunned, surrendered quickly. The Colón almost got away, but alone, it bore the full brunt of the American fleet, and within a few hours it, too, had surrendered. Watching the ships burn, the sailors aboard the Texas let out a victory roar—to which the ship’s captain, John Woodward Philip, replied with one of history’s famous statements of battlefield empathy: “Don’t cheer, boys! The poor devils are dying.”22
The Americans spent the afternoon rescuing what men they could from the burning Spanish hulks. They plucked Admiral Cervera from the flame-broiled Infanta María Teresa; 1,813 others were saved and taken prisoner from the fleet, but another 323 perished. “Far from being depressed, the admiral was in high spirits,” wrote Lieutenant Harry P. Huse, who had lunch with Cervera aboard the Gloucester. “He had done his duty to the utmost limits, and was relieved of the terrible burden of responsibility that had weighed upon him since leaving the Cape Verde Islands,” over three months before.23
At two o’clock the next morning, walking home from the War Department, Secretary Alger encountered a newsboy hawking the extra edition: “Full Account of the Destruction of the Spanish Fleet!” Alger shook his head. Sampson had achieved his victory. Where was Shafter’s?24
• • •
The American naval victory complicated matters for Shafter, who was now a man without a clear mission. The entire point of his campaign had been to assist the Navy in capturing the Spanish fleet; with that fleet destroyed, there was no purpose in taking the city. He could not retreat, even tactically. His men would mutiny. He could not go forward, because the Spanish defenses between San Juan Heights and the city were deadly in their density: barbed wire entanglements arrayed to funnel attacking soldiers into fire lanes, trenches, and booby traps, and towering barricades of sand-filled wine butts, behind which stood several thousand Spanish soldiers. But he could not, he was convinced, wait much longer—the Cubans joked that their greatest weapons against the Spanish were June, July, and August, the months of heavy rains and malaria, and now the Spanish hoped to extend the siege long enough that they could turn those same weapons against the Americans. Shafter had something else to worry about, too: The Cubans arrayed to the west had failed to stop a flying column of 3,300 Spanish soldiers from entering the city on the night of July 2.25
Shafter wanted to do whatever it took to get out of Cuba, even if it meant cutting a deal with the Spanish. The afternoon of the 3rd, he arranged a day-long truce with the Spanish, who were now led by General José Toral y Velázquez, after General Linares had been wounded on the 1st. Then, on July 4, while Americans celebrated both the naval victory and Independence Day, Shafter wrote Washington to say that he wanted to negotiate a compromise with the Spanish. The reply was once again unambiguous: “You will accept nothing but an unconditional surrender, and should take extra precautions to prevent the enemy’s escape.”26
The truce, while it did not relieve the men of their duties in the trenches, at least allowed them to stand up straight without worrying about being shot. “Everybody drew a long breath and thanked God,” wrote John J. Pershing, a lieutenant with the segregated 10th Cavalry (the source of his derogatory nickname, Black Jack, which would stick with him for his entire career, even when he commanded the 1.2-million-strong American Expeditionary Force during World War I). Officers read a thank-you message from McKinley to their troops, bands played, and a contingent of Rough Riders sang “Fair Harvard.” But there was tension in the moment. Only now, with the adrenaline no longer flowing, could the men stop to recognize how much they had lost, and what it would take to win the rest if the Spanish refused to surrender. “I went up to the top of the trenches and I could see the town’s people moving about and the soldiers cooking their dinners,” wrote Frank Knox. “Santiago is a pretty place. It seems a pity to lay it in ruins.”27
To give the civilians of Santiago time to leave, Shafter extended the truce until noon of July 5. Just before the hour, the mayor of Santiago opened the gates to the city, and 12,000 children, women, and old men came trudging out, headed for El Caney. Many of the women had put on their finest clothing; emaciated and sickly, they marched in pastel dresses, carrying matching parasols. But nothing could mask the desperation of the procession, comprised of “mothers with little naked babies with their little ribs sticking out and their arms and legs like pipe-stems,” wrote a correspondent for Leslie’s. Soon a town built for 500 people was home, at least temporarily, to twenty-four times that number. By the end the campaign, there were 20,000 civilians camped in El Caney’s bombed-out buildings and along its muddy, cobblestone streets.28
The Americans distributed what food they had to offer to the Cuban refugees, though for the most part they had nothing to give. The American soldiers were stunned by the tragic humanity of it all. Some had heard about recent refugee crises in Armenia and Greece, and of course some had read about similar crises in history books. But this was a magnitude and severity they were not prepared for. Later generations of American soldiers would learn, as part of their training, to deal with civilians as a matter of fighting a war. But in 1898, there was no protocol. “I shall never forget it,” said the Leslie’s correspondent. “It was the longest day I’ve lived.”29
The regimental officers, on orders from Shafter and his staff, tried to prevent their men from coming close to the refugees, for fear of disease or, worse, Spanish guerrillas hidden in their midst. They said they would arrest them, and even court-martial them. But for the most part, the men didn’t listen. They helped “carry their sick and decrepit and what little personal property they possessed and even carrying the little children for tired and overburdened mothers,” wrote the Leslie’s correspondent. They handed out spare rations—mostly hardtack, which the Cubans called “bisqueet”—but it was never enough. The hunger-induced barbarity of the crowd almost overwhelmed them. “The men pulled back women and children, and the strong got the food, the weak being shoved back,” the correspondent wrote. “There was a struggling mass, waving cups, pans, baskets, bags and all sorts of receptacles, some hoisting them on sticks in the effort to get over the heads of the crowd in front.”30
Eventually Roosevelt passed by and put a stop to it. “Boys, I did not think I could really love you more than I did but since witnessing what I have just seen I love you still more,” he told his men, who were among the most eager in helping the refugees. “But you know these people have fever among them and my command at present is in fine condition and free from any malignant fevers and we all want to go to Puerto Rico, but should fever break out in the regiment that fact would debar us from joining the expedition, so you must not go near these people any more.” Even the gentlest admonishment from Roosevelt achieved what the threat of arrest or court-martial could not.31
• • •
For a while, it looked like Theodore Miller would recover—not his full health; he was paralyzed from the neck down. But the cruel promise of a Mauser wound, because it was so clean, held that if you survived the first day or two, the wound was not going to be fatal, though any number of diseases might get you in the fetid hospital at Siboney. If a soldier could avoid those, he was going home. In fact, only thirteen men who arrived at the hospital with gunshots died from their wounds. The others, more than a hundred, survived (though hundreds of others died of diseases picked up along the way). And for a while, the doctors thought Miller might survive as well, and at least make it back to Ohio to convalesce. He was awake and dictating notes and chatting with friends, and making new ones.32
The hospital at Siboney comprised a few small buildings on a bluff above the beach. They were mostly used for administration—patients, in the main, slept in the same dog tents they had used throughout the campaign, which meant lying for hours, days even, on the hard ground with their lower limbs, at least up to their knees, exposed to the elements. Thomas Laird, a private, recalled: “The first night after the fight I tried to sleep near the field hospitals. I was kept awake by th
e awful shrieks and cries of the poor men lying in them.” Two weeks after the Battle of San Juan Heights, there were more than 100 cases of yellow fever in the camp.33
Officers at the front, including Roosevelt, did everything they could to prevent their soldiers from being sent to Siboney. They knew that, however bad a man’s wounds or illness, going back to the hospital was a death sentence—too many of them recovered from their battlefield injuries only to die of a disease picked up in the unsanitary hospital. The nine-mile trip alone was debilitating. Many men had to walk, or be carried by their comrades. At first there was no one to guide the wounded back to the coast, so they wandered, by the dozens, around the Cuban countryside. “For miles along the trail one has to wade through mud up to the knees, and the only variety in this experience is furnished when one gets to a stream of water,” a reporter for the Washington Times wrote. “There the mud is not so thick.” Occasionally a man would topple over, the victim of a Spanish sharpshooter who had worked his way behind the lines and sat picking off Americans from up a tree. Eventually squads of soldiers were dispatched to hunt them down. (The snipers were especially despised, not only because they targeted wounded men, but because they carried Remington rifles, which left a much nastier wound than the Mauser.)34
Those who did find transportation were only marginally better off, having to endure hours of bone shaking along the rutted, fetid half rivers of mud that constituted the main thoroughfares between the front and the rear. There were no ambulances, which were fitted with leather or spring shock absorbers. Those, like the artillery, had been left in Tampa for want of space. If they were caught in a rainstorm, the wounded might have to pause to wait for the resulting flash floods to subside, and hope that they didn’t wash out a stretch of the route in the process. Men who died in transit were often buried, just two feet under, without the dignity of a coffin, alongside the road. As the rains washed away the paths and new trails had to be blazed, the teamsters would occasionally encounter bodies half exhumed by the rains. In the humidity, the smell of the rotting corpses and decomposing plant life that had been trampled underfoot made moving along the routes nearly unbearable.35