Capture of Santiago (1898)

BY JOHN BLACK ATKINS

ABOUT five o’clock on the evening of Sunday, July 10, began what is known as the second bombardment. The firing was desultory, and almost entirely on the American side. But even there it was very slight: the guns in one battery, for example, were being fired only once in nine minutes. . . .

When I awoke the next morning the first thing I saw was a new regiment of volunteers just come to the front, with the sunlight aslant on their faces. They all expected to receive their baptism of fire that day; their friends rallied them on the expectation, and they on their side replied facetiously. After the first sunlight came a dulness over the whole sky, so that the day was like night sick—to reverse Shakspere’s phrase. A mist still lay over part of Santiago; everything was still, and dead, and wet, and silent; the leaves of the palms seemed as though they must fall for very heaviness. Perhaps the valley was never more strangely rich and beautiful. A shell came up from the American fleet, fired blindly at a range of over 8,000 yards, and plunged with a shrill cry into the mist; we could not see it burst. The American artillery was now a little stronger than on July 1. To the sixteen guns with which the fighting had begun eight mortars had been added and were now in position. But I heard an officer say that the ammunition for them could be fired away in half an hour with only four mortars in use. The siege guns which came with the first expedition had never been taken off the ships. General Randolph, who had lately arrived with General Miles, brought with him six batteries, and some of these guns were at the front and some were on their way there, but apparently none had yet been put in position. The artillery was of course delayed by the badness of the roads. When I left the front for the last time some of General Randolph’s guns were still stuck in a mud pool. The engineers appeared to do little. Where were they? Were they all building permanent forts in the United States? Of the brooks that one crossed on the ordinary route between General Shafter’s headquarters and the front not one was bridged over; one would think that with so much timber handy they could have been bridged at about the rate of one an hour. As it was, waggons sometimes overturned in them, and soldiers who had to wade through them were made unnecessarily wet.

The American intention was to surround the city as nearly as possible by extending the right of the line till it reached beyond the end of the harbour. Most of the infantry firing was in that direction, and for this reason General Lawton’s division was strengthened by the transference to it of a brigade from General Kent’s division. As on the previous evening, the firing was slight; the most active guns of all were those of the Rough Riders. Perhaps there never were volunteers who went about their business with greater zest than these, or who learned more in so short a time. Not content with the amount of ordinary artillery, they carried about with them quick-firing guns as a kind of personal equipment. Someone had presented this Colt to the regiment, someone else that Gatling, others had bought among them the dynamite gun. Sometimes there was a noise exactly like rapping on a door—that was one of the Colts at work; sometimes there was a noise like the grinding of coffee—that was one of the Gatlings. One of these nights I spent in the Rough Riders’ camp. The men in the trenches were like men out for a holiday; their chief characteristic was a habit of cheering on every possible occasion; they used to cheer when they went into the trenches, and cheer when they came out; they used to cheer when there was food, but also when there was no food. The camp used to laugh for hours over some quite silly joke, which seemed at the time to be mightily amusing and witty, and afterwards it would turn out that it was only that the silliness had been opportune. It was vastly amusing, for example, to hear a certain officer, whose name had incessantly to be repeated, spoken of as General Mango, or another officer spoken of as Lieutenant-Colonel Cocoanut. These light-hearted people did as much firing as they were allowed to do with the quick-firing instruments which one had come to look upon almost as their playthings. The dynamite gun was not fired very often, because it used to become jammed, but everybody loved it as a great big expensive toy. The firing string was not very long—not longer than that of an ordinary field-piece—but, as the operator used to explain, if the gun blew up you were no better off fifty yards away than five. When the gun was fired there was very little noise—only the sound of a rocket; but when the shell exploded there was a tremendous detonation. It was said that everything near the explosion was devastated. In one case a Spanish gun and a tree were seen to be hurled bodily into the air. It was my singular misfortune, however, to find no traces of the devastation done by this terrible instrument.

Colonel Roosevelt, the lieutenant-colonel of the Rough Riders, since elected Governor of New York, was a man who impressed one. He is the typical strong man, with the virtues and defects of the strong man; creating opposition and making enemies, but in the end beating down in his own direct, honest, didactic way the opposition which he himself has created, and turning, often, into friends the enemies whom he himself has made. So that in every adventure he almost inevitably—to use the expressive American phrase—’gets there.’ The impulse of which he is capable was illustrated by his sudden resignation of his Assistant Secretaryship to the Navy to command this whimsical, gallant regiment. The Rough Riders were the devotees of his person.

All the morning of July 11 the bombardment was a half-hearted affair. Neither side left its trenches. At noon General Toral, who had succeeded General Linares, sent out a flag of truce saying that he would meet General Miles personally in conference the next day. With the flag the firing ceased, and, as all the world knows, never began again. . . .

John Black Atkins, (London, 1899), 176–182 passim.