Ever After (37 page)

The morning wore on and the sun got hot, while the transports wallowed and the small boats bobbing beside them slowly filled with joking, swearing, seasick men, girdled with glistening cartridges, the white blanket rolls gleaming across their shoulders, and their
muskets
pointing any which way. Delays were caused by over-cautious captains who would not bring their precious vessels close enough in shore to facilitate loading the boats—for the transports were all merchant ships, still owned by commercial companies who would hold their officers responsible for any damage suffered. The Navy steam launches scurried distractedly about after whole battalions marooned on distant decks and wildly apprehensive lest they be forgotten and miss the picnic ashore.

For nearly three hours the loading of the small boats went on in full view of the beach and the blockhouse and the jungle, and
nothing
stirred on shore. Then Lawton’s first brigade signalled that it was ready, and the launches began to marshal their long strings of open boats on tow-lines for an untangled dash to the beach. It was also the signal for the Navy bombardment to begin, and for another twenty minutes the crowded boats were held back while the big guns pounded and the village took fire and bits of beach and jungle were blown into the air. But there was no answering fire.

In a silence which was loud and ominous after the echoing voices of the guns had ceased, the bow-to-bow shoreward race began. The
steel pier was too high to be used at all. The first boat touched at the wooden dock and the first men jumped for it, and the rotten planking held under them and they dragged their comrades up
beside
them, timing the swell as best they could. Other boats grounded some yards out and their occupants took off their shoes and rolled up their trousers and waded in. Two infantrymen fell into the water and were drowned by their equipment. They were the only two casualties of a landing which invited holocaust. For some
incredible
reason of inertia or bad judgment or caution—for they were not cowards—the Spanish had withdrawn from the town to inland defences, throwing away their best chance at turning back the invasion.

Daisy went waltzing in beside the Navy boat which was landing Rough Riders—ahead of their turn because its officer knew the lieutenant-colonel. Bracken and Fitz jumped for the dock and made land dry shod, and Daisy backed oft to await developments. Fitz stood on the white beach, gazing first at the mountains, then at the little bay, which was black with boats and men and confused,
swimming
animals—the only way to land four-legged transport was by opening the side hatches and pushing the unwilling beasts into the water.

“We don’t deserve this,” Fitz said solemnly. “God is sure good to Shafter. Look—natives.”

A ragged band of
insurrectos
was straggling in to meet the
Americans
. Even a non-military eye could see at a glance that as allies they would be pretty negligible. This was the native force with which the American Army was to co-operate in driving out the Spanish rule.

“Think we’d better send back to Tampa for some reinforcements that wear shoes,” Bracken said. “The Colonel seems to be mad about something special. Let’s go and see what it is.”

The Colonel was mad because one of his horses had been drowned. The pony called Texas stood dripping faithfully beside his master while Roosevelt’s coloured body-servant recounted almost with tears the fate of the other horse. While they all stood mourning,
thunderous
cheers broke out from the boats, the beach, and the dock, and all the whistles on all the transports began to blow with banshee glee. The stars-and-stripes had gone up on the cupola of the Spanish blockhouse on the hill.

By the time the swift tropic nightfall struck the Diaquiri beach things had reached the usual high state of American pandemonium, and when the bright, unwinking Navy searchlights were turned on to make it possible to continue the job of unloading men all night, they illumined a most improbable scene of light-hearted inefficiency.

Shrieks of laughter greeted each awkward spill or harmless
accident
. Cheers went up for all minor accomplishments. The men still
awaiting their turn on the transports sang
There’ll
Be
a
Hot
Time
in
the
Old
Town
Tonight,
and stamped in unison to pass the dull hours of inaction. The men who had reached shore stripped and went swimming in the surf and danced naked round the bonfires on the beach, yelling like Indians from sheer exuberance, while the ragged Cuban contingent looked on in paralysed bewilderment, and the officers gave up with helpless mirth the task of curbing the
rodeo-football
-rally spirits of the men. The sea was full too of anxiously swimming animals, their halters strung together and attached to rowboats, while cheery buglers on
the beach tried to guide them in with the musical water-call. The little dock where supplies were coming in lacked some of its planks so that the bare girders, two feet apart, were often the only foothold. These were awash most of the time and very slippery. Many precious articles fell through and were sometimes recovered by diving for them, but most of them stayed there. It never occurred to anybody to repair the dock, and anyway the Engineers were down the coast just then on a job for the Cuban Army—Shafter’s orders.

Several miles along the jungle trail which ran parallel to the shore to the port of Siboney, Lawton’s brigade were already pitching their dog-tents under the royal palms and beating off with some hysteria hordes of large land crabs, varying in colour from pale orchid to leprous, which scuttled fearlessly over the blanketed forms of tired, restless men who were trying to catch some sleep their first night in the field. From Siboney the trail turned inland, passing over a gap in the coast range into the rolling country around Santiago.

Lawton’s men flushed the Spanish rear guard at Siboney next day, but the enemy slipped away with a final rattle of Mausers from the jungle’s edge behind the town. Lawton had no casualties, but now the men had been under fire, and knew the sound of hostile bullets intended to kill. Its effect was not visibly sobering.

Daisy was away for Jamaica with Bracken’s story of the landing, and orders to ask Key West for news of Cabot Murray and wait for an answer. With Siboney in American hands, the landing operations were shifted there from Daiquiri, for though it was little more than an open roadstead without even a pier, it was seven miles nearer Santiago.

The Rough Riders had exceeded their orders and pushed
forward
along the jungle trail from Daiquiri on Lawton’s heels, full of curiosity and zeal, disgusted at having missed the first skirmish. If they had had their horses, they could have caught the retreating Spaniards.

That night the Navy searchlights made Siboney as light as a
ballroom
while the disembarking went on through a roaring surf under a white tropic moon, and the smell of bacon and coffee rose from the
campfires along the shore. Naked men waded out to catch the painters of the loaded boats that were being pitched on to the beach by headlong combers, and tried to hold them there while the
occupants
piled into waist-deep water, howling with triumph at having arrived at last on the soil of Cuba. On either side the black
overhanging
ridges rose above the pearly gleam of dog-tents and the red glow of fires.

Then it rained. Cuban rain, which comes down in solid sheets of water, extinguishing campfires, drenching through water-proofed material. Supper was late.

At the Rough Rider camp there was wakeful excitement among the officers. A Cuban scout had come in to say that the Spanish were intrenched at Las Guasimas five miles inland from Siboney, at the apex of two trails which there joined to lead on to Santiago. While Shafter remained on board the flagship, Wheeler was the senior officer ashore, ranking Lawton. After a reconnaissance in person, Wheeler gave orders for an advance by Wood and Young the
following
morning. He assigned the valley trail on the right hand to Young’s Regulars, and gave the Rough Riders the ridge trail which ran along high ground a mile or so distant from Young’s route. Both lines of march were supposed to be infested with sharpshooters and both offered every opportunity for ambush.

Wood and Roosevelt were known hardly to have lain down at all when reveille went at three-fifteen
A.M
. and they were still prowling about in their yellow slickers. Wood was haggard and hoarse,
Roosevelt
was lively as a lark and apparently quite unfatigued. Packing the mule train was a terrible business, for the overnight downpour had left the ground the general consistency of a dish of oatmeal, and water had seeped into everything. There was nothing dry enough to burn right, and breakfast was hasty and half-cooked, while Wood went roaring that anyone who was not ready in ten minutes would be left behind.

They moved out at six, with the sun coming over the hills. Half a dozen of the officers were mounted, but the troopers carried full packs, ammunition and carbines like infantry. Colonel Roosevelt rode the pony called Texas with a borrowed saddle—a secondary war having been narrowly averted when his own was discovered to be missing. His dotted blue bandanna marked him as soon as daylight came, and the early sunlight flashed on his spectacles as he rode.

Bracken and Fitz were with K Troop, their only field equipment a mackintosh and toothbrush and canteen apiece, their yellow neckerchiefs and field-glasses the badge of their profession. They had spent part of the wet night on the porch of a native shanty but their khaki clothes steamed with dampness as the sun burned down. Richard Harding Davis was stricken with his recurrent curse
of sciatica, and rode an Army mule unhappily near the head of the column.

The ridge trail was extremely narrow and the regiment went single file with two Cuban scouts well in advance and a “point” of five trained American scouts two hundred yards behind them. Then came Wood and Roosevelt with a group of other officers and some correspondents, and Captain Capron with L Troop, composed largely of cowboys and Indians from the Indian Territory. The first ascent of six hundred feet was gruelling, and protests from
exhausted
men brought a halt on the summit. From there they looked back on the little bay full of boats, every level piece of ground studded with white tents, and they heard the camp bugle calls like the horns of elfland blowing.

Advancing inland from the brow of the hill with Capron’s troop strung out ahead as an advance guard, they passed desolate
plantations
, burnt out and abandoned to the encroaching jungle—evidence of Cuba’s three years of revolution. The trail drew in until
twenty-foot
vegetation met over the men’s heads, a tunnel with whispering green walls, heated like an oven, and bordered on each side by derelict barbed wire fences live strands high. No flankers were
possible
on either side of the trail. The pace set was severe for troopers carrying accoutrement on foot, and men dropped out and lay gasping in the terrible heat beside the wire. The empty jungle silence around them was broken only by the started
wha-leep
of the brush cuckoo or the rustle of some small animal escaping from the line of march, and an unkind suspicion was voiced that Lawton’s had imagined that Mauser fire at Siboney.

Fitz and Bracken with K Troop were arguing the actual size of tarantulas viewed in cold blood, when the order to halt came from up ahead, and the men lay down where they were in the sour trampled grass. They were glad of another chance to rest, fanning the air with their hats, longing for a smoke or a glass of beer, grumbling because they were forbidden to remove their blanket rolls. An order for silence in the ranks was regarded as an unjust reprimand for
complaints
and everybody subsided aggrievedly, for it is the soldier’s inalienable right to mutter.

On a single mutual impulse Fitz and Bracken raised themselves cautiously and edged along to the head of the column where the officers were. There they found troopers kneeling with their carbines at the ready, peering into the solid green bushes while Wood went forward to reconnoitre. A knot of officers stood together over the body of a not very freshly dead Cuban scout. As Fitz and Bracken arrived unobtrusively on the scene Colonel Roosevelt lunged at them fiercely and bade them be quiet—quieter, anyway, then he was, somebody said.

The orders to unsling rolls and prepare for action, load chamber and magazine were given in whispers passed along, followed by another order for absolute silence in the ranks. Men were set to cut the barbed wire either side of the trail with nippers. Troops G, K, and A were ordered into the tangle of creepers and bushes on the right to try and make contact with Young’s forces coming up the valley trail. D, F, and E were deployed in skirmish line into a natural clearing on the left preparatory to a flanking movement. Before the manœuvre could be completed the first Spanish bullet sang over their heads, and then came a full volley. Everyone dived for cover in some astonishment. There were Spaniards in Cuba after all.

Bracken and Fitz side by side stepped over the wire on the right immediately behind Colonel Roosevelt, and plunged into the rank vegetation full of exotic blossoms which had to be torn and beaten apart with hand and carbines and knives before any progress could be made. Somewhere ahead of them across a mile or so of such country was Young’s brigade. The intervening jungle was so thick that if you lost touch with the man on either side of you you might never see him again, and would yourself be confused, isolated, and left behind. The Spanish firing was high but they had the range, and men began to go down. A dressing station was established at the place where the column had first halted, and a couple of surgeons who were members of the regiment went to work. Capron of L Troop got a mortal wound in the first few seconds of fighting.
Before
very long, Roosevelt’s eyes had been filled with dust and
splinters
when a bullet struck the trunk of a palm tree close beside him.