Ever After (38 page)

Nobody had yet seen a Spaniard and their smokeless powder left nothing to shoot at, while singing death poured into the American ranks. It was uncanny. The jungle itself spat fire. Bracken crouched at the foot of a palm tree, his notebook on his knee, and wrote furiously, Fitz lying at his side with field-glasses calling out things he might miss. They could see Wood now, standing in the front line, waist-deep in tall grass, leaning against his sorrel horse between it and the Spanish firing line ahead. The grass all round him moved as though in a capricious wind, which was the passing of bullets for no air stirred. Indentations in the grass near him showed where men had fallen, or were lying down to fire.

Every now and then bullets struck Bracken’s tree trunk with a
chug,
and when they dropped in the grass nearby it was with little
zips
like raindrops on a roof. Once a covey of Spanish soldiers who had had enough crossed an open space running like rabbits, and with a whoop the Americans opened a delirious fire on the first enemy to show themselves. Wood ran at his own lines, shouting, “
Don’t
shoot
at
retreating
men!
”
He was not heard, or at least was not obeyed,
until he had a trumpeter blow
Cease
firing.
It was some time later that Bracken learned that Wood’s action came from his grim
knowledge
that shooting at men already in flight was a waste of precious ammunition which would be more needed later on.

Bracken was pleased to find that he still functioned efficiently as a reporter, and that his hand had steadied after the first few minutes under fire. He was able to record with detached interest that bullets hit human flesh with an audible, rather hollow sound, and bodies went down like wet rags with a jingle of canteen and metal and a thick thud as their weight struck. Mauser bullets in the clear made a thin, shrill song past your ears, he noted coolly; those which struck foliage went
ping,
and there was sometimes a brief eerie silence in which the rustle of bullet-clipped leaves could be heard.

Young’s brigade was now in heavy fighting on the right, and always the regiment was working forward, across a shallow valley and
towards
the ascent on the other side, which was open ground. The noise of firing was so great from both sides that an L Troop
lieutenant
could not make his voice heard at all with the word of command and ran along the line striking his men with his hat to make them know what he wanted. They had to travel flat on their faces now, through sharp, thorny bushes which tore at their skin and clothes, through suffocating grass so thick and high it cut off what air there was. But they kept on moving forward, driving the Spanish ahead of them. Wood was up and down the line in touch with all his officers, but the growth was so dense that he never saw a whole troop at a time. The wounded lay still where they were, flattened under the hot fire, and the surgeons crawled out to them to put on tourniquets and dressings at the risk of their own lives, sometimes delaying to drag a man into the shade. As Bracken and Fitz followed doggedly the advancing line of fire they heard again and again the
death-rattle
clank of the big land crabs which gathered to feed on the wounds of bodies which were still warm; and they saw the helpless wounded battling hysterically with their hats at a hideous patient ring of the scavengers who waited, on tiptoe and with protruding eyes, for movement to cease.

The ground they traversed in the immediate wake of the battle was spattered and matted with blood and littered with abandoned equipment and the twisted forms of wounded men. They used up their own first-aid packets and resorted to pocket handkerchiefs and torn strips of clothing and blankets to make tourniquets and
dressings
, and found ownerless canteens for disabled men in an agony of thirst. Once they turned back to help carry a wounded man to the dressing station in a blanket, wincing in sympathy when his body bumped on the uneven ground, answering his delirium kindly—“We must give them hell,” he kept imploring them all the way. “They’ve
killed my captain—the damned dirty Mexicans have killed my
captain
—” Sometimes they knelt to write down names gasped out in pain, receiving keepsakes, promising to deliver messages which
became
incoherent on the lips of dying men. They had lost track of Miles soon after they left the trail, and they watched for him anxiously. Sweat ran down into their eyes and their clothes were soaked as though they had forded a stream, and both of them were smeared with blood which was not their own.

Somewhere along the way Fitz had picked up a carbine and
ammunition
belt, and now when they paused for Bracken to bend above a wounded man or scribble something in his notebook, Fitz lay on his stomach and fired busily towards the murderous jungle ahead, taking his direction from the nearest trooper, and cursing softly to himself in words Bracken had no idea he knew.

“Hey,” said Bracken once. “You aren’t supposed to do that. War Correspondents are non-combatants. That’s one of the rules.”

“The hell with rules!” Fitz replied, the Krag-Jorgenson cuddled lovingly against his cheek. His mouth was thin and white, his grey eyes flickered with a steely glint. “If I could only get my sights on one of those bastards I’d give ’im rules!” He pulled the trigger again and squinted as the gun kicked his shoulder, and loaded again from his belt. “Come on out and show yourselves, you lousy, crawling, lily-livered sons-o’-bitches, gimme a chance at your backsides, you blue-bottomed baboons, you—”

“We can’t print that,” said Bracken. “Come and lend a hand with this bandage.”

Eventually Young’s left wing connected with K Troop in a thin skirmish line, cheering like a grandstand as they sighted each other, their guidons fluttering through the trees like football pennants. After an hour’s fighting the Spanish were driven back, foot by foot, some three hundred yards into their third line position which
included
the building of an old distillery. Towards this Wood’s left wing was advancing in quick, stubborn rushes—half a troop racing forward to throw itself flat in the deep grass and go on firing. The fire discipline was excellent, and they fired in volleys at the word of command. The whole regiment was engaged now. There were no reserves.

Marshall of the
Journal
had been shot near the spine and was carried back to the dressing station in convulsions of pain. The
surgeon
passed him up as hopeless and worked on men who had a better chance of living. When Bracken left him he was trying to finish his dispatch before he died.

A bullet passed through Bracken’s sleeve, burning his arm as it went. Fitz turned his head and saw the rent it had made and the reddened skin beneath. At that moment the order for the final
charge came echoing along the line, and Fitz broke cover with a shrill Rebel yell inherited straight from his father.

“Yo-who
eee
, here we go!” he howled, and took off with K Troop, firing as he ran.

Bracken followed instinctively, unaware that he was panting with laughter. The air was full of cheering, and the Spanish, already
disconcerted
by the unorthodox behaviour of soldiers who only knew how to move forward after every volley poured into them, retreated upon Santiago, convinced that the entire American Army was after them.

R
EINFORCEMENTS
from Siboney arrived just too late to take part in the fight or to overtake the fleeing Spaniards. They were assigned to outpost duty while the tired men who had fought their first battle and won it made camp at the junction of the two trails where the Spanish front lines had been. Supper consisted chiefly of beans taken from the load of a dead Spanish mule. Young Miles Day turned up unhurt, and excessively proud of a bullet hole through the crown of his hat. The wounded and the dead were gathered into the little field dressing station in the trail. The defenceless bodies had been mangled by vultures and land crabs, which invariably tore at the eyes, lips, and wounds. Over these dead comrades the
cowpuncher’s
brief, philosophical epitaph was more than once spoken:
Many
a
good
horse
dies.

There was no tent at that hospital in the trail, only the branches of a mango tree, and there were not enough blankets to go round, and the regiment hadn’t a stretcher to its name. The blood-soaked surgeons cut the sleeves out of their shirts and worked with
claret-coloured
arms, operating on men laid on strips of canvas shelter tents on the ground while they made the worst cases ready to be sent down to Siboney on improvised litters.

Fitz was going with them to carry Bracken’s dispatch and make himself useful with the wounded on the way. Until then, he drifted casually among the prostrate forms, dropping a comforting word here, holding a canteen there, raising a laugh where he could from men who were pathetically eager for a joke. Thus he came to a boy shot through the neck and already half delirious, who was trying to beat time with his forefinger to a tune which had run through his head all day. His mouth was open slackly, making dry little sounds which had a sort of rhythm. Fitz knelt down beside him.

“What key are you in?” he asked gently, and the boy’s eyes wavered to his face and rested there with recognition. His lips formed words. “Once more,” said Fitz, bending closer.

Again the black, parched lips moved.

“I got it, son,” said Fitz, and his clear, easy voice floated out on the hot jungle air—

Just beyond them another voice took it up. Behind them a fine cowboy tenor came in. And soon all the wounded were singing, some of them jerkily, stitched with groans, some thickly, for lack of water, some hoarsely, from the cheering….

Fitz took them through to the end, and it was a heartening sound to a group of homesick, hurt men, most of them barely come of age, facing death or amputation or long agony, feeling very far from home. Bracken’s eyelids stung as he listened, and he added a
paragraph
to his letter to Cabot which Wendell would post at Jamaica when he filed the cable:

Bracken decided that Fitz was doing more good than he could there, and himself went off before dark with the first lot of wounded, carrying one end of a makeshift litter, his dispatch and letter in his pocket. Those that were left under the mango tree sang the long dark night away, following where Fitz’s tireless spirit led them, through
Tenting
Tonight,
The
Girl
I
Left
Behind
Me,
On
the
Banks
of
the
Wabash,
and even
Yankee
Doodle—
until a certain
rivalry arose to think up new ones to try to stump Fitz on a tune he didn’t know. There could be no campfire because of the
sharpshooters
, and there could be no sleep because of the groans and ravings of delirious men.

Bracken’s party was fired on all the way down by sharpshooters hidden in trees along the trail. When one of these was brought down by a lucky pistol shot he was found to have green branches tied to him for concealment among the leaves. Davis had got a stretcher up from Siboney for Marshall, who was taken aboard the hospital ship
Olivette
anchored off shore on a sickening swell, and there he
obstinately
refused to die, no matter who gave him up. By midnight on Saturday Siboney was full of suffering men. Yellow fever was
beginning
along with the wounds, adding its own horrors of vomiting and hæmorrhage, besides the scarcely lesser miseries of the chills and fevers attending malaria.

Bracken found Wendell in a state of nerves because of the wild
reports
which had reached Siboney from stragglers, walking wounded who had left before the fight was over, and mule-packers who had never been near enough the front to see for themselves. These
described
with what Roosevelt later called minute accuracy how the Rough Riders had run headlong into ambush, and both Roosevelt and Wood were rumoured dead in action.

“How could we be ambushed when we were expecting to be shot at from the minute we left town?” Bracken demanded disgustedly. “How headlong were we with a couple of Cuban scouts ahead of a five-man point ahead of Capron’s troop which was practically single file? I have seen both Wood and Roosevelt since the snooting stopped, make that quite clear to everyone. What’s the news from Tampa?”

Tampa had reported no change, and Cabot was apparently going to weather the attack as he had done many times before. Bracken saw Daisy off for Jamaica and spent the rest of the night firmly
setting
everyone right about the fight at Las Guasimas.