The Roughest Riders (17 page)

On the ground around Sumner, nearly seven thousand men attempted to get a little sleep before the next battle. Most stared up from their blanket rolls at the pitch-black, star-strewn sky, as the rains had mercifully departed for a while. Off to their right, General Chaffee, who had reinforced Wheeler's brigade with the black Ninth and some white divisions, camped among the bushes with his own men alongside the path to El Caney. The major surprise of the night occurred when Shafter's adjutant, Lieutenant Colonel Edward J. McClernand, looked in on his boss's tent at three o'clock in the morning and discovered him once again laid up with gout, complicated by fever and exhaustion from his struggle up the hill.

“He said he was very ill as a result of his exertions in the terrifically hot sun of the previous day,” McClernand reported, “and feared he would not be able to participate as actively in the coming battle as he had intended.” This meant that the bulk of battlefield generalship would fall primarily on Lawton, but also on Sumner, Kent, Wood, and Chaffee—a fragmented chain of command to say the least, since many of them had shown a tendency to go off in their own directions. When Roosevelt heard about it, he muttered, “The battle simply would fight itself.”

G
eneral Lawton, Shafter's next-in-command, made immediate plans to oversee the American assault on the Spanish positions—understanding that with so many idiosyncratic personalities in the field, it would be like trying to herd cats. To make matters worse, the morale of the American troops was increasingly challenged by the steady downpours alternating with blistering sunshine, unceasing harassment from assorted insects, and scant and inadequate food supplies. Their drinking water was contaminated, and with hardly enough time to boil it, the men were coming down with dysentery and other intestinal maladies.

On the Spanish side, General Linares was contending with his own array of problems. Cuban rebels were chewing up his reinforcements before they could reach the hills around Santiago to bolster his defenses. His stores of food and ammunition were low, and the soldiers under his command were dispirited and themselves prone to yellow fever, which was even more debilitating than malaria, the other major mosquito-spread sickness. More than one in ten had come down with the dreaded disease and were unfit for duty.

Linares remained convinced that the Americans would concentrate their primary assault on the old forts guarding the entrance to the harbor at Santiago, and he located the bulk of his able-bodied forces there. As a result, other vulnerable areas were less protected. On the slopes around El Caney, Linares had stationed only 521 infantrymen supported by two Krupp light artillery pieces; on San Juan Hill, he had 137 men, which he later bolstered to 461; another 324 men were placed between San Juan and Santiago; and 1,500 soldiers spread across his main line of defense around Santiago.

So, both sides confronted mounting challenges as they dug in for the most decisive battle of the campaign—Spain's struggle to hang on to the vestiges of its crumbing empire, and America's effort to replace it as a major player on the global stage.

Before dawn on July 1, Lawton broke camp at El Pozo and marched with 6,650 men up the right prong of the pitchfork toward the village of Marianage, roughly halfway along the route to El Caney. The men were divided in two brigades, each supported by two light 3.2-inch field guns, with the artillery commanded by Captain Allyn Capron Sr., the father of the young Rough Rider who had been killed at Las Guasimas.

A British military observer from the Royal Engineers noted that an eerie quiet prevailed in the moments before the battle. “There was no sign of life beyond a few thin wisps of smoke that curled from the cottage chimneys,” he reported. A few cattle grazed about in the valley, and on three sides around the men towered the peaks of the Sierra Maestra, glistening in the first rays of the rising sun.

Then, without warning, a great cacophony shattered the stillness. At around 7:30, the first shots of the battle boomed in the hills
south of El Caney. Lawton had given Captain Capron permission to unleash his artillery at El Viso. The shells overshot their target, however, which turned out to be fortunate since, at that precise moment, a group of fifty Cuban horsemen was riding across the field of fire. The rebels had been scouting the area around El Caney to get a better fix on Spanish positions, but they sped away in fear of their lives when the shells from Capron's guns roared overhead.

The black Twenty-Fifth marched with Lawton to Marianage, where Lawton called for a halt from 6:30 to 7:30 while he sent search parties to scout the area. About a mile north of Marianage, there was a house where Lawton wanted all the troops to rendezvous after El Caney was taken. Lawton sent another reconnaissance team ahead to get a clearer picture of the precise Spanish positions on the left side of El Caney. He directed some of his troops to the left and others, including the black Twenty-Fifth, to the right. They were all to converge in the center when the charge was launched.

The men advanced slowly beyond Marianage to a low hill covered with bushes, about a mile south of El Viso, the large fort situated on the southeast slope of El Caney. General Chaffee deployed the men under his direct command onto higher ground to the right of the fort. Other troops under brigade commander General William Ludlow circled around to the left. At the same time, Shafter directed General Henry Duffield from his sickbed to engage in a feinting action by marching twenty-five hundred men along the coast toward Santiago, where Linares expected the Americans to attack, while Admiral Sampson bombarded the area from the sea to reinforce the deception.

General Kent headed directly along the trail toward the San Juan Heights with fifty-two hundred troops, including the Rough Riders and the black Twenty-Fourth, along with General Sumner and his twenty-seven-hundred-man contingent of black and white regulars. The Rough Riders climbed up the trail toward San Juan with them, Roosevelt, mounted on his horse, at the lead of his men
and yelling that he was having a “bully time.” He understood that Shafter intended for the main fighting to be done by Lawton and his soldiers, and that the Rough Riders were being used as a diversion. But in his own mind, Roosevelt had other ideas about what was likely to happen. In the heat of battle, who was to say which unit would swarm over the hill first?

The American lines of advance and chains of command were hardly models of organization. Anything could happen, and victory was the only thing that mattered. Roosevelt tied a blue bandanna with white polka dots around his neck in cowboy fashion and pushed his way ahead on the path he was assigned. He had been modest in accepting his new leadership role, saying that he wouldn't have wanted to undertake it until he was sure he had had enough experience. But after his first combat engagement at Las Guasimas, he believed he could handle the responsibility.

Overhead, the huge observation balloon, with a couple of officers riding in the basket, hovered about a hundred feet above the men on the ground. It might as well have had a bull's-eye painted on it, but even without one it made a perfect target for the Spanish defenders. “We did not like having that balloon over us, in range of the Spaniards' guns,” wrote a colonel under Sumner's command.

“Is there a general officer below?” one of the men in the balloon yelled to the troops on the ground.

No one answered.

“Is there a field or staff officer down there?” was the next question.

Still, no one replied.

“Is there any officer?”

“Yes, quite a few,” someone yelled back.

“I see two roads in front,” one of the observers reported.

“Where do they lead to?”

“I can't tell.”

That was the extent of the information provided.

A moment later, a cascade of Spanish bullets directed at the balloon fell down on the men, and they immediately dove for cover, wondering what to do next. “We are ordered to remain here in reserve,” replied an officer, wishing he were somewhere else at that moment.

The storm of bullets missed the balloon, leaving it intact for a brief period, but its presence continued to take a horrifying toll on the men. From where the men at the front of the column lay on the ground and for a mile to their rear, hardly a yard of earth was outside the zone of Spanish fire. For a solid hour, the bullets poured in like cruel rain on the Americans, including the Rough Riders and the black Tenth, who were positioned near them. Dozens of troops were killed or injured, yet they were all under orders not to return fire until the command was given.

The ground, the grass, the trees around the men, and the men themselves were raked over and over with savage accuracy. Some tried to roll away or run for better cover, only to sink to the ground again, moaning as they clutched their shoulders, arms, or legs. Red Cross medics moved up the line and dragged the wounded back to the river, where they laid them near the muddy banks along the water's edge. The Spanish guns showed no mercy, riddling combatants and aides alike. Captain Mills, who had conveyed Shafter's orders to Wood and the other officers a day earlier, paid a heavy price when a Spanish bullet struck him between the eyes, blinding him temporarily. Incredibly enough, he survived the shot through the forehead, although he remained out of action until the war was over.

“When are we going to begin this thing?” Sumner asked McClernand.

“Our orders are not to do anything until Lawton gets through over there, but he seems to be pretty busy,” McClernand answered.

Sumner was growing increasingly frustrated. McClernand noted his impatience, checked his watch, and finally said to Sumner, “Well, I guess you might as well begin.”

With the sounds of war echoing from the north, twenty-four horses hauled four light Gatling field guns to the top of El Pozo, spurred on by whips and curses from artillerymen under the command of Captain George S. Grimes. Grimes positioned his guns facing a Spanish blockhouse on San Juan Hill, twenty-four hundred yards away. His field guns fired off about twenty rounds, but they caused more problems for the American forces than they did for the Spanish: the shells hit nothing of importance, but the smoke they emitted hung over El Pozo for a minute or more, giving the enemy a clear target toward which they could direct their return fire. A British war correspondent warned Wood that the artillery fire was likely to put his troops in greater danger.

“We have our orders and cannot move from here,” Wood snapped at him.

The Spanish fired with deadly accuracy at a nearby barn, the only structure visible within a mile of El Pozo. Many of the Rough Riders were standing in the barnyard, while a group of foreign observers, newspaper correspondents, and other noncombatants huddled inside the structure. The Spanish shells flew in, killing and wounding some of the men. At the same time, the Spaniards' smokeless guns made it impossible for the Americans to see where the fusillade was coming from.

A Spanish rocket shell roared in, followed by another that soared above Grimes's battery of Gatlings, detonating in the air overhead and unleashing a shower of shrapnel on the men below. In the moments before it exploded, it had emitted an ominous hissing sound accompanied by a trail of white smoke. The shrapnel failed to find a human target, and the men breathed a sigh of relief. But the Spanish had found their range, and the next shell roared in like a railroad train, its timed fuse shattering the projectile into thousands of metal pieces that poured down on the troops. Some Rough Riders and Cuban rebels were killed or wounded, and Roosevelt felt
the sting of enemy fire when a piece of shrapnel struck him on the back of his left wrist, raising a large welt. Wood's horse was shot through the lungs. Some of the Rough Riders were enraged at the sight of their stricken commander and started to charge forward, directly into the line of fire. Several were cut down, unable to fire back at the invisible enemy positions, and others ran off in different directions in a fog of confusion. Some tumbled down the western slope of El Pozo, others scampered to the right. Roosevelt wrapped a handkerchief around his wound and said, “Well, that's the first one. They'll have to do better next time.”

Roosevelt got back on his horse and rounded up his men, castigating them for their lack of discipline in the face of hostile fire. He took roll call there on the hill while the medics moved up the line and hauled the dead and wounded back to the field hospital. The men stacked their blanket rolls, haversacks, and other equipment on the sides of the trail as they regrouped for the next stage of the battle.

Sumner was perplexed, trying to figure out the best way for his troops to respond. The trail they had taken was bound on both sides by a thick growth of trees and underbrush, but now they had reached a point where the trail opened onto a wide expanse, and Sumner could see the Spanish emplacements only a half mile ahead on the sloping hills at San Juan. The San Juan River ran across the trail where Sumner stood, and another stream intersected it about two hundred yards farther along. Sumner's men were stretched out along the trail with little protection except for the foliage, and the Spanish guns homed in on them with ferocious accuracy. His men were dropping all around him as they were struck by a pitiless swarm of Spanish bullets. Yet, Sumner and the men under his command were still unable to return fire effectively. He finally received his marching orders from Shafter shortly before 9:00
AM
, when he was ordered to march his men forward from the peak of El Pozo toward the Spanish positions around the San Juan Heights.