 Section 1 of Notes of a War Correspondent. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Barry Eads. Notes of a War Correspondent by Richard Harding Davis. The Cuban Spanish War. The Death of Rodriguez. Adolfo Rodriguez was the only son of a Cuban farmer who lived nine miles outside of Santa Clara, beyond the hills that surround the city to the north. When the revolution in Cuba broke out, young Rodriguez joined the insurgents, leaving his father and mother and two sisters at the farm. He was taken in December of 1896 by a force of the Guardia Civila, the Corde elite of the Spanish Army, and defended himself when they tried to capture him, wounding three of them with his machete. He was tried by a military court for bearing arms against the government, and was sentenced to be shot by a fuselad some morning before sunrise. Previous to execution he was confined in the military prison of Santa Clara with thirty other insurgents, all of whom were sentenced to be shot, one after the other, and mornings following the execution of Rodriguez. His execution took place the morning of the nineteenth of January, 1897, at a place a half-mile distant from the city, on the great plain that stretches from the forts out to the hills, beyond which Rodriguez had lived for nineteen years. At the time of his death he was twenty years old. I witnessed his execution, and what follows is an account of the way he went to his death. The young man's friends could not be present, for it was impossible for them to show themselves in that crowd, in that place, with wisdom, or without distress. And I like to think that, although Rodriguez could not know it, there was one person present when he died, who felt keenly for him, and who was a sympathetic, though unwilling, spectator. There had been a full moon the night preceding the execution, and when the squad of soldiers marched from town, it was still shining brightly through the mists. It lighted a plain two miles in extent, broken by ridges and gullies, and covered with thick, high grass, and with bunches of cactus and palmetto. In the hollow of the ridges the mist lay like broad lakes of water, and on one side of the plain stood the walls of the old town. On the other rose hills covered with royal palms that showed white in the moonlight, like hundreds of marble columns. A line of tiny campfires that the centuries had built during the night stretched between the forts at regular intervals and burned clearly. But as the light grew stronger and the moonlight faded, these were stamped out, and when the soldiers came in force, the moon was a white ball in the sky without radiance, the fires had sunk to ashes, and the sun had not yet risen. So even when the men were formed into three sides of a hollow square, they were scarcely able to distinguish one another in the uncertain light of morning. There were about three hundred soldiers in the formation. They belonged to the volunteers, and they deployed upon the plain with their band in front playing a jaunty quickstep, while their officers galloped from one side to the other through the grass, seeking a suitable place for the execution. Inside the line the band still played merrily. A few men and boys who had been dragged out of their beds by the music moved about the ridges behind the soldiers, half clothed, unshaven, sleepy-eyed, yawning, stretching themselves nervously and shivering in the cool damp air of the morning. Either owing to discipline or on account of the nature of their errand, or because the men were still but half awake, there was no talking in the ranks, and the soldiers stood motionless, leaning on their rifles with their backs turned to the town, looking out across the plain to the hills. The men in the crowd behind them were also grimly silent. They knew that whatever they might say would be twisted into a word of sympathy for the condemned man or a protest against the government. So no one spoke, even the officers gave their orders in gruff whispers, and the men in the crowd did not mix together, but looked suspiciously at one another and kept apart. As the light increased a mass of people came hurrying from the town with two black figures leading them, and the soldiers drew up at attention and part of the double line fell back and left an opening in the square. With us a condemned man walks only a short distance from his cell to the scaffold or the electric chair, shielded from sight by the prison walls, and it often occurs even then that the short journey is too much for his strength and courage. But the Spaniards on this morning made the prisoner walk for over a half-mile across the broken surface of the fields. I expected to find the man no matter what his strength at other times might be, stumbling and faltering on this cruel journey. But as he came nearer I saw that he led all the others, that the priests on either side of him were taking two steps to his one, and that they were tripping on their gowns and stumbling over the hollows in their efforts to keep pace with him as he walked erect and soldierly at a quick step in advance of them. He had a handsome gentle face of the peasant type, a light- pointed beard, great wistful eyes, and a mass of curly black hair. He was shockingly young for such a sacrifice, and looked more like a Neapolitan than a Cuban. You could imagine him sitting on the quay at Naples, or Genoa, lolling in the sun and showing his white teeth when he laughed. Around his neck, hanging outside his linen blouse, he wore a new scapular. It seems a pretty thing to have been pleased with at such a time, but I confess to have felt a thrill of satisfaction when I saw, as the Cuban passed me, that he held a cigarette between his lips, not arrogantly nor with bravado, but with the nonchalance of a man who meets his punishment fearlessly, and who will let his enemies see that they can kill but cannot frighten him. It was very quickly finished with rough and, but for one frightful blunder, with merciful swiftness. The crowd fell back when it came to the square, and the condemned man, the priests and the firing squad of six young volunteers, passed in and the line closed behind them. The officer who had held the cord that bound the Cuban's arms behind him and passed across his breast, let it fall on the grass and drew his sword, and Rodriguez dropped his cigarette from his lips and bent and kissed the cross which the priest held up before him. The elder of the priests moved to one side and prayed rapidly in a loud whisper, while the other, a younger man, walked behind the firing squad and covered his face with his hands. They had both spent the last twelve hours with Rodriguez in the chapel of the prison. The Cuban walked to where the officer directed him to stand, and turning his back on the square, faced the hills and the road across them, which led to his father's farm. As the officer gave the first command, he straightened himself as far as the cords would allow, and held up his head and fixed his eyes immovably on the morning light, which had just begun to show above the hills. He made a picture of such pathetic helplessness, but of such courage and dignity, that he reminded me on the instance of that statue of Nathan Hale which stands in the City Hall Park above the roar of Broadway. The Cuban's arms were bound, as those of the statue, and he stood firmly with his weight resting on his heels like a soldier on parade, and with his face held up fearlessly, as is that of the statue. But there was this difference, that Rodriguez, while probably as willing to give six lives for his country as was the American rebel, being only a peasant, did not think to say so, and he will not, in consequence, live in bronze during the lives of many men, but will be remembered only as one of thirty Cubans, one of whom was shot at Santa Clara on each succeeding day at sunrise. The officer had given the order, the men had raised their pieces, and the condemned man had heard the clicks of the triggers as they were pulled back, and he had not moved, and then happened one of the most cruelly refined though unintentional acts of torture that one can very well imagine. As the officer slowly raised his sword, preparatory to giving the signal, one of the mounted officers wrote up to him and pointed out silently that, as I had already observed with some satisfaction, the firing squad was so placed that when they fired they would shoot several of the soldiers stationed on the extreme end of the square. Their captain motioned his men to lower their pieces, and then walked across the grass, and laid his hand on the shoulder of the waiting prisoner. It is not pleasant to think what that shock must have been. The man had steeled himself to receive a volley of bullets. He believed that in the next instant he would be in another world. He had heard the command given, had heard the click of the Mausers as the locks caught, and then, at that supreme moment, a human hand had been laid upon his shoulder and a voice spoke in his ear. You would expect that any man snatched back to life in such a fashion would start and tremble at the reprieve, or would break down altogether. But this boy turned his head steadily and followed with his eyes the direction of the officer's sword. Then knotted gravely, and with his shoulders squared took up the new position, straightened his back, and once more held himself erect. As an exhibition of self-control this should surely rank above feats of heroism performed in battle, where there are thousands of comrades to give inspiration. This man was alone, in sight of the hills he knew, with only enemies about him, with no source to draw on for strength, but that which lay within himself. The officer of the firing squad, mortified by his blunder, hastily whipped up his sword. The men once more leveled their rifles. The sword rose, dropped, and the men fired. At the report the Cubans had snapped back almost between his shoulders, but his body fell slowly, as though someone had pushed him gently forward from behind and he had stumbled. He sank on his side in the wet grass without a struggle or sound and did not move again. It was difficult to believe that he meant to lie there, that it could be ended so without a word, that the man in the linen suit would not rise to his feet and continue to walk on over the hills as he apparently had started to do to his home. That there was not a mistake somewhere, or that at least someone would be sorry or say something or run to pick him up. But fortunately he did not need help and the priest returned. The younger one with the tears running down his face and donned their vestments and read a brief requiem for his soul while the squad stood uncovered and the men in Hollow Square shook their accoutrements into place and shifted their pieces and got ready for the order to march and the band began again with the same quick-step which the fuselage had interrupted. The figure still lay on the grass untouched and no one seemed to remember that it had walked there of itself or noticed that the cigarette still burned, a tiny ring of living fire at the place where the figure had first stood. The figure was a thing of the past and the squad shook itself like a great snake and then broke into little pieces and started off jauntily, stumbling in the high grass and striving to keep step to the music. The officers let it pass the figure in the linen suit and so close to it that the file closers had to part with the column to avoid treading on it. Each soldier as he passed turned and looked down on it, some craning their necks curiously, others giving a careless glance and some without any interest at all as they would have looked at a house by the roadside or a hole in the road. One young soldier caught his foot in a trailing vine, just opposite to it and fell. He grew very red when his comrades giggled at him for his awkwardness. The crowd of sleepy spectators fell in on either side of the band. They too had forgotten it and the priests put their vestments back in the bag and wrapped their heavy cloaks about them and hurried off after the others. Everyone seemed to have forgotten it except two men, who came slowly towards it from the town, driving a bullock cart that bore an unplayed coffin, each with a cigarette between his lips and with his throat wrapped in a shawl to keep out the morning mist. At that moment the sun, which had shown some promise of its coming in the glow above the hills, shot up suddenly from behind them in all the splendor of the tropics, a fierce red disc of heat and filled the air with warmth and light. The bayonets of the retreating column flashed in it, and at the sight a rooster in a farmyard nearby crowed vigorously, and a dozen bugles answered the challenge with the brisk cherry notes of the revelry. And from all parts of the city the church bells jangled out the call for early mass, and the little world of Santa Clara seemed to stretch itself and to wake to welcome the day just begun. But as I fell in at the rear of the procession and looked back, the figure of the young Cuban, who was no longer a part of the world of Santa Clara, was asleep in the wet grass, with his motionless arms still tightly bound behind him, with the scapular twisted awry across his face and the blood from his breasts sinking into the soil which he had tried to free. THE DEATH OF RODRIGUEZ The Turks had made three attacks on Valestinos on three different days, and each time had been repulsed. A week later, on the 4th of May, they came back again to the number of 10,000, and brought four batteries with them, and the fighting continued for two more days. This was called the Second Battle of Valestinos. In the afternoon of the fifth, the crown prince withdrew from Farsala to take up a stronger position at Domokros, and the Greeks under General Smolenski, the military hero of the campaign, were forced to retreat, and the Turks came in, and according to their quaint custom, burned the village, and marched on to Verlo. John Bayes, the American correspondent, and myself, were keeping house in the village, in the home of the mayor. He had fled from the town, as had nearly all the villagers, and as we liked the appearance of his house, I gave Bayes a leg up over the wall around his garden, and Bayes opened the gate, and we climbed in through his front window. It was like the invasion of the home of the DeSantis, by Mrs. Legs and Mrs. Allerstein, and like them, we were constantly making discoveries of fresh treasure-trove. Sometimes it was in the form of a cake of soap, or a tin of coffee, and once it was the mayor's sleeted petticoats, which we tried on and found very heavy. We could not discover what he did for pockets. All of these things, and the house itself, were burnt to ashes, we were told, a few hours after we retreated, and we feel less troubled now, at having made such free use of them. On the morning of the fourth, we were awakened by the firing of cannon from a hill just over our heads, and we met in the middle of the room, and solemnly shook hands. There was to be a battle, and we were the only correspondents on the spot. As I represented the London Times, Bayes was the only representative of an American newspaper who saw this fight from its beginning to its end. We found all the hills to the left of the town, topped with long lines of men crouching in little trenches. There were four rows of hills. If you had measured the distance from one hill-top to the next, they would have been from one hundred to three hundred yards distant from one another. In between the hills were gullies, or lesser valleys, and the beds of streams that had dried up in the hot sun. These valleys were filled with high grass that waved about in the breeze, and was occasionally torn up and tossed in the air by shell. The position of the Greek forces was very simple. On the top of each hill was a trench, two or three feet deep, and some hundred yards long. The earth that had been scooped out to make the trench was pecked on the edge facing the enemy, and on the top of that some of the men had piled stones through which they poked their rifles. When a shell struck the ridge it would sometimes scatter these stones in among the men, and they did quite as much damage as the shells. Back of these trenches, and down that side of the hill which was farther from the enemy, were the reserves who sprawled at length in the long grass, and smoked and talked, and watched the shells dropping into the gully at their feet. The battle, which lasted two days, opened in a sudden and terrific storm of hail. But the storm passed as quickly as it came, leaving the trenches running with water, like the gutters of a city street after a spring shower, and the men soon sopped them up with their overcoat and blankets, and in half an hour the sun had dried wet uniforms, and a field-burnt had begun to chirp again, and the grass was warm and fragrant. The sun was terribly hot. There was no other day during that entire brief campaign when its glare was so intense, or to heat so suffocating. The men curled up in the trenches, with their heads pressed against the damp berth, panting and breezing heavily, and the heatwaves dancing quivered about them, making the plain below flicker like a picture in a sematograph. From time to time an officer would rise and peer down into the great plain, shading his eyes with his hands, and shout something at them, and they would turn quickly in the drench and rise on one knee, and at the shout that followed they would fire four or five rounds rapidly and evenly, and then at a sound from the officer's whistle would drop back again and pick up the cigarettes they had placed in the grass, and begin leisurely to swab out their rifles with a piece of dirty rag on a cleaning rod. Down and the plain below there was apparently nothing at which if they could shoot, except the great shadows of the clouds drifting across the vast checkerboard of green and yellow fields, and disappearing finally between the mountain passes beyond. In some places there were square dark patches that might have been bushes, and nearer to us than these were long lines of fresh earth from which steam seemed to be escaping in little wisps. What impresses most of what we could see of the battle, then, was a remarkable number of cartridges the Greek soldiers wasted in firing into space, and the fact that they had begun to fire at such long range that, in order to get the elevation, they had placed the rifle-but under the armpit instead of against the shoulder, and their sides were at a top-notch. The cartridges reminded one of corn-cops jumping out of a gala, and it was interesting when the balls were shot back to see a hundred of them pop up into the air at the same time, flashing in the sun as Odia were glad to have done their work and to get out again. They rolled by a dozen underfoot and twinkled in the grass, and when one shifted his position in a narrow trench, or stretched his cramped legs, they tinkled musically. It was like wading in a gutter filled with symbols. Then there began a concert which came from just overhead, a concert of jarring sound and little whispers. The shrieking shrapnel, of which one reads in the description of every battle, did not seem so much like a shriek, as it did like the jarring sound of telegraph wires, when someone strikes the pole from which they hang, and when they came very close. The noise was like the rushing sound that rises between two railroad trains when they pass each other in opposite directions and at great speed. After a few hours we learned by observation that when a shell sank overhead it had already struck somewhere else, which was comforting, and which was explained, of course, by the fact that the speed of the shell is so much greater than the rate at which a sound travels. The bullets were much more disturbing. They seemed to be less open in their warfare, and to steal up and sneak by, leaving no sign and only to whisper as they passed. They moved under a cloak of invisibility, and made one feel as though he were the blind man in a game of blind man's buff, where everyone tapped him in passing, leaving him puzzled and ignorant as to whether they had gone and from what point they would come next. The bullets sounded like rustling silk, or like hummingbirds on a warm summer's day, or like dewind as it is imitated on the stage of a theatre. Anyone who has stood behind the scenes when a storm is progressing on the stage knows a little wheel wound with a silk that brushes against another piece of silk, and which produces the whistling effect of dewind. As Philastinos, when the firing was very heavy, it was exactly as as though someone were turning one of these silk wheels, and so rapidly as to make the whistling continuous. When this concert opened, the officers shouted out new orders, and each of the men shoved his sight nearer to the barrel, and when he fired again, rubbed the butt of his gun snugly against his shoulder. The huge green blotches on the plane had turned blue, and now we could distinguish that they moved, and that they were moving steadily forward. Then they would cease to move, and a letter later would be hidden behind great puffs of white smoke, which were followed by a flash of flame, and still later there would come a dull report. At the same instant something would hurl itself jarring through the air above our heads, and by turning on one elbow we could see a sudden upheaval in the sunny landscape behind us, a spurt of earth and stones like a miniature geese, which was filled with broken branches, and tufts of grass and pieces of rock. As the Turkish aim grew better, these volcanoes appeared higher rubbed hill, creeping nearer and nearer to the rampant of fresh earth on the second trench, until the shells hammered it at last again and again, sweeping it away and cutting great gashes in it, through which we saw the figures of men caught up and held to one side, and others flinging themselves phased downward as if they were diving into water, and at the same instant in our trench the men would gasp as if they had been struck too, and then becoming conscious of having done this would turn and smile sheepishly at each other, and crawl closer into the burrows they had made in the earth. From where we set on the edge of the trench, with our feet among the cartridges, we could, by leaning forward, look over the piled-up earth into the plain below, and soon, without any aid from field classes, we saw the blucks of blue break up into groups of men. These men came across the plowed fields and long, widely open lines, walking easily and leisurely, as though they were playing golf or sewing seed in the furrows. The Greek rifles crackled and flashed at the lines, but the men below came on quite steadily, picking their way over the furrows and appearing utterly unconscious of the seven thousand rifles that were calling on them to hold. They were advancing directly toward a little sugar-loaf hill, on the top of which was a mountain battery perched like a tiara on a woman's head. It was a-froing one shell after another, in the very path of the men below. But the Turks still continued to pick their way across the field, without showing any regard for the mountain battery. It was worse than threatening. It seemed almost as though they meant to insult us. If they had come up on a run, they would not have appeared so contemptuous, for it would have looked then as though they were trying to escape the Greek fire, or that they were at least interested in what was going forward. But the steady advance of so many men, each plodding along by himself with his head bowed and his gun on his shoulder, was aggravating. There was a little village at a foot of the hill. It was so small that no one had considered it. It was more like a collection of stables gathered round residents than a town. And there was a wall completely encircling it, with a gate in the wall that faced us. Suddenly the doors of this gate were burst open from the inside, and a man in a fez ran through them, followed by many more. The first man was waving a sword, and a peasant at Pedyco's ran at his side, and pointed up with his hand at our trench. Until that moment the battle had lacked all human interest. We might have been watching a fight against the stars, or the men in the moon. But in spite of the noise and clatter of the Greek rifles, and the ghosts like whispers and rushing sound to him in the air, there was nothing to remind us of any other battle of which we had heard or read. But we had seen pictures of officers waving swords, and we knew that the fez was a sign of the Turk, of the enemy, of the men who were invading Tassily, who were at that moment planning to come up a steep hill on which we happened to be sitting and attack to people on top of it. And the spectacle at once became comprehensible, and took on the human interest it had lacked. The men seemed to feel this, for they sprang up and began cheering and shouting, and fired in an upright position, and by so doing exposed themselves at full length to defy from the men below. The Turks in front of the village ran back into it again, on those in the fields beyond, turned and began to move away, but in that same plodding, aggravating fashion. They moved so leisurely that there was a pause in a noise-long deline, and while the men watched them to make sure that they were really retreating, and then there was a long cheer, after which they all sat down, breathing deeply and wiping the sweat and dust across their faces, and took long pulls at their canteens. The different trenches were not hollow engaged at the same time. They acted according to the individual judgment of their commanding officer, but always for the general good. Sometimes the fire of the enemy would be directed on one particular trench, and it would be impossible for the men in that trench to arise and reply without having their heads carried away. So they would lie hidden, and the men in the trenches flanking them would act in their behalf, and rake the enemy from the front and from every side until the fire on their trench was silenced, or turned upon some other point. The trenches stretched for over half a mile in the semi-circle, and the little hills over which they ran lay at so many different angles and rose to such different heights, that sometimes the men in one trench fired directly over the heads of their own men. From many trenches in the first line it was impossible to see any of the Greek soldiers except those immediately beside you. If you looked back, or beyond, on either hand, there was nothing to be seen but high hills topped with fresh earth and a waving yellow grass and the glaring blue sky. General Smolensky directed the Greeks from the plain to the far right of the town, and his presence there, although none of the men saw nor heard of him directly throughout the entire day, was more potent for good than would have been the presence of five thousand other men held in reserve. He was a mile or two miles away from the trenches, but the fact that he was there, and that it was Smolensky who was giving the orders, was enough. Few had ever seen Smolensky, but his name was sufficient. It was as effective as is Mr. Bowen's name on the Bank of England note. It gave one a pleasant feeling to know that he was somewhere within cool. You felt that there would be no rounds, nor stampede, while he was there. And so for two days, those seven thousand men lay in the trenches, repulsing attack after attack of the Turkish troops, suffocated with the heat, and chilled with sudden showers, and swept unseizingly by shells and bullets, partly because they happened to be good men and brave men, but largely because they knew that somewhere behind them a stout bull-necked soldier was sitting on a camp-stool, watching them through a pair of field glasses. Toward midday you would see a man leave the trench with a comrade's arm around him, and starred on the long walk to the town where the hospital-corps are waiting for him. These men did not wear their wounds with eyes of pride or braggadocho, but regarded the wet sleeves and shapeless arms in a sort of wondering surprise. There was much more of surprise than of pain in their faces, and they seemed to be puzzling as to what they had done in the past to deserve such a punishment. Other men were carried out of the trench and laid on their backs on to high grass, staring up drunkly at the glaring sun, and with their limbs fallen into unfamiliar poses. They lay so still, and there were so utterly oblivious of the roar and rattle and the anxious energy around them, that one grew rather afraid of them and of their superiority to their surroundings. The sun beat on them, and insects and the grass waving above them buzzed and hummed, or burrowed in warm moist earth upon which they lay. Over their heads the invisible carriers of death jarred to the air with shrill crescendos, and near them a comrade's attacking with his bayonet at a lump of hard bread. He strawed contentedly, and the hot sun was hummed shoulders and legs far apart, and with his cap tipped far over his eyes. Every now and again he would pause, with a piece of cheese balanced on the end of his knife-blade, and look at the twisted figures by him on the grass, or he would dodge involuntarily as a shell swung low above his head, and smile nervously at the still forms on eyes the side of him that had not moved. Then he brushed a grump from his jacket and took a drink out of his hot canteen, and looking again at the sleeping figures pressing down the long grass beside him, crawled back on his hands and knees to the trench, and picked up his waiting rifle. The dead gave dignity to what the other men were doing, and made it noble, and, from another point of view, quite senseless, for their dying had proved nothing. Men who could have been much better spared than they were still alive in the trenches, and for no reason but through mere dumb chants. There was no selection of the unfittest. It seemed to be ruled by unreasoning luck. A certain number of shells and bullets passed through a certain area of space, and the men of different bulks blocked that space in different places. If a man happened to be standing in the line of a bullet, he was killed and passed into eternity, leaving a wife and children, perhaps to mourn him. Father died, these children will say, doing his duty. As a matter of fact, Father died because he happened to stand up at the wrong moment, or because he turned while the could demand on his right for a match, instead of leaning toward the left, and he projected his bulk of two hundred pounds, where a bullet, fired by men who did not know him, and who had not aimed at him, happened to want right of way. One of the two had to give it, and as the bullet would not, the soldier had his heart torn out. The man who sat next to me happened to stoop to fill his cartridge-box, just as the bullet, that wanted a space yet occupied, passed over his bench-holder, and so he was not killed, but will live for sixty years, perhaps, and will do much good or much evil. Another man in the same trench set up to clean his rifle, and had his arm in the air driving the cleaning-rod down the barrel, when a bullet passed through his lungs, and the gun fell across his face with the rod sticking in it, and he pitched forward on his shoulder, quite dead. If he had not clenched his gun at that moment, he would probably be alive in essence now, sitting in front of a cafe, and fighting the war over again. Viewed from that point, and leaving out the fact that God ordered it all, the fortunes of the game of war seemed as capricious, as matching pennies, and as impersonal as the wheel at Monte Carlo. In it the brave man did not win because he was brave, but because he was lucky. A fool and a philosopher are equal at a game of dice, and these men, who threw dice with death, were interesting to watch, because, though they gambled for so great a stake, they did so unconcernedly, and without flinching, and without apparently appreciating the seriousness of the game. There was a red-headed, frackered peasant boy in dirty petticoats, who guided bays and myself to the trenches. He was one of the few peasants who had not run away, and as he had driven sheep over every foot of the hills, he was able to guide the soldiers through those places where they were best protected from the bullets of the enemy. He did this all day, and was always, but a coming or going, under a heavy fire. Because he enjoyed that fact, and he seemed to regard the battle only as a delightful change and a quiet routine of his life, as one of our own country boys at home would regard a coming of the spring-circus or the burning of a neighbour's barn. He ran dancing ahead of us, pointing to where a ledge of rock offered a natural shelter, or showing us a steep gully where the bullets could not fall. When they came very near him, he would jump high in the air, not because he was startled, but out of pure animal joy and the excitement of it, and he would frown importantly and shake his red curls at us, as if though to say, I told you to be careful, now you see, don't let that happen again. We met him many times during the two days, escorting different companies of soldiers from one point to another, as though they were visitors to his estate. When a shell broke, he would pick up a piece and present it to the officer in charge, as though it were a flower he had plucked from his own garden, and which he wanted his guests to carry away with him as a souvenir of his visit. Someone asked the boy if his father and mother knew where he was, and he replied, with amusement, that they had run away and deserted him, and that he had remained, because he wished to see what a Turkish army looked like. He was a much more plucky boy than the overrated Casablanca, who may have stood on the burning deck once all but him had fled because he could not swim, and because it was with him a choice of being either burned or drowned. His boy stuck to the burning deck when it was possible for him at any time to have a walked away and left it burning, but he stayed on because he was amused, and because he was able to help the soldiers from the city and safety across his native heath. He was much the best part of the show, and one of the bravest Greeks on the field. He will grow up to be something fine, no doubt, and his spirit will rebel against having to spend his life watching his father's sheep. He may even win the race from Marathon. Another Greek, who was the most interesting figure to us, was a Lieutenant Ambrose Francis. He was in command of the mountain-battery on the flat-round top of the high hill. On account of its height, the play seemed much nearer to the sun than any other part of the world, and the heat there was three times as fierce as in the trenches below. When you had climbed to the top of this hill, it was like standing on a roof-garden, or as though you were watching a naval battle from a fighting-top of one of the battleships. The top of the hill was not unlike an immense circus-ring in appearance. The piled-up earth-arounded circular-edge gave that impression, and the glaring yellow weed that was dreamt into glaring yellow soil, and the blue ammunition-boxes scattered about, helped out the illusion. It was an exceedingly busy place, and the smoke drifted across it continually, hiding us from one another in a curtain of flying yellow dust, while over our heads the Turkish shells raced after each other so rapidly that they beat out the air like the branches of a tree in a storm. On account of its height, and the glaring heat, and the shells passing, and the Greek guns going off and then turning somersaults, it was not a place due to poor meditation, but Ambrose Francis meditated there as though he were in his own study. He was a very young man, and very shy, and he was too busy to consider his own safety, or to take time, as the others did, to show that he was not considering it. Some of the other offices stood up on the rest works, and called the attention of the men to what they were doing, but as they did not wish the men to follow their example in this, it was difficult to see what they expected gain by their braggadocio. Francis was as unconcerned as an artist, painting a big picture in his studio. The battle-plane below him was his canvas, and his nine mountain guns were his paint brushes, and he painted out turks and turkish cannon with the same concentrated, serious expression of countenance that you see on the face of an artist when he bides one brush between his lips, and with another wipes out a false line or a touch of the wrong colour. You have seen an artist cock his head on one side, and shut one eye and frown at his canvas, and then select several brushes and mix different colours, and hit the canvas aboard stroke, and then lean back to know the effect. Francis acted in just that way. He would stand with his legs apart and his head on one side, pulling meditatively at his pointed beard, and then, taking a closer look through his field-glasses, would select the three guns he had decided would give him the effect he wanted to produce, and he would produce the effect. When the shots struck plump in the turkish lines, and we could see the earth leap up into the air like geese of muddy water, and each gunner would wave his cap and cheer, Francis would only smile and certainly, and begin again, with the aid of his field-glasses to puzzle out fresh combinations. The battle that had begun in a storm of hail, ended on the first day in a storm of bullets that had been held in reserve by the turks, and which let off just after sundown. They came from a natural trench, formed by the dried-up bed of a stream which lay just below the hill on which the first Greek trench was situated. There were bushes growing under bank of the stream nearest to the Greek lines, and these hid the men who occupied it. Throughout the day there had been an irritating fire from this trench from what appeared to be not more than a dozen rifles, but we could see that it was fed from time to time with many boxes of ammunition which were carried to it on the backs of mules from the turkish position a half-mile farther to the rear. Base and a corporal took a greater version to this little group of turks, not because there were too many of them to be disregarded, but because they were so near, and base kept a corporal's services engaged in firing into it, and in discouraging the ammunition mules when they were being driven in that direction. Our corporal was a sharpshooter, and, accordingly, felt a superior priority to his comrades, and he had that cheerful contempt for his officers that all true Greek soldiers enjoy, and so he never joined in the volley-firing, but kept his ammunition exclusively for the dozen men behind the bushes and forage mules. He waged, as it were, a little better on his own account. The other men rose as commanded and fired regular volleys and sank back again, but he fixed the sides to suit his own idea of the range, and he rose when he was ready to do so, and fired whenever he thought best. When his officer, who kept curled up in the hollow of the trench, commanded him to lie down, he would frown and shake his head at the interruption, and paid no further attention to the order. He was as much alone as a hunter on the mountain peaks talking dear, and whenever he fired at the men in the bushes, he would swear softly, and when he fired at the mules, he would chuckle and laugh, with delight and content. The mules had to cross a plowed field in order to reach the bushes, and so we were able to mark where his bullet struck, and we could see them skip across the field, kicking up the dirt as they advanced, until they stopped a mule altogether, or frightened the man who was leading it into a disorderly retreat. It appeared later, that instead of there being but twelve men in these bushes, there were six hundred, and that they were hidden there, until the sun set in order to make a final attack on the first trench. They had probably argued, that at sunset a strain of the day's work, would have told on the Greek morale, and that men's nerves would be jerking, and their stomachs aching for food, that they would be ready for darkness and sleep, and in no condition to repulse a fresh and vigorous attack. So just as the sun sank, and the officers were counting the cost in dead and wounded, and the men were gathering up blankets and overcoats, and the firing from the Greek lines had almost ceased. There came a fierce rattle from the trench to the right of us, like a watchdog barking the alarm, and the others took it up from all over the hill, and when we looked down into the plain below to learn what it meant, we saw it blue with men, who seemed to have sprung from the earth. They were clamouring from the bed of the stream, breaking through the bushes and forming into a long line, which, as soon as formed, was at once hidden at regular intervals by flashes of flame, that seemed to leap from one gun barrel to the next, as you have seen a current of electricity run along a line of gas jets. In the dim twilight these flashes were much more blinding than they had been in the glare of the sun, and the crash of the artillery coming on top of the silence was a more fierce and terrible bite of contrast. The Turks were so close on us that the first trench could do little to help itself. The men cuddled against it while their comrades on the surrounding hills fought for them, their volleys passing close above our heads and meeting the rush of the Turkish bullets under way, so that there was now one continuous whistling shriek, like the roar of the wind-through deringing of a ship in a storm. If a man had raised his arm above his head, his hand would have been torn off. It had come up so subtly, that it was like two dogs, each springing at the throat of the other, and in a greater degree it had something of the sound of two wild animals struggling for life. Volly answered Volly, as if there was personal hate, one crashing in upon the roar of the other, or beating it out of recognition with the bursting roar of heavy cannon. At the same instant all of the Turkish batteries opened to his great ponderous booming explosions, and the little mountain guns barked and snarled and shrieked back at them, and the rifle volleys crackled and shot out blistering flames, while the air was filled with invisible express trains that shook and jarded and crashed into one another, bursting and shrieking and groaning. It seemed as though you were lying in a burning forest with giant tree trunks that had withstood the storm of centuries crashing and falling around your ears, and sending up great showers of sparks and flame. This lasted for five minutes or less, and then the death grip seemed to relax. The volleys came brokenly, like a man panting for breath. The bullet seized to sound with a hiss of escaping steam, and rustled aimlessly by, and from hill-top to hill-top, the officer's whistle sounded as though a sportsman were calling off his dogs. The Turks withdrew into the coming night, and the Greeks lay back, panting and sweating, and stared open-eyed at one another, like men who had looked for a moment into hell, and had come back to the world again. The next day was like the first, except that by five o'clock in the afternoon the Turks appeared on our left flank, crawling across the hills like an invasion of great ants, and a Greek army that at Philistines had made the two best and most dignified stands of the war withdrew upon Helmiros, and the Turks poured into the village and burned it, leaving nothing standing, save two tall Turkish minarets that many years before went hessily belonged to the sultan, the Turks themselves had placed there. End of the Greek-Turkish War, the Battle of Valestinos. In 3 of Notes of a War Correspondent. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information, or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Bradley Smith. Notes of a War Correspondent by Richard Harding Davis. The Spanish-American War, Part 1. The Rough Riders at Guasimas. On the day the American troops landed on the coast of Cuba, the Cubans informed General Wheeler that the enemy were entrenched at Guasimas, blocking the way to Santiago. Guasimas is not a village nor even a collection of houses. It is the meeting place of two trails which join at the apex of a v. Three miles from the seaport town of Sibone, and continue merged in a single trail to Santiago. General Wheeler, guided by the Cubans, reconnoitered this trail on the 23rd of June, and with the position of the enemy fully explained to him, returned to Sibone and informed General Young and Colonel Wood that on the following morning, he would attack the Spanish position at Guasimas. It has been stated that at Guasimas, the Rough Riders were trapped in an ambush, but as the plan was discussed while I was present, I know that so far for many ones running into an ambush, every one of the officers concerned had a full knowledge of where he would find the enemy, and what he was to do when he found him. That night, no one slept. For until two o'clock in the morning, troops were still being disembarked in the surf, and two ships of war had their searchlights turned on the landing place and made Sibone as light as a ballroom. Back of the searchlights was an ocean white with moonlight, and on the shore are red campfires at which half-drowned troops were drying their uniforms, and the Rough Riders, who had just marched in from Baikuri were cooking a late supper or early breakfast of coffee and bacon. Below the home of the Spanish Commandante, which General Wheeler had made his headquarters, lay the camp of the Rough Riders, and through it Cuban officers were riding their half-starved ponies and scattering the ashes of the campfires. Below them was the beach and the roaring surf in which a thousand or so naked men were assisting and impeding the progress shoreward of their comrades in pontoons and shoreboats, which were being hurled at the beach like sleds down a watershoot. It was one of the most weird and remarkable scenes of the war, probably of any war. An army was being landed on the enemy's coast at the dead of night, but with the same cheers and shrieks and laughter that rise from the bathers on Coney Island on a hot Sunday. It was a pandemonium of noises. The men still to be landed from the prison hulks, as they called the transports, were singing and chorus. The men already on shore were dancing naked around the campfires on the beach or shouting with delight as they plunged into the first bath that had offered in seven days, and those in the launches as they were pitched headfirst at the soil of Cuba, signalized their arrival by howls of triumph. On either side rose black overhanging ridges in the low land between where white tents and burning fires from the ocean came the blazing dazzling eyes of the searchlights shaming the quiet moonlight. After three hours' troubled sleep in this tumult, the Rough Riders left camp at five in the morning with the exception of half a dozen officers they were dismounted and carried their blanket rolls, heversacks, ammunition, and carbines. General Young had already started towards Quasimas. The first and 10th dismounted cavalry and according to the agreement of the night before had taken the eastern trail to our right, while the Rough Riders climbed the steep bridge above Sibone and started towards the rendezvous along the trail to the west, which was on high ground and a half mile to a mile distant from the trail along which General Young and his regulars were marching. There was a valley between us and the bushes were so thick on both sides of our trail that it was not possible at any time until we met at Quasimas to distinguish the other column. As soon as the Rough Riders had reached the top of the ridge, not 20 minutes after they had left camp, which was the first opportunity that presented itself, Colonel Wood ordered Captain Capron to proceed with his troops in front of the column as an advance guard and to choose a point of five men skilled as scouts and trailers. Still in advance of these, he placed two Cuban scouts. The column then continued along the trail in single file. The Cubans were at a distance of 250 yards, the point of five picked men under Sergeant Byrne, and duty Sergeant Fish followed them at a distance of 100 yards. And then came Capron's troops of 60 men strung out in single file. No flankers were placed for the reason that the dense undergrowth and the tangle of vines that stretched from the branches of the trees to the bushes below made it a physical impossibility for man or beast to move forward except along the single trail. Colonel Wood rode at the head of the column followed by two regular Army officers who were members of General Wheeler's staff, a Cuban officer and Lieutenant Colonel Roosevelt. They rode slowly in consideration of the troopers on foot who under a cruelly hot sun carried heavy burdens. To those who did not have to walk, it was not unlike a hunting excursion in our West. The scenery was beautiful and the view down the valley one of luxuriant peace. Roosevelt had never been in the tropics and Captain McCormick and I were talking back at him over our shoulders and at each other pointing out unfamiliar trees and birds. Roosevelt thought it looked like a good deer country as it once was. It reminded McCormick of Southern California. It looked to me like the trails of Central America. We advanced talking in that fashion and in high spirits and congratulating ourselves in being shut of the transport and on breathing fine mountain air again and on the fact that we were on horseback. We agreed it was impossible to appreciate that we were really at war, that we were in an enemy's country. We had been riding in this pleasant fashion for an hour and a half with brief halts for rest when Wood stopped the head of the column and rode down the trail to meet Capron who was coming back. Wood returned immediately leading his horse and said to Roosevelt, pass the word back to keep silence in the ranks. The place at which we had halted was where the trail narrowed and proceeded sharply downward. There was on one side of it a stout barbed wire fence of five strands. By some fortunate accident, this fence had been cut just where the head of the column halted. On the left of the trail, it shed off fields of high grass blocked at every 50 yards with great barricades of undergrowth and tangled trees and chaparral. On the other side of the trail, there was not a foot of free ground. The bushes seemed absolutely impenetrable as indeed they were later found to be. When we halted, the man sat down beside the trail and chewed the long blades of grass or fanned the air with their hats. They had no knowledge of the situation such as their leaders possessed and their only emotion was one of satisfaction at the chance the halt gave them to rest and shift their packs. Wood again walked down the trail with Capron and disappeared and one of the officers informed us that the scouts had seen the outposts of the enemy. It did not seem reasonable that the Spaniards who had failed to attack us when we landed it by Curry would oppose us until they could do so and force so personally. I doubted that there were any Spaniards nearer than Santiago. But we tied our horses to the wire fence and Capron's troops knelt with carbines at the ready, peering into the bushes. We must have waited there while Wood reconordered for over 10 minutes. Then he returned and began deploying his troops out at either side of the trail. Capron, he sent down the trail itself. G-troop was ordered to beat into the bushes on the right and K and A were sent over the ridge on which we stood down into the hollow to connect with General Young's column on the opposite side of the valley. F and E-troops were deployed in skirmish line on the other side of the wire fence. Wood had discovered the enemy a few hundred yards from where he expected to find him and so far from being surprised he had time, as I have just described, to get five of his troops into position before a shot was fired. The firing when it came started suddenly on our right. It sounded so close that still believing we were acting on a false alarm and that there were no Spaniards ahead of us, I guessed it was Capron's men firing at random to disclose the enemy's position. I ran after G-troop under Captain Luhlen and found them breaking their way through the bushes in the direction from which the volleys came. It was like forcing the walls of a maze. If each trooper had not kept in touch with the man on either hand, he would have been lost in the thicket. At one moment the underbrush seemed forming with our men and the next, except that you heard the twigs breaking and heavy breathing or a crush as a vine pulled someone down, there was not a sign of human being anywhere. In a few minutes we broke through into a little open space in front of a dark curtain of vines and the men fell on one knee and began returning the fire that came from it. The enemy's fire was exceedingly heavy and his aim was excellent. We saw nothing of the Spaniards except a few on the ridge across the valley. I happened to be the only one present with field glasses and when I discovered this force on the ridge and had made sure by the cockades in their sombreros that they were Spaniards and not Cubans, I showed them to Roosevelt. He calculated they were 500 yards from us and ordered the men to fire on them at that range. Through the two hours of fighting that followed, although men were falling all around us, the Spaniards on the ridge were the only ones that many of us saw, but the fire against us was not more than 80 yards away and so hot that our men could only lie flat in the grass and return it in that position. It was at this moment that our men believed that they were being attacked by Capron's troops, which they imagined must have slung to the right and having lost its bearings and hearing them advancing through the underbrush had mistaken them for the enemy. They accordingly ceased firing and began shouting in order to warn Capron that he was shooting at his friends. This is the foundation for the statement that the Rough Riders had fired on each other, which they did not do then or at any other time. Later we examined the relative position of the trail which Capron held and the position of G-Troop and they were at right angles to one another. Capron could not possibly have fired into us at any time unless he had turned directly around in his tracks and aimed up the very trail he had just descended. Advancing he could no more have hit us than he could have seen us out of the back of his head. When we found many hundred spent cartridges of the Spaniards a hundred yards in front of G-Troop's position, the question as to who had fired on us was answered. It was an exceedingly hot corner. The whole troop was gathered in the little open place blocked by the network of grapevines and tangled bushes before it. They could not see 20 feet on three sides of them but on the right hand lay the valley and across it came the sound of Young's Brigade who were apparently heavily engaged. The enemy's fire was so close that the men could not hear the word of command and Captain Luhlen and Lieutenant Greenway unable to get their attention ran among them, batting them off with their sombreros to make them cease firing. Lieutenant Colonel Roosevelt ran up just then bringing with him Lieutenant Woodbury Cain and 10 troopers from K-Troop. Roosevelt lay down in the grass beside Luhlen and consulted with him eagerly. Cain was smiling with the charming content of a perfectly happy man. When Captain Luhlen told him his men were not needed and to rejoin his troop he led his detail over the edge of the hill on which we lay. As he disappeared below the crest he did not stoop to avoid the bullets but walked erect still smiling. Roosevelt pointed out that it was impossible to advance farther on account of the network of wild grapevines that masked the Spaniards from us and that we must cross the trail and make to the left. The shouts the men had raised to warn Capron had established our position to the enemy and the firing was now fearfully accurate. Sergeant Russell who in his day had been Colonel on a governor's staff was killed and the other sergeant was shot through the wrist. In the space of three minutes nine men were lying on their backs helpless. Before we got away every third man was killed or wounded. We drew off slowly to the left dragging the wounded with us. Owing to the low aim of the enemy we were forced to move on our knees and crawl. Even then men were hit. One man near me was shot through the head. Returning later to locate the body and identify him I found that the buzzards had torn off his lips and his eyes. This mutilation by the hideous birds was without doubt what Admiral Sampson mistook for the work of the Spaniards when the bodies of the Marines at Guantanamo were found disfigured. K troop meantime had deployed into the valley under the fire from the enemy on the ridge. It had been ordered to establish communication with General Young's column and while advancing and firing on the ridge Captain Jenkins sent the Gideon bearer back to climb the hill and wave his red and white banner where Young's men could see it. The Gideon bearer had once run for Congress on the gold ticket in Arizona and as someone said was naturally the man who should have been selected for a forlorn hope. His flag brought him instantly under heavy fire but he continued waving it until the 10th cavalry on the other side of the valley answered and the two columns were connected by a skirmish line composed of K troop and A under Captain Bucky O'Neill. G troop meanwhile had hurried over to the left and passing through the opening in the wire fence had spread out into the open order. It followed down after Captain Luna's troop and D&E troops which were well already in advance. Roosevelt ran forward and took command of the extreme left in this line. Wood was walking up and down along it leading his horse which he thought might be of use in case he had to move quickly to alter his original formation. His plan at present was to spread out his men so that they would join young on the right and on the left swing around until they flanked the enemy. K&E troops had already succeeded in joining hands with Young's column across the valley and as they were capable of taking care of themselves Wood was bending his efforts to keep his remaining four companies in a straight line and revolving them around the enemy's end. It was in no way an easy thing to do. The men were at times wholly hidden from each other and from him probably at no one time did he see more than two of his troops together. It was only by the firing that he could tell where his men lay and that they were always advancing. The advances were made in quick desperate rushes. Sometimes the ground gained was no more than a man covers and sliding for a base. At other times half a troop would rise and race forward and then burrow deep in the hot grass and fire. On this side of the line there was an occasional glimpse of the enemy but for a great part of the time the men shot at the places from where the enemy's fire seemed to come aiming low and answering in steady volleys. The fire discipline was excellent. The prophets of evil of the Tampa Bay Hotel had foretold that the cowboys would shoot as they chose and in the field would act independently of their officers. As it turned out the cowboys were the very men who waited most patiently for the officers to give the word of command. At all times the movement was without rest. Breathless and fierce. Like a cane rush or a street fight. After the first three minutes every man had stripped as though for a wrestling match, throwing off all his impedimenta but his cartridge belt and canteen. Even then the sun handicapped their strength cruelly. The enemy was hidden in the shade of the jungle. While they for every thicket they gained had to fight in the open crawling through the grass which was as hot as a steam bath and with their flesh and clothing torn by thorns and the sword-like blade of the Spanish bayonet. The glare of the sun was full in their eyes and as fierce as a limelight. When G. Troupe passed on the trail to the left I stopped at the place where the column had first halted. It had been converted into a dressing station and the wounded of G. Troupe were left there in the care of the hospital stewards. A tall, gaunt young man with a cross on his arm was just coming back up the trail. His head was bent and by some surgeon's trick he was carrying a wounded man much heavier than himself across his shoulder. As I stepped out of the trail he raised his head and smiled and nodded and left me wondering where I had seen him before, smiling the same cheery, confident way and moving in that same position. I knew it could not have been under the same conditions and yet he was certainly associated with another time of excitement and rush and heat. Then I remembered him as now he had been covered with blood and dirt and perspiration but then he wore a canvas jacket and the man he carried on his shoulders was trying to hold him back from a whitewashed line. And I recognized the young doctor with the blood bathing his breeches as Bob Church of Princeton. That was the only one of four badly wounded men he carried that day on his shoulders over a half mile of trail that stretched from the firing line back to the dressing station and under an unceasing fire. As the senior surgeon was absent he had chief responsibility that day for all the wounded and that so few of them died is greatly due to this young man who went down into the firing line and pulled them from it and bore them out of danger. The comic paragraphers who wrote of the Knickerbocker Club and the college swells of the Roughriders and of their imaginary valets and golf clubs should in decency since the fight at Guasimas apologize. For the same spirit that once sent these men down a whitewashed field against their opponent's rush line was the spirit that sent Church, Channing, Devereaux, Reynolds, Ren, Cash, Bull, Lamed, Goodrich, Greenway, Dudley Dean and a dozen others through the high hot grass at Guasimas, not shouting as their friends the Cowboys did but each with his mouth tightly shut with his eyes on the ball and moving in obedience to the captain's signals. Judging from the sound our firing line now seemed to be half a mile in advance of the place where the head of the column had first halted. This showed that the Spaniards had driven back at least 300 yards from their original position. It was impossible to see any of our men in the field so I ran down the trail with the idea that it would lead me back to the troop I had left when I had stopped at the dressing station. The walk down that trail presented one of the most gruesome pictures of the war. It narrowed as I descended. It was for that reason that the enemy had selected that part of it for the attack and the vines and bushes interlaced so closely above it that the sun could not come through. The rocks on either side were splattered with blood and the rank grass was matted with it. Blanket rolls, haversacks, carbines and canteens had been abandoned all along its length. It looked as though a retreating army had fled along it rather than that one troop had fought its way through it to the front. Except for the clatter of the land crabs, those hideous orchid colored monsters that haunt the place of the dead and the whistling of the bullets in the trees, the place was silent as a grave. For the wounded lying along its length were as still as the dead beside them. The noise of the loose stones rolling under my feet brought a hospital steward out of the brush and he called after me. Lieutenant Thomas is badly wounded in here and we can't move him. We want to carry him out of the sun some place where there is shade and a breeze. Thomas was the first lieutenant of Capron's troops. He is a young man, large and powerfully built. He was shot through the leg just below the trunk and I found him lying on a blanket half naked and covered with blood and with his leg bound in tourniquets made of twigs and pocket handkerchiefs. It gave one a thrill of awe and wonder to see how these cowboy surgeons with a stick that one would use to light a pipe and with the gaudy kerchiefs they had taken from their necks were holding death at bay. The young officer was in great pain and tossing and raving wildly. When we gathered up the corners of his blanket and lifted him, he tried to sit upright and cried out, you're taking me to the front, aren't you? You said you would. They've killed my captain. Do you understand? They've killed Captain Capron. The Mexicans, they've killed my captain. The troops assured him that they were carrying him to the firing line, but he was not satisfied. We stumbled over the stones and vines, bumping his wounded body against the ground and leaving a black streak in the grass behind us. But it seemed to hurt us more than it did him, for he sat up again, clutching at us imploringly with his bloody hands. For God's sake, take me to the front, he begged. Do you hear? I order you. Damn you, I order. We must give them hell. Do you hear? We must give them hell. They've killed Capron. They've killed my captain. The loss of blood at last mercifully silenced him. And when we had reached the trail, he had fainted and I left them kneeling around him. Their grave boyish faces filled with sympathy and concern. Only 50 feet from him and further down the trail, I passed his captain with his body propped against church's knee and with his head fallen on the surgeon's shoulder. Capron was always a handsome, soldierly looking man. Some said he was the most soldierly looking of any of the young officers in the army. And as I saw him then, death had given him a great dignity and nobleness. He was only 28 years old. The age when life has just begun. But he rested his head on the surgeon's shoulder like a man who knew he was already through with it and that though they might peck and mend at the body, he had received his final orders. His breast and shoulder were bare. And as the surgeon cut the tunic from him, the sight of his great chest and the skin as white as a girl's and the black open wound against it made the yellow stripes and the brass insignia on his tunic strangely mean and tawdry. 50 yards further on around a turn in the trail, behind a rock, a boy was lying with a bullet wound between his eyes. His chest was heaving with short horse noises which I guess were due to some muscular action entirely. And that he was virtually dead. I lifted him and gave him some water but it would not pass through his fixed teeth. And the pocket of his blouse was a New Testament with the name Fielder Dawson, Missouri, scribbled in pencil. When I was writing it down for identification, a boy as young as himself came from behind me down the trail. It is no use, he said. The surgeon has seen him. He says he is just the same as dead. He is my Bunky. We only met two weeks ago at San Antonio but he and me had got to be such good friends but there's nothing I can do now. He threw himself down on the rock beside his Bunky who was still breathing with that horse inhuman rattle. And I left them, the one who had been spared looking down helplessly with the tears creeping across his cheeks. The firing was quite close now and the trail was no longer filled with blanket rolls and haversacks nor did pitiful prostrate figures lie in wait behind each rock. I guess this must mean that now was well in advance of the farthest point to which Capron's troops had moved. And I was running forward feeling confident that I must be close on our men. When I saw the body of a sergeant blocking the trail and stretched at full length across it. The position was a hundred yards in advance of that of any of the others. It was apparently the body of the first man killed. After death the bodies of some men seemed to shrink almost instantly within themselves. They become limp and shapeless and their uniforms hang upon them strangely. But this man who was a giant in life remained a giant in death. His very attitude was one of attack. His fists were clenched, his jaw set and his eyes which were still human seemed fixed with resolve. He was dead but he was not defeated. And so Hamilton Fish died as he had always lived defiantly running into the very face of the enemy standing squarely upright on his legs instead of crouching as the others called him to do until he fell like a column across the trail. God gives was the motto on the watch I took from his blouse and God could not have given him a nobler end to die in the forefront of the first fight of the war quickly painlessly with a bullet through his heart with his regiment behind him and facing the enemies of his country. The line at this time was divided by the trail into two wings. The right wing composed of K and A troops was advancing through the valley returning the fire from the ridge as it did so and the left wing which was much the longer of the two was swinging around on the enemy's right flank with its own right resting on the barbed wire fence. I borrowed a carbine from a wounded man and joined the regiment of L troop which was close to the trail. This troop was then commanded by Second Lieutenant Day who on account of his conduct that morning and at the battle of San Juan later when he was shot through the arm was promoted to the captain of L troop or as it was later officially designated Capron's troop. He was walking up and down the line as unconcernedly as though we were at target practice and an Irish Sergeant Bern was assisting him by keeping up a continuous flow of comments and criticisms that showed the keenest enjoyment of the situation. Bern was the only man I noticed who seemed to regard the fight as in any way humorous. For at Guasimas no one had time to be flippant or to exhibit any signs of braggadocio. It was for all of them from the moment it started through the hot exhausting hour and a half that it lasted a most serious proposition. The conditions were exceptional. The men had made a light march the evening before, had been given but three hours trouble to sleep on the wet sand and had then been marched in full equipment uphill and under a cruelly hot sun directly into action. And 80% of them had never before been under fire. Nor had one man in the regiment ever fired a Craig Jorgensen carbine until he fired it at a Spaniard for their arms had been issued to them so soon before sailing that they had only drilled with them without using cartridges. To this handicap was also added the nature of the ground and the fact that our men could not see their opponents. Their own men fell or rolled over on every side shot down by an invisible enemy with no one upon whom they could retaliate with no sign that the attack might not go on indefinitely. Yet they never once took a step backward but advanced grimly cleaning a bush or thicket of its occupants before charging it and securing its cover for themselves and answering each volley with one that sounded like an echo of the first. The men were panting for breath. The sweat ran so readily into their eyes that they could not see the sights of their guns. Their limbs unused to such exertion after seven days of cramped idleness on the troop ship trembled with weakness and the sun blinded and dazzled them. But time after time they rose and staggered forward through the high grass or beat their way with their carbines across the tangle of lines and creepers. A mile and a half of territory was gained foot by foot in this fashion. The three Spanish positions carried in that distance being marked by the thousands of Mauser cartridges that lay shining and glittering in the grass and behind the barricades of bushes. But this distance had not been gained without many losses for everyone in the regiment was engaged. Even those who on account of the heat had dropped out along the trail as soon as the sound of the fight reached them came limping to the front and plunged into the firing line. It was the only place they could go. There was no other line with the exception of church's dressing station and it's wounded there were no reserves. Among the first to be wounded was the correspondent Edward Marshall of the New York Journal who was on the firing line to the left. He was shot through the body near the spine and when I saw him he was suffering the most terrible agonies and passing through a succession of convulsions. He nevertheless in his brief moments of comparative peace bore himself with the utmost calm and was much a soldier to duty that he continued writing his account of the fight until the fight itself was ended. His courage was the admiration of all the troopers and he was highly commended by Colonel Wood in the official account of the engagement. Nothing so well illustrated how desperately each man was needed and how little was his desire to withdraw as the fact that the wounded lay where they fell until the hospital stewards found them. Their comrades did not use them as an excuse to go to leave the firing line. I have watched other fights where the men engaged were quite willing to unselfishly bear the wounded from the zone of danger. The fight had now lasted an hour and the line had reached a more open country with a slight incline upward toward a wood on the edge of which was a ruined house. This house was a former distillery for Aguardiente and was now occupied and forced by the enemy. Lieutenant Colonel Roosevelt on the far left was moving up his men with the intention of taking this house on the flank. Wood, who was all over the line had the same objective point in his mind. The troop commanders had a general idea that the distillery was the key to the enemy's position and were all working in that direction. It was extremely difficult for Wood and Roosevelt to communicate with the captains and after the first general orders had been given them they relied upon the latter's intelligence to pull them through. I do not suppose Wood out of the 500 engaged saw more than 30 of his men out any one time. When he had passed one troop except for the noise of its volley firing it was immediately lost to him in the brush and it was so with the next. Still, so excellent was the intelligence of the officers and so ready the spirit of the men that they kept an almost perfect alignment as was shown when the final order came to charge in the open fields. The advance upon the run building was made in stubborn short rushes, sometimes in silence and sometimes firing as we ran. The order to fire at will was seldom given. The men waiting patiently for the officer signal and then answering in volleys. Some of the men who were twice days age begged him to let them take the enemy's impromptu fort on the run but he answered them tolerantly like spoiled children and held them down until there was a lull in the enemy's fire when he would leave them forward always taking the advance himself. By the way they made these rushes it was easy to tell which men were used to hunting big game in the West and which were not. The Eastern men broke at the word and ran for the cover they were directed to take like men trying to get out of the rain and fell panning on their faces while the Western trappers and hunters slipped and wriggled through the grass like Indians dodging from tree trunk to tree trunk and from one bush to another. They fell into line at the same time with the others but while doing so they had not once exposed themselves. Some of the escapes were little short of miraculous. The man on my right Champneys Marshal of Washington had one bullet passed through his sleeves and another passed through his shirt where it was pulled close to his spine. The holes where the ball entered and went out again were clearly cut. Another man's skin was slightly burned by three bullets and three distinct lines as though it had been touched for an instant by the lighted end of a cigar. Greenway was shot through his shirt across the breast and Roosevelt was so close to one bullet when it struck a tree that it filled his eyes and ears with tiny splinters. Major Brody and Lieutenant Thomas were both wounded within a few feet of Colonel Wood and his color Sergeant Wright who followed close at his heels was clipped three times in the head and neck and four bullets passed through the folds of the flag he carried. One trooper, Roland of Deming was shot through the lower ribs. He was ordered by Roosevelt to fall back to the dressing station but their church told him there was nothing he could do for him then and directed him to sit down until he could be taken to the hospital at Cibone. Roland sat still for a short time and then remarked restlessly, I don't seem to be doing much good here and picking up his carbine returned to the firing line. There Roosevelt found him. I thought I ordered you to the rear he demanded. Yes sir, you did, Roland said but there didn't seem to be much doing back there. After the fighting he was sent to Cibone with the rest of the wounded but two days later he appeared in the camp. He marched from Cibone a distance of six miles and uphill all the way carrying his carbine, canteen and cartridge belt. I thought you were in the hospital, would said. I was, Roland answered, cheapest, but I didn't seem to be doing any good there. They gave him up as hopeless and he continued his duties and went into the fight of the San Juan Hills with the hole still through his ribs. Another cowboy named Hefner when shot through the body asked to be propped up against a tree with his canteen and cartridge belt beside him and the last his troops saw of him he was seated alone grimly firing over their heads in the direction of the enemy. Early in the fight I came upon church attending to a young cowboy who was shot through the chest. The entrance to his wound was so small that church could not insert enough of the gauze packing to stop the flow of blood. I'm afraid I'll have to make this hole larger, he said to the boy, or you'll bleed to death. All right, the trooper answered. I guess you know your business. The boy stretched out on his back and lay perfectly quiet while church with a pair of curved scissors cut away the edges of the wound. His patient neither whimpered nor swore but stared up at the sun in silence. The bullets were falling on every side and the operation was a hasty one but the trooper made no comment until church said, we'd better get out of this. Can you stand being carried? Do you think you can carry me? The trooper asked. Yes. Well exclaimed the boy admiringly. You certainly know your business. Another of the rough riders was brought to the dressing station where a shattered ankle and church after bandaging it gave him his choice of riding down to Cibone on a mule or of being carried a day later on a litter. If you think you can manage to ride the mule with that broken foot, he said, you can start at once but if you wait until tomorrow when I can spare the men, you can be carried all the way. The cowboy preferred to start at once. So six hospital stewards lifted him and dropped him on the mule and into a huge Mexican saddle. He stuck his wounded ankle into one strip and his untouched one into the other and gathered up the reins. Does it pain you? Can you stand it? Church asked anxiously. The cowboy turned and smiled down upon him with amused disdain. Stand this, he cried, why this is just like getting money from home. Toward the last, the firing from the enemy sounded less near and the bullets passed much higher. Roosevelt, who had picked up a carbine and was firing to give the direction to the others, determined upon the charge. Wood at the other end of the line decided at the same time upon the same maneuver. It was called Woods Bluff afterward for he had nothing to back it with. Well to the enemy it looked as though his whole force was but the skirmish line in advance of a regiment. The Spaniards naturally could not believe that this thin line which suddenly broke out of the bushes and from behind trees and came cheering out into the hot sunlight was the entire fighting force against it. They supposed the regiment was coming close on its heels and as Spanish troops hate being rushed as a cat hates water, they fired a few parting volleys and broke and ran. The cheering had the same invigorating effect on our own side as a cold shower. It was what first told half the men where the other half were and it made every individual man feel better. As we knew it was only a bluff, the first cheer was wavering. But the sound of our own voices was so comforting that the second cheer was a howl of triumph. As it was the Spaniards thought the Rough Riders had already disregarded all the rules of war. When we fired a volley, one of the prisoners said later, instead of falling back they came forward. That is not the way to fight to come closer at every volley and so when instead of retreating on each volley, the Rough Riders rushed at them cheering and filling the hot air with wild cowboy yells, the dismayed enemy retreated upon Santiago where he announced he had been attacked by the entire American army. One of the residents of Santiago asked one of the soldiers if those Americans fought well. Well, he replied, they tried to catch us with their hands. I have not attempted to give any account of General Young's fight on our right, which was equally desperate and owing to the courage of the colored troops of the 10th and storming a ridge equally worthy of praise. But it has seemed better not to try and tell of anything I did not see, but to limit myself to the work of the Rough Riders to whom after all the victory was due. As it was owing to Colonel Wood's charge which took the Spaniards in flank that General Wheeler and General Young were able to advance their own stubborn attack in front having failed to dislodge the enemy from his rifle pits. According to the statement of the enemy who had every reason not to exaggerate the size of his own force, 4,000 Spaniards were engaged in this action. The Rough Riders numbered 534 and General Young's force numbered 464. The American troops accordingly attacked a force over four times their own number entrenched behind rifle pits and bushes in a mountain pass. In spite of the smokeless powder used by the Spaniards which had hit their position, the Rough Riders routed them out of it and drove them back from three different barricades until they made their last stand in the run distillery once they finally drove them by assault. The eager spirit in which this was accomplished is best described in the Spanish soldier's answer to the inquiring civilian. They tried to catch us with their hands. The Rough Riders should adopt it as their motto end of the Rough Riders at Guasimas. Recording by Bradley Smith, Seattle, Washington.