Read CHAPTER VIII of Campaigning in Cuba , free online book, by George Kennan, on ReadCentral.com.

THE LANDING AND ADVANCE OF THE ARMY

Early Sunday morning, at the little zinc-walled telegraph office under the camp of the marines at Guantanamo, I happened to meet two war correspondents one of them, if I remember rightly, Mr. Howard of the New York “Journal” who had just come from the front with a detailed account of the fight at Guasimas. This fight, they said, was not a mere insignificant skirmish, as Admiral Sampson supposed when I saw him on Saturday, but a serious battle, in which a part of General Wheeler’s division was engaged, for several hours, with a force of Spanish regulars estimated at two or three thousand men. More than one hundred officers and men on our side had been killed or wounded, among them Captain Capron and Sergeant Hamilton Fish, both of whom were dead. The wounded, Mr. Howard said, had been brought back to Siboney and put into one of the abandoned Spanish houses on the beach, where, only the night before, he had seen them lying, in their blood-stained clothing, on the dirty floor, without blankets or pillows, and without anything that seemed to him like adequate attendance or care. At my request the two correspondents went on board the State of Texas and repeated their statement to Miss Barton, who, after consultation with the officers of her staff, decided to take the steamer back at once to Siboney. We could do nothing more at Guantanamo until General Perez should furnish transportation and an escort for the food that we intended to send to the refugees north of the bay, and, meanwhile, we might, perhaps, render some service to the wounded soldiers of General Wheeler’s command whom Mr. Howard had seen lying, without blankets or pillows, on the floor. We had on board the State of Texas, at that time, one hundred or more cots, with plenty of bedding, and if the medical officers of the army could not get hospital supplies ashore, we thought that we could. At any rate, we would try. Calling again upon Captain McCalla, I explained to him the reasons for our sudden change of plan, and told him that, although we had decided to go to Siboney, we should try to get back in time to meet the pack-train and escort to be furnished by General Perez. I then returned to the State of Texas, and we sailed for Siboney at two o’clock.

In order to follow intelligently the course of the Santiago campaign, and to understand and appreciate the difficulties with which the medical department of the army had to contend, one must know something of the coast upon which that army landed and the nature of the environment by which it was surrounded. The southeastern coast of Cuba, between the entrance to Santiago harbor and the Bay of Guantanamo, is formed by three parallel ranges of hills and mountains which may be roughly characterized as follows: first, what I shall call the rampart a high, flat-topped ridge, or narrow table, very steep on the sea side, and broken into long terraces by outcropping ledges of limestone; second, the foot-hills, which rise out of a wooded valley or valleys behind the rampart; and, third, the high mountains of the coast, or Sierra del Cobre, range, which lie back of the foot-hills, at a distance of five or six miles from the sea. This is not a strictly accurate topographical description of the coast, but it is roughly and generally true and will answer my purpose. In the vicinity of Santiago the rampart, or mesa-like elevation which borders the sea, has a height of two or three hundred feet, and stretches eastward and westward, like a stone wall, for a distance of nearly twenty miles. At three points it is cut down to the sea-level in narrow, V-shaped clefts, or notches, which have a width at the bottom of from seventy-five to two hundred yards, and which serve as outlets for three small streams. The first of these notches, as one goes eastward from Morro Castle, is that formed by the mouth of the Aguadores ravine, where the Juragua Railroad, on its way from Siboney to Santiago, crosses the Aguadores or Guamo River, and where the iron railroad-bridge and the approach to the city are guarded by a wooden blockhouse and an old stone fort. In the second notch, about six miles from Aguadores and ten from Morro Castle, are the hamlet and railroad-station of Siboney; and in the third, five miles farther to the eastward, lies the somewhat larger and more important mining village of Daiquiri, which, before the war, was the shipping-port of the Spanish-American Iron Company. There is no harbor, shelter for vessels, or safe anchorage at any of these places; but as the rampart, everywhere else, presents an almost insurmountable barrier, an invading force must either disembark in these notches, or go eastward to the Bay of Guantanamo and march forty miles to Santiago through the foot-hills. General Shafter, after inspecting the coast, decided to land in the notches occupied by the villages of Daiquiri and Siboney. He could then advance on Santiago either along the strip of beach under the rampart, by way of Aguadores and Morro Castle, or over a rough wagon-road running through the valleys and across the foot-hills of the interior, three or four miles back of the rampart.

The first difficulty which confronted him was that due to the lack of landing facilities. Not anticipating, apparently, that he might be forced to disembark on an unsheltered coast, he had neglected to provide himself with suitable surf-boats, and was wholly dependent upon the small boats of the transports and a single scow, or lighter, which he had brought with him from Tampa. Seeing that it would be impossible to land sixteen thousand men safely and expeditiously with such facilities, he applied for help to Admiral Sampson, and was furnished by the latter with fifty-two small boats and a number of steam-launches, all manned by officers and sailors from the fleet. Thus provided, he began the work of disembarkation on the morning of June 22 at Daiquiri, the vessels of the fleet, meanwhile, making feigned attacks at several other points along the coast, and shelling the notches and villages of both Siboney and Daiquiri, in order to drive the enemy back and cover the advance of the loaded boats.

Fortunately for General Shafter and for his troops, the Spaniards did not attempt to oppose the landing. If the sides of the notches and the foot-hills back of them had been fortified with earthworks and held by a daring enemy with a battery or two of light guns, it would have been extremely difficult, if not absolutely impossible, to get the troops ashore. Even without artillery, ten or fifteen hundred men armed with Mausers on the heights which command the notches and the approaches to them might have held off a landing force for days, if not weeks. The war-ships might have shelled them, or swept the heights with machine-guns, but it would have been easy for them to find shelter under the crest of the rampart on the land side, and I doubt whether a force so sheltered could have been dislodged or silenced by Admiral Sampson’s whole fleet. In order to drive them out it would have been necessary to land in the surf under fire, and storm the heights by scaling the precipitous terraced front of the rampart on the sea side. This might, perhaps, have been done, but it would have involved a great sacrifice of life. The Spanish officers in Cuba, however, were not skilful tacticians. Instead of anticipating General Shafter’s movements and occupying, with an adequate force, the only two places in the vicinity of Santiago where he could possibly land, they overlooked or neglected the splendid defensive positions that nature herself had provided for them, and allowed the army of invasion to come ashore without firing a shot. It was great luck for us, but it was not war.

Before night on the 22d, General Lawton’s division, consisting of about six thousand men with a Gatling-gun battery, had landed at Daiquiri, and on the morning of the 23d it marched westward along the wagon-road to Siboney. The Spanish garrison at the latter place retreated in the direction of Santiago as General Lawton appeared, and the village fell into our hands without a struggle. Disembarkation continued throughout the 23d and 24th, at both Daiquiri and Siboney, and before dark on the afternoon of the 24th nine tenths of the army of invasion had landed, with no other accident than the loss of two men drowned.

In the meantime, General Linares, the Spanish commander at Santiago, had marched out of the city, with a force of about three thousand men, to meet the invaders, and had occupied a strong defensive position on the crest of a wooded hill at Guasimas, three or four miles northwest of Siboney, where the two roads from the latter place one up the valley of the stream and the other over the end of the mesa come together. He did not know certainly which of these two roads the invading force would take, and therefore posted himself on the hill at their junction, where he could command both.

On the afternoon of the 23d, Cuban scouts reported the position of the enemy to General Wheeler, who was then in command of our advance, and, after a council of war, it was decided to attack simultaneously by both roads. Early on the morning of Friday, June 24, therefore, General Young, with the First and Tenth dismounted cavalry, marched out of Siboney on the main road to Santiago, and proceeded up the valley of the little stream which empties into the sea through the Siboney notch; while Colonel Wood, at the head of the Rough Riders, climbed the end of the rampart, on the western side of the notch, and advanced toward Guasimas by the mesa trail, which is considerably higher than the main road and lies half a mile to a mile farther west.

The two columns encountered the enemy at about the same time. The Rough Riders, under Colonel Wood, began the attack on the mesa trail, and a few moments later General Young’s command, on the Siboney-Santiago road, opened fire with three Hotchkiss mountain guns and began the ascent of the hill from the valley. The whole country was so overgrown with trees, shrubs, and tropical vines that it was almost impossible to see an object fifty yards away, and as the Spaniards used smokeless powder, it was extremely difficult to ascertain their position, or even to know exactly where our own troops were. Colonel Wood deployed his regiment to the right and left of the trail, and endeavored, as he advanced, to extend his line so as to form a junction with General Young’s command on the right, and at the same time outflank the enemy on the left; but the tropical undergrowth was so dense and luxuriant that neither of the attacking columns could see the other, and all that they could do, in the way of mutual support and cooeperation, was to push ahead toward the junction of the two roads, firing, almost at random, into the bushes and vine-tangled thickets from which the Mauser bullets seemed to come. Colonel Roosevelt told me that once he caught a glimpse of the Spaniards, drawn up in line of battle; but during the greater part of the engagement they were concealed in the chaparral, and could be seen only when they broke from cover and fled, to escape the searching fire of our steadily advancing line. While Colonel Wood, on the left, was driving the enemy out of the jungles intersected by the mesa trail, General Young, with a part of the Tenth Cavalry (colored) supported by four troops of the First, was engaged in storming the hill up which ran the valley road; and at the end of an hour and a half, after a stubborn defense, the Spaniards were forced to abandon their chosen position and retreat in the direction of Santiago, leaving the junction of the two roads in our possession. The battle of Guasimas the first fight of the Santiago campaign had been won.

The number of men engaged in this affair, on our side, was nine hundred and sixty-four, and our loss in killed and wounded was sixty-six, including Captain Capron and Hamilton Fish, both of whom died on the field. The Spaniards, according to the statement of Mr. Ramsden, British consul in Santiago, had a force of nearly three thousand men and reported a loss of seven killed and fourteen wounded. It seems probable, however, that their loss was much greater than this. General Linares would hardly have abandoned a strong position and fallen back on the city after a loss of only twenty-one men out of three thousand.

Two war correspondents, Mr. Richard Harding Davis and Mr. Edward Marshall, took an active part in this engagement, and the latter was so severely wounded by a Mauser bullet, which passed through his body near the spine, that when he was carried from the field he was supposed to be dying. He rallied, however, after being taken to Siboney, and has since partially recovered.

The effect of General Wheeler’s victory at Guasimas was to open up the Santiago road to a point within three or four miles of the city; and when we returned in the State of Texas from Guantanamo, the Rough Riders were in camp beyond Sevilla, and a dozen other regiments were hurrying to the front.

We reached Siboney after dark on Sunday evening, and found the little cove and the neighboring roadstead filled with transport steamers, whose twinkling anchor-lights or rather adrift lights, for there was no anchorage swung slowly back and forth in long curves as the vessels rolled and wallowed in the trough of the sea. As soon as a boat could be lowered, the medical officers of Miss Barton’s staff went on shore to investigate the state of affairs and to ascertain whether the Red Cross could render any assistance to the hospital corps of the army. They returned in the course of an hour and reported that in two of the abandoned Spanish houses on the beach they had found two hastily extemporized and wholly unequipped hospitals, one of which was occupied by the Cuban sick and wounded, and the other by our own. No attempt had been made to clean or disinfect either of the buildings, both were extremely dirty, and in both the patients were lying, without blankets or pillows, on the floor. The state of affairs, from a medical and sanitary point of view, was precisely as the correspondents had described it to us, except that some of the wounded of General Wheeler’s command had been taken on board the transports Saratoga and Olivette during the day, so that the American hospital was not so crowded as it had been when Mr. Howard saw it the night before. The army surgeons and attendants were doing, apparently, all that they could do to make the sick and wounded comfortable; but the high surf, the absence of landing facilities, the neglect or unwillingness of the quartermaster’s department to furnish boats, and the confusion and disorder which everywhere prevailed, made it almost impossible to get hospital supplies ashore. All that the surgeons could do, therefore, was to make the best of the few medicines and appliances that they had taken in their hands and pockets when they disembarked. The things that seemed to be most needed were cots, blankets, pillows, brooms, soap, scrubbing-brushes, and disinfectants. All of these things we had on board the State of Texas, and the officers of Miss Barton’s staff spent a large part of the night in breaking out the cargo and getting the required articles on deck.

Early the next morning, Dr. Lesser, with four or five trained nurses, all women, and a boat-load of hospital supplies, landed at the little pier which had been hastily built by the engineer corps, and walking along the beach through the deep sand to the American hospital, offered their services to Dr. Winter, the surgeon in charge. To their great surprise they were informed that the assistance of the Red Cross or at least their assistance was not desired. What Dr. Winter’s reasons were for declining aid and supplies when both were so urgently needed I do not know. Possibly he is one of the military surgeons, like Dr. Appel of the Olivette, who think that women, even if they are trained nurses, have no business with an army, and should be snubbed, if not browbeaten, until they learn to keep their place. I hope this suggestion does not do Dr. Winter an injustice; but I can think of no other reason that would lead him to decline the assistance of trained young women who, although capable of rendering the highest kind of professional service, were ready and willing to scrub floors, if necessary, and who asked nothing more than to help him make a clean, decent hospital out of an empty, dirty, abandoned Spanish house.

When told by Dr. Winter that they were not wanted, the nurses went to the Cuban hospital, in a neighboring building, where their services were accepted not only with eagerness, but with grateful appreciation. Before night they had swept, disinfected, and scrubbed out that hospital with soap and water, and had bathed the Cuban patients, fed them, and put them into clean, fresh cot-beds. Our own soldiers, at the same time, were lying, without blankets or pillows, on the floor, in a building which Dr. Winter and his assistants had neither cleaned nor attempted to clean.

Dr. Appel of the hospital steamer Olivette, in an official report to the surgeon-general of the army, published, in part, in the New York “Herald” of November 4, 1898, says:

“There was, at that time [the time when we arrived off Siboney], a number of surgeons on board the State of Texas, and four trained nurses; but, although we were working night and day, taking care of our sick and wounded, no assistance was given by them until some days afterward, when our own men were ready to drop from fatigue.”

The idea conveyed by this ungenerous and misleading statement is that the surgeons and Red Cross nurses on the State of Texas neglected or evaded the very duty that they went to Cuba to perform, and remained, idle and useless, on their steamer, while Dr. Appel and his associates worked themselves into a state of complete physical exhaustion. So far as the statement contains this implication, it is wholly and absolutely false. The State of Texas arrived off Siboney at eight o’clock on the evening of Sunday, June 26. In less than an hour the Red Cross surgeons had offered their services to Major Havard, chief surgeon of the cavalry division, and as early as possible on the following morning Dr. Lesser and four or five Red Cross nurses reported at the American hospital, offered the surgeon in charge the cots, blankets, and hospital supplies which they had brought, or were ready to bring, on shore, and asked to be set to work. When, on account of some prejudice or misapprehension, Dr. Winter declined to let them help him in taking care of our own sick and wounded soldiers, what more could they do than devote themselves to the Cubans? Two days later, fortunately, Major Lagarde, chief surgeon at Siboney, over-ruled the judgment of his subordinate, accepted the services of the nurses, and set them at work in a branch of the military hospital, under the direction of Dr. Lesser. There they all worked, almost without rest or sleep, until Dr. Lesser, Mrs. Lesser, Mrs. White (a volunteer), and three of the Red Cross nurses were stricken with fever, and four of them were carried on flat-cars to the yellow-fever camp in the hills two miles north of the village. The surgeon of the Olivette would have shown a more generous and more manly spirit if, in his report to the surgeon-general, he had mentioned these facts, instead of adroitly insinuating that the Red Cross surgeons and nurses were loafing on board the State of Texas when they should have been at work in the hospitals.

But Dr. Appel further says, in the report from which I have quoted, that at the time when the State of Texas reached Siboney two days after the fight at Guasimas “there was no lack whatever of medical and surgical supplies.”

If Major Lagarde, Dr. Munson, Dr. Donaldson, and other army surgeons who worked so heroically to bring order out of the chaos at Siboney, are to be believed, Dr. Appel’s statement concerning hospital supplies is as false as his statement with regard to the Red Cross surgeons and nurses. In an official report to the surgeon-general, dated July 29 and published in the New York papers of August 9, Captain Edward L. Munson, assistant surgeon commanding the reserve ambulance company, says: “After the fight at Las Guasimas there were absolutely no dressings, hospital tentage, or supplies of any kind, on shore, within reach of the surgeons already landed.” Dr. Munson was the adjutant of Colonel Pope, chief surgeon of the Fifth Army-Corps, and he probably knew a good deal more about the state of affairs at Siboney after the battle of Guasimas than Dr. Appel did. Be that, however, as it may; I know from my own observation and experience that there was a lack of medical and hospital supplies at Siboney, not only when we arrived there, but for weeks afterward. Dr. Frank Donaldson, surgeon of the Rough Riders, in a letter from Siboney, published in the Philadelphia “Medical Journal” of July 23, says: “The condition of the wounded on shore here is beyond measure wretched, and excites the lively indignation of every one.”

The neglect of our soldiers, both at Siboney and at the front, in the early days of the campaign, was discreditable to the army and to the country; and there is no reason why military surgeons should not frankly admit it, because it was not their fault, and they cannot justly be held accountable for it. The blame should rest, and eventually will rest, upon the officer or department that sent thirty-five loaded transports and sixteen thousand men to the Cuban coast without suitable landing facilities in the shape of surf-boats, steam-launches, and lighters.

In criticizing the condition of our hospitals, I cast no reflection upon the zeal, ability, and devotion to duty of such men as Colonel Pope, Major Lagarde, Major Wood, and the surgeons generally of the Fifth Army-Corps. They made the best of a bad situation for which they were not primarily responsible; and if the hospitals were in unsatisfactory condition, it was simply because the supplies furnished in abundance by the medical department were either left in Tampa for lack of water transportation, or held on board the transports because no adequate provision had been made by the commanding general or the quartermaster’s department for landing them on a surf-beaten coast and transporting them to the places where they were needed.