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.