SIBONEY ON THE EVE OF BATTLE
During my absence at the front on
Monday, the auxiliary cruiser Yale, with two
or three regiments of Michigan troops on board, arrived
off Siboney, and when I went on deck on Tuesday morning
these reinforcements were just beginning to go ashore
in a long line of small boats, towed by a steam-launch
from one of the war-ships of the blockading fleet.
The landing of troops and supplies
on the Cuban coast was the first serious difficulty
with which General Shafter had to contend. The
little cove at Siboney was wholly unsheltered; there
was no wharf or pier at which a steamer might lie;
a gale, or even a fresh breeze, from the southeast
raised a heavy surf on the strip of sand in front of
the village; the water deepened so suddenly and abruptly,
at a distance of fifty yards from the shore, that
there was practically no anchorage; and all men and
stores had to be landed by putting them into small
boats and running them up on the beach through the
breakers. At Daiquiri, where General Lawton’s
division disembarked, the situation was a little better,
for the reason that the Spanish-American Iron Company
had built there a substantial pier, of which the army
of invasion could make use. At that place, therefore,
General Shafter disembarked a large part of his command,
and unloaded all his wagons, siege-guns, light artillery,
etc. The mules and horses were put ashore or
rather pitched overboard with the expectation that
they would swim ashore at Siboney; but,
owing to unskilful management and lack of guidance,
twelve per cent. of the mules fifty out
of four hundred and fifteen perished.
Some, instead of making for the shore, swam directly
out to sea until they became exhausted and sank; while
others attempted to land on the eastern side of the
cove, where there was no beach, and were drowned under
the rocks. Inasmuch as the total number of draft-and
pack-animals loaded at Tampa was wholly inadequate
to meet the necessities of such an expedition, the
drowning of twelve per cent. of them, after they had
reached their destination, was a serious and, it seems
to me, unnecessary loss.
In the disembarkation of his troops,
General Shafter had the assistance of skilled officers
and well-drilled sailors from the blockading fleet,
to say nothing of half a dozen steam-launches and fifty-two
good boats; but when it came to unloading and landing
stores, he had to rely on his own men and his own
facilities, and it soon became painfully evident that
they were not equal to the requirements of the situation.
I watched the landing of supplies all day Tuesday,
and formed the opinion that it was disorderly, unskilful,
and unintelligent. In the first place, many of
the steamers from which supplies were being taken lay
too far from the beach; and there seemed to be no
one who had authority or power enough to compel them
to come nearer. As a result of this, the boats
and lighters were unable to make as quick and frequent
trips as they might have made if the transports had
been within one hundred yards of the beach, instead
of half a mile away.
In the second place, most of the boats
and lighters seemed to be directed and handled by
men who had had little experience in boating and no
experience whatever in landing through heavy surf.
As a result of this, boats were often stove against
the timbers of the little pier which the engineer
corps had hastily built; while the lighters, instead
of being held by an anchor and stern-line as they went
into the breakers, were allowed to swing around into
the trough of the sea, where they either filled and
sank, or drifted ashore, broadside to the beach, in
such a position that fifty men could hardly turn them
around and get them off.
Finally, the soldiers and Cubans who
acted as stevedores, carrying the boxes from the boats
and piling them on the pier, were not intelligently
directed, and, consequently, labored without method
or judgment getting in one another’s
way; allowing the pier to become so blocked up with
stuff that nobody could move on it, much less work;
and wasting more energy in talking, shouting, and
bossing one another than they utilized in doing the
thing that was to be done.
If I had ever had any doubt with regard
to the expediency of giving to the navy full and absolute
control of the army and its supplies while at sea,
such doubt would have been removed by one day’s
observation at Siboney. Army officers, as a rule,
know nothing of water transportation, and cannot reasonably
be expected to know anything about it; and to put
them in charge of transports, lighters, and surf-boats
is almost as inconsiderate as to put a sailor in charge
of a farm and expect him, without any previous training,
to run reaping-, binding-, and threshing-machines,
take proper care of his live stock, and get as much
out of the soil as an agricultural expert would.
Every man to his trade; and the landing of supplies
from thirty or forty transports, in small boats, on
an unsheltered, surf-beaten coast, is not the trade
of an army quartermaster. Lieutenant-Colonel
Humphrey and Major Jacobs undoubtedly did all that
they could do, with their knowledge and experience,
and with the limited facilities that General Shafter
had provided for them, to get supplies ashore; but
the results were not gratifying, either to observers
at Siboney, or to soldiers at the front. If officers
of the navy had directed the loading of stores on
the transports at Tampa, and the unloading and landing
of them at Daiquiri and Siboney, there would have
been a properly equipped hospital at the latter place
five days sooner than there was; there would have
been forty or fifty more mules in the army’s
pack-train; the beach would not have been strewn with
the wrecks of mismanaged boats and lighters; and the
transport-steamers Alamo, Breakwater,
Iroquois, Vigilancia, and La Grande
Duchesse would not have brought back to the United
States hundreds of tons of supplies intended for,
and urgently needed by, our soldiers at the front.
On the afternoon of Tuesday, June
28, one of the small vessels of the mosquito fleet
arrived from Guantanamo Bay with a letter from Captain
McCalla in which he said that General Perez had furnished
a pack-train and an escort for the food that the Red
Cross had promised to send to the Guantanamo refugees,
and that he would like to have us return there as
soon as possible and land five thousand rations.
As our hospital work on shore was well under way,
and Dr. Lesser and the nurses had been supplied with
everything that they would need for a day or two, Miss
Barton decided to fill Captain McCalla’s requisition
at once. Late Tuesday evening, therefore, the
State of Texas left Siboney, and after a quiet
and peaceful run down the coast entered Guantanamo
Bay about six o’clock Wednesday morning.
At half-past six Captain McCalla came on board to
make arrangements for the landing, and in less than
two hours there was a large lighter alongside, with
a steam-launch to tow it to the place where an officer
of General Perez’s command was waiting for it
with a pack-train and an escort. Before noon ten
or fifteen thousand pounds of supplies, consisting
principally of beans, rice, hard bread, and South
American jerked beef, had been safely landed on the
western side of the entrance to the lower harbor;
and as we passed the point, on our return, we saw
a large party of Cubans carrying the boxes and barrels
up the bank.
We reached Siboney early that evening,
drifted and rolled all night on a heavy swell, a mile
or two off the coast, and at daybreak on the following
morning ran close in to the beach and began landing
supplies for several thousand destitute Cuban refugees
who had assembled at the little village of Firmeza,
three miles back of Siboney in the hills. In
getting provisions ashore at Siboney, we encountered
precisely the same difficulties that the army had
to meet; but we fortunately had with us, as chief
of transportation, a man who was familiar with boats
and who had had large experience in handling them
in circumstances and under conditions similar to those
that prevailed on the Cuban coast. In proportion
to our facilities, therefore, we got more stuff ashore
in a given time than the army quartermasters did,
and with fewer accidents. Mr. Warner, I think,
was the first man to use, at Siboney, an anchor and
a stern-line to prevent a boat or a lighter from broaching
to in the surf. It was a simple enough expedient,
but nobody, apparently, had thought of it. By
dropping an anchor astern, just before the lighter
reached the outer edge of the breakers, and then slacking
off the line until the boat was near enough so that
thirty Cubans could rush into the water, seize it,
and run it up on the beach, a landing was effected
without difficulty or risk. Then, when the supplies
had been unloaded, the stern-anchor line could be
used again as a means of pulling the lighter off through
the surf into smooth water and preventing it from
swinging around broadside to the sea while being launched.
The best time for this work was between five and ten
o’clock in the morning. After ten o’clock
there was almost always a fresh breeze from the southeast,
which raised such a surf on the beach that unless the
landing of supplies was a matter of extreme urgency
it had to be temporarily suspended. We succeeded
in getting ashore on Wednesday food enough to satisfy
the wants of the refugees at Firmeza, and Mr.
Elwell was sent there to superintend its distribution.
Wednesday evening, as there seemed
to be no prospect of an immediate engagement at the
front, I decided to go to Port Antonio, Jamaica, with
Mr. Trumbull White, on the Chicago “Record’s”
despatch-boat Hercules, to post my letters
and the letters that had been intrusted to me by Colonel
Wood and Lieutenant-Colonel Roosevelt, and to get some
articles of camp equipment which I had ordered in
New York, but which had failed to reach me before
the State of Texas sailed from Key West.
We reached Port Antonio at eight o’clock
on Thursday, spent the day there, and returned the
next night to Siboney. Early Friday morning, as
we were approaching the Cuban coast, the captain of
the Hercules came down into the cabin with
the astounding news that the blockading fleet had
disappeared. “The jig is up, boys!”
he exclaimed excitedly. “They’ve
taken the city, and the fleet is inside the harbor.
I can’t see a sign of a ship anywhere along
the coast.”
We all rushed on deck and gazed with
sinking hearts at the long black line of the rampart
and the high blue mountains beyond it. If Santiago
had been taken in our absence, it would be the cruelest
blow that fortune had ever dealt us! Although
the sun was still below the horizon, the atmosphere
was crystal-clear, and we could see without a glass
the step-like outline of Morro Castle, and even the
hazy blue smoke rising from the camp-fires on-the
beach at Siboney; but of the war-ships the
New York, the Brooklyn, the Indiana,
and the Texas there was not a sign.
I do not know what Mr. White thought, he
seemed to be as cool and imperturbable as ever, but
when I fully realized that the fleet was not there,
and drew from that fact the inevitable conclusion
that the city had been captured, I was ready to anathematize
the British West Indies, Port Antonio, the Hercules,
and the cruel ill luck which had taken me a hundred
miles away at the decisive moment of the Santiago
campaign.
As the sun rose over the level plain
of the Caribbean, and the swift ocean-going tug bore
us nearer and nearer to the dark line of the still
distant coast, the captain, who had been sweeping the
base of the rampart with a long marine telescope,
suddenly shouted: “Aha! I think I
can see the Brooklyn, boys. It may be all
right yet.” I looked eagerly toward the
position that Commodore Schley’s flagship usually
occupied on the western side of the harbor entrance,
but could see nothing that even suggested the Brooklyn’s
familiar outline. If there were any vessels of
the blockading fleet between us and the land, they
certainly were off their stations and very close in
under the shadow of the land. But the captain’s
eyesight was better than mine. In five minutes
more he announced that he could see the Brooklyn,
the New York, and the Iowa. “They’re
all there,” he added after another look, “but
some of them seem to be away out of position.
The New York is off Aguadores, and the Brooklyn
is half-way down to Aserraderos.”
In fifteen minutes more it became
apparent to us all that the height of the rampart
and the mountains back of it, together with the crystalline
clearness of the atmosphere, had led us to underestimate
the distance, and that, when we first took alarm at
the apparent absence of the blockading fleet, the
war-ships were at least fifteen miles away, although
the coast did not seem to be five. At such a distance
the dull gray hulls of the vessels could hardly be
seen, even if they were not below our horizon.
With much lighter hearts, but with a feeling, nevertheless,
that something of importance had occurred or was about
to occur, we ran down alongside the Iowa, hailed
her through a megaphone, and asked if there was any
news. “It’s reported that they are
fighting over there,” replied the officer of
the deck, waving his hand toward Santiago, “but
we haven’t any particulars.” There
was no smoke rising above the rampart in the direction
of the city, we could hear no sound of cannonading,
and I was more than half inclined to believe that the
report of fighting at the front was premature; but
whether this were so or not, the Iowa, the
Texas, the New York, and all the warships
near us were cleared for action; their officers seemed
to be eagerly awaiting orders; Admiral Sampson’s
flagship was exchanging wigwag flag-signals with a
man on the beach beyond the mouth of the Aguadores
ravine, and it was perfectly evident that something
was expected to happen. Under such circumstances,
the thing for us to do was to get back, as speedily
as possible, to Siboney. Turning in a great circle
around the Iowa, we steamed swiftly eastward
along the coast, passing the New York, the
Suwanee, and the Gloucester, which were
lying, cleared for action, close under the walls of
the Aguadores fort; exchanging greetings with the
New York “Sun’s” graceful despatch-boat
Kanapaha, which came hurrying westward as if
bound for some important field of expected activity;
and finally rounding to alongside the State of
Texas in the Siboney cove.
There was nothing in the appearance
of the village to indicate that a battle was in progress,
or even in anticipation. Boats were going to and
fro between the transports and the pier as usual; there
was the usual crowd of Cuban ragamuffins and tatterdemalions
on the beach, with a sprinkling of soldiers in the
streets; everything seemed to be quiet on board the
State of Texas, and I said to Mr. White, as
I bade him good-by, that I did not believe we had
missed anything after all.
We soon had evidence, however, that
there was an engagement in progress off the coast,
if not at the front. Between nine and ten o’clock
in the morning heavy cannonading could be heard in
the direction of Morro Castle, and great clouds of
white smoke began to rise over a projecting point
of the rampart which hid, from our point of view, the
mouth of the Aguadores ravine. Anxious to see
what was going on, I persuaded Miss Barton to let
the State of Texas run out of the cove and take
some position from which we might witness the bombardment.
Getting under way at once, we steamed out four or
five miles in a west-southwest direction to a point
about three miles off Aguadores, from which we could
see the whole line of the coast. A column of
infantry the Thirty-third Michigan, I think,
under command of General Duffield had moved
westward along the railroad under the rampart to the
mouth of the Aguadores ravine, and was apparently
engaged in attacking the enemy’s position there
under cover of Admiral Sampson’s guns. We
could not clearly follow the movements of the troops,
for the reason that they were hidden, or partially
hidden, by the bushes and trees, but we could see every
movement made and every shot fired by the war-ships.
The Gloucester, on the western side of the
notch, was knocking to pieces the old stone fort half-way
up the hill; the New York, from a position directly
in front of the railroad-bridge, was enfilading the
ravine with four-and eight-inch shells; while the
Suwanee, completely hidden most of the time
in a great cloud of smoke, was close in to the mouth
of the river, sweeping the whole adjacent region with
a storm of projectiles from her rapid-fire and machine
guns. I do not know whether the old Aguadores
fort had any armament or not. Its sea face had
been reduced to a heap of crumbled masonry before
we reached the scene of action, and I did not afterward
see a shot fired from it, nor a single soldier in or
about it. Its offensive power if it
ever had any was so completely destroyed,
that I momentarily expected General Duffield’s
troops to ford the river above the railroad-bridge
and take undisputed possession of it. But the
Michigan men were apparently prevented from doing so
by the fire from some rifle-pits up the ravine, which
the guns of the war-ships could not, or did not, wholly
silence. We were not in a position, perhaps, to
form a trustworthy judgment with regard to the strength
of the Spaniards’ defense; but it seemed to
me that if the attack had been vigorously made and
persistently followed up, the enemy might have been
driven from the ravine. Admiral Sampson, in his
report of the engagement, says that the Spaniards
had no artillery except one small field-piece, which
they fired only four or five times, and that not more
than fifteen or twenty of them could be seen, at any
time, in or about the rifle-pits. General Duffield,
on the other hand, reports that they numbered five
hundred, and that their artillery shelled the railroad
track and the woods where his troops were until 3 P.M. about
five hours. That their fire was not very destructive
sufficiently appears from the fact that, in half a
day of more or less continuous skirmishing, General
Duffield lost only two men killed and six wounded.
Between three and four o’clock
in the afternoon the Michigan troops returned by rail
to Siboney; the war-ships withdrew to their blockading
stations; and the field, as well as the honors, remained
in possession of the Spaniards. After the engagement
the State of Texas ran close in to the shore,
and we saw perhaps a dozen Spanish soldiers standing
or walking on the hillside west of the ravine.
There may have been more of them in the concealment
of the woods; but my impression is that their force
was very small, and that General Duffield, with the
aid and support of the war-ships, should have been
able to clear the ravine and take possession not only
of the abandoned fort but of the commanding heights
above it.
When we got back to Siboney, late
in the afternoon, the village was full of rumors of
heavy fighting in front of Santiago; and, an hour or
two after dark, wounded men, some on foot and some
in army wagons, began to arrive at the Siboney hospital
from the distant field of battle. As they had
all been disabled and sent to the rear in the early
part of the day, they could give us no information
with regard to the result of the engagement.
Many of them had been wounded before they had seen
a Spanish intrenchment, or even a Spanish soldier;
and all they knew about the fight was that the army
had moved forward at daybreak and they themselves
had been shot in the woods by an enemy whom they could
neither locate nor see.
The Siboney hospital, thanks to the
devotion and unwearied energy of Major Lagarde and
his assistants, was by this time in fairly good working
order. There was a lack of blankets, pillows,
and tentage, and the operating facilities, perhaps,
were not as ample as they might have been; but in
view of the extraordinary difficulties with which the
surgeons had had to contend, the results were highly
creditable to them, even if not wholly satisfactory
to an observer. As fast as the wounded arrived,
they walked, or were carried on stretchers, to two
or three large tents, pitched end to end and opening
into one another, where hospital stewards and nurses
placed them on the tables, and the surgeons, some
of them stripped naked to the waist, examined their
injuries by candle-light, and performed such operations
as were necessary to give them relief. They were
then taken or led away, and, as far as possible, furnished
with blankets and shelter; but as the supply of blankets
was very short, and all the available houses and tents
were soon filled, the wounded who came in after midnight
were laid in a row on the ground and covered with
a long strip of canvas. Fortunately, the night
was clear, still, and warm, and a nearly full moon
made it almost as light as day, so that it was not
so cheerless and uncomfortable to lie out on the ground
without a blanket as it would have been if the night
had been dark and cold, or rainy; but it was bad enough.
Most of our Red Cross surgeons and
nurses were assisting in the operating-tents, and
I remained on shore until after three o’clock
in the morning. There was little that I could
do beyond looking up the wounded, who frequently came
into the village on foot, after a painful march of
ten or twelve miles, and were so weak, hungry, and
exhausted that, instead of coming to the hospital,
they lay down anywhere in the street or under the
wall of a house. Some of these men I found, with
the assistance of a friendly and sympathetic Cuban,
and had them carried on litters to the operating-tents.
All of the wounded who came back from the front that
night ought to have had hot tea or coffee, and some
such easily digested food as malted milk, as most
of them had eaten nothing since the early morning
and were worn out with pain and fatigue. But of
course no provision had been made for supplying them
even with hard bread and water, and when taken from
the operating-tables they were simply laid on the
ground, to get through the night as best they could
without nourishment or drink. We all understand,
of course, that, in the oft-quoted words of General
Sherman, “war is hell”; but it might be
made a little less hellish by adequate preparation
for the reception and care of the wounded.
I went off to the State of Texas
between three and four o’clock, and threw myself
into my berth just as day was beginning to break over
the hills east of the cove.