THE BATTLES OF CANEY AND SAN JUAN
General Shafter went to the front
to take personal command of the army on Wednesday,
June 29. At that time the divisions of Generals
Kent, Wheeler, and Lawton were encamped on the Siboney-Santiago
road, between the high ridge of Sevilla, from which
I had seen the city two days before, and a half-ruined
house and plantation, two or three miles farther on,
known as El Pozo. Most of the troops were in the
valley of a small stream which rises on the western
slope of the Sevilla watershed, runs for a short distance
in the direction of Santiago, and then, after receiving
a number of tributaries, turns southward, just beyond
the Pozo farm-house, and falls into the sea through
the notch in the rampart at Aguadores. Although
the bottom of this valley, in general, was densely
wooded, there was a series of grassy openings, or glades,
on the northern side of the stream just east of El
Pozo, and in one of these openings General Lawton,
who led the advance, had established his headquarters.
About three miles due north from El
Pozo, and between three and four miles in a northeasterly
direction from Santiago, there was a small village
called Caney, which, on account of its geographical
position, was regarded as a place of considerable strategic
importance. It was connected by roads or practicable
trails with Santiago on the west, Guantanamo on the
east, and El Pozo on the south; and an enemy holding
it would not only outflank us on that side as soon
as we should pass the Pozo farm-house, but, by means
of a rapid cross-march in our rear, might cut or seriously
imperil our only line of communication with our base
of supplies at Siboney. The fact was well known,
furthermore, that there was a strong division of Spanish
regulars (about six thousand men) at Guantanamo; and
if this division should undertake to reinforce the
garrison at Santiago, Caney would be directly on its
line of march. In view of these considerations,
General Shafter, after a survey of the country from
the summit of the hill at El Pozo, determined to seize
Caney, and, having thus cut off reinforcements from
Guantanamo and protected himself from a flanking movement
on the right, advance directly upon the city.
The plan was good enough, as far as it went; but General
Shafter had made no reconnaissance on the Siboney-Santiago
road beyond El Pozo, and was wholly ignorant not only
of the strength of the enemy’s position there,
but of the nature of the country to be traversed.
It is true that he had superficially looked over the
ground, once, from the top of the Pozo hill; but he
could get, in that way, very little accurate knowledge
of the topography of the region, and still less of
the Spaniards’ defensive strength.
Our only possible line of advance,
in the center, was the Siboney-Santiago road, which
ran, through a dense jungle, down the valley of the
Aguadores River, crossed a small stream flowing into
that river from the north, then crossed the San Juan
River, another tributary of the Aguadores, and finally
emerged from the forest directly in front of the San
Juan heights. The enemy, of course, knew exactly
where this road lay, and where it came out of the woods
into the open country; and they had so disposed their
batteries and rifle-pits that they could not only
concentrate their fire upon the lower stretches and
the mouth of the road, but sweep with a hail-storm
of projectiles the whole margin of the forest where
we should have to deploy and form our attacking line.
General Shafter had not ascertained these facts by
means of a reconnaissance, nor had he, apparently,
considered such a state of affairs as a contingency
to be guarded against; but Mr. Richard Harding Davis
asserts that General Chaffee, commander of a brigade
in General Lawton’s division, anticipated precisely
this situation, and predicted, five days before the
battle, that if our men marched down this trail into
the open country they would be “piled up so high
that they would block the road.” He thought
that it would be much better to keep away from the
road altogether; cut trails parallel with the entire
front of the forest and hidden by it, with innumerable
little trails leading into the open; and then march
the whole army out upon the hills through these trails
at the same moment. Whether this suggestion was
ever made to the commanding general or not, I do not
know; but if it was, it failed to commend itself to
his judgment. I refer now perhaps prematurely to
a state of affairs in our immediate front which was
not fully disclosed until much later; but I do so
because knowledge of it is absolutely essential to
a clear understanding of the way in which the battle
of San Juan was fought.
General Shafter’s plan of operations,
as outlined by Captain Lee, British military attache,
was substantially as follows: General Lawton’s
division was to attack Caney at daylight, July 1, and
was expected to drive the enemy quickly out of that
post, which then menaced our right flank. Meanwhile
the remainder of the Fifth Corps was to advance along
the main trail toward Santiago, pushing back the Spanish
outposts, and occupy the line of the San Juan River.
There it was to deploy and await Lawton, who, having
taken Caney, was to wheel to his left and form up on
the right of the main line. All these movements
were to be completed by the evening of the 1st, and
then the whole army would combine for the assault
of San Juan on the 2d.
The advance began on the afternoon
of Thursday, June 30. General Lawton’s
division, accompanied by Capron’s battery of
four field-guns, marched out on the Caney road, without
meeting any opposition, and bivouacked for the night
behind a ridge, or hill, about a mile southeast of
the village. At the same time the remainder of
the corps, consisting of General Wheeler’s cavalry
division, the division of General Kent, and three
batteries of light artillery, moved down the Siboney-Santiago
road, and went into camp near the Pozo farm-house.
At daybreak on Friday, July 1, both columns were in
position, within striking distance of the enemy’s
intrenched line. As the fighting at Caney was
wholly independent of the fighting at San Juan, it
will be more convenient to regard the two engagements
as separate battles, although they were carried on
simultaneously. I shall not attempt, however,
to do more than describe the tactics on the two widely
separated fields, and briefly state the results.
The defenses of Caney consisted of
a strong stone fort on a steep conical hill at the
southeastern corner of the village, and four or five
substantial log blockhouses, so placed as to command
every possible, or at least every practicable, avenue
of approach. The blockhouses were connected one
with another by deep, narrow trenches; the stone fort
was surrounded by a network of outlying rifle-pits;
there was a barbed-wire entanglement along the whole
eastern front of the enemy’s position; and the
large trees in the village, as well as the houses and
the old stone church, were full of sharp-shooters.
The garrison of the place, not including the inhabitants,
who, of course, participated to a greater or less
extent in the fighting, consisted of three companies
of infantry belonging to the San Luis brigade and
forty-seven guerrillas a total force of
five hundred and fourteen men. The regulars were
armed with the Mauser magazine-rifle, while the guerrillas
used a .45-caliber Remington, carrying a large and
very destructive brass-jacketed ball. They had
neither artillery nor machine-guns, and relied wholly
upon their small arms, their rifle-pits, and the great
natural strength of their position. The officer
in command was Brigadier-General Joaquin Vara
del Rey. The attacking force, under direction
of General Lawton, consisted of four brigades, numbering
about forty-five hundred men, and was made up wholly
of regulars with the exception of the Second Massachusetts.
The battle began at half-past six
o’clock in the morning. General Chaffee’s
brigade took up a position six or eight hundred yards
from the fort on the eastern side of the village;
Ludlow’s brigade marched around on the western
side, so as to seize the Caney-Santiago road and thus
cut off the enemy’s escape; while the brigade
of General Miles closed in on the south. Capron’s
battery, from the summit of a hill a little more than
a mile southeast of the fort, fired the first shot
at 6:35 A. M. Our infantry on General Chaffee’s
side then opened fire; the Spaniards replied from
their fort, blockhouses, and rifle-pits; and the engagement
soon became general. For the next three or four
hours the battle was little more than a rifle duel
at about six hundred yards’ range. Capron’s
battery, from the top of the distant hill, continued
to bombard the fort and the village at intervals,
but its fire was slow and not very effective.
Our infantry, meanwhile, were suffering far more loss
than they were able to inflict, for the reason that
they could find little or no shelter, while the Spaniards
were protected by loopholed walls and deep rifle-pits,
and were firing at ranges which had been previously
measured and were therefore accurately known.
In spite of their losses, however, our men continued
to creep forward, and about eleven o’clock General
Chaffee’s brigade reached and occupied the crest
of a low ridge not more than three hundred yards from
the northeastern side of the village. The fire
of the Spanish sharp-shooters, at this short range,
was very close and accurate, and before noon more than
one hundred of General Chaffee’s men lay dead
or wounded in a sunken road about fifty yards back
of the firing line. The losses in the brigades
of Generals Ludlow and Miles, on the western and southern
sides of the village, were almost as great, and at
1:30 P. M. the attacking force seemed to be barely
holding its own. At this critical moment, when
the chances of success or defeat seemed to be almost
evenly balanced, General Lawton received an order
from General Shafter to abandon the attack on Caney
and hurry to the relief of Generals Kent and Sumner,
who were hotly engaged in front of the San Juan heights.
Believing that a retreat at this juncture would be
disastrous, and that the demoralizing effect of a
repulse at Caney would more than counterbalance the
support that he could give the center of the line
in front of San Juan, General Lawton disregarded this
order and pressed the attack with renewed vigor.
Capron’s battery, about this time, got the range
of the stone fort, shot away its flagstaff, amid vociferous
cheers from our men, and soon began to make great
breaches in its massive walls. General Chaffee,
who had been directed to make a final assault on the
fort when, in his judgment, the proper time had come,
then gave the order to charge; and the Twelfth Infantry,
closely followed by several regiments from General
Miles’s brigade, and the brigade of General
Bates, which had just arrived from Siboney, swarmed
up the steep slope of the hill, drove the Spaniards
out of their rifle-pits, and took the fort by storm.
The first man inside its walls was Mr. James Creelman,
a war correspondent, who was shot through the shoulder
while recovering the Spanish flag. Although the
fire from the village and the blockhouses still continued,
it gradually slackened, and in less than half an hour
the Spaniards who remained alive gave up the struggle
and retreated by the northern Santiago road, suffering
considerable loss from the fire of General Ludlow’s
brigade as they passed. At 4 P. M. village, fort,
and blockhouses were all in undisputed possession
of General Lawton’s gallant division. The
battle had lasted about nine hours, and in that time
seven hundred men had been killed or wounded.
Our own loss was four officers and eighty-four men
killed, and twenty-four officers and three hundred
and thirty-two men wounded; total, four hundred and
forty-four. The loss of the Spaniards, as reported
by themselves, was two hundred and forty-eight, about
one half their entire strength, not including
inhabitants of the village killed in their houses
and in the streets. General Vara del
Rey, their commander, was shot through both legs as
he stood in the square opposite the village church
after the storming of the fort, and then, as his men
were placing him on a stretcher, he was instantly killed
by a bullet through the head. Our loss, in this
obstinately fought battle, was numerically much greater
than that of the Spaniards; but their percentage of
loss, based on the number of men engaged, was nearly
five times as great as ours. When they retreated,
they left forty-eight per cent. of their whole force
dead or wounded in the intrenchments that they had
so gallantly defended, and Lieutenant-Colonel Punet
was able to collect and take back to Santiago that
night only one hundred and three of the five hundred
and fourteen officers and men who originally composed
the garrison.
The loss on our side in this engagement
was far greater than it probably would have been if
General Lawton had had artillery enough to destroy
the fort and blockhouses and drive the Spaniards out
of their rifle-pits before he pushed forward his infantry;
but it was not expected, of course, that the taking
of a small and comparatively insignificant village
would be so serious and difficult a matter; and as
General Shafter had only sixteen light field-guns
in all, he doubtless thought that he could not spare
more than four for the attack on Caney.
The moral effect of this battle was
to give each of the combatants a feeling of sincere
respect for the bravery of the other. Our men
never doubted, after July 1, that the Spaniards would
fight stubbornly at least, behind intrenchments;
while the Spaniards, in turn, were greatly impressed
by the dash, impetuosity, and unflinching courage of
General Lawton’s regulars. A staff-officer
of General Vara del Rey said to a correspondent
after the battle: “I have never seen anything
to equal the courage and dash of those Americans,
who, stripped to the waist, offering their naked breasts
to our murderous fire, literally threw themselves
on our trenches on the very muzzles of our
guns. We had the advantage in position, and mowed
them down by the hundreds; but they never retreated
or fell back an inch. As one man fell, shot through
the heart, another would take his place, with grim
determination and unflinching devotion to duty in
every line of his face. Their gallantry was heroic.”
There could hardly be a more generous or a better deserved
encomium.
The battle on the Siboney-Santiago
road, in the center of our line, began nearly two
hours later than the battle at Caney. Grimes’s
battery, which had taken position on a hill near the
Pozo farm-house, opened fire on the heights of San
Juan about eight o’clock. A few moments
later the Spaniards, who evidently had the range of
the Pozo hill perfectly from the beginning, returned
the fire with shrapnel, killing two men and wounding
a number of others at the first shot, striking the
house at the third, and driving from the hill in disorder
some of the soldiers of the cavalry division who had
been stationed there, as well as a few war correspondents
and non-combatants who had gathered to witness the
bombardment. For three quarters of an hour, or
an hour, there was an artillery duel between Grimes’s
battery on the Pozo hill and a Spanish battery situated
somewhere on the heights to the westward. In this
interchange of shots the enemy had all the advantage,
for the reason that the smoke from Grimes’s
black powder revealed the position of his guns, while
the smokeless powder of the Spaniards gave no clue
to the location of theirs.
About nine o’clock the order
was given to advance; and the divisions of Generals
Kent and Wheeler began to move down the narrow, jungle-skirted
trail, toward the open country which was supposed to
lie beyond the crossing of the second stream, under
the heights of San Juan. General Kent’s
orders were to move ahead to a green knoll on the western
side of the San Juan River (the second stream), and
there deploy to the left in what was believed to be
the margin of the dense forest which covered the bottom
of the valley. At the same time the cavalry division,
which, owing to the illness of General Wheeler, was
temporarily under command of General Sumner, was directed
to advance along the same trail, cross the San Juan
River, deploy to the right in the margin of the woods,
and there await further orders. The attempt of
two divisions to march simultaneously down a forest
trail which in places was not more than twelve feet
wide resulted, naturally, in crowding, disorder, and
delay; and when the head of the column, after crossing
the first stream, came within the zone of the enemy’s
fire, the confusion was greatly increased. The
Spaniards, as General Chaffee predicted, had taken
the bearing and range of the road, between the first
stream and the western edge of the forest, and before
the cavalry division reached the ford of the San Juan,
on the other side of which it was to deploy and await
orders, it was receiving a heavy fire, not only from
the batteries and rifle-pits on the San Juan heights,
but from hundreds of trees along the trail, in which
the enemy had posted sharp-shooters.
So far as I know, riflemen had never
before been posted in trees to check the advance of
an army through a broken and forest-clad country;
but the scheme was a good one, and it was carried out
with thoughtful attention to every detail. The
sharp-shooters were generally hidden in carefully
prepared nests of leaves; some of them had tunics of
fresh palm-leaves tied around their bodies from the
shoulders down, so that at a little distance they
could not be distinguished from the foliage of the
trees in which they were concealed; and in a few cases
that were reported to me they wore under their leafy
tunics double canvas jackets filled with sand and
carefully quilted, as a partial protection from bullets.
This swarm of tree-men formed the Spanish skirmish-line,
and a most dangerous and effective line it was, for
the reason that it could be neither seen, driven in,
nor dislodged. The hidden marksmen used Mauser
rifles with smokeless powder, and although our men
heard the reports and were killed or disabled by the
projectiles, they had no guide or clue whatever to
the location of their assailants. A skirmish-line
in thickets or clumps of chaparral on the ground might
have been driven back as our army advanced, and thus
our rear would have been all the time secure from
attack; but a skirmish-line hidden in tree-tops was
as dangerous to the rear as to the front, and a soldier
pressing forward toward what he supposed to be the
enemy’s position was just as likely to get a
Mauser bullet in his back as in his breast. Scores
of wounded men who were brought into the First Division
field-hospital on Friday and Saturday had never seen
a Spanish intrenchment, or had even so much as a glimpse
of a Spanish soldier.
In spite of the deadly fire to which
they were subjected from front, sides, and rear, our
troops pushed on, as rapidly as the congested state
of the trail would permit, toward the ford of the San
Juan River. The loss which our advance sustained
at this point was greatly increased by the sending
up of an observation balloon, which hung over the road,
just above the trees, and not only attracted the fire
of the Spaniards in front, but served their artillerymen
as a target and a range-finder. It was an even
better firing guide than the sheets of iron or zinc
roofing which they had put up in some of the openings
through which the trail ran; and until it was finally
torn by shrapnel so that it slowly sank into the forest,
the men under and behind it were exactly in the focus
of the converging streams of bullets which it attracted
from all parts of the San Juan heights. The only
useful discovery made by it was the fact that there
was a second or branch trail leading to a lower ford
of the San Juan River which General Kent’s division
might take, and thus relieve the crowding on the main
road.
Parts of the divisions of Generals
Kent and Sumner crossed the San Juan shortly after
noon, and made an attempt to deploy on its western
bank and form in line of battle; but the jungle was
so dense, and the fire which swept the whole margin
of the forest between them and the heights of San
Juan was so destructive, that they could do little
more than seek such cover as could be had and await
orders. So far as I have been able to ascertain,
no orders were received at this critical time by either
of the division commanders. The narrow road,
for a distance of a mile back of the firing line,
was crowded with troops pressing forward to the San
Juan ford; General Shafter, at his headquarters two
miles in the rear, had little knowledge of the situation,
and no adequate means of getting orders to his subordinates
at the front; and meanwhile our advanced line, almost
lost in the jungle, was being decimated by a fire which
the men could not effectively return, and which it
was impossible long to endure. Exactly what happened
at this turning-point of the battle, who took the
lead, and what orders were given, I do not certainly
know; but the troops nearest the edge of the forest,
including the Rough Riders, two regiments of General
Hawkins’s brigade (the Sixth and Sixteenth),
a few men from the Seventy-first New York under Captain
Rafferty, and perhaps squads or fragments of three
or four other commands, suddenly broke from cover,
as if moved by a general spontaneous impulse, and,
with Colonel Roosevelt and General Hawkins as their
most conspicuous, if not their foremost, leaders,
charged “Kettle Hill” and the heights of
San Juan. The advancing line, at first, looked
very weak and thin; but it was equal to its task.
In less than fifteen minutes it had reached the crest,
and was driving the Spaniards along it toward the blockhouse,
and down the slope behind it into the next valley.
With the aid of the Ninth, Thirteenth, and Twenty-fourth
Infantry, and the Gatling-gun battery of Lieutenant
Parker, which supported the charging line by enfilading
the enemy’s trenches from a position on the left,
the summit of the long ridge was soon cleared, the
blockhouse captured, and the battle won before two
o’clock in the afternoon.
Whether General Sumner or General
Kent directly and personally ordered this charge or
not, I cannot say; but from statements made to me by
officers and men who participated in it, I am inclined
to believe that it really was as it has
since been called a “great popular
movement,” the credit for which belongs chiefly
to the regimental and company officers and their men.
That General Shafter had nothing to do with it is
evident. He might have ordered it if he had been
there; but he was not there. One of the wounded
men in the field-hospital told me a story of a sergeant
in one of the colored regiments, who was lying, with
his comrades, in the woods, under the hot fire from
the San Juan heights. Getting no order to advance,
and tiring of the inaction, he finally sprang to his
feet and rushed out into the open, shouting to the
men of his company: “Come on, boys!
Let’s knock h l out of the blankety-blanks!”
whereupon the whole regiment rose like a single man,
and started, at a dead run, for the hill. The
story is doubtless apocryphal, but it will serve as
an illustration of the way in which the charge up
the slope of San Juan may have originated. Our
men in the edge of the woods, in the bushes, and in
the grain-fields had perhaps become so tired of inaction,
and so exasperated by the deadly fire which was picking
them off, one by one, as they lay, that they were ready
for any desperate venture; and when somebody no
matter who started forward, or said, “Come
on, boys!” they simply rose en masse
and charged. I cannot find, in the official reports
of the engagement, any record of a definite order
by any general officer to storm the heights; but the
men were just in the mood for such a movement, and
either with orders or without orders they charged
up the hill, in the face of a tremendous fire from
batteries, trenches, and blockhouses, and, in the words
of an English officer, quoted by General Breckenridge
in his testimony before the Investigating Commission,
they not only covered themselves with glory, but extricated
their corps commander “from a devil of a fix.”
When the divisions of Generals Kent
and Wheeler had been distributed along the crest of
the San Juan ridge, the line looked too weak and thin
to hold the position; but Skobeleff once said that
a position carried by attack can be held, even if
seventy-five per cent. of the attacking force have
perished; and there was no doubt in the minds of the
regulars and the Rough Riders that there were enough
of them left not only to hold San Juan, but to take
the city. Mr. Ramsden, British consul in Santiago,
says, in his diary, that the Spaniards were so disheartened
by their defeat that “if the Americans had followed
up their advantage and rushed the town, they would
have carried it.” But our men were too much
exhausted by the heat, and by their floundering in
the jungle, to fight another battle that day.
When the firing ceased they had to pick up the wounded
and bury the dead, and then they spent a large part
of the night in erecting breastworks, digging trenches,
and making preparations for a counter-attack.