"Well, that get's me—a carriage!"
It was among the troopers of the escort that the carriage had the greatest success. They chuckled over it as if it had some hidden, mirthful significance. They addressed strange allusions to the lounging driver, and when they had ridden by they turned in their saddles and watched it out of sight at the risk of breaking their necks. They rode the sprucer for it; they were in better spirits for it. They laughed, they talked, they went at a faster pace, they cocked their hats, they were gay, they were debonair. They had seen a carriage!
And now we were close up. Here was the hospital on the very outskirts, with its plethora of Red Cross flags. It was a hospital, after all, and not a barracks, as we had said, studying it through our field glasses during the last week, for blanketed and beflanneled objects, hollow-eyed, with bandaged heads, crowded silently at the grated windows staring at us galloping past. Here was an abandoned trench, and here—steady all, pull down to a walk—here is the barbed wire entanglement we have heard so much about. Formidable enough, surely; three lines of posts right across the road with barbed wire interwoven. A rabbit could not have passed here; and back of it trenches and rifle pits; nothing but artillery could have forced these lines. What fools to have abandoned them—well.
We passed through the gap single file and gingerly, then forward again at a hard gallop, clattering rough-shod over paved streets, for now at last we were in the city of Santiago.
Soldiers without arms, refugees, the men in brown derby hats—Cubans, negroes, dark women with black lace upon their heads, and children absolutely naked, watched us very silently from the sidewalks and from balconies. The houses were of adobe, painted pale blue and pink, and roofed with rugged lichen-blackened tiles. The windows reached from sidewalk to roof and were grated heavily, the doors oak and clenched with great nail heads. Santiago, Santiago at last, after so many days of sailing, of marching, of countermarching, and of fighting.
Here we were in the city at last, riding in, hoofs clattering, sabres rattling, saddles creaking, and suddenly a great wave of exultation came over us all. I know the General felt it. I know the last trooper of the escort felt it. There was no thought of humanitarian principles then. The war was not a "crusade," we were not fighting for Cubans just then, it was not for disinterested motives that we were there sabred and revolvered and carbined. Santiago was ours—was ours, ours, by the sword we had acquired, we, Americans, with no one to help—and the Anglo-Saxon blood of us, the blood of the race that has fought its way out of a swamp in Friesland, conquering and conquering and conquering, on to the westward, the race whose blood instinct is the acquiring of land, went galloping through our veins to the beat of our horses' hoofs.
Every trooper that day looked down from his saddle upon Cuban and Spanish soldier as from a throne. Even though not a soldier, it was impossible not to know their feeling, glorying, arrogant, the fine, brutal arrogance of the Anglo-Saxon, and we rode on there at a gallop through the crowded streets of the fallen city, heads high, sabres clattering, a thousand iron hoofs beating out a long roll—triumphant, arrogant conquerors.
At the Plaza we halted and dismounted. The Cathedral was here, the Cuban and Spanish clubs and the Governor's Palace, a rather unimposing affair all on one floor, with the architectural magnificence of a railway station of the French provinces. The General and the generals went in and crowded the hall of audience, very clinquant with its black and white floor, glass chandeliers, long mirrors and single gilded center table. Here for an hour deputations were received. The Chief of Police, Leonardo Ras y Rodriguez, the ex-Governor, and last of all and most imposing, Monsignor Francisco Saenz de Urturi, the Archbishop, in his robes, purple cap and gold chain, followed by his suite. Him, General Shafter, came forward to meet, and the two shook hands under the tawdry chandelier. It was a strange enough sight. By many and devious and bloody ways had the priest and the soldier come to meet each other on that day.
But it was drawing toward noon. I went out into the Plaza again. The troops were already forming a line of cavalry that stretched along the street immediately before the Governor's Palace, and two companies of the Ninth Infantry and the band occupied the center where the little park is. I went across the Plaza and stood on the terrace in front of the main doors of the Cathedral. Directly opposite was the Governor's Palace, the naked flagstaff on the roof over the door standing out lean and stark against the background of green hills.
The sidewalks and streets outside the lines of soldiers were crowded with an even mixture of civilians and disarmed Spanish soldiers. The Spanish Club on the left was suddenly closed, but the balconies of the San Carlos—the Cuban Club—were filled with black-bearded, voluble gentlemen in white ducks and straw hats. Every window in the "hotel" was occupied, each one of the little balconies of the Cafe Venus had its gathering, while the terrace of the Cathedral was packed close. There were perhaps five thousand in the Plaza de Armas of Santiago on that seventeenth day of July.