At five minutes of the noon hour everything fell quiet. Captain McKittrick and Lieutenant Miley had appeared on the roof of the Palace by the flagstaff. Unfortunately there was not a breath of wind. The minutes passed, two, three, four. The silence was profound, nobody spoke. In all those five thousand people there was scarcely a movement.
Then back of us from the direction of the Cathedral's clock tower there came a slow wheezing as of the expansion of decrepit lungs, a creaking and jarring of springs and cog-wheels that grew rapidly louder till it culminated abruptly in a single sonorous stroke. At once Captain McKittrick laid his hand to the halyards of the flagstaff, a bundle of bunting rose in the air, shapeless and without definite color. But suddenly, wonderful enough, there came a breeze, a brisk spurt out of the north. The bunting caught it, twisted upon itself, tumbled, writhed, then suddenly shook itself free, and in a single long billow rolled out into the Stars and Stripes of Old Glory.
"Pre-sent h' ar-r-r!"
That was from the square, and in answer to the order came the Krag-Jorgensons leaping to the fists and the cavalry sabres swishing and flashing out into the sunlight.
Then the band: "Oh, say, can you see—" while far off on the hills from our intrenchments Capron's battery began to thunder the salute.
The moment was perhaps the most intense of the whole campaign. There was no cheering and that was the best of it. It is hard to understand this, but the occasion was too big for mere shouting, and infinitely too solemn. I have heard the "Miserere" in the Sistine Chapel, and in comparison with the raising of the flag over the city of Santiago it was opera comique.
For perhaps a full minute we stood with bared heads reverently watching the great flag as it strained in the breeze that, curiously enough, was now steady and strong, watching it as it strained and stiffened and grew out broader and broader over the conquered city till you believed the glory of it and the splendor and radiance of it must go flashing off there over those leagues of tumbling water till it blazed like a comet over Madrid itself.
And the great names came to the mind again—Lexington, Trenton, Yorktown, 1812, Chapultepec, Mexico, Shiloh, Gettysburg, the Wilderness, Appomattox, and now—Guasima, San Juan, El Caney, Santiago.