Campaigning in Cuba

by George Kennan

CHAPTER VIII

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 coöperation, 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.