“‘Manaña!’ (ma-nyah-na—to-morrow). ‘Manaña!’ is the beggarly whine for ever on the lips of the Dons, be they seamen or soldiers.
“But ‘To-day!’ is America’s battle-cry. Jackie just flings off his jacket and goes at it hammer and tongs, like a true-born Briton. And God give us gunners, lads, like the Americans, when our own day of battle dawns.
“Well, about Jack Hardy? He was a fine, open-countenanced boy, say seventeen or a little over. He really hadn’t been a year in the service, hardly time for some to get used to their sea-legs. But the lad was a sailor already—you could have told that at a glance—a sailor every inch, from his purser’s shoes to his broad blue-banded cap and collar, and his cheerful, willing, brick-dust face. Guess it was his splendid, spreading bare brown neck that first drew my attention to Jack. Give me a boy, or a dog either, that has a well-put-on neck; he’s got the sand in him. You can bet your blouse on that. Take your turtle-necked chap on shore again. He is no good for the navy, and a turtle-necked dog isn’t worth the price of a rope to hang him.
“Now, the American man-o’-war’s courtesy is well known, so is my modesty. But the latter is sui generis. For example, if I required to borrow money from a friend to get me a dinner, I should never ask for a dollar, if there was the ghost of a chance of getting a guinea. So when Captain Hotchkiss, in his kindly way, said to me, ‘Want to do Santiago, do you, Curtis? Press, eh? Very well, you can choose a man and boy as body-guard,’ I chose Hardy, and a fine old sailor not long promoted to the rank of bo’s’n’s mate—the two best hearts in the ship; and the latter, I knew, had been with Hobson in the Merrimac, and I hoped, therefore, to worm a vivâ voce yarn out of him before we came off from shore again.
“Now, I had been to Santiago before—years ago—and I rather liked it then. I can remember it even now as I speak, remember it as a lovely dream, a romance—with a beautiful Spanish girl in it whom I—— But never mind, the ruthless fingers of Time have long since torn that leaf from the log of my young life. But somehow I expected to find Santiago on this bright and beautiful forenoon, as my boat went dancing over the blue bay, just as I had left it in the days of ‘Auld Lang Syne.’ I had but to close my eyes to see once more all its greenery and quaintness, with its quiet court-yards where flowers and fruit trees grew; where, when moon or stars shone bright and fire-flies rose and fell among the foliage, I used to listen to the tinkle of the lute—Lucia’s lute, Lucia in robes of white, with dark mantilla thrown carelessly over her raven hair, and a flower on her breast, a flower I never left without.
“‘I say, bo’s’n’—I had opened my eyes now wide enough—‘I say, doesn’t the breeze smell rather—er—er—gamey?’
“The good fellow laughed. ‘That it do, sir,’ he said. ‘Santeehager ain’t what it used to be by a jugful. You’ll find it ain’t the sweetest o’ perfoomery now. Sometimes it’s wusser’n others. Sometimes, when seven miles at sea, ye might hang your sou’wester on the perfoom o’ sweet Santeehager!’
“My romance, my dream of fair women fled just then, and didn’t return.
“Well, I have seen a city or two after a siege and bombardment, and I know as well as anybody how many ‘r’s’ there are in horror, but the sights I saw that day I had better make no attempt to describe. How American and Spanish troops could live and laugh in such a place as this, even with assistance from the bodegas, was more than I could tell. Ruins everywhere, sometimes whole rows of them, with fallen roofs and blackened rafters; streets and lanes and piazzas obstructed with broken furniture of every sort; vilely smelling currents of black filth, and pools and lakelets of the same; and—mercy on us!—corpses everywhere in the quieter squares—corpses of wretches who had crawled there to die; corpses reeking in the sunlight; corpses that even the clouds of horrid vultures refused to put a talon in.
“Such was Santiago. I had come for copy, and I soon had enough of it.