“Laine and I hurried up to the stone fort and found that James Creelman, a Journal correspondent with the infantry column, had been seriously wounded and was lying in the Twelfth Infantry hospital. Our men were still firing an occasional shot, and from blockhouses and isolated trenches, from which the Spaniards could not safely retreat, flags of truce were waving.
“Guns and side-arms were being taken away from such Spaniards as had outlived the pitiless fire, and their dead were being dumped without ceremony into the trenches, after the Spanish fashion.
“When I left the fort to hunt for Creelman, I found him, bloody and bandaged, lying on his back on a blanket on the ground, but shown all care and attention that kindly and skilful surgeons could give him. His first words to me were that he was afraid he could not write much of a story, as he was pretty well dazed, but if I would write for him he would dictate the best he could. I sat down among the wounded, and Creelman told me his story of the fight. Here it is:
“ ‘The extraordinary thing in this fight of all the fights I have seen, is the enormous amount of ammunition fired. There was a continuous roar of musketry [pg 235]from four o’clock in the morning until four in the afternoon.
VICE-PRESIDENT HOBART.
“ ‘Chaffee’s brigade began the fight by moving along the extreme right, with Ludlow down in the low country to the left of Caney. General Chaffee’s brigade consisted of the Seventeenth, Seventh, and Twelfth Infantry, and was without artillery. It occupied the extreme right.
“ ‘The formation was like two sides of an equilateral triangle, Ludlow to the south, and Chaffee to the east.
“ ‘Ludlow began firing through the brush, and we could see through the palm-trees and tangle of bushes the brown and blue figures of our soldiers in a line a mile long, stealing from tree to tree, bush to bush, firing as they went.
“ ‘Up here on the heights General Chaffee, facing Caney, moved his troops very early in the morning, and the battle opened by Ludlow’s artillery firing on the fort and knocking several holes in it.