Cuba in War Time

by Richard Harding Davis

Above the platform is an iron or zinc roof, supported by iron pillars, and in the centre of this is the watch tower. The only approach to the fort is by a movable ladder, which hangs over the side like the gangway of a ship of war, and can be raised by those on the inside by means of a rope suspended over a wheel in the roof. The opening in the wall at the head of the ladder is closed at the time of an attack by an iron platform, to which the ladder leads, and which also can be raised by a pulley. In October of 1897 the Spanish hope to have calcium lights placed in the watch towers of the forts with sufficient power to throw a searchlight over a quarter of a mile, or to the next block house, and so keep the trocha as well lighted as Broadway from one end to the other.

As a further protection against the insurgents the Spaniards have distributed a number of bombs along the trocha, which they showed with great pride. These are placed at those points along the trocha where the jungle is less thickly grown, and where the insurgents might be expected to pass.

Each bomb is fitted with an explosive cap, to which five or six wires are attached and staked down on the ground. Any one stumbling over one of these wires explodes the bomb and throws a charge of broken iron to a distance of fifty feet. How the Spaniards are going to prevent stray cattle and their own soldiers from wandering into these man-traps it is difficult to understand.

[Illustration: The Trocha-From a photograph taken by Mr. Davis]

The chief engineer in charge of the trocha detailed a captain to take me over it and to show me all that there was to see. The officers of the infantry and cavalry stationed at Ciego objected to his doing this, but he said: "He has a pass from General Weyler. I am not responsible." It was true that I had an order from General Weyler, but he had rendered it ineffective by having me followed about wherever I went by his police and spies. They sat next to me in the cafés and in the plazas, and when I took a cab they called the next one on the line and trailed after mine all around the city, until my driver would become alarmed for fear he, too, was suspected of something, and would take me back to the hotel.

I had gotten rid of them at Cienfuegos by purchasing a ticket on the steamer to Santiago, three days further down the coast, and then dropping off in the night at the trocha, so while I was visiting it I expected to find that my non-arrival at Santiago had been reported, and word sent to the trocha that I was a newspaper correspondent. And whenever an officer spoke to the one who was showing me about, my camera appeared to grow to the size of a trunk, and to weigh like lead, and I felt lonely, and longed for the company of the cheerful cable operator at the other end of the trocha.

But as I had seen Mr. Gillette in "Secret Service" only seventeen times before leaving New York, I knew just what to do, which was to smoke all the time and keep cool. The latter requirement was somewhat difficult, as Ciego de Avila is a hotter place than Richmond. Indeed, I can only imagine one place hotter than Ciego, and I have not been there.

Ciego was an interesting town. During every day of the last rainy season an average of thirty soldiers and officers died there of yellow fever. While I was there I saw two soldiers, one quite an old man, drop down in the street as though they had been shot, and lie in the road until they were carried to the yellow fever ward of the hospital, under the black oilskin cloth of the stretchers.

There was a very smart officers' club at Ciego well supplied with a bar and billiard tables, which I made some excuse for not entering, but which could be seen through its open doors, and I suggested to one of the members that it must be a comfort to have such a place, where the officers might go after their day's march on the mud banks of the trocha, and where they could bathe and be cool and clean. He said there were no baths in the club nor anywhere in the town. He added that he thought it might be a good idea to have them.

The bath tub is the dividing line between savages and civilized beings. And when I learned that regiment after regiment of Spanish officers and gentlemen have been stationed in that town—and it was the dirtiest, hottest and dustiest town I ever visited—for eighteen months, and none of them had wanted a bath, I believed from that moment all the stories I had heard about their butcheries and atrocities, stories which I had verified later by more direct evidence.