Cuba in War Time by Richard Harding Davis
R >>
Richard Harding Davis >> Cuba in War Time
He sank on his side in the wet grass without a struggle or sound, and
did not move again.
It was difficult to believe that he meant to lie there, that it could
be ended so without a word, that the man in the linen suit would not
get up on his feet and continue to walk on over the hills, as he
apparently had started to do, to his home; that there was not a mistake
somewhere, or that at least some one would be sorry or say something or
run to pick him up.
But, fortunately, he did not need help, and the priests returned--the
younger one, with the tears running down his face--and donned their
vestments and read a brief requiem for his soul, while the squad stood
uncovered, and the men in hollow square shook their accoutrements into
place, and shifted their pieces and got ready for the order to march,
and the band began again with the same quickstep which the fusillade
had interrupted.
The figure still lay on the grass untouched, and no one seemed to
remember that it had walked there of itself, or noticed that the
cigarette still burned, a tiny ring of living fire, at the place where
the figure had first stood.
The figure was a thing of the past, and the squad shook itself like a
great snake, and then broke into little pieces and started off
jauntily, stumbling in the high grass and striving to keep step to the
music.
The officers led it past the figure in the linen suit, and so close to
it that the file closers had to part with the column to avoid treading
on it. Each soldier as he passed turned and looked down on it, some
craning their necks curiously, others giving a careless glance, and
some without any interest at all, as they would have looked at a house
by the roadside or a passing cart or a hole in the road.
One young soldier caught his foot in a trailing vine, and fell forward
just opposite to it. He grew very red when his comrades giggled at him
for his awkwardness. The crowd of sleepy spectators fell in on either
side of the band. They had forgotten it, too, and the priests put their
vestments back in the bag and wrapped their heavy cloaks about them,
and hurried off after the others.
Every one seemed to have forgotten it except two men, who came slowly
toward it from the town, driving a bullock cart that bore an unplaned
coffin, each with a cigarette between his lips, and with his throat
wrapped in a shawl to keep out the morning mists.
At that moment the sun, which had shown some promise of its coming in
the glow above the hills, shot up suddenly from behind them in all the
splendor of the tropics, a fierce, red disc of heat, and filled the air
with warmth and light.
The bayonets of the retreating column flashed in it, and at the sight
of it a rooster in a farmyard near by crowed vigorously and a dozen
bugles answered the challenge with the brisk, cheery notes of the
reveille, and from all parts of the city the church bells jangled out
the call for early mass, and the whole world of Santa Clara seemed to
stir and stretch itself and to wake to welcome the day just begun.
But as I fell in at the rear of the procession and looked back the
figure of the young Cuban, who was no longer a part of the world of
Santa Clara, was asleep in the wet grass, with his motionless arms
still tightly bound behind him, with the scapula twisted awry across
his face and the blood from his breast sinking into the soil he had
tried to free.
[Illustration: Regular Cavalryman--Spanish]
Along The Trocha
This is an account of a voyage of discovery along the Spanish trocha,
the one at the eastern end of Cuba. It is the longer of the two, and
stretches from coast to coast at the narrowest part of that half of the
island, from Jucaro on the south to Moron on the north.
Before I came to Cuba this time I had read in our newspapers about the
Spanish trocha without knowing just what a trocha was. I imagined it to
be a rampart of earth and fallen trees, topped with barbed wire; a
Rubicon that no one was allowed to pass, but which the insurgents
apparently crossed at will with the ease of little girls leaping over a
flying skipping rope. In reality it seems to be a much more important
piece of engineering than is generally supposed, and one which, when
completed, may prove an absolute barrier to the progress of large
bodies of troops unless they are supplied with artillery.
I saw twenty-five of its fifty miles, and the engineers in charge told
me that I was the first American, or foreigner of any nationality, who
had been allowed to visit it and make drawings and photographs of it.
Why they allowed me to see it I do not know, nor can I imagine either
why they should have objected to my doing so. There is no great mystery
about it.
Indeed, what impressed me most concerning it was the fact that every
bit of material used in constructing this backbone of the Spanish
defence, this strategic point of all their operations, and their chief
hope of success against the revolutionists, was furnished by their
despised and hated enemies in the United States. Every sheet of armor
plate, every corrugated zinc roof, every roll of barbed wire, every
plank, beam, rafter and girder, even the nails that hold the planks
together, the forts themselves, shipped in sections, which are numbered
in readiness for setting up, the ties for the military railroad which
clings to the trocha from one sea to the other--all of these have been
supplied by manufacturers in the United States.
This is interesting when one remembers that the American in the Spanish
illustrated papers is represented as a hog, and generally with the
United States flag for trousers, and Spain as a noble and valiant lion.
Yet it would appear that the lion is willing to save a few dollars on
freight by buying his armament from his hoggish neighbor, and that the
American who cheers for Cuba Libre is not at all averse to making as
many dollars as he can in building the wall against which the Cubans
may be eventually driven and shot.
If the insurgents have found as much difficulty in crossing the trocha
by land as I found in reaching it by water, they are deserving of all
sympathy as patient and long-suffering individuals.
A thick jungle stretches for miles on either side of the trocha, and
the only way of reaching it from the outer world is through the
seaports at either end. Of these, Moron is all but landlocked, and
Jucaro is guarded by a chain of keys, which make it necessary to reship
all the troops and their supplies and all the material for the trocha
to lighters, which meet the vessels six miles out at sea.
A dirty Spanish steamer drifted with us for two nights and a day from
Cienfuegos to Jucaro, and three hundred Spanish soldiers, dusty, ragged
and barefooted, owned her as completely as though she had been a
regular transport. They sprawled at full length over every deck, their
guns were stacked in each corner, and their hammocks swung four deep
from railings and riggings and across companionways, and even from the
bridge itself. It was not possible to take a step without treading on
one of them, and their hammocks made a walk on the deck something like
a hurdle race.
[Illustration: One of the Block Houses-From a photograph taken by Mr.
Davis]
With the soldiers, and crowding them for space, were the officers'
mules and ponies, steers, calves and squealing pigs, while crates full
of chickens were piled on top of one another as high as the hurricane
deck, so that the roosters and the buglers vied with each other in
continual contests. It was like traveling with a floating menagerie.
Twice a day the bugles sounded the call for breakfast and dinner, and
the soldiers ceased to sprawl, and squatted on the deck around square
tin cans filled with soup or red wine, from which they fed themselves
with spoons and into which they dipped their rations of hard tack,
after first breaking them on the deck with a blow from a bayonet or
crushing them with a rifle butt.
The steward brought what was supposed to be a sample of this soup to
the officer seated in the pilot house high above the squalor, and he
would pick out a bean from the mess on the end of a fork and place it
to his lips and nod his head gravely, and the grinning steward would
carry the dish away.
But the soldiers seemed to enjoy it very much, and to be content, even
cheerful. There are many things to admire about the Spanish Tommy. In
the seven fortified cities which I visited, where there were thousands
of him, I never saw one drunk or aggressive, which is much more than
you can say of his officers. On the march he is patient, eager and
alert. He trudges from fifteen to thirty miles a day over the worst
roads ever constructed by man, in canvas shoes with rope soles,
carrying one hundred and fifty cartridges, fifty across his stomach and
one hundred on his back, weighing in all fifty pounds.
With these he has his Mauser, his blanket and an extra pair of shoes,
and as many tin plates and bottles and bananas and potatoes and loaves
of white bread as he can stow away in his blouse and knapsack. And this
under a sun which makes even a walking stick seem a burden. In spite of
his officers, and not on account of them, he maintains good discipline,
and no matter how tired he may be or how much he may wish to rest on
his plank bed, he will always struggle to his feet when the officers
pass, and stand at salute. He gets very little in return for his
efforts.
One Sunday night, when the band was playing in the plaza, at a
heaven-forsaken fever camp called Ciego de Avila, a group of soldiers
were sitting near me on the grass enjoying the music. They loitered
there a few minutes after the bugle had sounded the retreat to the
barracks, and the officer of the day found them. When they stood up he
ordered them to report themselves at the cartel under arrest, and then,
losing all control of himself, lashed one little fellow over the head
with his colonel's staff, while the boy stood with his eyes shut and
with his lips pressed together, but holding his hand at salute until
the officer's stick beat it down.
These soldiers are from the villages and towns of Spain; some of them
are not more than seventeen years old, and they are not volunteers.
They do not care whether Spain owns an island eighty miles from the
United States, or loses it, but they go out to it and have their pay
stolen, and are put to building earth forts and stone walls, and die of
fever. It seems a poor return for their unconscious patriotism when a
colonel thrashes one of them as though he were a dog, especially as he
knows the soldier may not strike back.
The second night out the ship steward showed us a light lying low in
the water, and told us that was Jucaro, and we accepted his statement
and went over the side into an open boat, in which we drifted about
until morning, while the colored man who owned the boat, and a little
mulatto boy who steered it, quarreled as to where exactly the town of
Jucaro might be. They brought us up at last against a dark shadow of a
house, built on wooden posts, and apparently floating in the water.
This was the town of Jucaro as seen at that hour of the night, and as
we left it before sunrise the next morning, I did not know until my
return whether I had slept in a stationary ark or on the end of a
wharf.
[Illustration: Spanish Cavalry-From photographs taken by Mr. Davis]
We found four other men sleeping on the floor in the room assigned us,
and outside, eating by a smoking candle, a young English boy, who
looked up and laughed when he heard us speak, and said:
"You've come at last, have you? You are the first white men I've seen
since I came here. That's twelve months ago."
He was the cable operator at Jucaro; and he sits all day in front of a
sheet of white paper, and watches a ray of light play across an
imaginary line, and he can tell by its quivering, so he says, all that
is going on all over the world. Outside of his whitewashed cable office
is the landlocked bay, filled with wooden piles to keep out the sharks,
and back of him lies the village of Jucaro, consisting of two open
places filled with green slime and filth and thirty huts. But the
operator said that what with fishing and bathing and "Tit-Bits" and
"Lloyd's Weekly Times," Jucaro was quite enjoyable. He is going home
the year after this.
"At least, that's how I put it," he explained. "My contract requires me
to stop on here until December of 1898, but it doesn't sound so long if
you say 'a year after this,' does it?" He had had the yellow fever, and
had never, owing to the war, been outside of Jucaro. "Still," he added,
"I'm seeing the world, and I've always wanted to visit foreign parts."
As one of the few clean persons I met in Cuba, and the only contented
one, I hope the cable operator at Jucaro will get a rise in salary
soon, and some day see more of foreign parts than he is seeing at
present, and at last get back to "the Horse Shoe, at the corner of
Tottenham Court Road and Oxford street, sir," where, as we agreed,
better entertainment is to be had on Saturday night than anywhere in
London.
In Havana, General Weyler had given me a pass to enter fortified
places, which, except for the authority which the signature implied,
meant nothing, as all the cities and towns in Cuba are fortified, and
any one can visit them. It was as though Mayor Strong had given a man a
permit to ride in all the cable cars attached to cables.
It was not intended to include the trocha, but I argued that if a
trocha was not a "fortified place" nothing else was, and I persuaded
the commandante at Jucaro to take that view of it and to vise Weyler's
order. So at five the following morning a box car, with wooden planks
stretched across it for seats, carried me along the line of the trocha
from Jucaro to Ciego, the chief military port on the fortifications,
and consumed five hot and stifling hours in covering twenty-five miles.
[Illustration: One of the Forts along the Trocha-From a photograph
taken by Mr. Davis]
The trocha is a cleared space, one hundred and fifty to two hundred
yards wide, which stretches for fifty miles through what is apparently
an impassable jungle. The trees which have been cut down in clearing
this passageway have been piled up at either side of the cleared space
and laid in parallel rows, forming a barrier of tree trunks and roots
and branches as wide as Broadway and higher than a man's head. It would
take a man some time to pick his way over these barriers, and a horse
could no more do it than it could cross a jam of floating logs in a
river.
Between the fallen trees lies the single track of the military
railroad, and on one side of that is the line of forts and a few feet
beyond them a maze of barbed wire. Beyond the barbed wire again is he
other barrier of fallen trees and the jungle. In its unfinished state
this is not an insurmountable barricade. Gomez crossed it last November
by daylight with six hundred men, and with but the loss of twenty-seven
killed and as many wounded. To-day it would be more difficult, and in a
few months, without the aid of artillery, it will be impossible, except
with the sacrifice of a great loss of life. The forts are of three
kinds. They are best described as the forts, the block houses and the
little forts. A big fort consists of two stories, with a cellar below
and a watch tower above. It is made of stone and adobe, and is painted
a glaring white. One of these is placed at intervals of every half mile
along the trocha, and on a clear day the sentry in the watch tower of
each can see three forts on either side.
Midway between the big forts, at a distance of a quarter of a mile from
each, is a block house of two stories with the upper story of wood,
overhanging the lower foundation of mud. These are placed at right
angles to the railroad, instead of facing it, as do the forts.
Between each block house and each fort are three little forts of mud
and planks, surrounded by a ditch. They look something like a farmer's
ice house as we see it at home, and they are about as hot inside as the
other is cold. They hold five men, and are within hailing distance of
one another. Back of them are three rows of stout wooden stakes, with
barbed wire stretching from one row to the other, interlacing and
crossing and running in and out above and below, like an intricate
cat's cradle of wire.
One can judge how closely knit it is by the fact that to every twelve
yards of posts there are four hundred and fifty yards of wire fencing.
The forts are most completely equipped in their way, but twelve men in
the jungle would find it quite easy to keep twelve men securely
imprisoned in one of them for an indefinite length of time.
The walls are about twelve feet high, with a cellar below and a vault
above the cellar. The roof of the vault forms a platform, around which
the four walls rise to the height of a man's shoulder. There are
loopholes for rifles in the sides of the vault, and where the platform
joins the walls. These latter allow the men in the fort to fire down
almost directly upon the head of any one who comes up close to the wall
of the fort, where, without these holes in the floor, it would be
impossible to fire on him except by leaning far over the rampart.
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.
From a military point of view the trocha impressed me as a weapon which
could be made to cut both ways. What the Spaniards think of it is shown
by the caricature which appeared lately in "Don Quixote," and which
shows the United States represented by a hog and the insurgents
represented by a negro imprisoned in the trocha, while Weyler stands
ready to turn the Spanish lion on them and watch it gobble them up.
It would be unkind were Spain to do anything so inconsiderate, and
besides, the United States is rather a large mouthful even without the
insurgents who taken alone seem to have given the lion some pangs of
indigestion.
If the trocha were situated on a broad plain or prairie with a mile of
clear ground on either side of it, where troops could manoeuvre, and
which would prevent the enemy from stealing up to it unseen, it might
be a useful line of defence. But at present, along its entire length,
stretches this almost impassable barrier of jungle. Now suppose the
troops are sent at short notice from the military camps along the line
to protect any particular point?
Not less than a thousand soldiers must be sent forward, and one can
imagine what their condition would be were they forced to manoeuvre in
a space one hundred and fifty yards broad, the half of which is taken
up with barbed wire fences, fallen trees and explosive bomb shells.
Only two hundred at the most could find shelter in the forts, which
would mean that eight hundred men would be left outside the breastworks
and scattered over a distance of a half mile, with a forest on both
sides of them, from which the enemy could fire volley after volley into
their ranks, protected from pursuit not only by the jungle, but by the
walls of fallen trees which the Spaniards themselves have placed there.
A trocha in an open plain, as were the English trochas in the desert
around Suakin, makes an admirable defence, when a few men are forced to
withstand the assault of a great many, but fighting behind a trocha in
a jungle is like fighting in an ambush, and if the trocha at Moron is
ever attacked in force it will prove to be a Valley of Death to the
Spanish troops.
[Illustration: Spanish Troops in Action]
The Question Of Atrocities
One of the questions that is most frequently asked of those who have
been in Cuba is how much truth exists in the reports of Spanish
butcheries. It is safe to say in answer to this that while the report
of a particular atrocity may not be true, other atrocities just as
horrible have occurred and nothing has been heard of them. I was
somewhat skeptical of Spanish atrocities until I came to Cuba, chiefly
because I had been kept sufficiently long in Key West to learn how
large a proportion of Cuban war news is manufactured on the piazzas of
the hotels of that town and of Tampa by utterly irresponsible newspaper
men who accept every rumor that finds its way across the gulf, and pass
these rumors on to some of the New York papers as facts coming direct
from the field.
It is not surprising that one becomes skeptical, for if one story
proves to be false, how is the reader to know that the others are not
inventions also? It is difficult to believe, for instance, the account
of a horrible butchery if you read in the paragraph above it that two
correspondents have been taken prisoners by the Spanish, when both of
these gentlemen are sitting beside you in Key West and are, to your
certain knowledge, reading the paragraph over your shoulder. Nor is it
unnatural that one should grow doubtful of reported Cuban victories if
he reads of the taking of Santa Clara and the flight of the Spanish
garrison from that city, when he is living at Santa Clara and cannot
find a Cuban in it with sufficient temerity to assist him to get out of
it through the Spanish lines.