The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt (130 page)

Lawton, whose division landed first on the twenty-second, had left for Siboney the same afternoon. Marching at a leisurely pace, he encamped en route and completed his journey next morning. The port (which had been so hastily vacated that tortillas were still steaming over breakfast coals) was reported “captured” at
9:20 A.M.
, much to Wheeler’s chagrin. Only then did he receive the longed-for permission to bring his men on to Siboney.
³⁰

Doubtless General Shafter expected the cavalry to proceed west at the same comfortable pace as the infantry had the day before. From the moment the bugles sounded “March” in Daiquirí at
3:43 P.M
., 23 June,
³¹
it was plain that Wheeler wanted the Rough Riders in Siboney by nightfall.

Seven miles did not look far on the map, but paper was flat and the Cuban coastline was not. The hard coral road ran up and down precipitous hills, and the heat was blinding enough to incapacitate men in loincloths, let alone military uniform and the heavy accouterments of war. Even when the road leveled off to wind through coconut groves, the entrapped humidity and clouds of insects buzzing over rotten fruit made the exposed slopes seem almost preferable. Soon blanket rolls, cans of food, coats, and even underwear were littering the trail, to be picked up by delighted Cubans.
³²

“I shall never forget that terrible march to Siboney,” wrote Edward Marshall of the
New York Journal
. Unlike “Dandy Dick” Davis of the
Herald
(impeccable as usual in a tropical suit and white helmet), Marshall was unable to ride with the officers. He had lost his horse during the debarkation, and had generously offered his saddle to Roosevelt, who had little Texas, but nothing in the way of harness.
³³
Roosevelt accepted the gift, but refused to ride “while my men are walking.”
³⁴
All the way to Siboney he tramped along in his yellow mackintosh, streaming with perspiration and earning the affectionate respect of his troopers.

“Wood’s Weary Walkers”—never had the name seemed more apt—caught up with General Lawton’s rear guard, a mile or so above Siboney, just as dusk fell. Without slackening pace, they marched on down the valley. Burr McIntosh of
Leslie’s Magazine
asked the commander of the rear guard, Brigadier General J. C. Bates, where they were going. “I don’t know,” said Bates, peering after them in the dim light. “They have not had any orders to go on beyond us.”
³⁵

If not, they very soon had. Wood encamped his men in a coconut grove well north of Siboney, then rode into the squalid village for a council of war with General Wheeler and his own immediate superior, Brigadier General S.B.M. Young. He learned that Wheeler had made a personal reconnaissance of the Camino Real that afternoon,
and had found that the first line of enemy defenses was four miles up-country, at a point where the road crested a spur in the mountains. Fighting Joe’s orders were “to hit the Spaniards … as soon after daybreak as possible.”
³⁶

W
HILE
W
OOD
, W
HEELER
, and Young discussed tactics at headquarters, Roosevelt stayed with the men in camp, eating hardtack and pork and drinking fire-boiled coffee. Rain began to fall. He sat for a couple of hours in his yellow slicker, not bothering to seek shelter. It was at times like this, when lack of seniority excluded him from the decision-making process, that he had leisure to reflect on what he had missed by turning down the offer of the colonelcy. But war had its opportunities.…

The sky cleared eventually, and new fires began to blaze as the soldiers stripped off their sweat-drenched, rain-sodden clothes and held them up to dry. Roosevelt strolled over to L Troop, where two of the biggest men in the regiment, Captain Allyn Capron and Sergeant Hamilton Fish, were standing talking. He caught himself admiring their splendid bodies in the flickering glare. “Their frames seemed of steel, to withstand all fatigue; they were flushed with health; in their eyes shone high resolve and fiery desire.” Like himself, they were “filled with eager longing to show their mettle.”
³⁷

T
HE PASS OVER THE
mountains where the Spanish lay in wait was locally known as Las Guásimas, after a clump of
guácima
, or hog-nut trees that grew there. Cuban informants, aware that Americans would have difficulty recognizing these trees in the surrounding jungle, gave General Wheeler a more macabre landmark to search out. There was an approach in the vicinity, scouts said, where the body of a dead guerrilla lay across the trail. Discovery of that body would indicate that the enemy was somewhere in the vicinity
³⁸
—perhaps only a hundred yards ahead.

This was hardly the most sophisticated reconnaissance briefing, but it was good enough for Fighting Joe. Shortly before dawn the next morning, 24 June, his dismounted cavalrymen began a two-column
advance upon Las Guásimas. The right thrust, on the west, was undertaken by General Young and about 470 Regulars, marching directly up the Camino Real. The left thrust, up a high but roughly parallel trail half a mile to the west, was undertaken by Wood and 500 Rough Riders. If Cuban information was correct, trail and road would meet about where the dead guerrilla lay, enabling Young and Wood to deploy, touch flanks, then lead their thousand men against the enemy-held ridge together. Spanish forces were estimated at about 2,000.
³⁹

Climbing quickly out of the valley at
6:00 A.M.
, the Rough Riders took their last look at Siboney, seven hundred feet below. Gilded by the sun, half-shrouded in early morning mist, the squalid little port looked almost pretty. It gave off faint sounds, “like blasts from faery trumpets.”
⁴⁰
Evidently Lawton’s men were at last waking up.

From this viewpoint the trail led northwest along a forest ridge, the vegetation growing ever taller and thicker until it closed overhead. The Rough Riders found themselves irradiated with chlorophyllic half-light; its effect would have been eerily charming had the
tropical warmth not made it sinister. “The jungle had a kind of hot, sullen beauty,” one trooper remembered. “We had the feeling that it resented our intrusion—that, if we penetrated too far, it would rise up in anger, and smother us.”
⁴¹
From time to time a cooing of wood-doves, and the call of a tropical cuckoo, strange to Roosevelt’s ears, sounded in the trees,
⁴²
although the birds themselves were never seen.

The Rough Riders advanced like Indians, behind a “point” tipped by those two steely giants, Sergeant Fish and Captain Capron. After them came Wood, flanked by three aides, and Roosevelt, flanked by his two favorite reporters, Richard Harding Davis of the
Herald
and Edward Marshall of the
Journal
. Both men had reported favorably, in the past, on his exploits as Police Commissioner; he now relied on them to glorify him as a warrior, and cultivated them accordingly. Stephen Crane of the
World
, whom Roosevelt did not like at all,
⁴³
was left to bring up the extreme rear.

Half a mile west and two or three hundred feet lower, on the valley road, General Young’s infantrymen were marching in a roughly parallel direction. But the intervening vegetation was so dense that they could be neither seen nor heard, save for a bugle-call now and then.
⁴⁴

After about an hour’s march, Captain Capron came back through the trees to announce that his scout had discovered the body of the dead guerrilla. Wood turned to Roosevelt. “Pass the word back to keep silence in the ranks.”
⁴⁵
Then he disappeared up the trail with Capron, leaving Roosevelt and Marshall to discuss coolly—and disobediently—a lunch they had once had with William Randolph Hearst at the Astor House. Meanwhile the men relaxed on the ground, chewing blades of grass and fanning the stagnant air with their hats.
⁴⁶

As Roosevelt talked, his glance fell on some barbed wire curling from a fence to the left of the trail. He reached for a strand, gazed at it with the expert eye of a ranchman, and started. “My God! This wire has been cut today.”

“What makes you think so?” asked Marshall.

“The end is bright, and there has been enough dew, even since sunrise, to put a light rust on it …”
⁴⁷

Just as he spoke, the regimental surgeon came up from behind, riding noisily on a mule. Roosevelt leaped to silence him. Then, as the Rough Riders held their breath, a terrifying sound came winging through the bushes.
⁴⁸

M
ARSHALL, WHO WAS
to hear the sound endlessly repeated that day, and would find himself paralyzed from the waist down by it, described it as a
z-z-z-z-z-eu
, rising to a shrill crescendo, then sinking with a moan on the
eu
. It was the trajectory of a high-speed Mauser bullet, standard equipment with Spanish snipers. Bloodcurdling though the sound was, with the concomitant
ping
and
zip
of perforated leaves (enabling a man to judge its approach velocity, and the utter impossibility of getting out of the way in time), the worst moment came when the
z-eu
was followed by a loud
chug
, indicating that the bullet had hit flesh. The force of impact on a man’s outstretched arm was enough to spin him around before he thumped in a flaccid heap on the ground. Often as not, a man so struck would rise again after a few minutes, none the worse but for a tiny, cauterized hole; the flaccidity was merely a shock reaction, common to all Mauser victims.
⁴⁹
But other men lay where they dropped.

The first soldier to be killed by these first rifleshots of the Spanish-American War was Sergeant Hamilton Fish, who fell at the feet of Captain Capron. Then another Mauser took Capron in the heart. So much for their “frames of steel.”
⁵⁰
Six more Rough Riders died in the hail of fire that followed—the most intense, according to one scholarly major, in the history of warfare.
⁵¹
Thirty-four men were wounded, many of them repeatedly. Private Isbell of L Troop was hit three times in the neck, twice in the left hand, once in the right hand, and finally in the head.
⁵²
Roosevelt, literally jumping up and down with excitement
⁵³
as he awaited Wood’s order to deploy, made no effort to run for cover; somehow the bullets missed him, although one did smack into a tree inches from his cheek, and filled his eyes with splinters of bark.
⁵⁴