Honoring the Enemy

by Robert N. Macomber

  A pair of electric lamps illuminated the mixture of curiosity and pity on the lieutenant’s face as he stood to greet me. Naval officers are rarely seen inside Army staff offices. But by the way he was studying me, especially the fresh scars on my face, I could tell I was no stranger to him. His manner indicated he’d seen me around the hotel while I’d been recovering from my wounds, though I’d tried to stay at the other end of the huge place. No doubt he’d heard the rumors about my ill-fated mission inside Cuba in late April. I could also tell that he probably had heard the rumor about where I was heading next; thus the pity.

  The lieutenant quickly assumed a neutral expression. “Good morning, Captain Wake. I’m First Lieutenant Buford of the general’s staff. We’re honored you have officially joined us this morning, sir.”

  No more than two years out of West Point, I guessed. The shiny new aide-de-camp aiguillette braid on the left shoulder of Buford’s immaculate uniform matched his gleaming silver rank insignia; wartime sped up the promotion system in both the Army and the Navy. I wondered if Buford ever visited his academy classmates sweltering in tents not a quarter mile away.

  “Thank you, Lieutenant. I was told to be here at six for the chief of staff. I am a bit early, but it looks like the place hasn’t yet opened up for the day. Is he around here somewhere?”

  Buford caught my sarcasm. “Oh, we’re open, sir. The rest of the staff will be arriving any minute. The chief of staff was looking forward to discussing the military situation in Cuba with you this morning, sir, but he’s been called away on an important training issue in one of the regimental camps and doesn’t know when he can get back. General Shafter will be here in a few minutes, though, and I know he also wanted to see you this morning.”

  He said it effortlessly, a very smooth lie. He followed with a reassuring smile to indicate all was well. I began to dislike First Lieutenant Buford. I knew his type. We had them in the Navy, too. They go far in their career without ever hearing a shot or making a deadly decision.

  A training issue in one of the camps that requires a senior officer to solve? I knew better. The embarrassing fact was that there had been a drunken riot among some of the volunteer soldiers, barely quelled only a few hours before.

  Buford gestured to a row of plush-looking red leather chairs near a potted areca palm. Having Army headquarters in a luxury hotel had its benefits.

  “If you could wait here for the general, sir. It won’t be long. Coffee, sir?”

  “Thank you, Lieutenant,” I replied as I settled into a chair and considered his adroit detour around the actual reason for the “important training issue.”

  Prostitutes had been found inside the tents of a newly recruited New York infantry regiment camped in the pine woods west of town. When the regiment’s officers told the women to leave, the drunken soldiers suggested it was the officers who should leave. The confrontation went from insubordinate words to physical threats in seconds. It ended only with the desperate colonel’s warning that he would bring in another regiment to kill the mutineers.

  I’d heard all about it from a waiter serving me coffee thirty minutes earlier in the hotel’s kitchen. He’d learned it from an exasperated messenger who was searching for an officer at headquarters to receive the regimental commander’s request for help. The waiter thought it all quite funny. I thought it pathetic and wondered what the press would think of it when they arrived for their leisurely breakfast at the dining room in three hours or so. By noon the New York papers would have it via the wires. Then I thought of that smirk on Joseph Herrings’ face and corrected my estimate. Maybe before noon.

  The smiling lieutenant brought me a cup of very good Cuban coffee, some of the last brought in from the island before war was declared. He assured me we’d soon have much more of the stuff once we kicked those “cowardly little spics” off the island and took it over once and for all.

  I merely nodded as I considered what an excellent target Buford’s shiny shoulder braid would make for one of the “little spics” in the Spanish army.

  2

  The Army

  U.S. Army V Corps Headquarters, Tampa Bay Hotel, Tampa, Florida 5:45 a.m., Monday, 6 June 1898

  REGIMENTAL INSUBORDINATION was a rarity in the regular Army, but it was emblematic of the mob of raw recruits who had joined up for a patriotic lark after Maine exploded and sank in Havana Harbor. Unlike their professional counterparts, the volunteers flooding into Tampa from around the country showed little discipline or martial skill. Many had never fired their weapon. Some hadn’t even been issued one.

  The Army completely lacked the organizational ability to cope with the situation it suddenly faced: fighting a tropical jungle war in Asia and the Caribbean while defending the U.S. coasts from Spanish raiders. Army officers hadn’t operated or supplied formations larger than a thousand men since the Civil War. In March, there had been only 28,000 men in the entire Army; 2 months later there were more than 100,000. Within another 3 months it would be more than 250,000. Across the country, Army camps run by overwhelmed officers sprang up haphazardly, placed more by politics than by military necessity or logic.

  At Tampa alone, almost 30,000 soldiers had arrived in the past 3 weeks. Many still lacked shelter, provisions, supplies, clean water, and sanitary facilities. Most had never endured anything like the 95-degree heat, humidity, mosquitos, and rain of a Florida summer. Camp diseases such as dysentery were beginning to appear. The only item easily obtained was cheap liquor, some of which was little more than sweet-tasting poison.

  Used to institutional ineptitude, regular Army soldiers quietly took care of themselves by scavenging for what they needed, much of it being the private or government property of the volunteers. As for the grog and the trollops, regulars were smart enough to keep those dubious pleasures out of their officers’ sight.

  Even worse for the Army, reporters were starting to sniff around and ask questions. The real danger wasn’t members of the New York City press. Those worldly Hearst and Pulitzer men ignored the more sordid aspects of camp life. Some even quietly indulged in them. No, it was the reporters from America’s small hometowns writing about how their beloved boys were being led and fed who had the generals worried. If word of what was really happening in Tampa got out, the endless supply of cannon fodder for the U.S. Army would evaporate like the hotel’s famous ice shavings in the summer sun. This was the real reason the chief of staff wasn’t in his office to discuss war operations. He was trying to keep the proverbial lid on a pot already boiling over.

  The effort in Tampa was not an auspicious beginning for the great military crusade the national press and politicos had been promoting. I pitied the Army, for when they actually entered the jungles of Cuba and faced the well-armed, well-led, and well-supplied Spanish enemy their difficulties at Tampa would seem trivial. I wondered how they would cope.

  So far, the war hadn’t gone particularly well for me, either. I’d spent the previous month recuperating from a coastal raid concocted by politicians in Washington. I was heartily tired of fighting on land and more than ready for a naval command. I’d damn well earned one. But I knew it wasn’t going to happen. I was a pariah in Washington because of what I’d had to do in Cuba to salvage that damned operation.

  So instead of getting what I wanted and deserved, I was ordered to report to the Army, a not so subtle message of my superiors’ disapproval. “Senior naval liaison to the V Army Corps staff” was my official assignment, presented to me as if it were a prestigious posting. That was just another lie, one among the many fabricated in Washington recently.

  Thus I was sitting across from First Lieutenant Buford, who busied himself trying to look busy. He arranged piles of papers in neat rows on his desk while sipping his iced tea. I wanted to fling them all onto the floor in disgust. Such disagreeable thoughts were interrupted ten very long minutes later by a commotion in the hallway outside. The soldier stationed by the outer door, now fully awake, stamped the floorboards with his boots an
d slapped his rifle to present arms position. I heard somebody shout, “Morning, sir!”

  The door opened, and in lumbered an obese, sad-eyed Army officer who was already sweating profusely at this early hour. It was none other than the senior commander of America’s military effort to liberate Cuba.

  The lieutenant shot up into perfect West Point attention. “Good morning, General!”

  I stood up as Maj. Gen. William Rufus Shafter grunted something to Buford about the morning being anything but good.

  The lieutenant politely gestured toward me. “Captain Wake of the Navy is here to report in, sir.”

  I announced myself to my new superior officer. “Captain Peter Wake, reporting as ordered, General.”

  Shafter looked at me for the first time. A slight smile of recognition crossed his face. He had probably seen me on the hotel’s verandah. “Ah yes, the Navy. A fish out of water, eh?” he said, chuckling at his little joke. The lieutenant smiled appreciatively. I didn’t. The general’s chuckle faded away. “Yes, well, come on in, Wake, and we’ll talk.”

  He turned to the lieutenant. “When the chief of staff returns, I want to see him immediately. In the meantime, Captain Wake and I need privacy.”

  “Yes, sir,” said Buford. I followed the general into his office, a converted corner suite overlooking the hotel’s colorful gardens. Behind us, an entourage of eager minions surged into the anteroom. The senior ones grabbed the fancy chairs, awaiting their turn with the great man.

  Once the door was closed, Shafter plopped down with a sigh into a groaning swivel chair behind a large desk. Placing his valise on the desktop, he swung around to take me into his gaze and got right to the point. “Know why you’re here, Wake?”

  I found his abruptness surprisingly refreshing. Shafter was no fool. Fully aware of the Army’s unpreparedness and his own ignorance of Cuba and the Spanish foe, he knew the daunting odds against succeeding in this assignment. The man had seen combat, from the colossal horrors of the Civil War, where he received the Medal of Honor, to the ruthless battles against cagey bands of hostile Indians on the western Plains, where he picked up his nickname, “Pecos Bill.” But all that was long ago. He wasn’t Pecos Bill anymore.

  I’d heard that Shafter was chosen for this critically important command because he lacked political ambition and therefore posed no threat to anyone in power at Washington. This, in my opinion, was a point in his favor. I decided he could handle the truth.

  “General, I thought I was getting a ship command, but instead I received official orders from the Navy Department to be the naval liaison for the Army expeditionary forces here in Tampa. I’ve recently learned, however, that I won’t really be on your staff because you are sending me on a clandestine mission inside Oriente, Cuba, ahead of the invasion.”

  The general’s eyes narrowed and hardened.

  I went on, “Once there, I am to make contact with Major General Calixto García, commander of the eastern department of the Cuban Liberation Army, and be the liaison between his force and the American Army. I am to ensure that Cuban forces clear away Spanish forces from our invasion landing area near Santiago de Cuba. Once that is done, our regiments can come ashore unopposed and have the time and space to form up properly before facing the enemy. Otherwise, the landing will be a bloodbath.”

  Shafter’s eyes were no longer merely hard. They were angry now, boring into me as I continued.

  “I was selected for this assignment because nobody in the Army has my knowledge of Cuba and the Spanish enemy, my contacts among the Cubans, and my ability to move quietly in a foreign country. I was further told the invasion is in ten days, and your entire corps is embarking on makeshift troopships here at Tampa within two days. So obviously, neither I nor you have much time … sir.”

  His ever-darkening expression made it clear that the general found my unenthusiastic candor disturbing. I didn’t really care.

  “You’re right on all counts, Wake,” he growled. “But how the hell do you know all this? It’s confidential.”

  “From one of your staff officers, sir. He was drunk at dinner here in the hotel three nights ago.”

  I didn’t elaborate that in his inebriated state the ignorant lout had told me he was jealous of my mission, which he declared would be “an exciting adventure.” I also didn’t add that he was one of the sycophants waiting in the anteroom.

  “Really? And who was this officer with the big mouth?” Shafter demanded.

  I shrugged. “Does it matter, sir? The entire staff knows the confidential invasion plans, and they all need to keep their mouths shut. Thousands of American lives will be in jeopardy when they arrive on that Cuban beach. Not to mention mine in setting all this up.”

  Before he could press further about his loose-tongued officer, I changed topics. “General, I’ve already arranged clandestine transport to Cuba and have to start my journey this evening to get there in time, so we’ll need to conclude our plans for my mission right now.”

  He said nothing, appearing a bit taken aback by my attitude, so I continued my monologue. “I understand the exact beaches have not yet been chosen for the landing. Once your forces arrive at the Santiago area, I will send word out to your ship from General García’s headquarters about recommended places to land. Also, I strongly suggest a preinvasion meeting ashore with you, Admiral Sampson, and General García when you arrive so the three commanders can work out last-minute details and eliminate any confusion over timing and responsibilities. Do you have any other information for my mission, sir?”

  The proper way to put my last question would be to ask if he had any further orders for me, but I preferred to be unencumbered by such restrictions. Most generals and admirals have forgotten how to be innovative and nimble. Shafter had been a general a long time.

  For a split second his face reflected extreme resentment and I anticipated a rebuke, but it soon faded into reluctant resignation. “No, I can’t think of anything more, Captain Wake. I heard what you did in Cuba in April and was told you were the right man for this job. I can see they were correct.”

  I rose from the chair without seeking permission to do so, yet another breach of military courtesy. “Thank you, sir. I know your time is valuable, General, and you have a lot of officers waiting to see you, so I’ll be on my way. Good luck, sir. I’ll see you in Cuba.”

  He stood also, requiring an effort that was unsettling to watch. As I walked out of the office I wondered how this well-intentioned but profoundly unfit man could survive the Cuban jungle in the lethal fever season. How could any of the Americans?

  3

  Breakfast with a Hero

  U.S. Army V Corps Headquarters, Tampa Bay Hotel, Tampa, Florida 6:52 a.m., Monday, 6 June 1898

  I WAS HEADING PAST THE hotel’s registration desk toward the elevator to my third-floor room when Col. Leonard Wood marched into the lobby. A renaissance man if ever there was one, the thirty-eight-year-old Wood was a handsome and cultured Bostonian, Harvard-educated physician, former football athlete, amateur naturalist, career soldier, Medal of Honor recipient, and Indian fighter. Now he was the commanding officer of the 1st Volunteer Cavalry Regiment, already nicknamed the Rough Riders by the press. His usually pensive face split into a wide smile the moment he saw me. Seconds later he was excitedly pumping my hand.

  “Good to see you, Peter! Theodore told me you’d be here. I haven’t seen you since our dinner at the Metropolitan Club. What was that, six months ago?” He raised a finger to trace the wound on my cheek. “Whoa, who sewed you up—a native witch doctor?”

  I didn’t get a chance to reply that it was a Navy boatswain with a sail needle, because another man burst through the doors: Wood’s assistant regimental commander and my energetic young friend of a dozen years, Theodore Roosevelt. Until a month ago Theodore had been assistant secretary of the Navy and my direct civilian superior. Now he was a volunteer lieutenant colonel in the Army and one rank junior to me.

  Upon seeing me, Roosevelt ex
ecuted a flawless left-oblique march and stopped the regulation thirty-six inches from me, complete with clicked heels. He straightened to attention, his toothy grin tightening into mock solemnity. Looking me in the eye, he slowly rendered the hand salute.

  I returned the salute, violating naval regulations, and told him to stand easy.

  Then the sentimental dam within Roosevelt burst. He clasped my shoulders and announced in a voice they could hear back in the kitchen, “Oh, my gracious, Peter! I have waited such a long time to be able to do that! I am simply delighted to see you. Edith told me she’d had dinner with you and your lovely Maria here in the hotel last week. I’ve a thousand questions. How are the wounds?” He pointed at my cheek. “Say, that’s a very impressive Renommierschmiss!”

  I laughed. “It’s hardly a dueling scar, Theodore. Just a couple of minor splinter wounds.”

  “No matter, it shows you’ve been in action. Let’s get some breakfast!” Theodore spun toward Wood. “Do you agree, sir? We’ve a bit of time right now, and Peter can fill us in on what’s what down there.” With dismay he quietly added, “He’s probably the only one around here who really knows a thing about Cuba.”

  Wood nodded. “Good idea, Theodore. Peter, the Army’s buying, so please say yes.”

  “Very well, Leonard,” I heard myself say, though I had little time and a lot to do.

  A few minutes later we were seated, breakfast was ordered—my second of the day—and I was being interrogated about the enemy’s leadership, strategy, defensive works, weaponry, transport, and communications. After I’d given my opinions on those subjects, which were generally positive, I was asked about the enemy’s individual morale and fighting ability. Most Americans underestimated them. I didn’t.

  “The Spanish order of battle in Cuba totals about a quarter of a million troops. In my opinion, morale is generally low among the conscripts sent out from Spain to serve in Cuba, relatively high among the veteran regular soldiers on the island, and very high among the pro-Spanish island militia, the guerillas. The Spanish forces have fought a nasty war for the last three years. They won’t run away from us, fellas.”