The Crowded Hour
Page 25
“I have seen many illustrations and pictures of this charge on the San Juan hills, but none of them seem to show it just as I remember it,” Davis wrote.
In the pictures-papers the men are running up hill swiftly and gallantly, in regular formation, rank after rank, with flags flying, their eyes aflame, and their hair streaming, their bayonets fixed, in long, brilliant lines, an invincible, overpowering weight of numbers. Instead I think the thing which impressed one the most, when our men started from cover, was that they were so few. It seemed as if someone had made an awful and terrible mistake. One’s instinct was to call them to come back. You felt that someone had blundered and that these few men were blindly following out some madman’s mad order. It was not heroic then, it seemed merely terribly pathetic. The pity of it, the folly of such a sacrifice was what held you.33
No one bothered to fix their bayonets, and no officer thought to halt his men so they could fire at once, in concentrated volleys—it’s unlikely any of the soldiers would have listened, had an officer tried. There was no order to the assault. They ran as fast as they could without drawing fire. “There was hardly a semblance of a line—simply a broad swarm,” another reporter watching from El Poso, John Bigelow, wrote.34
Eventually the Rough Riders were joined by men from the Ninth, Third, Sixth, and 10th Cavalry Regiments. As they ran, they could see, off to their left, a wave of blue as the regular infantry begin to run up San Juan Hill at the same time, led by the white-maned General Hamilton Hawkins of the First Brigade, First Division, who knew something about gallant charges—as a young man, he had fought at the Battle of Gettysburg. “General Hawkins,” Davis wrote, “with hair white as snow, and yet far in advance of men thirty years his junior, was so noble a sight that you felt inclined to pray for his safety; on the other hand, Roosevelt, mounted high on horseback and quite alone, made you feel that you would like to cheer.” As his biographer Arthur Lubow points out, Davis was not shy about drawing the generational distinction between the two men, with Hawkins a noble relic and Roosevelt the dynamic future.35
It was a true skirmish—no ranks, no order, just a halting, furious run up the hill, cheering and jostling and falling along the way. “The whole line, tired of waiting, and eager to close with the enemy, was straining to go forward; and it seemed that different parts slipped the leash at almost the same time,” Roosevelt recounted. He galloped back and forth, surging forward to urge the men on, then back to the sunken roads to direct more troops. He ordered Dade Goodrich, in charge of Troop D, to the right, and saw to it that another three troops followed them. Then he tore off uphill, where he found his personal orderly, Henry Bardshar, already in position, taking aim at Spanish troops who were pouring out of the small clay-colored house that sat at the top of the hill. The charge, said John Greenway, “was the grandest sight I ever saw.”36
As the regiment got closer to the summit of the hill, they could hear American rifle fire plinking off the giant kettle on the top of the hill. The men stood to fire, and white puffs of smoke and dirt rose along the crest. One trooper, John Swetnam, knelt to fire and immediately fell over, a bullet hole in his forehead. “You couldn’t place your finger more in the center of his forehead than that bullet that hit him was placed,” said David Hughes, who was lying nearby. “He didn’t even kick.” About forty feet from the top, Roosevelt came to another barbed wire fence. Instead of trying to jump it, or wait for someone to hold it down, he dismounted, and was immediately attacked by two Spanish soldiers. Bardshar, Roosevelt’s orderly, picked them off with his revolver. Wisely, this time Roosevelt had left his saber in camp, and he could run, unencumbered, the rest of the way up the hill.37
Who made it to the top first? In the confusion of the scrum, no one quite knew. By the time Roosevelt arrived after the first wave, there was already a fierce debate under way. The three New Mexico troops had all planted their guidons around the same time. But off to the other side of the hill, two troops from the Ninth Regiment claimed they were the first, and had their upright flags to prove it as well. “As for the individual men, each of whom honestly thought he was first on the summit,” Roosevelt wrote, “their name was legion.” With the Spanish in retreat from the hill and their gunfire lessened, Roosevelt ordered the dead, dying, and wounded moved to the side of the hill, away from the main body of men, so as not to demoralize them. While a detachment of soldiers handled their fallen comrades, others dove ravenously at a pot of hot rice they found still sitting over a fire. It might be poisoned, someone warned, but no one listened. “Poison or no poison we soon finished it up,” said one trooper.38
The respite from Spanish gunfire did not last long. Within minutes, the few hundred men now gathered on the top of Kettle Hill were taking fire from the entrenched Spanish soldiers on San Juan Hill, less than a quarter mile to the south—not just rifle fire, but from small artillery, with timed fuses that exploded in starbursts of shrapnel above them. A few men took shelter behind the iron kettle; everyone took aim to return fire. Dade Goodrich remembered lying beside his cousin, Theodore Miller, and firing their Krags as fast as they could. “He seemed to be enjoying himself immensely,” Goodrich recalled. They could just make out the blue jackets of the Spanish regulars in the San Juan Hill trenches, and the cousins smiled at each other whenever one would double over, or leap and fall back against the trench wall.39
The firefight went on for about ten minutes; from time to time a Rough Rider would drop, or roll on his side, dead or wounded. They were back where they had been at the bottom of the hill—exposed under fire, though this time much closer to the Spanish trenches. They could see, several hundred yards away, the American infantry still slowly making its way up the hill, but it was an even tougher climb than the Rough Riders had just completed. The noise of the carbines and the shouting of the men were intense, but above it all, Roosevelt could hear a quick, steady drumming. He paused, then realized—“It’s the Gatlings, men, our Gatlings!” Lieutenant John W. Parker, the head of the Gatling detachment, had managed to pull up his battery of four machine guns to a flat open meadow to the left of the hill, and proceeded to pour fire on the Spanish positions. Under the cover of the rapid-fire guns, American infantry began to make their final push to the summit.40
Inside Santiago, the sounds of battle grew closer, though they remained muffled by the concentric lines of hills that surrounded the city. Müller y Tejeiro, the officer who would later be one of the few Spanish soldiers to recount his army’s side of the battle, went walking around the empty Santiago streets—the soldiers were at the front, the civilian residents were in hiding. Over his head, shells fired by the Spanish ships, in the harbor, soared toward the far side of San Juan Heights. But without forward observers, there was no way to find the range; they were firing blind, and not hitting a thing. Müller y Tejeiro found General Linares, hurrying from one branch of his headquarters to another, shouting orders, insisting that he was on the verge of pushing the Americans back to Siboney.41
Finally Roosevelt could not wait any longer. His troops, watching the American infantry rush headlong toward the Spanish position, were in an excellent position to take on the enemy’s flank. He stood and yelled for his men to follow him. He vaulted a barbed wire fence and ran out about 100 yards before realizing that only five soldiers had joined him. Immediately, two of them were shot. Roosevelt told the other three to find whatever cover they could, and he ran back to Kettle Hill. There he found his men more or less where he’d left them. “I taunted them bitterly for not having followed me,” he said, before realizing that they simply hadn’t heard him.42
This time Dade Goodrich and Theodore Miller rose up to follow Roosevelt, running down the gentle slope between Kettle Hill and San Juan Hill, joyous grins on their faces. Miller was hit almost immediately. Goodrich, steps ahead of his cousin, ran several more seconds before realizing something was wrong. Miller was on the ground, his chest heaving, his clothing soaking with blood. Goodrich tore open his shirt and saw the bul
let had gone in through Miller’s left shoulder and traveled, internally, across his upper body. Miller smiled and said he was okay. Leaving two men to guard him, Goodrich recalled, “I said goodbye to Thede and took a last look that he should be cared for . . . he was pale but perfectly calm and collected.” But Miller was not okay. After Goodrich and the rest of the regiment had advanced, he looked up at one of the men, Harrison Jewell Holt, and said, “I’m going, Harry . . . but it’s in a good cause, isn’t it?”43
• • •
Missing from the assault were General Lawton and his men in the Second Division, who did not complete their assault on El Caney until nearly twelve hours after they had begun. Unlike the Spanish soldiers at San Juan Heights, those at El Caney seemed determined to fight to the death—inspired, perhaps, by the tenacity of their commander, Vara del Rey. He had been shot in both legs, but refused to remove himself or his soldiers. At 1:30 Shafter, via McClernand, ordered a retreat, so he could direct the Second Division to the south, but Lawton refused. The tide of battle only turned when Vara del Rey, still trying to stand on his bullet-riddled legs and still very much in charge of the Spanish defenses, was hit in the head, and killed instantly. (Two of his sons were killed that day at El Caney as well.)44
The Americans entered the fort at El Caney first. “The interior was a charnel house,” wrote Secretary Alger, based on reports he had read from the field. “The remains of eighteen dead were lying about. The walls and floors were bespattered with blood.” Only about 100 of the original 521 Spanish defenders escaped back to Santiago; 235 had been killed or wounded, the rest captured. Even after the fort fell, the Americans spent another hour in house-to-house combat. The Americans at El Caney lost more than 100 men, killed or wounded, scores more than Shafter had expected. Arthur Lee, writing later in Scribner’s, said that the American dead were spread so thick across the hillside before El Caney “that one could only pass by stepping over them.” General Lawton had completed his objective, but at enormous cost, and by the time he did it was too late to matter.45
In Alger’s estimation, the delay at El Caney was a good thing—if Lawton had made quick work of it and then proceeded south to San Juan Heights, the three reunited divisions might have pressed on, by inertia, toward Santiago, tired but unstoppable. Had they made such an advance, Alger feared, the entire army might have pushed past the first line of Spanish defenses, atop San Juan Hill, but they would have been cut down once they reached better-defended Spanish positions closer to the city. “I shall always regard the unexpected delay experienced in taking Caney as one of the many incidents connected with the Santiago campaign in which the guiding hand of Providence seems to have interposed for America,” he wrote. As it was, the two divisions assaulting Kettle Hill and San Juan Hill took more than 1,000 casualties that day.46
• • •
By the time Roosevelt and his men, now just over 490 in number, arrived at the top of San Juan Hill, dozens of the regular infantry were already there, and a close-order fight was under way. Many of the Spanish soldiers had already fled back toward Santiago, but hundreds more remained in the trenches and blockhouses. The trenches were nothing like the semipermanent affairs of the Western Front of World War I, two decades later. They were hastily dug, two feet wide and four feet deep, and one had to crouch inside them to gain any real protection. They were filled with Spanish bodies. American officers, armed with revolvers, stood picking off Spanish as they charged, or ran. Roosevelt, pulling out the pistol salvaged from the Maine, shot one man just a few feet from him. The man jumped back “like a jackrabbit,” he bragged to Robert Ferguson, a second lieutenant in the Rough Riders and an old family friend—tellingly, almost the exact same phrase he had once used to describe killing a buck in the Dakotas, over a decade before. Roosevelt was overjoyed at being able to check off another of his life’s carnal ambitions, to kill a man at close range, though his memoirs mention the incident only in clinical, passing terms. In the safety of hindsight, he was clearly ashamed of his bloodlust. But he made no attempt to hide his brutal joy that afternoon. “No hunting trip so far has ever equaled it in Theodore’s eyes,” wrote Ferguson in a letter to Edith Roosevelt. “T. was just reveling in victory and gore.”47
Davis arrived on the hill a few minutes later. He found an undifferentiated mass of men; by this point there was no coherence to the regiments congregating on San Juan Hill—white, black, regular, volunteer, cavalry, and infantry stood side by side in the hot sun of July 1 in Cuba. The black soldiers had fought with particular courage, and white soldiers—even those used to bearing their prejudices openly—singled them out for praise. One Southern soldier told a reporter from the Associated Press: “I am not a negro lover. My father fought with Mosby’s Rangers [a famous Confederate cavalry battalion], and I was born in the South, but the Negroes saved that fight, and the day will come when General Shafter will give them credit for their bravery.” Roosevelt likewise praised the black soldiers, saying, in a letter to a friend, “I wish no better men beside me in battle than these colored troops showed themselves to be. Later on, when I come to write of the campaign, I shall have much to say about them.” But in his memoir of the war, published in 1899, he was cooler. The black troops were brave, Roosevelt still agreed, but only as simple soldiers, who need white men to lead them: “Occasionally they produce non-commissioned officers who can take the initiative and accept responsibility precisely like the best class of whites; but this cannot be expected normally, nor is it fair to expect it.” Roosevelt’s revision of his own history set off a wave of consternation and disappointment in the black press, which had reprinted his earlier comments and generally looked with pride on the performance of the black regiments in the war.48
Those Spanish who had made it off the hill had regrouped and were firing at the Americans, so Roosevelt pointed at a few dozen men and ordered them to push further west, toward a line of palm trees behind which the new Spanish line had formed. It was not until they reached them, and saw, over a low crest of hills, Santiago itself, that they realized they were too far ahead of the main force, a few men suddenly exposed to a Spanish counterattack.49
What had been a pitched battle had turned into a rout, and a slaughter. Many of the Spanish dead had been shot by the Gatling guns while still in the trenches, which were filled with bloody, nearly headless bodies, their brains and skulls scattered against the hilltop. The dead men wore rope shoes, rotten and falling to pieces, and often too big for their small feet—they were, after all, conscripts in a war no one wanted to fight, which meant they were often taken from the ranks of the poor, the undernourished, and the young. The Rough Riders, among whom even the toughest had never seen more than a handful of men dead from gunfire at a time, were disgusted by the scene, and by themselves. “So help me God, they looked like kids about twelve years old. All of us boys kind of felt ashamed of ourselves, we really did,” trooper Jesse Langdon said. “It was pitiful.”50
The Spanish made two mistakes at the Battle of San Juan Heights. Even though it was clear for days that the American assault would come as a massive, pointed attack from the east, General Linares spread his forces in a semicircle around the city—fearing, ostensibly, the Cuban detachments arrayed to the north and west. The Cubans were a sizable force, but they had neither the ammunition nor the leadership necessary to pull off an assault on the city. As a result only 521 Spanish troops sat in the trenches at San Juan Hill, and just 137 at Kettle Hill, an order of magnitude fewer than the 7,000 American forces making the assault against them. Meanwhile there were 3,389 Spanish deployed around the rest of the city, and another 1,869 in reserve.51
The second mistake was even less excusable: Spanish engineers had designed the trenches so that they sat at the top of the hills, but not at the crest of the crown, the point on a hill where one can still see the bottom—in other words, they were too far toward the top of the hill to be able, from inside a trench, to see down the entire slope. If the Spanish had been positioned correc
tly, the Rough Riders, as they advanced, would have faced much more fire from the Spanish trenches. “Had there been on the Spanish side any generalship worthy of the name, it is doubtful whether there would have been anything left of Shafter’s army,” wrote the historian Herbert H. Sargent, who fought in the battle and later wrote a three-volume history of the campaign.52
• • •
The Rough Riders suffered the highest casualties of any cavalry regiment that day: Out of the 490 men who made the assault up the hills, 13 were killed or would soon die of their wounds, and 76 more were wounded. Another 10 were wounded and four were killed in fighting the next day—in all a 19 percent casualty rate. But they didn’t suffer alone—the entire cavalry division suffered heavy losses. “Some idea of the severity of the enemy’s fire may be gained from the fact that of the five officers of the brigade staff four were killed or wounded and one exhausted by the extreme heat,” Wood wrote in his after-action report.53
Acclaim for the Rough Riders began to appear almost immediately in the press back home. Davis’s dispatches in particular were full of rich detail and focused on the achievements of Roosevelt’s men that day; the lieutenant colonel’s efforts to cultivate the correspondent were proving a wise investment. The charge up Kettle Hill “gave us such a thrill as can never stir us again,” Davis wrote in Scribner’s. It was “a miracle of self-sacrifice, a triumph of bull-dog courage, which one watched breathless with wonder.” Other correspondents were equally in awe. “Wood, Roosevelt, the men who were killed and the men who survived at Sevilla all gave the world an object lesson in American bravery that will not soon be effaced from the tables,” wrote one reporter. “By their reckless daring the Rough Riders set an example to the remainder of our armies which will undoubtedly tend to lift the standard of bravery.”54