The Crowded Hour

by Clay Risen

  • • •

  With the truce in place, over the next few days the American toehold along the San Juan Heights grew; hastily dug trenches were deepened and reinforced with sandbags arranged around the edges, with loopholes for rifles. The Rough Riders brought forward their Colts, which they put under command of Lieutenant John Parker, who oversaw the Gatling detachment. They also brought up their dynamite gun. Using it like a mortar, they intended to lob four-and-a-half-pound Whitehead “torpedoes” into the Spanish trenches. And they finally dug zigzag communication trenches to the rear. When they were done, they had a well-armed, well-defended redoubt at the front of the line, looking down toward Santiago. American flags fluttered in the breeze. The Rough Riders called it Fort Roosevelt.36

  Life along the front settled into a meager, tense existence. By the end of July 4, just over 300 Rough Riders were left whole, out of the 490 who had started at the Battle of San Juan Heights. Twenty-three had been killed since the Battle of Las Guasimas, on June 24; the rest were wounded or sick. During the day the men sat in their trenches or out in front in cossack posts, exposed to the sun and the heat and the rain; they made what shelters they could in the ground. They went around bare-chested, their shirts tied around their heads as a make-do sun shade. They had little food and no tobacco. “Some of them became delirious from the heat, and with their tongues hanging out losing all sense or appreciation of danger, would stand up and expose themselves as they looked around in the hope of discovering water nearer than the creek, that was so distant,” the reporter Stephen Bonsal wrote. One soldier told Bonsal, “I only wish the fighting would begin . . . for then we wouldn’t have the time to think or feel how sick we are.” Conditions were even worse for the black soldiers. After fighting alongside the white regiments as equals, they were relegated to menial duties, like digging communications trenches, or, paradoxically, going on the most brazen and dangerous missions.37

  After days of marching and running and slogging through the mud, the soldiers’ boots were in tatters, and they gained some respect for the Cuban rebels who, after three years in the field, wore little more than rags. “In the trenches a match was so precious a possession that, when you saw a man light his pipe instead of at the cook’s fire, you felt as though you had seen him strike a child,” Davis wrote. Lice flitted from man to man, so many of them that they developed a taxonomy for the bloodsuckers: the Rough Rider, the Gray Back, the Crab. (Somehow, though, Woodbury Kane, considered the dandiest of the Fifth Avenue Boys, always managed to appear every morning “clean-shaved and neatly groomed, shoes duly polished, neat khaki, fitting like a glove and brushed to perfection, nails polished, and hair parted as nicely as if he were dressed by his valet in his New York apartments,” the novelist and reporter Frank Norris wrote.) As the pace of the fighting slowed, some men took the time to bathe. Lacking pails or nearby standing water, they would dig holes in the earth and line them with their ponchos; after the afternoon rains filled them with water, they took whatever ablution they could manage before it seeped away. They also built bombproofs—small caves burrowed into the side of the hill, essentially, that they covered with timber cut from coconut tree logs and, above that, four feet of soil. The bombproofing protected the men inside them, but they lent the front line a troglodytic quality.38

  The Rough Riders’ base camp was positioned safely behind the front line at the foot of San Juan Hill, underneath a twenty-foot tree. It was from this spot, during the weeks of siege that followed the fighting on July 1, that Roosevelt came into his own as a military leader. He had proven his mettle in battle, but it was only afterward, against the corrosive effects of disease, heat, enemy bullets, and American bureaucracy daily threatening his troops that he proved his ability to lead and inspire. Sitting in his camp chair under the tree, working at a large wooden crate that he used as a desk, he pulled the levers of influence and paperwork to get his healthy men food and his sick men medical care. It was here that he adjudicated disputes among his men wrote long letters of condolence to the families of his fallen men, and it was from here that he left to inspect the lines, and go far behind them to retrieve food and organize water runs. Often Roosevelt paid for the supplies out of his own pocket, or else it came from one of the other wealthy troopers, like Woodbury Kane, who for all his dandy pretensions had a great affection for his comrades, and they for him—at one point he bought $85 (about $2,500 in 2018 dollars) worth of tobacco from the commissary at Siboney and distributed it to the men. Over several days Roosevelt built up a forty-eight-hour supply of hardtack and beans, in case of emergency.39

  It was also during this time that the positive press around Roosevelt and the Rough Riders hit its stride. They were already famous, but now that they were stationary, captive even, reporters could come by daily to see their camp and their section of the line and write home with laudatory missives. Davis, who was practically living with the regiment along the front line, set the tone, and his friends and competitors did their best to match him. Over the coming months Americans poured into theaters to watch newsreels from the battle and its aftermath—though most of them, including those attributed to Smith and his Vitagraph crew, were inauthentic; one, “Raising Old Glory over Morro Castle,” was staged by actors on a rooftop in New York. If audiences saw through the artifice, no one complained—the myth was what mattered. “The Rough Riders were the supreme of the elite; no regiment has ever received the newspaper space that was devoted to them,” wrote a soldier in the 71st New York Infantry Regiment.40

  Many of the most popular and oft-repeated stories at Rough Rider reunions came from this time. True or not, they illustrate the brazen humor and gumption that made the regiment so popular back home. An example: At one point Roosevelt sent the regimental chaplain, Henry Alfred Brown, to Siboney to buy food; he returned with a wagonful. Roosevelt asked how he got it. “God put it down there and kept it for me,” the chaplain replied. “When I reached Siboney I found a great body of men packing supplies into a number of wagons. One wagon which was entirely loaded was without a driver. I supplied the deficiency and drove away. That was all.”41

  No American adventure story is complete without a heel, and the Rough Riders found one in their adjutant, Tom Hall. After fleeing to Siboney at the outset of the engagement at Las Guasimas, he returned to the regiment on July 3, acting as if nothing had happened. The men on the line welcomed him warily. But as soon as the Spanish trenches loosed a few volleys, he was off again. When Roosevelt heard, he told Bardshar, his ever-present orderly, “Take a gun and get that yellow dog and bring him to my tent.”

  Bardshar found him, loitering a few hundred yards away from the hill, and told Hall to come with him. Hall was indignant. “What do you mean stopping me in this way?” he protested. “Someone is exceeding his authority.” Bardshar grabbed his tunic and roughly marched him to Roosevelt’s tent. Hall, straightening himself, said that Bardshar should leave before the two of them discussed matters above his rank.

  “I have no secrets from Trooper Bardshar,” Roosevelt said. “And what I have to say to you, he or anybody else can hear. Get out—get out of the regiment and get out of Cuba. I hope I shall never have to see you again.”

  Hall began sobbing. He turned to James Church, the assistant surgeon, who was standing nearby, and asked him to intervene. Church turned away in silent refusal. The adjutant left for Siboney, and from there took the first ship home. (Hall would have something of a last laugh; the next year he published a best-selling, self-serving account of the regiment with the awkward title The Fun and Fighting of the Rough Riders.)42

  • • •

  On July 6, Roosevelt received a letter from his friend Senator Lodge. Enclosed was a clipping from the Washington Times, praising Roosevelt as one of if not the hero of the war. “I hear talk all the time about your being run for Governor and Congressman, and at this moment you could have pretty much anything you wanted,” Lodge wrote. But the senator had more ominous news as well. He had been in the of
fices of the War Department a few days before. There was, as far as he could tell, no plan for what to do next—no plan, at the Executive Mansion at least, for how to make Santiago surrender, no plan for how to occupy it, no plan for how to move on from Santiago to the rest of the island, and above all no plan for what to do with the 16,000 men in Cuba, with more coming every day and the malaria season fast approaching. “A great deal of time is spent asking why the Navy does not do this, that and the other,” Lodge wrote. “I have been filled with an anxiety about the Army in the last two or three days owning to the state of things at the department.”43

  For now, though, the siege held. The men suffered, and bent, but they did not break. The Americans could not go forward, but the Spanish could not get out. As July progressed, Shafter extended the line around Santiago, so that by the third week of the month he had the city completely surrounded. All he had to do—all he could do—was wait.

  As with Roosevelt, the rigors of the siege were in some ways a better test of the Army than the battle that led up to it. Under appalling conditions made worse by the War Department’s incompetence, the soldiers lacked all the essentials: food, water, clean clothes, shelter. And yet no one deserted, no one rebelled. The reporters noticed, and they told their readers, and the public standing of the Regular Army skyrocketed. “I had thought, and I believe it is the popular belief throughout the country, that the men of the regular regiments are to a very large extent the waifs and the derelicts of the great cities, together with a few country boys fired with a desire to do a little soldiering and see the world,” Bonsal wrote. “This impression may have been the true one a few years ago, but it certainly is not now.”44

  What Senator Lodge did not know, and what Roosevelt knew only dimly, was that all the while, Shafter was negotiating with General Toral. On July 5 he persuaded the Spanish general to take back into Santiago some of the hundreds of wounded prisoners the Americans were holding in a makeshift hospital at El Caney. The next day he secured the release of Lieutenant Hobson and his crew, who had been in Spanish custody since being picked up from the sinking Merrimac, over a month before. At noon that day, a group of American officers rode toward the Spanish line with three blindfolded prisoners. Hundreds of American soldiers stood up from their trenches, whatever they were doing, and watched. The blindfolded men were released to their comrades. After two hours, a clutch of figures materialized from the Spanish line. It was the men of the Merrimac. Suddenly the American soldiers stood at attention, every one of them. “Then there was a magnificent silence,” wrote Stephen Crane, “broken only by the measured hoof-beats of the little company’s horses as they rode through the gap. It was solemn, this splendid silent welcome of a brave man by men who stood on a hill which they had earned out of blood and death.” Davis, standing near Crane, wrote that Hobson was the “first officer I’d seen saluted in six days.”45

  Shafter had told Toral that the truce would end an hour after Hobson’s release, but again he postponed. That afternoon he told the Spanish that both the American Army and the Navy would begin bombarding Santiago at noon on July 9. Toral replied that he would surrender, but with conditions, specifically that he and all his men be allowed to retreat to Spanish-held territory to the west. Shafter was elated, but McKinley and Alger once again refused to accept anything but total capitulation. Shafter said as much to Toral, and extended the truce again, to noon on July 10. The sight of new truce flags was too much for the rank and file. “To the men in the pits, who knew nothing of the exigencies of diplomacy, those virgin flags were as offensive as those of red are to the bull,” wrote Davis. Observing the table tennis of white flags passing back and forth between the lines in the valley below them, he added, “their watchfulness seemed wasted, their vigilance became a farce, and they mocked and scoffed at the white flags bitterly.”46

  • • •

  Around July 7, Miller’s friend Frank Knox arrived in Siboney, having come down with one of the tropical maladies sweeping through the American lines. Knox saw that Miller had begun to slip. He was having trouble breathing, and pain wracked his body. Still, Miller remained chatty. He told Knox about his parents, about his famous brother-in-law Thomas Edison, about how his father had founded the Chautauqua movement and how he was determined to get home to help run it. Knox, in a letter to Miller’s parents that he later wrote from a quarantine ship docked outside New York, tried to put a gloss on their son’s suffering. “All through those days of torture and pain he never uttered a complaining word but with a faint wan smile he would tell us he felt better,” Knox wrote. “Not till the last did he suppose that his end was near.”47

  When Miller finally accepted that he was unlikely to leave Cuba alive, he asked Knox to make sure that his combat pay made it back to Akron. Then he fell asleep. “I sat by him the next day as long as I could sit up and then laid down on a cot near by (I was on the sick list myself) and fell into a doze and when I awoke he had left us,” Knox wrote. “I went up and sat down and had a long look at his face. Around the corners of his mouth were the traces of that patient smile that he had worn so bravely through it all.” Knox wept.48

  That afternoon a detail from the 23rd Michigan Volunteers buried Miller in the graveyard adjacent to the hospital. Knox carved his friend’s name and regiment number into a piece of wood and planted it as a makeshift headstone—enough of a marker, he hoped, to last until someone could come to claim the body.49

  A few weeks after Miller died, his mother received a package in the mail. Inside was a small, weather-beaten book—his diary—and inside of that a letter. The package came from David V. McClure, a corporal in the Rough Riders, from Oklahoma City. The letter read: “Dear Mamma: A rather narrow escape but feel sure I will pull through all right. . . . Mr. Whitney offered to write to you but Mr. McClure had offered to do so before and so he is doing so. You must not worry about these things for Dr. Lesser is here now and is at the head of the Red Cross of America. He said I would come out all right soon. He said he was going to write to you himself. They are doing everything for me. I remain your most loving son and will be with you soon. Goodbye.”50

  • • •

  Finally, at four in the afternoon on July 10, the Rough Riders were called to action: Toral had refused to surrender on Washington’s terms, and the truce was over. They would fight again, and ignore, for the moment, the disease and thirst and heat. As soon as the Spanish flag of truce fell, their rifles and Gatlings and artillery opened up. Even the dynamite gun managed to squeeze off a few rounds before it malfunctioned. From out in the Caribbean, the Brooklyn and the Indiana lobbed shells into the city. The Spanish replied weakly, and by dusk the American barrage petered off, with just a few casualties on each side. The two adversaries picked up their long-range duel the next morning, again with little effect. “The Spanish are more active to-day and we have suffered some loss from their shells,” wrote trooper J. Ogden Wells. “Our artillery seems to fire in a half-hearted sort of way.” By then reinforcements had begun to arrive—not the reserves, held back during the battle almost two weeks earlier but otherwise just as beaten down by almost a month in the tropics, but men fresh from the mainland, including Nelson Miles himself, the commander of the entire Army, who had hurried to Cuba from Washington over concerns about Shafter’s physical and mental stamina. And indeed Shafter was a sorry sight. Still laid up, his gout rendered his feet too swollen for boots, and he swaddled them in rags.51

  The next day the Rough Riders were shifted a half mile north, to make room for fresh regiments from Florida coming onto the line, and to cover the road to El Caney. Life was getting marginally easier; tents were brought up, and Roosevelt had one with walls, tall enough that he could hang a hammock inside. That night it rained ferociously, and occasionally someone on the line would open fire, swearing that he had seen dark forms moving among the trees. The rain knocked down Roosevelt’s tent and sent him soaking to the kitchen tent, where Bert Holderman, a Cherokee Indian from the Oklahoma Territory, wa
s on duty. He gave Roosevelt some dry clothes, and let him sleep on a table that he had salvaged from a nearby house.52

  On July 12 General Linares, likewise sick and bedridden, wired Madrid: “The situation is fatal; surrender inevitable.” The Spanish plan to run out the clock had failed. But Shafter had no way of knowing how close he was to victory, how few cards his adversary held. The next morning, now with Miles’s support, he wrote to Alger that he still did not think the Spanish, under the day-to-day leadership of General Toral, would surrender without concessions from the Americans: “If he fights, as we have reason to believe he may, it will be at fearful loss of life; and to stay here with disease threatening may be at great loss from that cause.” But Alger and McKinley resisted, and the next day Shafter and Miles met with Toral in person, at a spot between the lines. Miles told Toral that he was under orders not to accept anything except surrender or destruction of the Spanish force in Santiago, and that he and Shafter had enough fresh troops to achieve either goal. Miles offered to transport Toral’s soldiers back to Spain, paid for by the American government. Toral asked for time to consult with Madrid, and when the trio met again the next day, he said he would accept America’s terms, and surrender unconditionally, as long as the Americans would transport him and his soldiers home. Shafter, who had harbored little hope that his efforts at negotiation would work, was floored. “I was simply thunderstruck that, of their own free will, they should give me 12,000 men that were absolutely beyond my reach,” Shafter later said.53