The Roughest Riders Page 9

  American losses began to build heavily, and Wheeler grew concerned that his casualties would prove to be unacceptable in the event of a defeat—particularly since he had exceeded his authority in launching the assault, reason enough to get him court-martialed himself. He didn’t want to admit it, but he needed Lawton to send him reinforcements as quickly as possible. Fortunately, Lawton had surmised as much, even before he got word from Wheeler; he had been listening to the deafening roar of guns and cannons with mounting alarm from his own base in Siboney. By the time Wheeler’s messenger arrived from Las Guasimas, Lawton already had his own white infantry division plus the black Ninth, which had remained behind with him, ready to charge into battle.

  The reinforcements, under the leadership of General Adna Chaffee, got there none too soon, although they were needed more by Wood, Roosevelt, and the Rough Riders than by Wheeler’s forces, which were holding their own against the Spanish guns. Wood and Roosevelt, who knew nothing about Wheeler’s plea for help from Lawton, were meanwhile struggling with the mule train, which was giving them more grief than it was worth. A soldier in charge of unloading the Colt rapid-fire guns from the mules accidentally let them slip and fall to the ground, damaging them beyond immediate repair. The Spanish Mauser bullets continued to rain down upon the men. Wood described the situation as desperate, with bullets cutting through the trees and dropping leaves like green snowflakes. Large branches crashed all around. The Rough Riders fired back blindly until one of Wood’s men yelled out, “For God’s sake, stop! You are killing your own men!”

  The reporters with the Rough Riders were themselves in great danger, among them Edward Marshall, who fell to the ground when a bullet found its mark and smashed into his spine. He was standing close to Wood when he was hit, and the colonel later recalled that the reporter had shown his mettle by dictating a story to the Journal while he lay injured on the ground. Marshall let out not so much as a whimper while Stephen Crane took down the wounded man’s dictation.

  “In hard luck, old man?” Crane asked Marshall.

  “Yes, I’m done for.”

  “Nonsense. You’re all right. What can I do for you?”

  “Well, you might file my dispatches. I don’t mean file them ahead of your own—but just file them if you find it handy.”

  Crane agreed and eventually delivered Marshall’s reports to the Journal, even though Crane himself was writing for the World—an act that was largely responsible for costing him his own job.

  Crane helped a few others load Marshall onto a stretcher and carry him to a field hospital, where a doctor attended to his wound. After filing his dispatches, Crane saw to it that Marshall was transported to the Olivette, which had been turned into a hospital ship. He thought Marshall was a dead man as he waved him off. Crane was amazed that any man could remain so collected in such dire condition; Marshall had put his job as a reporter ahead of his personal agony, writing first-rate prose as he lay writhing on the ground. Crane was even more astounded that Marshall did not die from his injury.

  Marshall not only survived the wound—although it cost him a leg—but he outlived Crane by more than three decades. He later wrote an article about his experiences in the war, and his account includes an interview with one soldier who recalled the horrors of battle in gruesome detail. He said his own breath left his body when he saw the man next to him hit by a bullet that blew the top of his head off, sending it flying into the air. The man collapsed to the ground, his body intact except for the shattered skull.

  The black Ninth scrambled up the main path and joined the black Tenth and white troops on their right flank. General Chaffee directed the action on horseback. The Spanish defenders saw the reinforcements advancing rapidly to join the rest of Wheeler’s troops and turned their machine guns in that direction. The Ninth fired back with enfilading fire—meaning it cut across the ranks and swept the entire Spanish line of defense, as distinct from defilading, or more targeted, fire. On the far left, the Rough Riders, under constant assault themselves, continued their own slow climb to join Wheeler’s men where the two trails came together.

  Part of the Tenth moved to the left, where they drew enemy fire without the ability to respond, since they were out of range with their carbines. They pushed ahead of Wood and the Rough Riders on the left, and came under heavy fire without letup for more than an hour. “Their coolness and fine discipline were superb,” said a white officer with them. Another troop of the Tenth took command of the Hotchkiss mountain guns, which had a longer range, and zeroed in on the Spanish entrenchments—but sparingly, since their supply of ammunition was low. The rest of the Tenth was ordered to advance on the far right.

  “I ordered the troops forward at once, telling them to take advantage of all cover available,” said the lieutenant commanding the troop. The volleys from the Spanish were homing in heavily, striking the ground on all sides of the men. It was almost impossible for them to move forward from their cover with any confidence. The lieutenant ran back to where the black troops were positioned near a brick wall and ordered them to charge forward en masse. They dashed ahead in a single great outpouring of men, with three or four of them dropping as they were hit. The Spanish had erected a wire fence in the midst of thick brush, which stood on their right, making it difficult to push ahead. The black troops followed along the fence for a hundred yards or so, reaching a spot where most of them found an opening through which they could charge ahead toward the enemy.

  The black Ninth and Tenth and white First pushed ahead into the relentless Spanish fire, advancing cautiously toward the crest up a sheer incline. Their movement was difficult because of the steep slope, the thick cactus, and the sharp-leaved grass, known as Spanish bayonet, that covered the hillside. The men sliced through it with their knives and sabers. The lieutenant who had ordered them forward recalled that it was impossible to see more than a few men at a time because of the thick foliage. But all of them made it to the crest at about the same time and, from there, began to advance steadily.

  General Young had a similar view of the battle: “The ground over which the right column advanced was a mass of jungle growth, with wire fences, not to be seen until encountered, and precipitous heights as the ridge was approached.” It was impossible for the troops to keep in touch with one another toward the front, he recalled, and they could only judge the enemy positions from the sound and direction of the gunfire. Their progress was remarkably difficult, yet they pulled together and moved ahead under continuous rifle fire, backed up by rapid-fire guns. Young noted that the troops under his command maintained perfect discipline in the face of the heavy onslaught. No one straggled or attempted to fall back as they kept up their steady advance toward enemy lines.

  14

  The battle raged on for more than two hours, with both sides suffering mounting casualties under the steady hail of bullets. The shrieks, groans, and deafening din of warfare shook the very air itself. The smoke from the American guns seared the men’s eyes and choked them with every breath they took. As they slogged up the hill, branches crashed around them, inflicting even more injuries. Then, almost miraculously, the Spanish soldiers, despite their greater numbers, slowly began to pull back as the black Ninth and Tenth and the white First pushed past the crest and closed in on the enemy positions. Wheeler’s voice rose above the roar as he uttered his famous cry, “We’ve got the damn Yankees on the run again!”

  The Spanish were indeed pulling back as the American troops charged ahead in the face of blistering fire. Wood and Roosevelt could hear the rebel yells emitted by black and white troops alike as they forced the defenders back from their barricades to a new line of defense a few hundred yards to the north. When Roosevelt rode up to the junction of the two paths, he saw Wheeler’s men whooping wildly near the brick walls of the abandoned sugarcane storage house. Nearby lay the bodies of two dead Spaniards, a pile of cartridge cases, and some canned beans, which the Americans immediately cooked over an open fire to assuage their hunger
. The men were too exhausted to pursue the enemy to their new redoubt. They collapsed to the ground, shared their meal, and breathed a collective sigh of relief to be out of the hellish fire for a brief moment.

  Herschel V. Cashin, the only reporter with Wheeler’s and Young’s forces, described the scene in his account of the war: “If it had not been for the Negro cavalry, the Rough Riders would have been exterminated…. The Negroes saved that fight and the day will come when General Shafter will give them credit for their bravery.”

  His message was prescient. When Shafter later learned of what took place during the first real battle of the war, he wrote to an aide, “The First and Tenth (colored) regiments of regular cavalry (dismounted) deployed and charged up the hill in front, driving the enemy from their position, but not until we had sustained a severe loss in both killed and wounded…. The conduct of the troops, both white and colored, regular and volunteer, was most gallant and soldierly.”

  Chaplain Steward penned his own version of what transpired at Las Guasimas, saying that “the colored regulars in three days practically revolutionized the sentiment of the country in regard to the colored soldier.” The poem “The Negro Soldier” by L. B. Channing reflected Steward’s view: “We used to think the Negro didn’t count for very much, but we’ve got to reconstruct our views on color more or less / Now we know about the Tenth at Las Guasimas.”

  “I have it from men who were upon the field that had it not been for the boys in black, the recent victory at Las Guasimas would have been a second Custer massacre,” wrote John E. Lewis with the Tenth. But he lamented that the Rough Riders and other white troops got all the glory and the promotions. The press failed to report how the black cavalry and infantry soldiers took the lead and urged the Rough Riders on. After overrunning the Spanish positions, Lewis said, the black troops sent them scampering in retreat.

  Colonel Wood, however, lost no time in constructing his own revisionist history of the battle. “I don’t want to boast,” he wrote in a letter to his wife, “but we had a brilliant fight. The Spaniards said they fought the entire American army for four hours. My men had the bulk of the enemy in front of them and the Regulars one-third.”

  Wood was privately seething over the attention most of the reporters were paying to Roosevelt when the battle was over. The press loved the colorful politician with his thick mustache, round eyeglasses, and jaunty campaign hat. He made good copy, and they reveled in following him around. And Roosevelt was an expert at cultivating writers whom he knew to be partial to him, and he was more than willing to report his own self-aggrandizing views of his personal history. The future president had handpicked the reporters who accompanied the Rough Riders at Las Guasimas.

  His favorite was Richard Harding Davis, a writer whom he originally disdained as “unpatriotic” and “flamboyant.” Roosevelt courted Davis without restraint, wined and dined him regally while feeding him stories not available to others, because he knew Davis’s dispatches would land on the front pages of the New York Herald. John Dunning was useful because he wrote for the Associated Press, which had massive distribution, and Kennett Harris was totally loyal to Roosevelt and would report to the Chicago Record just about anything his larger-than-life source told him. Edward Marshall was a brilliant writer who could be counted on most of the time, and young Stephen Crane, only twenty-six at the time, was already too famous to be ignored, although Roosevelt had some reservations about his cranky temperament and independence. Casper Whitney of Harper’s was a solid professional with a valuable reputation, and Frederic Remington, who had greater fame as an artist and sculptor than as a writer, was also in attendance, having been sent by William Randolph Hearst as an observer who could provide illustrations of the war for the New York Journal. Cashin was the only reporter who followed Young and Wheeler into action; other reporters and observers joined the troops after Las Guasimas.

  So it was inevitable that the Rough Riders would receive most of the credit for the early victory at Las Guasimas—credit that Roosevelt was not about to disavow. And it was certain that Roosevelt would receive the lion’s share of credit for the Rough Riders’ success, rather than his autocratic superior, Colonel Wood, whom the press stuck with the moniker “Old Icebox.”

  What none of the soldiers at Las Guasimas knew, however—neither black nor white, volunteer nor regular—was that the blood-letting they were subjected to during the first battle in Cuba was merely a warm-up exercise for the hell that was soon to come.

  It was all over by ten o’clock in the morning, roughly two and a half hours after Young’s scouts had first spotted the enemy. General Chaffee looked around and observed the condition of the Rough Riders and knew they would have been decimated had his reinforcements not arrived on the scene when they did. The Cuban rebels, who were expected to be in the thick of the action, were the last troops to come sauntering up the slope, and Chaffee suspected that their leader, Castillo, had played a role in the ambush on the mountain trail. But he decided to keep his opinions to himself as he complimented Wood and Roosevelt for bearing up under the “disastrous attack” on their men.

  The official count of dead and wounded Americans minimized the extent of the actual carnage. According to the tally released to the public, of the 534 men under Wood’s command, 8 Rough Riders lost their lives and 34 were wounded. Wheeler and Young’s contingent of 464 men saw 8 killed and 18 wounded. Roosevelt reported the same figures in his own book and claimed that only one of the dead was black. But other reports differed substantially, including an account written by Richard Harding Davis, who stated in Notes of a War Correspondent that “every third Rough Rider was killed or wounded at Las Guasimas.” In other words, the true number was upwards of 150 dead or wounded on the Rough Riders’ side alone. Assistant surgeon Bob Church, working under LaMotte, gave anecdotal evidence in support of Davis’s figures, maintaining that he and his superior treated closer to 200 seriously wounded men at their makeshift battlefield hospital.

  “Everybody was wounded. Everybody was dead,” wrote Stephen Crane in his inimitable style. “First there was nobody. Gradually there was somebody. There was the wounded, the important wounded. And the dead.”

  The Spanish gave out their own version of events. One Spanish soldier had high praise for the black soldiers—“Smoked Yankees” the Spanish labeled them—who charged their barricades first. He reported to his officers that “when we fired a volley, instead of falling back they came forward. This is not the way to fight, to come closer at every volley. They tried to catch us with their hands.”

  The Spanish press, however, engaged in its own form of propaganda. The newspaper Espagna, published in Santiago de Cuba, reported that “the column of General Rubin [sic] was attacked … with vigor, and they fought without being under cover. They were repulsed with heavy losses.” The official Spanish position was that 10,000 Americans attacked 4,000 Spanish soldiers on the hill, resulting in 265 casualties on the invaders’ side. The actual numbers, broadly speaking, were closer to about 1,500 Spaniards defending their position against around 1,000 Americans. When General Shafter read the Spanish account afterward, he laughed. “Reports from Spanish sources from Santiago say we were beaten,” he quipped, “but persisted in fighting, and they were obliged to fall back.”

  General Arsenio Linares, who commanded the Spanish forces in the area, actually had more than thirty-six thousand troops stationed throughout the province, ten thousand of them guarding Santiago and its harbor a few miles to the west. Had he deployed more of his men to Las Guasimas, there is little question that they could have withstood the American assault on the hill. Wood himself admitted that the odds were slim for a smaller group of attackers to overpower a larger defensive force uphill in well-entrenched positions. But Linares feared that the American presence in Siboney was just a feinting maneuver, and that the real target was Santiago, with its strategic harbor. His reluctance to defend Las Guasimas with strength turned out to be a tactical blunder of his own—even as
the real fighting had scarcely begun.

  15

  One of the biggest problems facing the Spanish was their scarcity of provisions. The number of Spanish soldiers in Cuba was estimated to be close to two hundred thousand, but the great majority were located in and around Havana and were scattered in garrisons throughout the countryside, where they rode herd over their rebellious subjects. The troops near Santiago lacked decent uniforms and shoes and subsisted on small rations of rice, beans, and whatever game they could kill. Spain was having financial problems and had not paid its soldiers in Cuba in more than a year. Their ammunition supply was dwindling along with their morale.

  Spain had also failed to understand the strategic difference between an occupying army and one that was geared for combat. The garrison troops whom Spain had stationed around the country were proficient at suppressing the locals—burning down their houses, setting fire to their crops, and keeping them under the boot—but what they had not been trained well for were the tactical skills required to defend a country against a determined invading army. The Americans had committed their own share of blunders during their first few days on Cuban soil, but they were experienced at charging enemy fortifications, and they had the resilience to alter their strategy when the situation called for it.

  Wood, in an effort to share in the attention the press showered on Roosevelt, summed up the battle with garbled syntax that had none of Roosevelt’s flair: “A superior force of the enemy was driven from a strong position of their own choosing and thrown into a disorderly fight in which he could readily have become destroyed,” he said. Old Icebox seemed to be a nickname that suited him well.