War is mainly a catalogue of blunders.
Churchill went to Cuba as a correspondent and an observer, of course. But it is worth remembering that he was a war correspondent and a military observer, as well as a serving officer in the British Army. It is therefore to be expected that his aim would be to give especially good analysis of the military situation in the colony more than the political. In spite of his age, he was exceptionally well suited to give such analysis: he was keen on politics, and had been for some years, but he was avid about things military, and had been since childhood.
He had come to see a war, to experience a war and to comment on a war; only incidentally was he there to see, experience and comment on the political context of that war. Little wonder then that it is in his military analyses made in Cuba that we get a better insight into the sort of man he was at the time, the things that interested him and the degree to which his eyes were open, taking in the sights around him and understanding them.
The war was a complicated one and its military aspects were no less complex than its political ones. Churchill’s commentary fairly bristles with his impressions of a war unlike the ones he had studied in his books or his courses on military history. The Cuban insurrection of 1895 was indeed unlike almost anything European armies had experienced in the nineteenth century, despite the vastly diverse military experience of colonial expansion and its accompanying wars outside the old continent, involving the armies not only of the major colonial powers of Britain and France but also those of Germany, Russia, Austria-Hungary, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, Portugal and even tiny Belgium.
The Cuban war, however, was an example of something unknown in European late nineteenth-century experience, that of a ‘settlement’ colony that was made up overwhelmingly of a European population, that is, Spanish, of whom over half were white, rising against its mother country. While the British had had such an experience, of course, well over a century before, in the American Revolution of 1775–83, and the Spanish had also experienced vast revolutions that shook all of Spanish America, from Mexico in the north to Chile and Argentina in the south, from 1808 to 1826, those experiences were far away in time by 1895. In the meantime the British had, more or less, understood that when a ‘people numerous and armed’ decide on independence from your rule, it is probably better to yield to that demand and find a way to a friendly relationship with them after that status is achieved. The Spanish had learned no such lesson from the loss of their American empire and adopted a colonial system even more corrupt, oppressive and exclusionary than the one they had applied before.
In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the British faced sporadic risings in Africa and on the North-West Frontier of India, the French in North Africa, the Portuguese and the Germans to a small extent in southern Africa, the Italians in eastern Africa, and the Dutch in the East Indies. But these were related to the usual conquest and questionings of the rule that followed that conquest, and normally involved people whom the BBC was to later call ‘dissident tribesmen’ rather than settled subjects of their own sovereign, merely distant from and misruled by their mother country. Only the Boer War, breaking out at the very end of the century and involving white settlers, although not those from the metropolitan power against whom they fought, had more than a few similarities with Cuban events.
The Spanish Army now faced a colony no longer festering with revolt in only its eastern and poorer regions, but open and widespread revolution in all of the east and centre of the island. The invasion would mean the carrying of the war to literally the whole of the colony, from the traditional realms of revolt in the east to the town of Mantua, in westernmost Pinar del Río, in popular lore the place where Cuba ended. That rebellion would have significant support not only in Cuban exile communities abroad but even among the general population of the United States and the neighbouring British territories of the Bahamas and Jamaica. The only improvement in Spain’s international position vis-à-vis this insurrection, compared with the last, was that Latin American support for this rebellion was now very slight, fearful that Madrid’s rule would merely be replaced by Washington’s in the case of a rebel victory. In this war Cubans could not look to the automatic support of their fellow Latin Americans as they had done in the first. But this was in the end to be of precious little real help to Spain.
Cuba insula est. And as was discovered in the first independence war, control of the seas around the island was essential if assistance for the rebels coming from abroad, in men, weapons and ammunition, was to be intercepted. As in the previous war, the lack of ammunition, and to some extent weapons, was the Achilles heel of the rebellion. The Spanish system of intelligence in the neighbouring countries, as we have seen, was very good indeed. But, in the final analysis, naval resources able to do the actual interception of rebel supplies was just as key in ensuring that this rebel vulnerability was fully exploited.
The navy had a major role in the first war and Spain deployed significant naval resources to the war effort then. An effective system of intelligence abroad, intelligence on the island and naval deployments and activity repeatedly put paid to insurgent schemes not only of supplying themselves but broadening the war. Spain in that first war had enjoyed a modern fleet of gunboats but Rear Admiral Delgado Parejo, the newly appointed commander of naval forces in Cuba and former commander of the Mediterranean fleet, who had arrived in Havana in June 1895, could count on no such support. His force, described by a prominent Cuba historian as so weak that Spain had little option but to count on US efforts to intercept expeditions and its own ‘efficient network of espionage’, led that same historian to conclude that ‘there was no doubt that Spain’s worst enemies in the war were to be found in the Cabinet’. In his words, Delgado Parejo had been given a ‘badly mixed collection of vessels, true shells in some cases, which of warships had only the name’.1
This had already ended in tragedy. Stung by criticisms earlier in the war by the press in Madrid, the admiral had taken matters into his own hands and, hoping to outwit rebel spies in Havana, had sailed out of the harbour some weeks before Churchill arrived, at night and with no lights on his ship, the light cruiser Sánchez Barcáiztegui, to intercept a suspected rebel expedition. No sooner had he rounded the tip of land at the narrows leading out of the port than the ship collided with a coastal vessel, the Mortera, and sank, carrying the admiral, the captain, and thirty-two members of the crew to the bottom. This was 18 September, the same date on which the transport ship Ensenada sailed from Cádiz to Scotland to pick up the first consignment of new gunboats for this war. This would prove yet another example of too little too late and was still the talk of the town when Churchill arrived in the city.
If the navy was ill supplied to do its needed work, the army was less so. It had, as we have seen, a new rifle, a good artillery piece and plenty of men. But without doubt a major problem was that it had in large part the wrong sort of men. Instead of a fully regular army, it had a mixture of units, some very good, like the battalions in the column with which Churchill marched, and some very bad, the latter almost always made up of unwilling young farmers or urban labourers conscripted into the army, in the terribly corrupt Spanish system, and sent to Cuba with little adequate training, no acclimatisation and less understanding of why there were there. Their being brought into the army by this means, the quinta as it was called, the conscript soldier being termed, often disparagingly, but sometimes with sympathy for his plight, a quinto, was part and parcel of a context which explains in large part why, with the tens of thousands of troops Spain had on the island, and with its resultant total numerical superiority over the insurgents, it still could not suppress the rebellion and bring peace again as it had done in 1878.
Although many authors have not placed great emphasis on this matter, no discussion of Churchill’s considerations of the military situation in Cuba in 1895 can begin without a look at the state of the cavalry presence in Cuba in 1895 and for the whole of the war. The mid-nineteenth century had seen changes in military technology that had placed the horse in a much more vulnerable position, in so far as its status as a highly useful and integral component of the forces on the battlefield was concerned, than at any time in history. The rapid-fire, rifle-barrelled musket, loaded from the breach, or ‘rifle’ for short, had by the late 1860s replaced the single-shot, muzzle-loaded musket in use in one form or another for centuries. That rifle, with ranges of around 1,000m, could fire several times the distance, much more rapidly and with much more accuracy than muskets of the past.
This made the horse much more vulnerable to the fire of infantry than it had ever been. Infantry had for long understood that they offered tempting targets to cavalry when they were in line or column formations, their flanks or rear being favourite spots for cavalry attack. The solution, at least for solid infantry, was to form in squares and thus not ‘offer’ any flanks or rear for an enemy’s cavalry to exploit, and use volley fire to break up attacks against it. Otherwise the infantry’s chances could be very slim indeed since cavalry mobility would tend to find the offered flanks, or the even more vulnerable rear, and close, charge home and rupture their cohesion, turning them into a routed force more vulnerable still to the cavalry, now in hot pursuit of men on foot, whose broken formation would not afford them any protection.
This arrangement functioned, however, because even the best infantry could only get off perhaps four rounds a minute and those rounds were only effective at an absolute maximum range of about 100m. Now trained infantry, especially those with a rifle that used a multi-round ‘clip’, could fire many more rounds each minute and up to ten times the distance normal in the past. This rate of fire, added to this range of possible engagement, would slowly but surely sound the death knell of the cavalry except in highly particular circumstances.
Along with rapid-firing, long-range, rifle-barrelled weapons for the infantry soldier came the first machine guns, the Gatling gun being very tentatively introduced into the US army by the end of the Civil War in 1865, and the mitrailleuse reaching the French army by the end of that decade and at least theoretically ready for use in time for the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71. This added firepower, soon to revolutionise battle and end for a time mobility on the battlefield, was likewise to shatter the traditional place of cavalry in combat. Finally, as if these other two breakthroughs were not enough, the development of the rapid-fire, breach-loaded, rifle-barrelled artillery of the end of the century added its powerful sound to the cacophony of modern battlefields where the cavalry would soon not find much of a place.
In response, there had been regiments of heavy cavalry (carabiniers, cuirassiers and heavy dragoons), medium cavalry (usually dragoons but sometimes lancers as well) and light cavalry (hussars, light dragoons and at times lancers) or their equivalents in all major armies. The heavy cavalry, larger men on larger horses, would engage in major events such as cavalry charges aimed at breaking the enemy. Medium cavalry would be slightly smaller men on slightly smaller mounts, often armed with a carbine and able to work as infantry as well, and capable of tackling many of the jobs of heavy or light cavalry. And then there was light cavalry, mounted on even smaller horses and manned by even slighter men, responsible for reconnaissance, pursuit, harassing, liaison, other communication and flank protection duties.
With the developments mentioned, however, the jobs of heavy and medium cavalry were becoming impossible for them to perform and only the light cavalry seemed to be destined to keep a place, however small, reserved for itself in modern warfare. And this place seemed even smaller for men raised on the stories of horsemen of old. This was the context for cavalry that people like Churchill, a romantic in these matters and newly arrived in the legendary 4th Hussars, were busy telling themselves could not be true.
Cuba, as it turned out, proved that there were still places where the new rules of the game did not yet apply. On the long and often relatively flat island, stretching nearly 1,400km from the westernmost tip of Cape San Antonio to the easternmost of Cape Maisí, movement by land was difficult at the best of times. The distances between points, the climatic conditions and the difficult topography meant that movement by horse was in the main the only practical means of getting about, except for short trips.
The Cuban farmer was accustomed to his horse, or at least those who could afford one. And the small and sure-footed Cuban pony to which Churchill referred more than once offered another enormous advantage to the peasant or soldier in that he did not know the concept of fodder and ate wherever he stopped and on whatever was available. A group of Cuban military historians recently published an excellent analysis of the island’s small horse of the time, which was ‘no longer the Arab beauty that [the sixteenth-century Spanish explorer] Hernando de Soto brought to Cuba’. But it grazed exclusively on grass and even the shortest stops for feed and rest seemed to provide the energy to continue on long marches and support its rider in combat. Another great advantage it offered the rebels was, logically enough, its total acclimatisation.2
A number of other factors contributed to cavalry remaining the main arm of the rebel army and not merely an important adjunct. For one thing, superior mobility was the only way to ensure a fighting chance of avoiding the many columns, dominated overwhelmingly by foot soldiers, the Spanish sent after the invading Cuban forces in 1895 and later. Invading columns made up entirely of infantry would soon have been brought to battle by the superior numbers of the metropolitan forces and surely beaten decisively if levels of mobility between the two armies had been the same.
It is important to be clear here for our discussion of Churchill’s views on the war. The same group of Cuban military historians insists, doubtless with reason, that the dominance of cavalry was also losing ground in Cuba and the main ‘rebel victories were where infantry and cavalry cooperated well’. But for the mambises to go where they needed to go, transport what they needed to carry, conduct the only kind of war open to them, and fight and flee in order to fight again another day, mobility was the key and that mobility could only come from cavalry. The Spanish, by this analysis, ‘lost from view that they were facing a guerrilla army and that, in counterinsurgency fighting, mobility is an essential factor’. Cavalry was thus the key to gaining and keeping both the tactical and the strategic initiative. And the Spanish, lacking in cavalry, were never able to get that initiative at either level. Gómez, especially in the 1895 invasion, was willing to give up infantry if he could get cavalry, and mounted as many infantrymen as possible, because cavalrymen could and did fight as infantry, but without a horse an infantryman could only fulfil his one assigned role. Such was the security the Cubans felt when riding around the country that the generalissimo, when moving about, kept an escort of only 100 men, all cavalry.
Nonetheless, the Cuban cavalry had a firm respect for the Mauser and its speed of fire and effective range. They made sure that, where possible, the distance between them and enemy infantry was kept to the minimum if they were going to be asked to cross it against that rifle’s fire. This required cavalry to cooperate more closely with infantry than in the past, adopt a more open order offering less of a concentrated target to the enemy, and above all to move more quickly and employ speed, audacity and surprise. Even so, casualties among horses and men were often high when infantry were engaged. After Churchill’s departure, in the action at Saratoga of 11–13 June 1896, some 100 of the total 350 horses fell in the fight.3 A last point worth mentioning at this stage is that, munitions often being short in the rebel ranks, there were times when cavalry charges, however dangerous and costly, were the only option for commanders at key points in battle when a critical situation needed saving.
The Spanish general preference was to adopt the European standard idea of one cavalryman for every six infantrymen in a campaign. But, while perhaps accepted in theory in the old country, this was never applied in Cuba. Even at the height of the expansion of cavalry numbers under Weyler after Martínez Campos was long gone from the Cuban scene, the ratio was never anywhere near this. Instead, cavalry would be about one to fourteen infantrymen and these figures rarely included the infantry-heavy volunteer corps. This meant that the supposedly ‘mobile’ columns, to which reference was and is so often made, is a misnomer. They were only as mobile as infantry could march and waggons could roll over terrible terrain and bad or frightful roads. Artillery, available in significant quantities for the African wars, was rarely deployed in any strength in part because it was just too difficult to move about, and only lightweight and easy transportable mountain guns were sent at all. They proved useful on occasion but were rarely a decisive factor in action, although at times they could play a useful role, as we saw in the action at La Reforma, even when not available in large numbers.
Three weeks before Churchill arrived in Cuba, the chargé d’affaires in Madrid wrote to the Foreign Office with the following figures of Spanish strength:4
Infantry |
59,000 |
Marine Infantry |
2,700 |
Cavalry |
3,886 |
Guardia Civil |
4,400 |
Artillery |
1,853 |
Police |
976 |
Engineers |
1,415 |
Guerrillas |
1,152 |
|
|
Total |
76,282 |
These figures do not give us the total number of mounted guerrillas mobilised for service. But merely taking into account the regular cavalry and regular infantry shows roughly less than 6 per cent of the combined force is cavalry rather than the 14 per cent that would have been normal for operations in the European style. Even if one were to assume, against all known evidence, that all the guerrillas were mounted, the figure would only improve to just under 8 per cent. And the point here is that Spain needed more than the ratio of one to six: it needed a figure that would allow the cavalry, through their mobility and speed, to force the Cubans to give battle once and for all. Essentially they had here a totally infantry-dominated army in the field, in a counter-insurgency war, and with mobility squarely on the side of the insurgents.
The Liberation army (Ejército Libertador) was a different matter altogether. Raised in 1868 on a highly regionalist basis, with rank, especially higher rank, usually more related to local status than to military knowledge, that regionalism permitted the construction of the army but also carried with it many of the seeds of eventual defeat. Troops from one province often felt very unhappy in being used to liberate others. The fact was that the force was, in its 1895 form, completely dependent for its rank and file on ex-slaves, poor labourers, the recently swelled ranks of the unemployed, landless peasants and the like. While some officers, especially senior ones, had experience of war from the 1868–78 revolution, most other ranks were new recruits, usually illiterate and with nothing like a military background.
Troops often reflected a situation known even today. Cubans rarely like the idea of military service and recent decades of required conscription have been accepted as a necessary evil only by generations of youth called upon to do their two or three years of national service with the colours. On the other hand, Cubans tend to make very good soldiers. With the Castro Revolution of half a century later, and the current Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Cuba (the Cuban Revolutionary Armed Forces), which were formed after its success in 1959, Cuba has shown that it can build a very impressive military, one capable of besting the 1961 US planned, armed, trained and in part directly supported invasion, and later a Western-backed South African force thousands of miles from home, with the Cubans having little local knowledge.
While that modern force takes its inspiration and much of its history from the rebel forces of 1868–78 and 1895–98, there is little in common between them. Other than the determination of its 1895–98 leadership and many of its men, and of course its great strength in cavalry, it was not an impressive body. It was rather a typical Latin American insurgent army in that, for example, it lacked heavy weapons like artillery altogether. Some almost humorous attempts were made, with considerable originality, to address that particular weakness, but little was achieved. It also lacked properly trained heavy infantry, although what it had as light and irregular troops on foot could surprise the Spanish on occasion with their steadfastness and hardiness. Las Villas province especially had developed something of an infantry tradition in the first war and continued it in the 1895 conflict.
The Liberation Army lacked proper logistics and lived off the land almost exclusively, the main exception being the occasions when the expeditions from abroad arrived to succour them. ‘Off the land’ meant, in reality, that the army was dependent on what it could obtain from raiding villages and towns, looting what could be taken, especially but hardly completely from Spanish merchants, on extortion of funds from landholders, and on what could be obtained from a more or less willing peasantry. The system functioned because of the large number of unarmed men who accompanied the force as it moved, filling tasks of acquisition of supplies, cleaning, carrying extra equipment, minding the horses on occasions and many other duties. And often the columns were accompanied by swarms of camp-followers who, as we saw at La Reforma, could cause real problems for the mobility of the column as a whole.
With such a ‘system’ of logistics nothing was easy. One enormous complication was the simply vast array of different basic weapons with which the rebel force was equipped. While all might have the machete, even the cavalry, the variety of rifles and even old-fashioned muzzle-loading muskets were part of the Achilles heel of ammunition supply and remained so throughout the war. For not only was ammunition hard to come by, to say the least, but such supplies as there were needed to respond to a huge range of different firearms: Remington single shot, Spanish model .43; Mauser Spanish 7mm; Mauser Argentino 7.65 (usually captured from the Spanish or obtained in raids on arsenals); US Remington and Remington Lee 7mm; Springfield .45; British, French and Belgian rifles, and even 1865 US models such as Sharps and Peabody .44.5 If the Spanish thought they had problems because some voluntario units still had Remington’s the Cubans would not have been impressed.
The army also had serious discipline problems. At the higher level, they tended to stem from either racial questions such as whites not wishing to take orders from superior black officers or from regionalist issues as seen in the first war. At lower levels they tended to be related to the general rejection of the need for formal discipline among much of the rank and file. The kind of war being waged, the hunger that often haunted the rebels’ ranks, the lack of proper uniforms and the absolute need to conduct raids in order to secure booty of all kinds meant that a degree of similarity did exist between banditry and the reality of the war being conducted. The purposes were certainly very different but the actual conduct of the fighting, especially as seen by town dwellers so often attacked by the rebels, did come close to banditry or so it seemed to many.
Many of these issues Churchill addressed in his letters to The Daily Graphic, his letters home, his articles for other journals or his correspondence with other third parties. And the degree to which he addressed so many key aspects of the war showed clearly his keenness for and understanding of military affairs.
Churchill’s very first written comments on the war were in his letter to his mother of 19 October. He was incorrect in his suggestion that the Spanish were building up their forces in Havana before heading up country to quell the rebellion, since they were quite capable of landing their forces anywhere they wished and thus avoiding the quite considerable difficulties of transporting them from the capital to the war zones.6 And, since until the very end of the war following the US intervention in April 1898 the rebels were never able to take and hold a single town, the ports remained entirely available for Spanish troop movements as desired.
On arrival, however, and as a result of Churchill’s duties, and perhaps some reading into the situation, thanks to the materials General Chapman had given him, his reporting became much more exact. While it is a pity that he did not look into the defences of Havana a little more carefully upon his initial arrival on the island, he did comment on Morro Castle and the lack of an atmosphere of war in the capital, both of which comments were accurate and important. It is also fascinating to note that of all the incidents of the war so far upon which he could comment, he discussed the arrest and trial of a junior officer for ‘neglect of duty’. And even though the event was six months in the past, he spent time and space on it:
Here it was that the sentence of death on Lieutenant Gallegos was carried out in May last. This officer had the charge of a small post with some fifty soldiers, and was unfortunate enough to be breakfasting in a café when the insurgents happened to pass, and so was taken prisoner, with all his men. The rebels let them go, but kept their arms, and the court-martial sentenced the lieutenant to be shot for neglect of duty.7
This story, old as it was, impressed Churchill. Yet it is interesting that he did not share his views with the readers of the ‘letter’ despite the fact that there are at least three interesting points mentioned here and indicative of things of importance in the conflict:
there were instances of unprofessional conduct in the army; the rebels would often let government troops go when captured, doubtless because they did not have the means to take care of prisoners of war since they were constantly on the move and could often hardly feed themselves; and the measures taken to ensure officers and men conducted themselves correctly could be draconian.
As an aspiring young officer, the story must have made him think about his career. But he did not go further than merely relating what had happened. And another such incident, not ending quite so tragically for the young officer and to which reference will be made later on, occurred near where his column was operating.
His main comments on the military soon after arrival were those on the voluntarios who he saw that first evening in Havana. He was impressed and said so, in this first assessment of soldiers he made in print:
During the evening which I passed in the capital some volunteers marched in from the front, preceded by a band and surrounded by a great crowd. They were a fine lot of men – young, but well developed – and though they looked tired, marched jauntily, and were evidently much pleased with themselves. Their uniform was made of white cotton and they wore large straw hats of limp material, twisted into every conceivable shape. They were very dirty and did not preserve much order, but for all that they looked like solders and were well armed. These ‘volunteers’, of which there are about 25,000 in all, take it in turn to garrison the different outlying towns, afterwards coming back for duty in Havana.8
Recruited in large part, especially in this second major war, from Spanish-born young male immigrants, dependent for their livelihood in general on the more integrista, and also usually Spanish-born part of the population, these voluntarios joined up to show their loyalty, to protect their privileges as peninsulares, and often enough merely to have the opportunity to impose themselves on the native-born population. It is a somewhat curious but easily explained fact that these Spaniards, having come to Cuba to make their fortunes as Churchill himself pointed out, often hated the locals whom they felt considered themselves superior to their fellow subjects from Iberia. Cuban urban society, especially that of Havana, was much more cultured and refined than the places in the peninsula from which most of these reservists came. And the Cuban people they dealt with at work could probably read and write, were often polished urbanites as Havana still produces, and did not feel inferior to this class of Spaniard, ill educated and often from the most backward areas of a backward country.9 There were many more than the figure of 25,000 volunteers Churchill gives on the whole island now that war had broken out again. And at least in the capital they could cause havoc if something happened they did not like, especially if the Captain-General of the day appeared to be adopting any policy other than ‘search and destroy’ to the enemy. Despite his formal power they could, and did, make or break these officers on occasion.
In this war the Cuban element of this corps was much less loyal than in the first. The misgovernment of the interwar years had had its effect on bodies of troops from the island itself just as it had on the population of the island as a whole. Desertions to the insurgent camp, almost unknown in the first war, were numerous in this one. Even units of proven loyalty over many years could, with the effects of the invasion, turn on their employers and pass over to the enemy. Churchill did not have enough time to get to know these troops, their exceptional intransigence and the special problems they posed to the government and the prospects for a compromise peace. But he was impressed with them, as we can see, and there is no doubt that, as a mobilised auxiliary force to the regulars, they were of great value not only in allowing regulars to be freed up for less static duties than the ones they usually performed, but in participation in a wide range of full-scale military operations.
Churchill turned his attention in his first letter to the military situation with respect to transport as it appeared as he left the station in the train he took to Santa Clara and Martínez Campos’ headquarters, especially the part of that journey after Colón. The enemy clearly struck wherever they wished and the huge deployments of men for duties in the small forts, blockhouses guarding railway bridges and other defensive works did not greatly deter them. On the other hand, while they had a number of tricks (Churchill called them ‘dodges’) in their use of dynamite, he wrote that ‘the insurgents appear not to understand its employment, as only two explosions have taken place so far, though there have been many attempts’. He likewise could not resist the temptation to take a first jibe at supposed rebel lack of courage when he says ‘At Santo Domingo a pilot engine and an armoured-car are added to the train, as the rebels often indulge in target practice – from a respectful distance.’
He then reflected upon the determination of the Spanish in this war but also on the advantages the rebels have in having access to ‘accurate intelligence’, and the ‘sympathy of the entire population’. His assessment of the rebels’ strategy in using incendiary weapons, however often he criticised them for their excesses and negative effects, was nonetheless one of admiration for its effect in potentially crippling the Spanish war effort. And, as we have seen in the discussion of the jubo, he was correct in emphasising these effects.
His next letter, dated 23 November, from Sancti Spiritus, now that he had seen more of the war zone, was even more clear-headed and analytical. His discussion of the railway journey from the port town of Tunas de Zaza to Sancti Spiritus showed his information-gathering capacities as well. He spoke of the 30 miles of railroad between the two places as ‘the most dangerous and disturbed on the whole island’. This may be an exaggeration, as was the suggestion, already discussed, that in the Escambray Mountains, which he was skirting, there were some 15,000 to 20,000 rebels operating. In fact, there were only just over 17,000 total enrolments in the insurgent army by the end of 1895 and the percentage of them in this region would have been small if nonetheless significant.10 There were many other parts of the island which might have claimed the status of more dangerous, but this was certainly an exposed and difficult example as well. What struck him especially was that in this small part of the war, the requirement for troops and emplacements was massive. A full 1,200 troops were deployed along this short line of track, yet, despite this, ‘communication is dangerous and uncertain’. This was surely an important part of his assessment – huge deployments of troops for small tasks and even then they did not achieve fully the objective set them. The fact that the speed of the train in which he travelled was reduced to a mere 10 miles per hour shows the kind of impact the mere thought of a rebel threat could produce on the Spanish defensive deployment island-wide.
He was also right in insisting on writing about what might appear a small incident but one that was to have considerable impact. He described briefly an attack, led by Máximo Gómez himself, against one of the small forts the Spanish had everywhere. The place in question was the small outpost of Pelayo, 18km south-east of Sancti Spiritus, garrisoned by a small detachment of troops, forty from the Regimiento de la Unión and seven Guardia Civil. The post’s commander was Lieutenant Quinciano Feijóo and he had his men deployed in the post’s four outer small blockhouses and one large central one. Churchill would doubtless have said, as he did about Lieutenant Gallego in his first letter, that this lieutenant was also unfortunate. For on 17 November, three days before Churchill’s arrival in Cuba, the main column commanded by Máximo Gómez himself, who, it will be recalled, was west of the Trocha in order to pin the Spanish down and permit an easy passage of that defensive line by Maceo, approached the lieutenant’s small command with a very large force. The Cuban version of events is that Gómez called on the Spaniard to surrender and after a parley it was agreed that he would surrender but only after honour was saved and that therefore the Cubans would have to fire a few shots prior to the fort raising the white flag. This sort of arrangement was hardly original in such circumstances.
The Cuban version of the story is that nonetheless when Gómez and his forces approached the fort after the formalities had been observed, the garrison opened fire and wounded three insurgents and some horses. It is likely that this occurred not through perfidy but because some of the soldiers either did not understand they were to surrender or that they did not agree with the decision taken and wished to continue resistance. Be that as it may, the storming of the fort now began, and the Spanish lieutenant then surrendered properly. All the Spanish troops were released and it was they who Churchill saw, and of whom he wrote:
About a week ago they took one of the small fortified posts which I have described to you. Maximo Gomez himself directed the attack. Fire was opened on the fort from a hill distant about 500 yards. As soon as the attention of the defenders was drawn to this point two fresh bodies of the enemy opened upon them on each flank, and, at the same time, a fourth detachment, about 100 strong, assaulted the gate, and had it down in an instant. The garrison, numbering fifty, surrendered promptly, and after being deprived of arms and ammunition were allowed to go free. They marched in here in a body looking very crestfallen, and it is reported that the officer will be brought before a court-martial.
Clearly Churchill had been given a different version of events by the Spanish. At his court martial Feijóo presented a declaration saying that there were 4,000–5,000 rebels and that, in the face of Gómez’s invitation to surrender, ‘I answered roundly no and in no way, and then a little more than 800 rebels presented themselves attacking the fort, I defending myself for two hours of firing from four to six, and the fort being reduced to ashes.’ He said that it was only in the face of ‘certain death’ that he had surrendered his post and his men.11 What is curious about this story is that the implication in what Churchill wrote seems to be that he saw these men but in fact the deposition to the court martial is dated 18 November, the attack took place on 17 November, and therefore it is difficult to imagine how Churchill could have seen the men march into Sancti Spiritus when he only arrived there on 23 or, more likely, 24 November. Be that as it may, Churchill is surely right in suggesting that the rebels in the area were giving the Spanish ‘a great deal of trouble lately’. And the Spanish must have been extremely embarrassed by this event, which was the talk of the town in Sancti Spiritus when he and Barnes arrived. The Spanish version of great courage on the part of the subaltern officer resisting hours against hopeless odds, and only surrendering when his post was in ruins, must have been required to salvage national honour at that moment.
Another interesting comment from this letter is the suggestion that disease was mostly affecting the poor and the troops. And it is here that Churchill suggested the impossible figure of 15,000–20,000 insurgents outside the town, an exaggeration which the Spanish may have given as the reason why they were not having much success.
Writing in more detail of intelligence and such matters in this war, he then gave a description of the advantages guerrillas have in this kind of insurgency that could have come from a twentieth century textbook on the subject:
The great advantage the insurgents have is the detailed and constant information which they receive. Their only uniform is a badge. This can be taken off at will, and when so removed it is impossible to tell a rebel from an ordinary peasant. Hence they know everything: the position of every general, the destination of every soldier, and what their own spies fail to find out their friends in every village let them know.12
In his last letter before his 21st birthday, dated 27 November, in Arroyo Blanco, he was recounting his march with the column up to that fortified village and most of his comments on the military context were more tactical than strategic. He wrote with great sense of a military situation in which the difficulties of tactical movement are many impassable roads, dependence on convoys for supplies, long detours through the country, the difficulties of moving with the column having to ‘straggle over a couple of miles of ground’ and its inevitable vulnerability at such times. As seen he summed it up with a phrase many later commanders of counter-insurgent forces would understand about the situation they faced as well: ‘As a rule it is impossible to do more than to go straight ahead, and often it is difficult to do that.’ This quality of observation was remarkable for an officer of his age and experience, unable to easily communicate with his colleagues on the march and, as a rule, unable to see the enemy.
At Arroyo Blanco he described the defensive arrangements of the village with clarity and told of the troops there having had a ‘brush with the enemy the day before yesterday’ (almost certainly 26 November). He had been learning well the lessons of his first day in Havana, where he wrote with a lovely turn of phrase, ‘it was explained to me that while the Spanish authorities were masters of the art of suppressing the truth, the Cubans were adepts at inventing falsehoods. By this arrangement conflicting statements and inaccuracy are alike assured.’ A week later, with all his new experience, he did not accept at face value assertions from either side and said merely that the garrison ‘claims to have killed and wounded over twenty rebels, including a “chief”’.
This is just as well. Recent research suggests that the real story was rather different although such an action did take place. When General Luque’s column was near Arroyo Blanco shortly before Churchill’s arrival, they were harassed by Colonel Rosendo García’s rebel forces, essentially the Honorato Cavalry Regiment, a local Sancti Spiritus unit. During that operation there was an action on 26 November in which the rebel leader (jefe or chief) Pío Cervantes was killed. But it is unlikely that there were anything like the casualties inflicted on the rebels that the garrison in Arroyo Blanco claimed to the young British subalterns.13 It is interesting but hardly surprising that the Cubans suggested they turned back this column from more far-reaching operations and the action was therefore a victory for the rebels and thus the Spanish had no reason for boasting to the British.
Be that as it may, it is this mambí cavalry regiment, the Honorato, and its commander, Rosendo García, who almost certainly have the honour of having engaged the column in what was Churchill’s baptism of fire.14 Rosendo García Medrano was a cavalry commander from Puerto Príncipe, capital of the province of Camagüey, the classic home of Cuban cavalry (Puerto Príncipe has now been renamed Camagüey). He was 40 at the time of the engagement with the Suárez Valdés column and had fought, virtually as a child to begin with, in the Ten Years War, going into exile after having resisted the Pact of Zanjón agreements ending the war in 1878. By the middle of 1895 he was back in Cuba as a full colonel and given command of the Regimiento de Caballería Honorato. This man, who had such a major role in Churchill’s development (if undocumented and hitherto unknown), is hardly ever mentioned, nor are the actions which preceded the La Reforma fighting of 2 December; they are never linked to the Churchill experience in a direct fashion. Research on him is sometimes more complicated because of later accusations as to his real loyalty to the insurgent cause.15
Leaving this aside, Churchill’s account continued to brim with interesting points on the war and what he was seeing. He was now noting his first real signs of the war’s effects and referred to the rebel forces’ harassing tactics and the constant presence of their reconnaissance elements; he suggested that the troops were able to kill a couple of these men on 26 November, though Spanish official reports mention no such success. They do, however, confirm that the Spanish lost one man in fighting that day. The key point though is that the column was being observed by the insurgents for much of the time.
Then Churchill began a well-argued though brief assessment, for an audience of illustrated daily paper readers, of the strategic situation and what the Spanish were up against:
To-day, however, we have news that Maximo Gomez is encamped with 4,000 men a couple of leagues to the east, and early tomorrow we start after him. Whether he will accept battle or not is uncertain, but if he does not want to fight the Spaniards have no means of making him do so, as the insurgents, mounted on their handy little country-bred ponies, knowing every inch of the ground, possessed of the most accurate information, and, unimpeded by any luggage, can defeat all attempts to force a battle.16
He demonstrates his understanding of the context of the war in its essentials, that is, the lack of mobility of the Spanish forces, combined with exceptional potential in that field on the part of the rebels, joined with their very special intelligence conditions, leaving almost automatically the initiative in the hands of the insurgents. They gave battle when they pleased, refused to do so when they did not please, and left the Spaniards slow to react, outmanoeuvred constantly and with all the frustrations of a large regular force with size but few other advantages over a smaller enemy which held the initiative. And, with the invasion, this enemy now held that initiative in the decisive area of the country and not just in the ignored east.
Winston also certainly had his eyes and ears open for information on the rebels. As we have seen, he had heard that the chief problem for them was the lack of ammunition, suggesting they often went into action with only two or three rounds a man. In addition, as already alluded to, he found them ‘very bad shots’. It is here that he then discussed the machete. This sword-like instrument, which he called the ‘national weapon’ of the islanders, deserves a bit more discussion since Churchill is so obviously impressed by it as to spend more time on it than on the Mauser or any other weapon he mentioned. One of the keenest Spanish military observers in Cuba, Colonel Camps y Feliú, certainly agreed with Churchill, calling the machete ‘the best combat weapon in Cuba’, and adding that it ‘works to defend oneself in the countryside, it serves to cut branches in the wild, it serves to clear land and it is of indisputable practical use for any soldier on foot or on horseback, in the attack, in the woods or small meadows’.17
Another source, agreeing with Churchill’s observation that one of the main problems the Spanish had was that their columns tended to debouch from the trails they were following into the open in single file or two abreast, meaning that they were in the worst possible formation to resist attack or ambush, commented on the machete at greater length and in ways with which the British officer would undoubtedly have agreed:
the machete, which in open country cannot compare with the bayonet; fighting in the midst of woods, on the other hand, assuming a clash with them, one can assume that it will occur with both sides in open order or in defilade; in the first case, groups or pairs, and in the second, the lead persons, will have to fight more or less individually, using bayonets which will easily get caught in the vines, bushes and other underbrush, being very difficult to extricate in those moments and, on the other hand, machetes cut through such obstacles speedily. Advancing or withdrawing, with a machete one opens the way everywhere and a bayonet is merely a hindrance.18
It is also important to note that the negative morale effect of the machete was great among Spanish troops. They feared the dreadful wounds the weapon produced on those unlucky enough to be struck by one, especially in the hands of a mambí soldier. The rebels knew of this effect and with it their own morale would rise. It is then interesting to note that, despite the almost mystical fame of the cavalry charge with the machete (the ‘carga al machete’) in Cuba, even to his day, they were rarely employed by commanders who could avoid having recourse to them. In the face of the Mauser, they were simply too expensive in human lives. But this does not change the fact that in the hands of horsemen or infantry, as Churchill quickly seized upon, the weapon itself was extremely useful and much respected.
In his fourth letter, Churchill noted but made no further comment on what was in effect the emasculation of Suárez Valdés’ column in Arroyo Blanco as one force was sent off with the rations for a north-western garrison, taking with it two battalions and what was doubtless only loosely describable as a squadron of cavalry as escorting troops. This left the general with only just under half of his original force, 1,290 men, although Churchill mistakenly thinks he has ‘about 1,700’, and only seventy of those mounted. In addition, rather oddly, he referred to those seventy men as ‘two squadrons’, which of course would have been far from the case since a single full squadron of regular cavalry would normally have been made up of more men than that. The state of enemy intelligence was again referred to, if only obliquely, in Churchill’s comment that, once the main column heard their fellows in the ration column come under fire just as soon as both headed out of the village, Suárez Valdés ordered his own troops to wheel about and ‘For about two miles we retraced our steps in the direction of Iguara, in order to deceive the enemy’s scouts, and then struck off to the left and marched due east.’
He then gave the account of the enemy party of twenty-five, doubtless cavalry, who were watching the column’s movements and who headed off rapidly towards the protection of some woods when they were seen by the Spanish. Even with the best will in the world, the Spanish were in their usual position of not being able to close with the enemy. But they at least tried to resist the traditional rebel effort to keep them from sleeping as Churchill’s words show:
The cavalry remounted and pursued those fellows with the greatest promptitude, but they were unable to catch them before they reached the edge of the forest, into the depths of which it was impossible to follow. It was evident that the enemy was very close, and in order to prevent the camp being disturbed by his fire during the night no fewer than four companies of infantry were posted on the edge of the woods, and numerous other precautions taken to avoid a surprise.19
The next sections of the letter referred to the heavy going involved in marching through the local terrain and the impact of this factor on reconnaissance, an issue to which he came back more than once given its centrality. It is curious, however, that Churchill did not inform the readership of the context here, one in which the enemy was slowing the advancing Spaniards by taking up highly temporary firing positions to harass the column, then giving ground and moving farther back upon his base at La Reforma. It may well be that Churchill did not know that such a tactic was likely because the briefings from his hosts were of the usual Spanish ‘best case analysis’ type. As at other times, even if he were allowed to attend a briefing, his lack of Spanish would have limited his ability to follow the overall picture. But this is conjecture. Perhaps the most telling comment came from his incident at the riverside, where, in his description of that in some ways humorous scene, he put in an aside of real importance for the conduct of guerrilla warfare: ‘Of course they had their rifles – in this war no soldier ever goes a yard without his weapon.’ Less convincingly, and curiously, he also remarked that ‘After about half an hour the insurgents had enough, and went off carrying their wounded and dead away with them’, adding that they had ‘killed and wounded several soldiers about the camp’. It does appear that there were some wounded at this stage of the march, but no dead, and there is no evidence to suggest the rebels lost dead at this time either. On the other hand, it was almost always the case that reports from both sides in this war minimised friendly casualties while exaggerating those of the enemy.
As the main action was joined, he made some other interesting comments: for example, ‘To describe ground shortly is always difficult, and to describe it at length is futile, as no one ever takes the trouble to read the description carefully enough to understand it.’ Many war correspondents and military historians can attest to the validity of Churchill’s statement here, although he then went on to give rather a good and useful description of the very ground across which they were moving. And it must be said that his description of the action itself is as good as one could hope in a short article of this kind. What is also interesting to note is that his sketch of the battlefield shows the ground very well and it is really rather easy to imagine the tactical context from it. He would not have known, however, that it would be published alongside the article he wrote, so he could not assume that the reader had a visible image to refer to when reading the account.
From his description of the fight, several conclusions about his analysis of the Spanish and rebels can be inferred. One is of course the great personal courage of General Suárez Valdés, which Churchill and Barnes could not avoid emulating as they remained under the same fire, which was heavy at times. Another is the professionalism of the infantry. And yet another is the obvious vigour of the Spanish troops in the advance under fire. Less clear is why he suggested that casualties among the staff, which were minimal, as for the column as a whole, were ‘out of all proportion to those of the rest of the force’.
Then there is a contradiction with points he makes in his fifth and last letter to London, one which it is important to address here. He had first written, ‘The infantry advanced and occupied the enemy’s position. Pursuit was impossible owing to the impenetrable nature of the woods in the rear, and as the force had only one day’s rations left we withdrew across the plain to La Jicotea.’ Yet, in the next letter, he criticised at length and sharply the decisions made at the end of that day:
The Government troops had taken a week’s hard marching to find the enemy, and, having found them, had attacked them promptly and driven them from their position. The natural course was to have kept in touch at all costs, and to have bucketed them until they were forced to either disperse or fight. No pursuit was, however, attempted. Honour was satisfied, and the column adjourned to breakfast, after which we marched to La Jicotea, and the men went into cantonments. It seems a strange and unaccountable thing that a force, after making such vigorous marches, showing such energy in finding the enemy, and displaying such steadiness in attacking them, would deliberately sacrifice all that these efforts had gained. Such tactics make the war interminable. Here you have a General of Division and two thousand of the best troops in the island out for over ten days in search of the enemy, overcoming all sorts of difficulties, undergoing all kinds of hardships, and then being quite contented with killing thirty or forty rebels and taking a low grass hill which was destitute of the slightest importance. At this rate of progress it would take the Emperor William, with the German Army, twenty years to crush the revolt.20
This is Churchill’s only major assessment of the overall scene he had witnessed over those few days with the column. It is noteworthy on several points. First, despite an increasingly pro-Spanish ring to his writing, this attack on their strategy and tactics is obvious. It is difficult to find fault with what he wrote in the sense that, as a good cavalry officer and as someone with at least a good deal of book learning about the military, he would have expected Suárez Valdés to have pressed home his advantage and pressured the Gómez–Maceo column to the greatest extent possible, giving the rebels no rest and pinpointing their position while he assembled forces to give them the coup de grâce.
If it was so important to stop this invasion, then why, he was asking, did the one force that was in contact with the enemy, and which had just ‘driven them from their positions’, stop right there and do no more? These are fair questions and it is interesting that he did not find in his own analysis any answers, thus leaving the criticisms standing. Churchill’s training as a cavalry officer and his lifelong interest in things military would have taught him that under circumstances like those the Spanish faced on the late morning and early afternoon of 2 December, the initiative should not be lost. The enemy was attempting to move westwards and it was vital to stop him from doing so as early as possible, both for tactical reasons and because the propaganda value of his enjoying an unimpeded continued advance was very great indeed in a war where propaganda, and its objective of public opinion, was of the essence in achieving victory.
That same training and love for military history should perhaps have made him look a little more deeply into the context of the column with which he was serving, the orders his general had almost certainly received, and the simple relative strengths and capacities of the two forces that had met that day at La Reforma. General Suárez Valdés, for reasons of increased mobility for his slow fighting column, had been obliged to reduce the rations of his troops for this operation to only four days. This meant he could not imagine successfully keeping in touch with the enemy, much less ‘bucketing them’ or even less forcing them to disperse or fight. While Churchill was certainly right that the textbook of military tactics would have suggested such an approach, the real context in which Suárez Valdés was working did not allow for such a thing.
Instead, he found himself not only constrained by the issue of remaining rations but infinitely more by the fact that he was vastly outnumbered and totally outclassed in terms of the required mobility to engage the enemy in the fashion his second-lieutenant critic advised. Even if with more rations he could have continued to operate for several more days, he would not have been able to achieve what Churchill suggested. Churchill acknowledged that his column’s commander certainly did not have more than 1,700 men available and we now know that the figure was in fact slightly less than 1,300. The enemy’s strength was reported as at least 4,000 and in some reports even more. And he had just seen that the enemy’s impedimenta suggested strongly that this figure was accurate. But these total figures were in many senses neither here nor there: what mattered was the number of horsemen that were available. They alone would have provided the mobility for Suárez Valdés to keep contact with the enemy, ‘bucket him’ and put such pressure on him that he would be forced to fight or disperse. That cavalry was neither in the Spanish column nor available on call at any foreseeable time in the future. It could even be argued that such mounted strength was not available on the island as a whole, much less locally. Instead the general had the ridiculously small mounted force of some seventy cavalry, who were not going to be able to achieve any of the goals Churchill discussed and would simply have been swept aside by mounted troops over forty times their number in any kind of attempt to force into fight the rebel column or even simply shadow it effectively. And Spanish infantry plodding along, however well, could do little to help in this.
Even in infantry terms, the situation was not all that good. Suárez Valdés was not to know that the column was about to lose 1,000 men from its infantry force when it was detached shortly thereafter for duties to the south-west in the attack on the Trinidad area. He himself had only slightly more than that number, some 1,130, and from them must be taken the light casualties of the day and the two previous days. His two small artillery pieces did little to address this vast imbalance in the forces of the two armies present.
To some extent this is to quibble. The objective here is to assess the quality of the military analysis of a 21-year-old subaltern, himself, as we have seen from the New York World article of a few days later, ‘knowing only the amount of strategy necessary for the duties of a second lieutenant’. In spite of Churchill’s deep study of military history, this is largely accurate. Second lieutenants were and are taught tactics, not strategy. While they may have learned the principles of war, generally acknowledged to apply at both tactical and strategic levels, they do not have opportunities to see them in application except at the lower of those two strata of operations. Churchill knew what should have been the strategic and tactical precepts applied in this case but he knew them as part of an ideal case.
In the actual situation of that afternoon of 2 December, his column’s commander, not in a position yet to attempt to bring together sufficient force to do the things Churchill suggested, did what he had to do. He left the slow-moving column behind, moved as fast as possible to get into a position where he could be overall commander in the region, and so left on horseback the next day for Ciego de Ávila to take the train immediately for the coast, to take ship for Cienfuegos and thence back to his headquarters, in order to pull together the size and type of forces that might actually achieve the things that, he would have agreed with Churchill, now had to be done. This thinking is confirmed by his draft messages that very day to his commander-in-chief in Santa Clara, two of which are extant in the Spanish military archive although it is impossible to know which was actually sent:
[Version 1]
I left for Ciego de Ávila with a guerrilla … and I came here [Tunas de Zaza] with a gunboat in order to continue on to Sancti Spiritus, with the objective of organising a column to leave as soon as possible for Iguará, where I think there should be established a force to join the operations of the Navarro and Aldecoa columns, and I believe it would be of great convenience that Remedios send another strong column towards Tobosi to avoid among the four of them that the enemy achieve without difficulty his objective, which according to news is nothing other than to advance via the territory of Las Villas towards the western part of the island as far as is possible.
[Version 2]
Considering that it is urgent to organise columns from Sti. Spiritus to combine them with those mentioned and contain the advance of those bands [Maceo and Gómez], I have gone with my escort to discuss with General Aldave [commander at the Trocha] and I have come here by sea to advise you of the measures I am taking and to await your orders.21
It is also confirmed in the General Order issued by General Suárez Valdés to his troops of the column when he left them the next day at Jicotea before he, his escorting guerrilla (presumably the Yero), and Churchill and Barnes left that morning for Ciego de Ávila: ‘The necessity to organise in my district forces to engage in the operations against Gómez and Maceo obliges me, much to my regret, to separate myself momentarily from the column.’22 This was his priority and this is what he did. It was not to carry on at the head of a slow infantry column attempting to hold onto the extreme tail of a rapidly advancing and large enemy column that had to be stopped, not ‘tailed’.
Churchill may also simply not have been sufficiently well informed of what the strategic stakes were to be able to make a fully accurate assessment. The Spanish, as we have seen, knew that things were going badly. And, though they probably did not know he was writing for a major newspaper in Britain while with them as a military observer, they certainly knew he was an officer from an important army and country, and the son of an aristocrat of note. They would not have wanted him to know too much of the simply dreadful context in which they found themselves with the feared invasion of the west on its way, the army’s columns woefully inadequate, despite their numbers of men, to defeat it, and political pressure mounting against their Commander-in-Chief and even some of his more junior generals.
It must be said that Churchill gave in his military analysis proof of a major gift for understanding military issues, a powerful ability for expression of that understanding, and a clear thirst for knowledge of what was going on about him. From small points on morale to large ones on approaches to guerrilla warfare in general, the young correspondent showed promise of the highest order. Humour, intelligence and balance already characterised his writing and would continue to do so when he addressed military affairs.
Perhaps the views of one of the very few Spanish sources who have looked at the military aspects of Churchill’s analysis of things in Cuba at the time will help us to measure the value of his work. Colonel Blas Piñar Gutiérrez, a Spanish infantry colonel and former army attaché at the embassy in Buenos Aires and commentator on the sole Spanish-speaking translation of the letters for The Daily Graphic, sums up the young Winston’s military analysis as follows:
[while] one cannot deny an enormous ingenuity and frankness, which goes with his youth, in his descriptions and considerations, that do not always follow along the same narrative line, but rather change in rhythm and in argument, the whole is impregnated with a notable knowledge of military affairs, a frank, positive, open and in some way didactic attitude, and an obvious capacity for reflection before a reality that breathes before him day after day.23
The major flaw in the analyses Churchill made of the military context in Cuba was surely in the area of some elements of his understanding of the type of war the Cuban rebels were conducting. Churchill was a young and keen regular officer, in his first ever exposure to a military operation. He came from a highly traditionalist army and was himself an aristocrat, conservative and a decided imperialist. He was not likely to be keen on the kind of warfare he saw the rebels engaging in during the revolution against Spain that he witnessed for those eighteen days. He was also the guest of another regular army and was enjoying very much being, to use the modern term, ‘embedded’ with the Suárez Valdés column and being considered in general by the Spanish as something of a celebrity guest.
As he himself admitted, he was at first in considerable sympathy with the rebellion and his criticisms of Spanish misgovernment abound. But he also soon suggested that such sympathy was reserved for the rebellion and not the rebels themselves. He found their tactics disturbing, to say the least, and not those of gentlemen. The policy of torching property, leading to the ruin of the island, he found particularly unacceptable. This did not mean that he did not find what the rebels were doing sound strategy, as we have seen.
He was especially impressed with the ability of the Cubans, avoiding action when it did not suit them, and waiting always for only the most favourable conditions before ever engaging the Spanish in open warfare, to choose when and where to fight. Several authors suggest that Churchill did not really understand the Cubans’ use of guerrilla warfare. Manchester wrote that he had ‘failed to grasp the essential nature of guerrilla warfare’. Isaac Pitrulla and many others agree. But this is not entirely fair. He certainly understood many of its principles: for example, mobility, fighting only when conditions favoured such action, the importance of propaganda, making war against the economic structures of the state.
Churchill does not seem, however, to understand that this type of war involved a different kind of courage on the part of the soldiers engaged in it. As a regular he does not seize on why the rebels must, in his words, be ‘masters of the art of running away’ or other damning phrases of the kind. He was wrong when he wrote in The Saturday Review that the insurgents ‘cannot win a single battle or hold a single town’. They won many battles before getting to La Reforma or they would not have made it that far. And they won others while Churchill and Barnes were still in Cuba and while they sailed home, during what was a triumphal march westward, the beginnings of which the two officers had witnessed. And it can be forcefully argued, from what we have seen, that the action at La Reforma itself was a victory, since the Spanish were unable to stop the invasion or even appreciably slow it down. While they could not hold a town for any significant period, such a goal did not form part of their strategy although they would certainly have liked to hold one in order to settle their revolutionary government and increase the chances of international recognition. Cuban rebel soldiers often fought with great gallantry but Churchill saw them only in a hit-and-run role, and in a rapid withdrawal from a fight. Given who he was, he was unlikely to be impressed. But he should have been able to draw consistently conclusions more closely related to the facts of the case as he does on occasion. For example, while sarcastic about rebel valour in one of his articles for the British press, he does situate their approach to fighting within the insurgent strategy: ‘I admire the rebels for the quickness and rapidity with which they get over the ground … soon out of sight. I make no reflections on their courage, but they are well versed in the art of retreat. Of course the secret of their strength is the ability to harass the enemy and carry on a guerrilla warfare.’ Churchill’s firm professional understanding of why the rebels do what they do is here, as often elsewhere, at war with his disgust with their unmannerly way of doing it.24
It is not clear whether the idea of sketches to accompany the Cuban articles was Churchill’s or his editor at The Daily Graphic. It would have been perfectly logical for either of the two men to have suggested them, Churchill because he wanted to write for an illustrated paper, and Thomas and Heath Joyce because that was what they most wished for in order to provide drawings to accompany the articles in their newspaper.
Winston’s training as a light cavalry officer would have included some instruction in drawing. Hussars routinely reported back to their commanding officers and the latter to their higher formation commanders on what they discovered on reconnaissance duties, in traditional intelligence terms, ‘on the other side of the hill’. Such reports frequently included sketches of enemy positions, troop movements, fortifications or just terrain features of interest to higher commanders at all levels, which helped them visualise much better than mere texts what the report was referring to and thus be in a better situation to understand the context in which they found themselves and to prepare plans for future action. In order to better do such sketches all light cavalry officers were expected to develop at least the rudiments of drawing and of linking by text an understanding of what was seen with what was said in their reports. Churchill also almost certainly had some basic drawing lessons in some of the fortifications courses he so enjoyed at Sandhurst before joining his regiment.
It is also true that there are at least some references to Churchill liking drawing at a much earlier age, and of turning that interest to military themes. In what William Manchester call’s Winston’s ‘first surviving attempt in the arts’, as a 16-year-old he had made a sketch of Kaiser Wilhelm II, in London to visit a special exhibition at the Crystal Palace. Winston had gone there to see him with Count Kinsky, his mother’s Austrian lover, and had brought a sketchbook for the occasion. He described the Emperor’s uniform to his brother Jack in a letter, where he said the large brass helmet of His Imperial Majesty was accompanied by a ‘polished steel cuirass & a perfectly white uniform with high boots’.25 Thus Winston’s first such effort was of a military figure in the most glorious of uniforms, perfectly in keeping with the boy’s interests and passions.
While in Cuba, Churchill did at least sixteen sketches, some or perhaps all of which are still extant in some form and in safe keeping at the Churchill Archive at Churchill College, Cambridge.26 They are of immense interest to historians dealing with the uniforms and weapons of the day, battle scenes such as his own at La Reforma, troops moving and being inspected, river and other obstacle crossings by elements of the column, arrivals and departures of the column from places such as Arroyo Blanco, warships, fortifications, parts of the Trocha, scenes of military life in the column, senior officers and much else. Contemporary renderings of the Cuban flag, the mambí badge which served as their uniform in so many cases, the Spanish railway defensive posts, the armoured trains they used constantly and the types of locomotive that towed them, the blockhouses of the Trocha, both Spanish regular soldiers and voluntarios, a staff dinner scene on campaign, cavalry on the march, the town of Sancti Spiritus and the village of Arroyo Blanco or at least parts of them, Martínez Campos himself inspecting newly arrived troops at the quayside, close sketches of officers and soldiers, troops at rest, and the actual action at La Reforma: these sketches form a valuable piece of heritage for both Cuba and the Churchill story. The fact that it was Winston himself who drew them, even if they were subsequently greatly ‘doctored’ by specialists, makes them priceless.
It is, however, very difficult to judge how good at drawing Churchill was from these sketches. As mentioned above when discussing the way the Daily Graphic and other illustrated papers dealt with their business, Churchill would doubtless have sent the sketches with his letter for publication. Standard practice was then for a staff artist to improve sketches for publication. We have no idea as to how good or bad the initial work was although it is clear that it was good enough to invite publication, kudos from the editor and pay for work done. And we know nothing about the staff artist except for his name: Mr T.C. Crowther.27 It would be fascinating to know more about these drawings from his first adventure abroad given his later sketches accompanying his Boer War articles and his future interest in painting.
Churchill’s need to do military analysis in depth grew over most of his career and outstripped anything he was required to do on the island. His analysis of the Boer War just four years later is impressive to this day. Carlo D’Este wrote, ‘What is less explicable is how a young man of his limited education and experience, untrained as he was in strategy and high command, could have achieved such a deep understanding of the Boer War.’28 This was the case in Cuba but not to the same degree as in South Africa, much less in the working up to the First World War, the interwar years or the great trials of the Second World War. And we cannot see anything in Churchill’s thinking about war in Cuba that would lead us yet to Manchester’s assertion that ‘In fact, his military thought was so extraordinary that others simply could not grasp it.’29 But for a 21-year-old lacking experience, it was frequently exceptional in its breadth and its flashes of deep intelligence, and very often in its originality.
1. See for this and the sequel below, César García del Pino, ‘El Naufragio del crucero “Sánchez Barcáiztegui”’, in his La Habana a través de los siglos, Havana, Ediciones Boloña, 2012, pp. 151–83, especially 165–6.
2. Ángel Jiménez González et al., Historia militar de Cuba, Vol. 5, Havana, Editorial Verde Olivo, 2011, p. 258.
3. Ibid., pp. 253–7.
4. FO 72/1979 Sir G. Bonham to Lord Salisbury No. 299 dated 26 Oct 95 No.299. Bonham was chargé in Madrid from August to December when Sir Henry Drummond Wolff was away either on leave or away from the capital. These figures were reported in the press but interpreted to Bonham by the German military attaché in Madrid. The report was in error in terms of its total figure, which should be 75,382.
5. Jiménez González, Historia militar de Cuba, Vol. 5, p. 330.
6. The rebels had tried to found a navy, or at least put to sea a corsair raider, in the first war for independence. The attempt failed for a variety of reasons and probably was quite far-fetched to begin with. They did not get even close to this option in the 1895 war as conditions for such ships had changed entirely.
7. BRDW, Churchill, ‘Letters from the Front’, 1, The Daily Graphic, 13 December 1895.
8. Ibid.
9. For the fascinating story of these voluntarios, especially their early years, see Mercedes García Rodríguez, Con un ojo en Yara y el otro en Madrid, Havana, Ciencias Sociales, 2012, pp. 88–134; and Marilú Uralde, Voluntarios españoles en Cuba, Havana, Editora Historia, 2009.
10. Pérez Guzmán, Radiografía, p. 15.
11. For a Cuban version of these events, see Escalante Colas et al., Diccionario enciclopédico de historia militar de Cuba, Vol. 2, Havana, Editorial Verde Olivo, 2004, p. 291. For the court martial, see SHM Caja 3953 Campaign Operations Santa Clara November 1895, Declaration Lieutenant Quinciano Feijóo, dated 18 November 1895. And for Churchill’s recounting see BRDW, Churchill, ‘Letters from the Front’, 2, The Daily Graphic, 17 December 1895.
12. This quote and the next are from BRDW, Churchill, ‘Letters from the Front’, 2, The Daily Graphic, 17 December 1895.
13. It is curious that neither this action nor Pío Cervantes makes it into the encyclopedia of Cuban military history (Diccionario enciclopédico de historia militar de Cuba, Havana, Verde Olivo, 2004), often quoted here and written under the direction of General Amels Escalante Colás, in either Vol. 1 (Biografías) or Vol. 2 (Acciones Combativas). However, see Luis F. del Moral Nogueras, Serafín Sánchez: un carácter al servicio de Cuba, Havana, Verde Olivo, 2001, p. 243, quoted in Méndez Vargas, Arroyo Blanco, pp. 102–3. See also Miró Argenter, Crónicas de la guerra, pp. 174–5.
14. See Méndez Vargas, Arroyo Blanco, p. 104. The author does not go this far but it is implicit in her assertions here and certainly seems highly likely to the author of this book that she is correct.
15. Pérez Guzmán, Radiografía, pp. 37–9.
16. BRDW, Churchill, ‘Letters from the Front’, 3, The Daily Graphic, 24 December 1895.
17. Colonel Camps y Feliú, quoted in Jiménez González, Historia militar de Cuba, p. 338. Many readers will doubtless be thinking of the famed Gurkha kukri while considering this weapon.
18. Colonel Jiménez Castellanos, quoted in ibid., pp. 338–9.
19. BRDW, Churchill, ‘Letters from the Front’, 4, The Daily Graphic, 27 December 1895.
20. BRDW, Churchill, ‘Letters from the Front’, 5, The Daily Graphic, 13 January 1896. It is interesting to note, as usual during this period, that the German army is taken as the example of the best, this on the basis of its exceptional success against Austria in 1866 and France in 1870–71. Churchill was to see it first-hand during manoeuvres in 1906 and 1909, as the guest of the Kaiser himself, and of course even more dramatically in the First World War.
21. SHM Caja 3954 Operational Diaries December 1895, draft cables Suárez Valdés (Tunas) to Martínez Campos dated 2 December 1895.
22. Ibid., Orden General, Jicotea, 3 December 1895, Suárez Valdés’ column.
23. Blas Piñar Gutiérrez, ‘Prólogo’, Churchill en Cuba 1895, Buenos Aires, Editorial Nueva Mayoría, 1998.
24. Randolph Churchill, Companion Volume, p. 620.
25. See Randolph Churchill, Companion Volume I/1, pp. 256–7.
26. Nine of these sketches, through the kindness of Mr Allen Packwood of the Churchill Centre Archive, were published in this author’s ‘Cuba 1895: First Full Signs of the Man He Was to Become’, in Finest Hour, No. 159 (Summer 2013), pp. 24–9.
27. One reference to Mr T.C. Crowther is in the Spanish translation of the texts Churchill sent to The Daily Graphic, done by Elena Patejuck for the Editorial Nueva Mayoría, in 1998 and to which reference has already been made. It reads ‘In addition to his despatches, Churchill also sent to the Daily Graphic informal sketches. These were not used but were drawn anew by a member of the staff of the Graphic, T.C. Crowther, for their publication.’ Piñar Gutiérrez, Churchill en Cuba 1895, p. 34. The second reference is in the work of Frederick Woods, Artillery of Words: The Writings of Sir Winston Churchill, London, Pen and Sword Publishers, 1992, Chapter 2, fn. 12.
28. D’Este, Warlord, p. 143.
29. Manchester, The Last Lion, p. 569.