Nobody is shooting at them. Royal has been imagining it, dreading it, the green mat of jungle facing them crowded with armed Spanish, every one of them sighting his rifle at a spot dead between his eyes. But nobody is shooting, nobody here but a passel of sick-looking locals, nary a one of them got shoes on their feet. At least that, with all the orders shouted and screamed, with the waves washing over the rowboats and the mess with the livestock. The muscles in Royal’s stomach ache from all he’s thrown up on the big ship, his legs feel weak and it is hotter than it ever got in Tampa, but as he lunges out of the boat, waves breaking around his knees, and hurries after the others onto the little strip of sandy beach he is flooded with relief to be here, on solid ground, on Cuba.
“Company H stack rifles here!” shouts Sergeant Jacks, standing on a small rise in a swarm of mosquitoes he chooses to ignore. “Then get on those crates. Move!”
“I don’t see any of the white soldiers unloading cargo,” says Junior. He and Royal butt their rifles into the sand, bringing the muzzles together, and Little Earl adds his to make the pyramid stand.
“Somebody got to do it.”
Junior follows back to the boats. “But it’s always us.”
Royal shrugs as he wades out, then staggers backward into the surf as a crate of ammunition is pushed into his arms. “Didn’t send us down here to sit on the beach and eat cocoanuts.”
In the drawing a barefoot insurrecto stands behind Uncle’s massive calf, sticking his tongue out. Just in front of Uncle’s knee is Teddy in his campaign outfit, gloved hands on hips, glaring. The object of scorn is a Spanish don, greasy moustache ends dragging the ground, peeking up timorously at the towering American Icon whose top-hatted shadow covers him.
A NEW “BULLY” ON THE BLOCK
But he’ll have to start again. It’s impossible not to sweat on the paper here, to smear, and the Cuban isn’t right yet. He’s drawn a Mexican before, but the sombrero is different here and what cactus there is grows only a few inches from the ground. And the Chief is not fond of Mexicans. There are Cubans in Tampa of course, cigar kings and soapbox politicians, but they look nothing like this motley rabble grinning at the edges of the American throng, looking for something loose and preferably not terribly heavy to steal.
And then every few moments one of the damned illustrators drifts by from the operations at the shoreline to peer over his shoulder, maybe chuckle, and say how wonderful it would be to just be a lampoon man and not have to render the realities of life.
It is not meant kindly.
Remington is here, glued to the Rough Riders, the younger illustrators all kowtowing each time he passes, and Glackens from McClure’s, and Howard Christy from Collier’s and Macpherson drawing for the London papers, and a claque of photographers hung with leather-covered boxes and even a fellow from the Vitagraph company who thinks he’ll make a motion picture of the fighting.
The quandary is which type of insurrecto to draw. All the ones here to greet them are barefoot and starving and wear tattered white linen pajamas and slouch hats, the wide brims rolled back in the front so as not to hamper their aim. They carry their machetes, but for the few who sport captured Spanish Mauser rifles or ancient Winchesters, and have a beaten, hangdog look to them. Something less than your ideal plucky freedom fighter. A handful look like his Mexican or have the long El Greco faces of dignified European gentlemen, sans monocle and trapped in beggar’s rags. But more vexing, two out of three are clearly negro, and many of the others some mongrel mix. The Chief has not been promoting a slave rebellion, or an endorsement of miscegenation. He is sailing down on his yacht, due any day now, and Crane and a few of the other wags insist no real fighting will be allowed till he comes ashore. Perhaps when presented with the facts, when he sees the actual ebony-skinned, barefooted article—but no. Higher ideals are at stake here.
This place, Bacquiri, Daiquiri, something like that, is pleasant enough but for the heat and the mosquitoes. They were expecting a hot reception, and the Navy guns plied the coastal hills for a good while, a fireworks exhibition that perhaps induced the Dons to scurry inland. The only real excitement was the unloading of the beasts, which, in the absence of a landing dock, had to be improvised. A mule or horse would be led to the cargo port and given a glance at the beach, some four hundred yards distant, then shocked on the hindquarters with a blacksnake whip, the animal bolting forward into an awkward plunge. Quite a bit of braying and screaming when they first went in, but then each got down to the grim business of survival, many considering the floating transports to be their only safe haven and circling back to try to climb on board. There had been a particularly persistent mule just below him, somehow managing to lift its forelegs clear of the swells and thump the hull for a solid hour before going under. Teamsters and sailors were out among them in rowboats, talking softly, trying to herd them, occasionally managing to rope and guide a few to shore. Fitzpatrick was beside him at the rail, sketching furiously, doing an especially nice job on their eyes, huge with terror, and with the already drowned rolling about on the surface. And glancing over at the Cartoonist’s own empty hands as if to say, You’re not getting this?
Oh, he can draw a mule, all right. His Democratic donkey is second only to old Nast’s, and the Chief loved his Bryan riding backward on a Populist nag. But he likes to think he is more an interpreter of events, an editorialist, colleague to Davis in his pith helmet and Crane and Creelman, to Stephen Bonsal and Poultney Bigelow and the other correspondents who stand querulous in the seething mass of blue uniforms, pumping the regulars for information and priming the volunteers for quotables, colleague to men of ideas, rather than a mere draftsman.
“Look there,” he said at one point, and Fitz was obliged to reckon with the despatch boat chugging past with a half-dozen Kodak fiends and the Vitagraph man cranking his bulky apparatus, all capturing the bedlam on celluloid. “There’s your future, old man,” he added, in what was meant to be a kidding tone. “You’ll go the way of the buffalo.”
So no bloated equines, but he has done a sketch of one of the scurrying land crabs, terrible little brutes with their eyes, in perpetual astonishment, suspended above their bodies on little stalks. Very promising—perhaps a Spanish diplomat, or one of their key generals, or even Spain itself as a crab, side-stepping in terror beneath Uncle’s giant impending footstep. It is a shame they’ve recalled General Weyler, the “Butcher” sobriquet license for wonderfully gory analogies, cleaver in hand, dripping innocent Cuban blood, clasping horrified black-eyed maidens to his offal-smeared apron.
Keep Your Claws Off! Uncle will say, or some play on scuttling.
It needs work.
Wooden crates of ammunition are being hauled ashore, negro soldiers staggering wet to their armpits, while sergeants everywhere bark regiment numbers and company letters and order their milling warriors to fall in. The men are casual, light-hearted even, no doubt relieved to be making the landing without Spanish interference and exuberant to be free of the stifling, overcrowded transports. Like a football rally, American boys all in blue, or an especially crowded 4th of July picnic, and if not for the steaming heat you could imagine it was the Jersey shore.
He ran into Rudy Dirks in Tampa, Dirks who draws the Katzenjammers, wearing the uniform of one of the volunteer regiments, and Post who’d sketched at the Journal is here with the 71st New York, a private in arms. Taking things a bit far, he feels, though maybe for the German it is a declaration of his patriotism. Personally, he needs to take the Olympian view, to distill the essence of a situation, to perch on a general’s shoulder, if need be, and view the larger canvas. He has done several drawings of Shafter, his favorite the one where the commander’s bulk is sinking the flagship of the invasion fleet. But the Old Man has so nurtured this war, is so thoroughly in the jingo camp, that in everything he’s submitted Shafter is merely “substantial” rather than the gout-ridden colossus he’s made to appear in the Havana papers.
In the drawing, now, the insurrecto is scrawnier, clinging onto Uncle’s massive thigh, not even a machete to protect himself. And his face—
The Chief’s favorite, Davenport, is not here, nor is Fred Opper or any of the other big-money cartoonists. He is the only one who has made the voyage, not in uniform but here nonetheless, with beasts of burden still washing ashore, some of the colored Ninth detailed to drag them out of the surf. The native militia are offering doughboys huge green bananas from their flour-sack carryalls, offering short stalks of sugarcane and exotic fruit, hoping to trade for tinned beef, and the strip of beach is just as crowded and disorganized as the dock at Tampa the day they left. This, this whole thing, could be a disaster, a folly. A great mulatto approaches him, smiling, holding out one of the oblong yellow-green fruits.
“Mango?” says the giant insurrecto.
He waves his pen in the air to decline. “No, thank you very much.” He tilts his head back and closes his eyes then, feels the relief of a slight breeze off the ocean, and tries to imagine the Cuban face.