1898
WE HAD OUR DUPLICATES, OUR DOUBLES, REALLY, hawkeyes and cowboy cavaliers who seemed to have their own strange camaraderie. They wore ragged green uniforms—the clothes rotted off your back in the jungle—and were wise enough not to wear hats. Our spotters couldn’t identify such sharpshooters; they hid in the palm trees, nestled there, never moved, and had their Mausers—rifles with smokeless powder that couldn’t be discerned. They communicated by birdcalls. It took me a while to realize that the songs of tropical doves weren’t songs at all, but the musical whisperings of wild men. No one, not even the insurrectos themselves, could figure out where these Spanish cavaliers came from. They didn’t have the funny straw hats with conical crowns that the Spanish regulars wore, together with the pale blue and white uniforms. It was the conical crowns that got many of the regulars killed.
I’d made a fool of myself at first, tripping over the sword between my legs. But I had to learn in the lightning quick of battle, or not learn at all. I rode into danger like some D’Artagnan in white suspenders, a Musketeer with silver-leaf clasps and my blue flannel shirt. The steel spectacles were pinching my nose, and I should have been shot off Little Texas a hundred times, but we took the heights at Las Guásimas, and I’m still here.
Leonard Wood was given his own brigade early on, and command of the Rough Riders devolved upon my shoulders. But after our first charge we had to lay back a little—Shafter must have been planning a long siege of Santiago while he sat on his ass. I established our camp on the side of a hill, with the regimental field hospital in the rear. Still, something deeply vexed me. The faces had been ripped right off our dead, the eyes plucked out of their sockets, and I assumed it was the diabolical work of Spanish cavaliers, who sought to wipe off every trace of their foes. I should have known better—vultures the size of eagles wheeled over our heads, looking for their own special carrion. I couldn’t go on a vulture hunt. Chasing after these buzzards would have revealed our position to the Spanish regulars and those pirates in green uniforms. So we buried the mutilated corpses as quickly as we could. But that had its own risk. Such secretive cowboys weren’t satisfied shooting at soldiers—Rough Riders or regulars. They fired from their jungle posts in the palm trees at our padre in the middle of a funeral service.
As it turned out, the damn burial detail was just as dangerous as leading a charge. The cavaliers preyed on noncombatants. Those human buzzards murdered, wounded, and maimed doctors, mule drivers, and war correspondents—made no difference to them. And they did worse. They shot at child scavengers who collected bloody bandages and other debris. They even shot at nurses of the Army Nurse Corps, who lived in their own little compound. And they seemed to have a special affliction for the Red Cross brassard. Red Cross volunteers had to stop wearing such brassards, or they would have been picked off one by one.
“It just isn’t civilized,” I complained to Sergeant Raddison of Troop H. “Selecting Red Cross armbands as targets.”
“Colonel,” he said, “we ought to shake those bastards right out of their trees.”
He’d been spectacular on our run up that razorback ridge, holding his men to the firing line, with foliage in front of his eyes, yelling like a cowboy from Mulberry Street, driving the Spaniards out of their trenches and rifle pits as if he were still with his bicycle boys. But we weren’t dealing with regulars in conical crowns.
“Sergeant, we can’t shake every tree in the province.”
“Then how shall we dislodge them?”
I had to rely on that poet-correspondent from the World, the ex-newsie, William Winters-White. He’d been on the charge with us, had carried field glasses and a carbine, while all the other correspondents remained at the rear. He’d spotted the conical crowns with his glasses, and led us out of one brutal ambush after another. But his hands were shaking now. The poor fellow could not function without nicotine. And I had to find him contraband tobacco made from dry grass, tea leaves, and manure.
“Will,” I said, “we nearly lost that ridge at Las Guásimas. An invisible enemy is one thing, but someone has to know their antecedents.”
“Capture a general,” he snapped, with his saturnine, tobacco-starved face.
“But the Spanish generals are all in Santiago, sitting in the Governor’s palace.”
He bit into a crumbling cigarette, went off to meet with his confreres in the press, and returned with a sinister smile.
“They’re volunteers—just like you. Vaqueros. Some tended cattle in Morocco and on the Spanish plains. Others are pirates and convicts from the Azores.”
“But why are they here?”
“Ah, Colonel, that remains a mystery.”
Meanwhile, we were near starvation. Shafter had bungled everything. We seemed to have lost touch with the Commissary Department. Nothing arrived from the seacoast, not a single sack of rice or a bag of red beans. We had to plunder what we could from captured Spanish mule trains, and we didn’t capture much. Shafter couldn’t even ride in a sedan chair. His gout grew worse and worse. He lay groaning on a cot at headquarters. He developed a scalp disease in this tropical climate, and his aides and junior commanders had to devote themselves to scratching his head—that’s how he conducted a war. So I borrowed several mules, since most of our mule drivers had disappeared, and started down to the sea on Little Texas, Private Taggart and his ex-Pinkertons as my scouts. The insurrectos were not always reliable; I didn’t want them to steal whatever I might bring back from the coast. And the Vaqueros might come down from their trees and ambush us on El Camino Real, or shoot the eyes out of my head. Taggart, to his credit, did not seem to fear any snipers.
“We can avoid them, Colonel,” he advised.
“How?
“With our noses.”
“But were not bloodhounds, Taggart.”
“Still, they have to defecate from time to time. We will track them by their sweat—and the crap in their green pants. I know what I’m talking about. It’s an old Cherokee trick.”
I suddenly had a little more faith in this professional assassin and his fellow Pinks. I also listened to the birdcalls, and could not discern any signals from tree to tree. Yet I wondered if the Vaqueros had given me a special “pass” to the Commissary Department. We were living carrion to them, a kind of fodder.
Down we went through the foliage, with fronds scratching our faces and an army of red ants at our feet. I even had to climb off my saddle, and coax our mules with a clucking sound. They were restless, ornery beasts, and I didn’t want them to make an idle run and injure themselves. But we arrived in one piece at the commissary near the coast, an abandoned rum distillery with rotting floorboards.
I had to wait in line for an hour to deal with the commissary clerk. He’d established a fiefdom for himself with a mountain of goods guarded by a little corps of factotums. My rank meant nothing to him.
“Colonel,” he said with a sneer, “we don’t deal with irregulars.”
I had to resist the urge to reach across his little booth, pluck him by the ears, and bury him in one of his own pathetic sacks of beans. It would have meant a court-martial. I’d have to stand in front of Shafter, while some poor rascal scratched away at the general’s scalp until his fingers bled. I’d come too far to miss the rest of the show.
“Corporal, you may think whatever you like of me, but my men require seven hundred tins and bags of tobacco and eleven hundred pounds of beans.”
That little potentate sniggered at me and winked at his fellow clerks. “Colonel, you must be blind. Tobacco’s vanished from the market—Bull Durham is scarce as blue jade. And I have no beans for your cowboys.”
I pointed to all the sacks behind his booth. “But your commissary is full.”
He grabbed a worn bible of regulations from the counter and started to read the rules. “It’s clear as day, sir. According to section C of the codebook, beans and such are strictly for officers and not for volunteers and enlisted men.”
I took off my steel rims and stared right at him. “Then this whole damn commissary is an officer’s club.”
He nodded his head. “That’s the gist of it, sir.”
“Fine,” I said. “I’ll take all the grub you can spare for my officers’ mess—and bags of Bull Durham.”
But I couldn’t daunt him no matter what I said. “Roosevelt, I’d still have to ship your request to Washington—and that would take a week.”
I was prepared to pistol-whip the clerk, no matter what the consequences were. But Taggart leaned over and whispered into the corporal’s collar. That potentate’s eyes lit with palpable terror. He hopped about; he and his fellow clerks provided us with our requisite tobacco and beans, and we loaded the supplies onto the mules. But Taggart was suddenly tight-lipped.
“Trooper,” I finally asked, “how did you get that clerk to go into Ali Baba’s cave?”
“Colonel, he could tell I was a Pink. I told him I would come back and set him on fire with a bottle of kerosene.”
I was bewildered. “But how did you convince him that you’d been with the Pinks?”
“Oh,” he said, with a little wink. “It’s the demeanor we have, sir.”
That bladelike walk of an assassin.
I rode back into the hills with my supplies and my scouts. We had to protect our new treasure of beans and tobacco from red ants and land crabs that were as large as any helmet. Tarantulas whirled in front of our eyes with their porous black capes. I began to worry about the birdcalls—the melodies were a little too detailed. We didn’t find Vaqueros on El Camino Real, but three men stood in our way with repeaters and Rough Rider neckerchiefs they had turned into masks. They pretended to be outlaws, but I could recognize their leader by his bowed legs. He couldn’t really disguise his voice or his cowpuncher’s walk.
“Colonel, the beans are your own good fortune, but we’ll take the tobaccy.”
I didn’t pause, or reflect on what my unmasking of this trick outlaw might mean. “Red Finnegan, you swore an oath to the Rough Riders.”
“That’s a damn shame,” he uttered as he took off his neckerchief. “I’ve grown fond of you and the Riders. I was planning to let you live. But now you’ll tattle.”
He must have requisitioned two of the insurrectos, gotten them drunk with the dream of what they could make with a stash of tobacco that was trading at fifty gringo dollars for a couple of ounces.
“And all that pilfering among the troopers—the gold watches and other missing items—was that you, Finnegan?”
His eyebrows quivered. “I guess I was born to it.”
“But you were as gallant as any trooper in that first charge. I saw you myself. You helped us take the ridge.”
“Oh, when it comes to fightin’, I’m as fine as the next fellah. But I had tobaccy on my mind the minute we landed—red and brown gold. And what does Mr. Taggart have to say?”
Taggart was silent. He couldn’t draw on that gunslinger. But the other Pinks stood a step or two to the side on that road of red ants. They didn’t want to interfere with Taggart’s play. There was a terrific racket in the trees. A troop of monkeys was shadowing us; the troop chattered and yelped and hurled an arsenal of coconuts at us, their lean arms extending out of the fronds like hairy fulcrums. I ducked, or I would have left my brains on El Camino Real. I didn’t want the mules to bolt. They would have vanished into the jungle and shed all our supplies in some obscure trap of tangled roots. I had to hug their reins and pull against the load on their backs.
Red Finnegan created his own folly with a maniacal laugh. He shot the monkeys out of the fronds with his Colt repeater. The monkeys dropped their coconuts, tumbled onto El Camino Real, clawing at the air until they expired. Finnegan couldn’t seem to lose that wretched laugh.
“You had no cause to kill those damn monkeys,” Taggart told him. “They were funnin’ with you, Red.”
“And I’m funnin’ with you.”
Taggart was no quick-draw artist. Red could have shot the eyes out of his skull; that was his signature move.
“I’ll take the tobaccy, Colonel, and you can sing your prayers. Hallelujah to the Lord!”
That’s when I heard the birdsongs again, the tweets doubling and tripling until it was a riot of songs, a roar, and I knew that the Vaqueros were following this escapade, like some kind of chorus. Their Mausers struck the trees over our heads, with little explosions that left splinters in the bark. They weren’t aiming to kill. Finnegan turned his head a trifle, and Taggart shot him in the cheek with his Colt. Blood splattered onto my specs and the tarpaulins that held our supplies in place.
The two other men ran into the jungle. I had to wipe my specs with a cloth. There was no wind in Red at all.
“Colonel, I think we should bury the son of a bitch right here.”
“I can’t,” I said. “There’ll have to be an inquiry.”
Taggart had the saturnine look of an old soldier lost in the fray. “You’ll crush the regiment, sir. The provost-marshal will want his own inquiry. His advocates will swoop down on us from Washington, and meanwhile the Rough Riders will be in limbo. The advocates will wonder how many other renegade Rough Riders there are—if your cowboys can be trusted at all—and we’ll sit out the rest of the war.”
This damn assassin was as sharp as any advocate-general, so we carried Red’s corpse to our camp on the back of a mule. I had to swallow my own bile. I blamed the bullet in Red’s cheek on the Vaqueros. We buried him in a grove, with the padre reading from an Army Bible and worrying about the snipers in the trees. He was shivering all the time in this heat, with a handkerchief over his ears like a curtain. One padre had already been killed. Those tree-huggers shot our field hospitals to pieces; their savagery multiplied the more we sat in our camp.
I had Winters-White come to my tent. The ex-newsie’s hands no longer shook and his eyes didn’t wander now that he had his tobacco. I kept our tins and bags of Bull Durham in my tent, but we donated half our tobacco to other regiments and the general staff to avert a civil war. But spies, like vultures, lurked everywhere, and the stash we still had was always kept under guard. Finnegan wasn’t shrewd enough to steal his own supply from the commissary clerks, but he hadn’t been wrong—tobaccy was better than gold.
“Will, you know all the correspondents and reporters. They treat you like a deity. You’ve covered pogroms and forest fires. You’ve traveled from conflict to conflict. You’ve met with the Czar in his summer palace. I shouldn’t need to remind you. The Vaqueros have to have a leader—find him, even if he’s a ghost.”
“And what if I fail?” he averred, with tobacco stains on his teeth.
“You’re a wonder, Will.”
He left with an ounce of tobacco, which I measured with a spoon and a little cup.
“Roosevelt, you’re the deity,” he said, “not I. And your father was even a bigger deity. I’m only here because of Brave Heart.”
I felt a bit abashed. “Papa was devoted to the newsies,” I said. “That’s true, but you got here on your own cunning, Will.”
He was quiet for a moment, summoning up the difficult days and nights of a newsie. “You cannot possibly imagine what it meant to have him there week after week in his tie and tails. . . .”
Will returned in an hour with his yellow slicker and his Colt. “Colonel, come with me. Don’t forget your sword and your carbine and your cartridge belt . . . and a little gift of Bull Durham.”
“Where are we going?” I had to ask, clutching my own slicker.
“To meet a ghost.”
THEY INSISTED THAT I wear a blindfold. I had little choice. We wouldn’t have a padre left in another week. We couldn’t fight the Spanish regulars and these sinister cowboys in the trees.
I tried to mark the time, pace by pace, as we traveled through the jungle. I could feel the corded roots at my feet. “Damn you, Will, why do I have to wear a sword?”
“In case a boa attacks.”
“But how can I fight a boa while I’m wearing a blindfold!” I had to insist.
“No matter. A colonel wouldn’t be a colonel without his sword—this is Cuba.”
I had clocked twenty minutes, like pulse beats in my temples. Winters-White kept me from plummeting into that gnarled jungle floor. He tapped me on the shoulder and removed the blindfold. We were in a slight clearing, a bald patch without a single root or tree. And in this clearing was a canvas chair that might have come from a general’s tent. A man in a pince-nez and a cowboy neckerchief sat in that chair. I’d have guessed he was my age—a few months shy of forty. He had a jeweler’s nimble hands. His mustache was almost as red as mine, and his eyes were probably just as weak. I couldn’t imagine him as a sniper, shooting at children and nurses from the Army Nurse Corps. Yet here he was, in the green uniform of a Vaquero.
“We’ve met before,” he said in a slight accent.
“Captain, or general, or whoever you are, I rarely forget a face.”
“Well,” he said, “it seems you have forgotten mine.”
But I didn’t forget, you see. I had to rip him right out of his jungle habitat before I could master that camouflage of his. He’d been in my class at Columbia Law. Rueben Martinez. His father had been a peasant who broke into the merchant class with a cigar factory in Santiago, and had sent his oldest son to Manhattan to study law.
“It was not amiable,” he said. “The winters, and all the poverty and the wealth. I did not graduate. I caught double pneumonia . . . and nearly died in Bellevue. But we often chatted.”
“I cannot recall a word. Forgive me—are you a general or not?”
He laughed and revealed his crooked teeth. His was the only chair. Will and I had to squat on our haunches.
“Teedie, there are no titles here, not even a rank. We don’t use such nonsense in the jungle.”
“Yet you are the chieftain of the Vaqueros.”
“Perhaps,” he said, “perhaps. I have followed both your careers in the papers. Mr. White is fond of traveling on a camel’s back. He can describe the sunset in Arabia.” The Vaquero shut his eyes and recited the correspondent’s words like an incantation. “ ‘The sky in Arabia is not red. It is bloodless, and bleaches the blood out of any man. The sun does not set—it dies in mid-sentence, and darkness hits like a hammer.’ Have I misquoted you, Mr. White?”
“Not at all,” said Will.
“Your beginnings were much more humble than mine, but I will not dwell on that. And Colonel, you cannot seem to outrun your own glory days. A sheriff in the Badlands, a Police Commissioner who got rid of corrupt captains, and now a colonel with his own regiment. What does your wife—your second wife—think of all this?”
I wasn’t too fond of this fox with a jeweler’s hands. “She calls me Sinbad,” I said.
He twirled his mustache, just a bit. “Sinbad, yes. That is perfection. Sinbad has come across the sea with his cowboys to liberate us from the hidalgos.”
He presided on his canvas throne in the wild and pontificated like a jungle poet.
“But the hidalgos have rounded up your own people and put them into camps. Why are you supporting them?”
“Because I am a businessman,” he said, “in the business of war.”
“I find that hard to believe, Don Rueben.”
He snarled at me. “I’m nobody’s don. You can call me Coronel. Finally, I do have a rank. It’s the same as yours, Colonel Sinbad. The Spanish governor of Santiago pays me a small fortune to protect his province. And so I have my cowboys, too.”
“But you cannot win. Your snipers shoot at little children and helpless nurses with armbands, not to mention a padre or two. That is not war. It is wanton cruelty.”
“Anything,” he said, “anything to slow you down. The hidalgos are like a tottering wall. The whole Spanish conquest will crumble—it is crumbling as we speak. The generals hide in Santiago with most of their army. And they leave a thousand regulars in a blockhouse on a hill. Colonel, I am more frightened of you than that idiot of a Governor in his palace.”
“Why?” I asked. “Why?” I could see that Will was scribbling one of his dispatches—an interview in the raw, amid an army of red ants, with the elusive leader of the Vaqueros.
“Because,” that other colonel said, “the Yankees have confused their own destiny with ours.”
I wasn’t amused by this Plato of the forest, who was a soldier of fortune and a philosopher. I dangled a bag of Bull Durham. All his ranting stopped. He plucked the Bull Durham out of my hand with his tiny talons.
“There is no tobacco here, Colonel—none. Couldn’t you spare another bag?”
I did not have a second bag.
“Don Rueben, enjoy your Bull Durham. I doubt that we’ll meet again. We will chase the Spaniards out of Cuba, erase their presence in the New World. The Governor will return to Madrid with half the wealth in the province.”
“And we will have the Yankee invaders in our laps—no!”
We listened to a piercing birdcall, and he answered the call with a staccato tweet of his own. He collected his canvas chair, and without a word of warning he vanished into the foliage.
THERE WAS ANOTHER MATTER, not as urgent, but still a regimental folly, the kind a novice colonel could never expect in war. Sergeant Raddison came into my tent with Corporal Anton Little Feather of Troop H. The corporal was our standard-bearer. And he’d clubbed a few of the Spanish regulars with the Rough Rider flag. I’d inherited him from a school in the Indian Territory. He’d come to our recruitment counter with the highest letters of recommendation from his teachers, and his physical exam in hand, signed and sealed. I took great pride in the corporal—not a bravo among us had trained so hard.
“We have a problem, sir,” Raddison said. “He is a she.”
“Raddison, you’re talking riddles.”
“Well, let me unriddle it. I caught him undressing, and the corporal has, ya know, female genitals.”
“That’s preposterous,” I said. “Trooper, is that a lie—or a fact?”
“A fact, sir,” Anton Little Feather said in a husky voice. He didn’t have one female feature, at least one that I could surmise. While he didn’t wear a mustache, his shoulders were as broad as mine.
“What’s your real name, Corporal?”
“Antonia Little Feather, sir.”
I should have known. Little Feather was the name of a princess, not a Sioux warrior. But that had completely skipped my mind because of her corded neck and the sweep of her shoulders. Antonia had indeed been a pupil at a school in the Indian Territory. Her letters of recommendation were genuine. She was applying for the Army Nurse Corps. And she had passed the physical, too. But she craftily altered both documents. She had wanted so much to be a Rough Rider—she could shoot in the saddle and ride the roughest bronco. We’d climbed that razorback together at Las Guásimas, with her holding the colors while she fended off Spanish regulars. And she had guarded Little Texas after I got down from my chestnut cowpony. I tripped once on my own sword. And it was Antonia who pulled me back into the fray—the corporal was everywhere at once.
“Sergeant,” I said, “I’m damned whatever I do; if I notify the provost, we’ll be laughed right out of the war.”
“Then it might be best to notify no one,” Raddison volunteered.
“And what if another bravo uncovers her female charms?”
“That’s unlikely, sir.”
“Doesn’t she use the latrine and the shower stalls?”
“I shower after midnight,” the trooper insisted. “And the jungle is my private latrine.”
I’d been duped. She’d lied and cheated and falsified legal documents to become a Rough Rider. But it meant as much to her as it meant to me. I’d created the Riders out of my own phantasm, an unbridled wish. The Riders were my Aladdin’s lamp, and perhaps Antonia was its genie—perhaps, perhaps.
SHAFTER’S TOE MUST HAVE risen out of its burlap bag like an oracle. Finally, the order came to advance upon San Juan Heights, a pair of ridges actually, one lower than the other. The lower one we dubbed Kettle Hill, because it was a ruined ranch with a great iron kettle, which had once been used for sugar refining, I suppose. It was a deadly place, since it had its own red-tile blockhouse that commanded the hill. But right across the ravine was the upper crest, San Juan Hill, a hacienda with an infernal line of rifle pits and a red-tile blockhouse that was a regular fort, located on the cusp of El Camino Real, our only route to Santiago, mud and all.
We were told to seize the Heights from two separate points, like a pincer. Our big guns were practically useless. Their black powder left a dark residue of smoke that gave the enemy a chance to punish us with their own big guns. Our Gatlings were another story. These hand-cranked guns on their swivel mounts raked the enemy with a relentless precision all along our lines of fire. We couldn’t have advanced without the Gatlings, couldn’t have scaled the Heights, but our dynamite gun did not have the same wallop. It was difficult to operate, yet its shells of nitroglycerin could rip into a rifle pit or explode in front of some abandoned blockhouse.
Our orders arrived at four a.m. by a courier in a campaign hat with a missing crown—a bunch of us had to charge Kettle Hill. I do not remember much after that. I heard the bugle’s call, like the patchwork of a dream. I was caught up pell-mell in a brigade of Buffalo Soldiers and Rough Riders, horseless horsemen on the run, in the hurly-burly of war. The Spaniards had called our black bravos “smoked Yankees,” and considered them ghost warriors, who could rise up from the dead and reassemble all their body parts. The regulars ran from their rifle pits once the smoked Yankees arrived.
I led the charge from my saddle. I had tucked my blue bandanna under the floppy brim of my campaign hat, so that it could protect the back of my neck from the bite of the morning sun, and it must have looked strange to my boys, like the headdress of a sheikh. Thus I rode Little Texas into battle. Still, our Gatlings couldn’t rake every damn royal palm in the hills. The Vaqueros shot troopers on both sides of Little Texas. Yet there I was on my warhorse, escaping bullets with an invincible flair.
Sinbad.
I went up and down our lines, waving my hat with its blue tail. “Forward, boys, we have to take that hill.”
But there were ranges of barbed wire strewn like the devil’s own instrument across our path. And I didn’t want to catch Little Texas’ flanks on a piece of that wire. So I climbed off my saddle and shooed that chestnut cowpony back to our camp with a swat of my hat. “Go on, now.”
Little Texas galloped unharmed across a hail of bullets. And I continued my charge. I must have been caught in the tremor of an exploding shell. I tumbled to the ground, scraped my knee and smashed my specs; the steel frames were gone. I knew I had another pair in my hat, but I couldn’t seem to reach them somehow, as if my hands belonged to a marionette. All my preparations had gone awry. I had to push and grope into battle half blind. I’d lost that powerful compass in my head. I panicked, because I could have been slogging in the wrong direction.
And then I tripped. A hand reached out and grabbed mine. A smoked Yankee had wandered out of the haze. It was Bellows, my former body-servant. “Colonel, what is a white man doing on his hands and knees?”
“Looking for my specs, Bellows, why else? I got thrown into the wake of a shell.”
“Well, ain’t that a catastrophe?” he said with a smile, as I caught a glimpse of his gold teeth.
Thank the Lord he still had an extra pair that he kept for me in his pocket. I put them on, my hands shivering over the earpieces. I barely had time to salute Bellows. A bullet slapped him in the shoulder, spun him around. I cradled him in my arms. His eyes had that vacant, bleeding look.
“Sergeant Bellows, do you know who I am?”
He blinked once. “Teddy Roosevelt, sir, of the Riders.”
“Well, I’m sending you back down to the field hospital. I’ll find an orderly.”
But Bellows twisted right out of my grasp. “And miss my chance to take Kettle Hill with the Buffalos? I didn’t come here to have beetles and tarantulas bite my ass.”
He took his neckerchief, knotted it into a sling around his wounded shoulder, and went back into the haze. I had my specs now. I saw Trooper Antonia with our flag, a dozen boys behind her. Antonia’s flag must have blinded the Spanish regulars. We arrived at that mammoth cast-iron kettle that must have been used for sugaring once upon a time at this hilltop hacienda. More troopers congregated behind that kettle. The snipers couldn’t get to us from this iron mass. We weren’t scarecrows, straw men. We kept hearing loud, metallic pings. The Spanish regulars were shooting at us from their stronghold in the red-tile fort of the hacienda. But all they could catch was their own damn kettle—on Kettle Hill. Then the whole hacienda began to shiver, and there was a groundswell under our feet, like a minor earthquake. A nitroglycerin shell from our dynamite gun must have landed on the hacienda; the red tiles began to crumble.
We charged the red-tile fort, with Trooper Antonia grimacing while she clutched our flag. We screamed until our throats were raw.
YA-HA-HAW!
The sheer ferocity of the Rough Riders’ cowboy call must have frightened the Spanish regulars, who didn’t want another shell from the dynamite gun to burst on top of their skulls. They dropped their rifles and fled. They left wine bottles in their wake. Their trenches were filled with corpses, splayed like tatterdemalions and rag dolls. Through the mist and wavelike ribbons of heat, we caught glimpses of Santiago emerging from its own mirage, with a shimmering rattle of red tiles and white, white streets, as if the Yankees had never come to Cuba. . . .
Yet the Spanish regulars were firing at us from the blockhouse and rifle pits on that hill across the ravine, six or seven hundred yards from the sanctuary of our kettle. They had their own big guns and sharpshooters. A Spanish regular had been creeping near the kettle in his blue and white coat. He had a bad case of battle fright, I imagine. I shot at the son of a bitch. I’m not sure what happened next. Suddenly the Spaniard crumpled up and crashed to the ground. My own orderly, Bardshar, winked at me through the feathers of smoke and little sparks of gunpowder.
“Nice shot, Colonel.”
Our own regulars were attacking the blockhouse on San Juan Hill and getting shot to pieces, so I decided to lead a charge down that ravine. But I let out a rip that was lost in all that smoke and thunder. I had to run back up Kettle Hill to collect Rough Riders and stray Buffalos here and there. The constant drum of the Gatlings had created a deafening roar that diminished every other sound. I felt like an idiot, leading a charge where no one came. I found Bardshar wandering about, with blood everywhere. A shell had exploded near him, and two Rough Riders had been hit by the fragments—it was their blood that covered his face and his clothes. He seemed like a random dummy as I shouted at him. He did a pantomime and pointed to his ears.
“Colonel, I’m a little deef.”
I did my own pantomime and pointed to the San Juan blockhouse.
“We’re gonna enfilade that cozy little nest of theirs.”
We were a crazy mix of Rough Riders, smoked Yankees, and white regulars. A bullet cut down one of my boys in the crossfire. “Medic,” I cried, but there were no hospital orderlies on this charge. The Vaqueros were still in their royal palms, and the orderlies wouldn’t go near a battlefield. We could not seem to make that final charge to the San Juan blockhouse. The Vaqueros had pinned us down.
“Sir, it’s a suicide run,” Raddison said.
“Maybe so. But we’ll have to risk it. We can’t shake the sons of bitches out of their trees.”
We ran into a blistering storm of bullets. Ripped to shreds, Trooper Antonia’s standard still flew like a regimental rag. But she never stopped once, never faltered. She used that flag as a lance, stabbing into arms and legs as she ripped up Spanish regulars and cried—Ya-ha-haw!—with a demonic grin that sent those regulars as far as they could from San Juan Hill.
Sergeant Raddison lost a finger in the skirmish, but that couldn’t even break his stride. One of the Pinks fell, and then another. The Vaqueros fired at us from their royal palms with impunity—those damn bullets of theirs landed like plops of soft silk in the rustle of leaves. Still, our Gatlings ripped across the blockhouse. And once our black and white warriors arrived at the crest of the hill, some with torn shoulders, others with missing pockets and welts on their backs from all the flying metal, the Spanish regulars abandoned the blockhouse for the safety of Santiago. Their officers had left big iron kettles on the stoves filled with beef stew and boiled rice; there were decanters and demijohns of rum—rum, a river of rum.
THE GENERALS IN SANTIAGO, who hadn’t taken part in a single skirmish, hadn’t raised or lowered a flag, wouldn’t surrender the city unless we fired upon them—it was a matter of honor, they said; and their demands were as surreal as the war itself. Shafter didn’t want to maim women and children with cannonballs. But civilians began to flee Santiago in anticipation of some big surprise attack. We did not have enough grub to feed them—our rations were running low, while the Spanish generals had shuttered all the markets and warehoused whatever food there was in their garrisons. We worried about a scourge of yellow fever—“the black vomit,” clotted with blood. The negotiations continued. More refugees arrived, dragging wobbly piles of furniture in little three-wheeled carts, with a grandma or two at the very top of the pile like some reigning queen in a ripped mantilla.
Shafter, in desperation, had Santiago shelled for three days and nights. He did not want it to become a city without roofs and without water, with bits of red tile in the roads—he’d have had to send in nurses to care for cases of yellow fever, and gravediggers to bury the dead, or the city itself would have become one vast graveyard. So he bombarded Santiago above the rooftops—it was the madness of a general laid up with gout. He still left a lot of debris. Meanwhile, the Spanish generals vanished with a mule train of gold. I broke into the garrisons and fed as many people as I could—all I could provide was rotting potatoes and blackened cobs of corn. I reopened every hospital, every clinic, often with Antonia Little Feather at my side, and her rumpled flag.
Raddison warned me not to enter Santiago alone. “We’ll be your honor guard, Colonel.”
“Nonsense,” I said. “There isn’t a Spanish regular within miles.”
“And what about the snipers, sir?”
“Sergeant, what would they do in a provincial town? They’ve hired themselves out to other generals, for the next war.”
And so I wandered into that dusty old town in my yellow suspenders and blue denim shirt—a colonel without the least sign of my rank. I marched through the narrow, winding streets, passing little shops with empty windows, squat little houses of stained stucco, with fanciful wrought-iron balconies, and arrived at a plaza with a white cathedral and a watering hole called the Café Venus, with plaster chips on its awning. I knew the fates had brought me here, like Philoctetes stranded on the rocky isle of Lesbos, but this island café was full of wild men, Vaqueros, and I had a misshapen knuckle rather than a festering foot, from the shrapnel I’d caught in the crossfire, charging San Juan Hill.
He was sitting there at the center table, still wearing his green uniform, guzzling rum, while the walls and little narrow bar of the Café Venus were decorated with souvenirs and relics, our souvenirs, it seems—Red Cross brassards, ripped campaign hats, and Rough Rider neckerchiefs with the distinctive polka dot.
“Don Rueben, I have the right to arrest you. You’re a criminal. You’ve murdered my men with your Mausers.”
He laughed. “And you come into my headquarters in your suspenders and your red mustache, without an escort.”
“Is the Café Venus really your headquarters, señor?”
“Yes. Do you think I live in trees, Colonel? We should go into business together. You will never leave this town. Don’t you understand the business of war? The generals in Washington will say that you have mingled with the locals and have become infected with the black vomit. And Santiago will become your charnel house. You will spend your days roaming among the red tiles.”
“I could still arrest you, Don Rueben.”
“Not likely,” he said, surrounded by Vaqueros in the Venus Café.
I no longer knew what to believe. Shafter must have had grave news from the War Department. Even with his gout, he summoned us to Santiago for a council of officers, and I went back into those winding streets. We met in the governor’s mansion, a rambling little palace with boarded windows, across from the white cathedral. Shafter had a funereal look. A buckboard had to carry him from his headquarters in an abandoned sugar factory to a palace full of floating white dust. We were all sentenced to the black vomit, it seems. Shafter was whimpering now. I could see the sores in his scalp, red pockmarks that looked like little swollen mouths.
“We must either stay here, in Santiago, or move into the mountains,” he mumbled. I had to strain to catch his words. “Lads, the Army will not release us. We have become worse than vultures. We are not considered safe.”
As the one maverick and irregular at the council, I was enlisted to write a letter to General Shafter that could be circulated among ourselves and used later as live ammunition.
“Make it pungent,” Shafter said. “Make it wise—and very dire.”
I did have help from Winters-White, whose pen had all the craft of a poisonous snake.
General Shafter:
Our clothes are in ribbons and rags. My officers do not possess a decent pair of socks. Our boys sit idly in their dog-tents, with nothing to do. Each day the torrential rains and blistering sun sap our energy. There’s no quinine—nothing. No supplies. Our Gatlings have gone to rust. The Red Cross nurses have vanished with all their medical kits and hospital cots. The last padre has left. We will not survive Santiago. . . .
The letter was leaked to the press, of course. And within three days our invasion force of regulars, Buffalos, and Rough Riders was ordered to assemble and sail for home. We’d gone from saviors to stumblebums in less than a month.