ONLY TWENTY LEFT.

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A witness of the adventure relates that the two captains moved entirely on their own responsibility, and that during the upward climb they became separated and as if by a mutual instinct on reaching the crest ordered the same manoeuvers. Captain Kennan made his men lie down, and ordered them not to shoot at anything but men, and not to fire without orders. The men watched him eagerly, anticipating the word to advance. Very soon he ordered them forward. "The men's faces," Captain Kennan testifies, "were like the faces of schoolboys when they heard that they are to have an unexpected holiday." They rushed on eagerly, and found a road which fortunately saved them from a good deal of slaughter which other companies met in crossing a barbed wire fence that borders the meadows here. They lined up at one point with some of the men of the Sixteenth Infantry, but left them again; they passed on up the hill-not directly at the blockhouse, but in a flanking direc tion, which gave them an easier ascent and then turned at right angles to face the blockhouse. All the way up Captain Kennan led and encouraged his men; but not one of them anywhere showed any disposition to waver. When the turn was made, Captain Kennan found himself and his company alone on the hill; he had supposed that the whole regiment was coming up. He hesitated a moment, wondering if he must retrace his steps. For one company, reduced more than one half by the scattering in the woods and the falling of men before the Spanish fire, to take the fortification alone, would be impossible. The captain sent his junior officer down the hill with this message: "The hill is ours if you'll come up; for God's sake come." Meanwhile, he saw other men ascending, and pressed on. At the same time, the Gatling battery, under Captain Parker of the Thirteenth Infantry, poured a galling fire from below straight across the edge of the Spanish trenches into the defenders' faces. Kennan saw the Spanish leaving their blockhouse and getting into the trenches, which was a sign of panic. On he went with his men; and now he saw the Spanish, who by this time were menaced with the advance of other companies up the hill, abandoning the trenches and flying down the back side of the hill toward Santiago. In another moment he and his men, now reduced to about twenty, were leaping over the trenches, which they found full of dead and wounded.

Battle itself would have been almost preferable to the hardships of the miserably inadequate ground where the army lay sprawled, it cannot be called encamped, during the trying hours of General Toral's pourparlers with Madrid. The hill was too steep and cut up, to admit of even pitching of shelter tents, and beyond this, not even an officer was provided.

340

MUD-STAINED INDESCRIBABLES.

But the grave-like ditches were enlarged, and by dint of branches and all sorts of inventions which come readily to the Yankee under stress, made huts of more or less capacity. These spread all over the sanguinary plateau, which to some extent sheltered the bodies or part of the bodies from the inconceivably thick downpour of water which seemed to come regularly every afternoon in these leafy uplands. But the walking, since walking was now possible, with the white flag flying, became a burden for the mud was sticky as glue and left a murky spot wherever it touched the flesh or the garments. All ranks and conditions were "painted red " as the men humorously described it, for all were obliged alike to crawl into the mud holes, for shelter. Not a man in the entire mass had a whole garment on his back or body. Few had shoes that were not outworn and in most cases tied on by cords. From the highest officer down, there was scarcely a man in the grim ranks holding Santiago in leash that did not resemble the worst form of "tramp" that wanders about the northern cities. All the baggage was left at Baiquiri and carried back to Tampa in the empty transports. Had any of the millions admiring the bravery reported from day to day seen with the eye of the flesh the men who achieved it, it would have been difficult to make them believe that these mud-stained indescribables were the architects of an unparalleled victory.

It is impossible to exaggerate the density of the uncanny growths that fairly pinioned the writhing masses attempting to push through, even in single file, man behind man. In the tangled wildernesses in which our armies, were engaged during the Civil War, the lusty growth of briars was thought a torment almost beyond endurance, but in the Santiago. impenetralia, the rank arms of a dozen different thorn bushes, from cactus to briars, clustered in vast reaches, thickly set as the most carefully trained hedge. The lances, prickles, were in most cases over an inch long, piercing as needles and tough as steel; the leaves of the cacti were sharp as knives and of a consistency that defied blade and bayonet to break or wrest them from the stem. Never were such instruments of torture invented, for the edge of the leaf was practically a saw-like obstacle,, with millions of spurs and vicious teeth. The tortured ranks could neither cut them down, burn them nor crawl under them; they were forced to wedge through them, tearing their clothing to shreds and lacerating every inch of the body exposed to the venomous points.

The Cubans indeed had established themselves along the route, as if life had finally reached the stage that realized their highest expectations. Picnic pavilions, not uningeniously constructed of palms, jutted out from

the edge of the roadside, making miles of what under less acute sensations might have easily been transformed into vernal villages of Arcady. But though apparent ease to these nomads, the existence could not be called peace, with all the signs and tokens of war straggling past in the shape of the maimed, the wounded and the implements of war. To those who had time to observe the destitution of the natives, the task at hand for the new masters of Cuba when the campaign had ceased, came vividly to mind. As night fell, the male portion of these refugees assembled in surly counsel to bemoan the fate they had brought on themselves. For there was no concealment made of the fact that they had begun to conceive a more violent hatred of the masterful invaders than they had ever borne toward the easy-going, if cruel Spaniards. Words fail to describe their emotions when the more adventurous from the front, retailed the hideous heartlessness of "los Americanos" in denying the "patriot " bands their inherent privilege of entering the towns taken in fight, looting the stores and perpetrating the death ceremony on such recalcitrant Spaniards, as persisted in living after the sword and gun had done their work. At first when the army landed, these dark-browed conspirators had received the most humble soldier in the ranks, with a servility that soon became nauseating. They could not lift their ragged hats too high, nor bend their supple bodies too low when welcoming their rescuers. The tide had now turned. Their rescuers were beasts come to burden their beloved Cuba with a new tyranny. For it seemed from the plaints that could be gathered by those comprehending the jargon of the "patriots" that law and order were the most odious signals of tyranny to men who had for years lived by rapine and slaughter.

The observant newspaper correspondents found no end of amusement in studying the promiscuous herding of these disenchanted natives with the hardly less ferocious "land crabs," and these animals under other cir cumstances would deserve a chapter to themselves. A lurid red in color with black trimmings-so to speak, the crab swarms and rattles through the palm villas of the herding Cubans, as ants might in a more civilized community. This crab ranges in size from a soup plate to a "plug" hat and what is more grewsomely grotesque about it, a casual glance reveals a hideous resemblance to the human countenance, as sketched by careless artists in making charcoal studies for pictures. No matter how crowded the roadway, no matter how thick the battalions pressing onward to the fight, or the litters carrying off the wounded, these loathly crawling things skirmished and scattered under the very horses' hoofs, seeking the offal of the camp when helplessness no longer gave the human bodies to the maws of

342

THE GROTESQUE CRAB.

these hideous things, for forage. Their locomotion was a constant surprise to the astonished invaders. They could go forward, backward, upside down, or down side up, any and every conceivable way, where a natural object offered itself for their tentacular clutch. The small Cuban children could be seen at times playing with them as with cart-wheels, the crab revolving, very much as the old-fashioned fourth-of-July fire piece called "spin-wheel." No interior, no matter how well constructed by the soldiery, resisted them. They were in tents, under the straw or leaves, in the hospital wards, in the wagons in short, wherever the sight or smell of flesh or food attracted them. It was no unusual thing for the worn soldier to be startled in his sleep by a clammy vulpine clasp on his face, and on waking find these pestiferous marauders crawling over and about him. They inflict on the flesh a very painful bite, which if not attended to, degenerates into a poisonous wound.

Some of the adventurous and half-famished soldiery attempted to retaliate upon the "varmints" by potting them. But whether through lack of skill in cooking or lack of the proper ingredients, these vicious monsters fattened upon the flesh of the dead, were found unavailable, to the no small satisfaction of the hospital people, who regarded the attempt to cook them as almost canibalistic.

For two or three days after the army's advance began stalwart Cubans almost naked as to garments, without arms or any evidences of soldiership, flocked to the ranks demanding accoutrements and the wherewithal to fight.

But it was very soon found that their fighting meant pillage, and that they had no sort of notion of the discipline exacted in the conduct of large bodies of men. They were incredibly clever however, in penetrating the jungles of cactus and thorn, and suggested to the staff some ideas as to the proper way of traversing Cuba, should our conquest of the island involve a campaign against the very people we set out to rescue. For instead of using the ground as our thousands were compelled, to sleep on, no matter how wretched, the Cuban had a hammock and a few simple appurtenances, whereby at the coming of night he was comfortably couched far from the crabs and out of danger of the malarial effluvia that oozes from the soil or exhales from the foliage.

They became humorously expert too in picking up the refuse of the outworn soldiery. For, as universally testified, the painful labor of road building and the unforeseen hardships involved in the jungle march, compelled the strongest to disembarrass themselves of very nearly everything but gun and ammunition. All these disjecta membra, fell spoil to the far

THE STORY OF THE ANTS.

343

seeing Cubans. Now and then a staff officer striking out through an opening came upon recesses where the accumulated accoutrements, blankets and what not, of the army made the leafy glades resemble a government storehouse. In many cases too when regiments were sent off suddenly upon a reconnoissance, piled their impedimenta, and at first neglected to place guards over them, the entire store was seized and secreted by the Cubans. It not unfrequently happened too that small squads of men, worn out by the march, halted by the wayside, were attacked and pillaged by Cuban marauders.

A British correspondent who had seen war in all the recent outbreaks in Europe, witnessed nothing so fierce for the time taken, or the sacrifices of life involved, than the advance on Santiago. He gives a few glimpses. that the readers of military history will prize :

"When afternoon came--I lost exact count of time-there was still a jumble of volleying over by Caney. But in front, our men were away out of sight behind a ridge far ahead. Beyond, there arose a long, steepish ascent crowned by the blockhouse upon which the artillery had opened fire in the morning.

"Suddenly, as we looked through our glasses, we saw a little black ant go scrambling quickly up this hill, and an inch or two behind him a ragged line of other little ants, and then another line of ants at another part of the hill, and then another, until it seemed as if somebody had dug a stick into a great ants' nest down in the valley, and all the ants were scrambling away up hill. Then the volley firing began ten times more furiously than before; from the right beyond the top of the ridge burst upon the ants a terrific fire of shells; from the blockhouse in front of them machine guns sounded their continuous rattle. But the ants swept up the hill. They seemed to us to thin out as they went forward; but they still went forward. It was incredible, but it was grand. The boys were storming the hill. The military authorities were most surprised. They were not surprised at these splendid athletic daredevils of ours doing it. But that a military commander should have allowed a fortified and intrenched position to be assailed by an infantry charge up the side of a long, exposed hill, swept by a terrible artillery fire, frightened them not so much by its audacity as by its terrible cost in human life. "As they neared the top the different lines came nearer together. One moment they went a little more slowly; then they nearly stopped; then they went on again faster than ever, and then all of us sitting there on the top of the battery cried with excitement. For the ants were scrambling all round the blockhouse on the ridge, and in a moment or two we