[Illustration] THE SURRENDER OF SANTIAGO AN ACCOUNT OF THE HISTORIC SURRENDER OF SANTIAGO TO GENERAL SHAFTER JULY 17, 1898 BY FRANK NORRIS SAN FRANCISCO PAUL ELDER AND COMPANY NINETEEN SEVENTEEN Copyright, 1913, 1917 by Otis F. Wood THE SURRENDER OF SANTIAGO For two days we had been at the headquarters of the Second Brigade(General McKibben's), so blissfully contented because at last we had areal wooden and tiled roof over our heads that even thetarantulas--Archibald shook two of them from his blanket in onenight--had no terrors for us. The headquarters were in an abandoned country seat, a little six-roomedvilla, all on one floor, called the Hacienda San Pablo. To the left ofus along the crest of hills, in a mighty crescent that reached almost tothe sea, lay the army, panting from the effort of the first, second andthird days of the month, resting on its arms, its eyes to its sights, Maxim, Hotchkiss and Krag-Jorgenson held ready, alert, watchful, straining in the leash, waiting the expiration of the last truce thathad now been on for twenty-four hours. That night we sat up very late on the porch of the hacienda, singing"The Spanish Cavalier"--if you will recollect the words, singularlyappropriate--"The Star-Spangled Banner, " and 'Tis a way we had at Caney, sir, 'Tis a way we had at Caney, sir, 'Tis a way we had at Caney, sir, To drive the Dons away, an adaptation by one of the General's aides, which had a great success. Inside, the General himself lay on his spread blankets, his handsclasped under his head, a pipe in his teeth, feebly applauding us atintervals and trying to pretend that we sang out of tune. The night wasfine and very still. The wonderful Cuban fireflies, that are like littleelectric lights gone somehow adrift, glowed and faded in the mango andbamboo trees, and after a while a whip-poor-will began his lamentablelittle plaint somewhere in the branches of the gorgeous vermilionFlamboyana that overhung the hacienda. The air was heavy with smells, smells that inevitable afternoondownpours had distilled from the vast jungle of bush and vine andthicket all up and down the valley. In Cuba everything, the very mud andwater, has a smell. After every rain, as soon as the red-hot sun is outagain, vegetation reeks and smokes and sweats, and these smells steamoff into the air all night, thick and stupefying, like the interior of acathedral after high mass. The orderly who brought the despatch should have dashed up at a gallop, clicked his spurs, saluted and begun with "The commanding General'scompliments, sir, " et cetera. Instead, he dragged a very tired horse upthe trail, knee-deep in mud, brought to, standing with a gasp of relief, and said, as he pushed his hat back from his forehead: "Say, is here where General McKibben is?" We stopped singing and took our feet down from the railing of theveranda. In the room back of us we heard the General raise on an elbowand tell his orderly to light a candle. The orderly went inside, drawinga paper from his pocket, and the aides followed. Through the open windowwe could plainly hear what followed, and see, too, for that matter, bytwisting a bit on our chairs. The General had mislaid his eyeglasses and so passed the despatch to oneof his aides, saying: "I'll get you to read this for me, Nolan. " On oneknee, and holding the despatch to the candle-light, Nolan read it aloud. It began tamely enough with the usual military formulas, and the firstthirty words might have been part of any one of the many despatches theGeneral had been receiving during the last three days. And then "toaccompany the commanding General to a point midway between the Spanishand American lines and there to receive the surrender of General Toral. At noon, precisely, the American flag will be raised over the Governor'sPalace in the city of Santiago. A salute of twenty-one guns will befired from Captain Capron's battery. The regimental bands will play 'TheStar-Spangled Banner' and the troops will cheer. SHAFTER. " There was a silence. The aide returned the paper to the General andstraightened up, rubbing the dust from his knee. The General shifted hispipe to the other corner of his mouth. The little green parrot who livedin the premises trundled gravely across the brick floor, and for aninstant we all watched her with the intensest attention. "Hum, " muttered the General reflectively between his teeth. "Hum. They've caved in. Well, you won't have to make that littlereconnaissance of yours down the railroad, after all, Mr. Nolan. " And soit was that we first heard of the surrender of Santiago de Cuba. We were up betimes the next morning. By six o'clock the General had usall astir and searching in our blanket rolls and haversacks for "anykind of a black tie. " It was an article none of us possessed, and theGeneral was more troubled over this lack of a black tie than the factthat he had neither vest nor blouse to do honor to the city'scapitulation. But we had our own troubles. The flag was to be raised over the city atnoon. Sometime during the morning the Spanish General would surrender tothe American. The General--our General--and his aides, as well as allthe division and brigade commanders, would ride out to be present at theceremony--but how about the correspondents? Almost to a certainty they would be refused. Privileges extended tojournalists and magazine writers had been few and very far betweenthroughout the campaign. We would watch the affair through glasses fromsome hilltop, two miles, or three maybe, to the rear. But for all that, we saddled our horses and when the General and his staff started to ridedown to corps headquarters, fell in with the aides, and resolved to keepup with the procession as far as our ingenuity and perseverance wouldmake possible. It was early when we started and the heat had not yet begun to beoppressive. All along and through the lines there were signs of thegreatest activity. Over night the men had been withdrawn from thetrenches and were pitching their shelter tents on the higher and drierground, and where our road crossed the road from Caney to Santiago wecame upon hundreds of refugees returning to the city whence they hadbeen driven a few days previous. Headquarters had been moved a mile or two nearer the trenches during thetruce, and we found it occupying the site of General Wheeler's tent onthe battlefield of San Juan. The ground is high and open hereabouts, and, as we came up we could see the general officers--each of themaccompanied by his staff--closing in from every side upon the same spot. It was a great gathering. We had seen but few of these generals; most ofthem had been but mere names, names that found place in a breathlessfragment of news shouted by an orderly galloping to or from the front. But now they were all here: Wheeler, small, white-bearded and wiry;Ludlow, who always contrived to appear better dressed than everyoneelse, in his trim field uniform and white leggings; Randolph, with hisbull neck and fine, salient chin, perhaps the most soldierly-looking ofall, and others and others and others; Kent, Lawton, Wood, Chaffee, Young, Roosevelt, and our own General, who, barring Wheeler, had perhapsdone more actual fighting in the course of his life than any three ofthe others put together, yet who was like the man in Mr. Nye's song, "without coat or vest, " even without "any kind of a black tie. " Shafter himself sat under the fly of his tent, his inevitable pithhelmet on his head, a headgear he had worn ever since leaving the ship, holding court as it were on this, his own particular day. In the fieldbelow, the cavalry escort was forming, and aides, orderlies andadjutants came and went at the top speed of their horses, just as themilitary dramas had taught us to expect they should. But, except ourselves, not a correspondent was in sight, and we werevery like to be ordered back at any moment. But the god descended fromthe machine in the person of Captain McKittrick of the commandingGeneral's staff, and we were given an unqualified permission to fall inso soon as the start should be made, provided only that we fell in atthe rear of any one of the generals' staffs. But here a difficulty developed itself. The procession started almostimmediately, and when we fell in at the rear of one of the staffs wefound ourselves naturally at the head of the one immediately behind. Itwas a time when, if ever, precedence and rank were of paramountimportance, and a brigadier-general does not take it kindly when tworather forlorn-appearing men, wearing neither stripe nor shoulder strap, and mounted upon an unkempt mule and a lamentable little white pony, rank him out of his place when he is marching to receive an enemy'ssurrender. As much was said to us, at first with military terseness, andlatterly, this proving of no effect, with cursings and blasphemies. Our_deus ex machina_ was far ahead with General Shafter by this time, andit was only our mule that saved us from ultimate discomfiture. Hebelonged to a pack-train and his life had been spent in following closeupon the footsteps of the animal in front of him. He was a mule with oneidea; his universe collapsed, his cosmos came tumbling about his earsthe instant that it became impossible for him to follow in a train. Itwas all one that Archibald tore and tugged at the bit, or roweled himred. He could as easily have reined a locomotive from its track as tohave swerved the creature from its direct line of travel by so much asan inch. So what with this and with that, we worried along until just beyond theline of our trenches, where the road broadened very considerably and wecould compromise by riding on the flanks of the column. And an imposing column it was, nearly three hundred strong, and itactually appeared as if one-half was made up of brigadier-generals, major-generals, generals commanding divisions, staff officers and thelike. A mere colonel was hardly better than a private on that day. Wemoved forward at a quick trot, General Shafter's pith helmet bobbingbriskly along on ahead. As we passed through our lines there was a smartcheer or two from the men, and at one point a band was banging away at animble Sousa quickstep as we trotted by. We were now on what had been the debatable ground, as much the enemy'sas ours, and had not gone far before we were suddenly aware of a groupof Spanish horsemen over the hedge of cactus to the left of the road, brightly dressed young fellows wearing the blue linen and red facings ofthe _guarda civile_, who at the sight of us turned and dashed backthrough the fields as though to give news of our approach. Then therewas a freshly macheted opening in the hedge; the column turned in, advanced parallel with the road some hundred yards through a field ofstanding grass and at last halted. At once the place was alive with Spanish soldiery. They came forward tomeet us in very brave and gay attire. First a corps of trumpeterssounded a pretty trumpet march. They blew defiantly, did these Spanishtrumpeters, and as loudly as ever they could, just to show us that theywere not afraid--that they did not care, not they, pooh! After thesecame a small detachment of _guarda_, with arms, who watched the Yankeesoldiers with bovine intentness while they came to a halt and orderedarms in front of our position. Toral, the defeated General, came next. Suddenly it had become veryquiet. The trumpeters had ceased blowing, and the rattling accoutrementsof the moving troops had fallen still with the halt. The beaten Generalcame out into the open space ahead of his staff, and General Shafterrode out to meet him, and they both removed their hats. I cast a quick glance around the scene, at the Spaniards in their bluelinen uniforms, the red and lacquer of the _guarda civile_, the orderedMausers, the trumpeters resting their trumpets on their hips, at our ownarray, McKibben in his black shirt, Ludlow in his white leggings, andthe rank and file of the escort, the bronzed, blue-trousered troopers, erect and motionless upon their mounts. It was war, and it wasmagnificent, seen there under the flash of a tropic sun with all thatwelter of green to set it off, and there was a bigness about it so thatto be there seeing it at all, and, in a way, part of it, made you feelthat for that moment you were living larger and stronger than everbefore. It was Appomattox again, and Mexico and Yorktown. Tomorrownearly a hundred million people the world round would read of thisscene, and as many more, yet unborn, would read of it, but today youcould sit in your saddle on the back of your little white bronco andview it as easily as a play. Toral rode forward toward Shafter and, as I say, both uncovered. Toralwas well-looking, his face rather red from the sun and half hidden by afine gray mustache. He was a little bald and his forehead was high andround. As the two Generals shook hands it was so still that the noise ofa man chopping wood in our lines nearly half a mile away was plainlyaudible. Immediately at their backs the staffs of the two watched. Theescort watched. Back along the Spanish and the American trenchesthousands of men stood in line and watched; Santiago watched, andWashington, Spain and the United States, the two hemispheres, the OldWorld and the New, paused on that moment, watching. A sentence or twowas spoken in low tones and the Generals replaced their hats and shookhands smilingly. Instantly a great creaking of saddles took place as the men eased theirpositions, and conversation began again. The Spanish soldiers filed offthrough a break in the barbed wire fence, the defiant trumpeters playingtheir pretty march-call more defiantly than ever. Introductions were the order of the next few moments, Shafterintroducing all his major and brigadier-generals to Toral. MeanwhileSpanish soldiers were defiling past us along the road going toward ourlines, and without arms. There was no rancor or bitterness in theexpression of these men. They evinced mostly an abnormal curiosity inobserving the cavalrymen who formed our escort, and the cavalry repaidit in kind. The soldiers on both sides wanted to know just what mannerof men they had been fighting these last few weeks. I, myself, became lost in the fascination of these silent-shod soldiers(for they wear a kind of tennis shoe) filing off at their rapid marchinggait. We noted that most of them were young, jolly, ratherinnocent-looking fellows, and we looked especially for officers, studying them and watching to see how "they took it. " One fellow led avery fat cow, with his knapsack and impedimenta bound to her horns. They had nearly gone by and the end of their pack-train of littledonkeys was already in sight when a general movement of our escort mademe gather up the reins. The head of our column was just descending intothe road, going on at a trot. The ride into the city was beginning. Shall I ever forget that ride? We rode three abreast, always at a rapidtrot and sometimes even at a canter, the General himself always settingthe pace. Just after leaving the field where the surrender had takenplace the road broadened still more until it became a veritable highway, the broadest and best we had ever seen in Cuba, but disfigured here andthere with the dead horses of officers, the saddle and headstall stillon the carcass. The city was in plain sight now, but its aspect, withwhich we had become so familiar, was changing with every hundred yards. At the junction of the Caney road a block house was passed with itsusual trench and trocha, strong enough against infantry, as we all knewby now. This one was of unusual strength and we would have given it moreserious attention had not our eyes been smitten with the sight of averitable marvel. It might have been the white swan of Lohengrin thereon the stony margin of the road, or the green dragon of Whantley, or theHolland submarine torpedo boat; but it was none of these. It was acarriage--a carriage. I say it was a carriage, a hack, with girls in white muslin frocks init, the driver lounging on the box and two miserable horses dozing inthe harness. I suppose it would be quite impossible to make a readerunderstand how incongruous this apparition seemed to us. It was in use, no doubt, carrying refugees from Caney back into the city and itspresence was easily accounted for. But Mr. Kipling's phantom rickshawcould hardly have produced a greater sensation. "A carriage!" "Say, will you look at that!" "Well, for God's sake!" "Damned if it isn't a carriage!" "Say, Jim, look at the carriage!" "It is a carriage for a fact--well, of all the things!" "Well, that get's me--a carriage!" It was among the troopers of the escort that the carriage had thegreatest success. They chuckled over it as if it had some hidden, mirthful significance. They addressed strange allusions to the loungingdriver, and when they had ridden by they turned in their saddles andwatched it out of sight at the risk of breaking their necks. They rodethe sprucer for it; they were in better spirits for it. They laughed, they talked, they went at a faster pace, they cocked their hats, theywere gay, they were debonair. They had seen a carriage! And now we were close up. Here was the hospital on the very outskirts, with its plethora of Red Cross flags. It was a hospital, after all, andnot a barracks, as we had said, studying it through our field glassesduring the last week, for blanketed and beflanneled objects, hollow-eyed, with bandaged heads, crowded silently at the grated windowsstaring at us galloping past. Here was an abandoned trench, andhere--steady all, pull down to a walk--here is the barbed wireentanglement we have heard so much about. Formidable enough, surely;three lines of posts right across the road with barbed wire interwoven. A rabbit could not have passed here; and back of it trenches and riflepits; nothing but artillery could have forced these lines. What fools tohave abandoned them--well. We passed through the gap single file and gingerly, then forward againat a hard gallop, clattering rough-shod over paved streets, for now atlast we were in the city of Santiago. Soldiers without arms, refugees, the men in brown derby hats--Cubans, negroes, dark women with black lace upon their heads, and childrenabsolutely naked, watched us very silently from the sidewalks and frombalconies. The houses were of adobe, painted pale blue and pink, androofed with rugged lichen-blackened tiles. The windows reached fromsidewalk to roof and were grated heavily, the doors oak and clenchedwith great nail heads. Santiago, Santiago at last, after so many days ofsailing, of marching, of countermarching, and of fighting. Here we were in the city at last, riding in, hoofs clattering, sabresrattling, saddles creaking, and suddenly a great wave of exultation cameover us all. I know the General felt it. I know the last trooper of theescort felt it. There was no thought of humanitarian principles then. The war was not a "crusade, " we were not fighting for Cubans just then, it was not for disinterested motives that we were there sabred andrevolvered and carbined. Santiago was ours--was ours, ours, by the swordwe had acquired, we, Americans, with no one to help--and the Anglo-Saxonblood of us, the blood of the race that has fought its way out of aswamp in Friesland, conquering and conquering and conquering, on to thewestward, the race whose blood instinct is the acquiring of land, wentgalloping through our veins to the beat of our horses' hoofs. Every trooper that day looked down from his saddle upon Cuban andSpanish soldier as from a throne. Even though not a soldier, it wasimpossible not to know their feeling, glorying, arrogant, the fine, brutal arrogance of the Anglo-Saxon, and we rode on there at a gallopthrough the crowded streets of the fallen city, heads high, sabresclattering, a thousand iron hoofs beating out a long roll--triumphant, arrogant conquerors. At the Plaza we halted and dismounted. The Cathedral was here, the Cubanand Spanish clubs and the Governor's Palace, a rather unimposing affairall on one floor, with the architectural magnificence of a railwaystation of the French provinces. The General and the generals went inand crowded the hall of audience, very clinquant with its black andwhite floor, glass chandeliers, long mirrors and single gilded centertable. Here for an hour deputations were received. The Chief of Police, Leonardo Ras y Rodriguez, the ex-Governor, and last of all and mostimposing, Monsignor Francisco Saenz de Urturi, the Archbishop, in hisrobes, purple cap and gold chain, followed by his suite. Him, GeneralShafter, came forward to meet, and the two shook hands under the tawdrychandelier. It was a strange enough sight. By many and devious andbloody ways had the priest and the soldier come to meet each other onthat day. But it was drawing toward noon. I went out into the Plaza again. Thetroops were already forming a line of cavalry that stretched along thestreet immediately before the Governor's Palace, and two companies ofthe Ninth Infantry and the band occupied the center where the littlepark is. I went across the Plaza and stood on the terrace in front ofthe main doors of the Cathedral. Directly opposite was the Governor'sPalace, the naked flagstaff on the roof over the door standing out leanand stark against the background of green hills. The sidewalks and streets outside the lines of soldiers were crowdedwith an even mixture of civilians and disarmed Spanish soldiers. TheSpanish Club on the left was suddenly closed, but the balconies of theSan Carlos--the Cuban Club--were filled with black-bearded, volublegentlemen in white ducks and straw hats. Every window in the "hotel" wasoccupied, each one of the little balconies of the Cafe Venus had itsgathering, while the terrace of the Cathedral was packed close. Therewere perhaps five thousand in the Plaza de Armas of Santiago on thatseventeenth day of July. At five minutes of the noon hour everything fell quiet. CaptainMcKittrick and Lieutenant Miley had appeared on the roof of the Palaceby the flagstaff. Unfortunately there was not a breath of wind. Theminutes passed, two, three, four. The silence was profound, nobodyspoke. In all those five thousand people there was scarcely a movement. Then back of us from the direction of the Cathedral's clock tower therecame a slow wheezing as of the expansion of decrepit lungs, a creakingand jarring of springs and cog-wheels that grew rapidly louder till itculminated abruptly in a single sonorous stroke. At once CaptainMcKittrick laid his hand to the halyards of the flagstaff, a bundle ofbunting rose in the air, shapeless and without definite color. Butsuddenly, wonderful enough, there came a breeze, a brisk spurt out ofthe north. The bunting caught it, twisted upon itself, tumbled, writhed, then suddenly shook itself free, and in a single long billow rolled outinto the Stars and Stripes of Old Glory. "Pre-sent h' ar-r-r!" That was from the square, and in answer to the order came theKrag-Jorgensons leaping to the fists and the cavalry sabres swishing andflashing out into the sunlight. Then the band: "Oh, say, can you see--" while far off on the hills fromour intrenchments Capron's battery began to thunder the salute. The moment was perhaps the most intense of the whole campaign. There wasno cheering and that was the best of it. It is hard to understand this, but the occasion was too big for mere shouting, and infinitely toosolemn. I have heard the "Miserere" in the Sistine Chapel, and incomparison with the raising of the flag over the city of Santiago it wasopera comique. For perhaps a full minute we stood with bared heads reverently watchingthe great flag as it strained in the breeze that, curiously enough, wasnow steady and strong, watching it as it strained and stiffened and grewout broader and broader over the conquered city till you believed theglory of it and the splendor and radiance of it must go flashing offthere over those leagues of tumbling water till it blazed like a cometover Madrid itself. And the great names came to the mind again--Lexington, Trenton, Yorktown, 1812, Chapultepec, Mexico, Shiloh, Gettysburg, the Wilderness, Appomattox, and now--Guasima, San Juan, El Caney, Santiago. PUBLISHED FOR THE BENEFIT OF THE RED CROSS FUNDS The Surrender of Santiago, a thrilling account of an historic event, wasgraphically set down by the late Frank Morris, and first published byOtis F. Wood, in the Sun, New York, through whose courtesy it is nowreprinted in booklet form. Issued by Paul Elder & Company at theirTomoye Press, under the direction of Ricardo J. Orozco, in May, nineteenseventeen.