Even Later, When I Saw Battles Fought Among Villages,
Artillery Galloping Through A Cornfield, Garden Walls Breached For
Rifle Fire,
And farm-houses in flames, it always seemed as though the
generals had elected to fight in such surroundings through
An
inexcusable striving after theatrical effect - as though they wished
to furnish the war correspondents with a chance for descriptive
writing. With the horrors of war as horrible as they are without any
aid from these contrasts, their presence always seemed not only
sinful but bad art; as unnecessary as turning a red light on the
dying gladiator.
There are so many places which are scenes set apart for battles -
places that look as though Nature had condemned them for just such
sacrifices. Colenso, with its bare kopjes and great stretch of
veldt, is one of these, and so, also, is Spion Kop, and, in
Manchuria, Nan Shan Hill. The photographs have made all of us
familiar with the vast, desolate approaches to Port Arthur. These
are among the waste places of the earth - barren, deserted, fit
meeting grounds only for men whose object in life for the moment is
to kill men. Were you shown over one of these places, and told, "A
battle was fought here," you would answer, "Why, of course!"
But down in Cuba, outside of Santiago, where the United States army
fought its solitary and modest battle with Spain, you might many
times pass by San Juan Hill and think of it, if you thought of it at
all, as only a pretty site for a bungalow, as a place obviously
intended for orchards and gardens.
On July 1st, twelve years ago, when the American army came upon it
out of the jungle the place wore a partial disguise. It still was an
irregular ridge of smiling, sunny hills with fat, comfortable curves,
and in some places a steep, straight front. But above the steepest,
highest front frowned an aggressive block-house, and on all the
slopes and along the sky-line were rows of yellow trenches, and at
the base a cruel cat's cradle of barbed wire. It was like the face
of a pretty woman behind the bars of a visor. I find that on the day
of the fight twelve years ago I cabled my paper that San Juan Hill
reminded the Americans of "a sunny orchard in New England." That was
how it may have looked when the regulars were climbing up the steep
front to capture the block-house, and when the cavalry and Rough
Riders, having taken Kettle Hill, were running down its opposite
slope, past the lake, to take that crest of San Juan Hill which lies
to the right of the block-house. It may then have looked like a
sunny New England orchard, but before night fell the intrenching
tools had lent those sunny slopes "a fierce and terrible aspect."
And after that, hour after hour, and day after day, we saw the hill
eaten up by our trenches, hidden by a vast laundry of shelter tents,
and torn apart by bomb-proofs, their jutting roofs of logs and broken
branches weighed down by earth and stones and looking like the pit
mouths to many mines. That probably is how most of the American army
last saw San Juan Hill, and that probably is how it best remembers
it - as a fortified camp. That was twelve years ago. When I
revisited it, San Juan Hill was again a sunny, smiling farm land, the
trenches planted with vegetables, the roofs of the bomb-proofs fallen
in and buried beneath creeping vines, and the barbed-wire
entanglements holding in check only the browsing cattle.
San Juan Hill is not a solitary hill, but the most prominent of a
ridge of hills, with Kettle Hill a quarter of a mile away on the edge
of the jungle and separated from the ridge by a tiny lake. In the
local nomenclature Kettle Hill, which is the name given to it by the
Rough Riders, has always been known as San Juan Hill, with an added
name to distinguish it from the other San Juan Hill of greater
renown.
The days we spent on those hills were so rich in incident and
interest and were filled with moments of such excitement, of such
pride in one's fellow-countrymen, of pity for the hurt and dying, of
laughter and good-fellowship, that one supposed he might return after
even twenty years and recognize every detail of the ground. But a
shorter time has made startling and confusing changes. Now a visitor
will find that not until after several different visits, and by
walking and riding foot by foot over the hills, can he make them fall
into line as he thinks he once knew them. Immediately around San
Juan Hill itself there has been some attempt made to preserve the
ground as a public park. A barbed-wire fence, with a gateway,
encircles the block-house, which has been converted into a home for
the caretaker of the park, and then, skirting the road to Santiago to
include the tree under which the surrender was arranged, stretches to
the left of the block-house to protect a monument. This monument was
erected by Americans to commemorate the battle. It is now rapidly
falling to pieces, but there still is enough of it intact to show the
pencilled scribblings and autographs of tourists who did not take
part in the battle, but who in this public manner show that they
approve of its results. The public park is less than a quarter of a
mile square. Except for it no other effort has been made either by
Cubans or Americans to designate the lines that once encircled and
menaced Santiago, and Nature, always at her best under a tropical
sun, has done all in her power to disguise and forever obliterate the
scene of the army's one battle. Those features which still remain
unchanged are very few.
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