When last I visited it,
Carlos Portuondo was the official guardian of San Juan Hill. He is
an aged Cuban, and he fought through the Ten Years' War, but during
the last insurrection and the Spanish-American War he not only was
not near San Juan, but was not even on the Island of Cuba. He is a
charming old person, and so is his aged wife. Their chief concern in
life, when I saw them, was to sell me a pair of breeches made of
palm-fibre which Carlos had worn throughout the entire ten years of
battle. The vicissitudes of those trousers he recited to me in great
detail, and he very properly regarded them as of historic value. But
of what happened at San Juan he knew nothing, and when I asked him
why he held his present post and occupied the Block-House, he said,
"To keep the cows out of the park." When I asked him where the
Americans had camped, he pointed carefully from the back door of the
Block-House to the foot of his kitchen-garden. I assured him that
under no stress of terror could the entire American army have been
driven into his back yard, and pointed out where it had stretched
along the ridge of hills for five miles. He politely but
unmistakably showed that he thought I was a liar. From the Venus
Hotel there were two guides, old Casanova and Jean Casanova, his
languid and good-natured son, a youth of sixteen years. Old
Casanova, like most Cubans, is not inclined to give much credit for
what they did in Cuba to the Americans. After all, he says, they
came only just as the Cubans themselves were about to conquer the
Spaniards, and by a lucky chance received the surrender and then
claimed all the credit. As other Cubans told me, "Had the Americans
left us alone a few weeks longer, we would have ended the war." How
they were to have taken Havana, and sunk Cervera's fleet, and why
they were not among those present when our men charged San Juan, I
did not inquire. Old Casanova, again like other Cubans, ranks the
fighting qualities of the Spaniard much higher than those of the
American. This is only human. It must be annoying to a Cuban to
remember that after he had for three years fought the Spaniard, the
Yankee in eight weeks received his surrender and began to ship him
home. The way Casanova describes the fight at El Caney is as
follows:
"The Americans thought they could capture El Caney in one day, but
the brave General Toral fought so good that it was six days before
the Americans could make the Spaniards surrender." The statement is
correct except as regards the length of time during which the fight
lasted. The Americans did make the mistake of thinking they could
eat up El Caney in an hour and then march through it to San Juan.
Owing to the splendid courage of Toral and his few troops our
soldiers, under two of our best generals, were held in check from
seven in the morning until two in the afternoon. But the difference
between seven hours of one day and six days is considerable. Still,
at present at San Juan that is the sort of information upon which the
patriotic and puzzled American tourist is fed.
Young Casanova, the only other authority in Santiago, is not so sure
of his facts as is his father, and is willing to learn. He went with
me to hold my pony while I took the photographs that accompany this
article, and I listened with great interest to his accounts of the
battle. Finally he made a statement that was correct. "How did you
happen to get that right?" I asked.
"Yesterday," he said, "I guided Colonel Hayes here, and while I
guided him he explained it to me."
THE SOUTH AFRICAN WAR
I - WITH BULLER'S COLUMN
"Were you the station-master here before this?" I asked the man in
the straw hat, at Colenso. "I mean before this war?"
"No fear!" snorted the station-master, scornfully. "Why, we didn't
know Colenso was on the line until Buller fought a battle here.
That's how it is with all these way-stations now. Everybody's
talking about them. We never took no notice to them."
And yet the arriving stranger might have been forgiven his point of
view and his start of surprise when he found Chieveley a place of
only a half dozen corrugated zinc huts, and Colenso a scattered
gathering of a dozen shattered houses of battered brick.
Chieveley seemed so insignificant in contrast with its fame to those
who had followed the war on maps and in the newspapers, that one was
not sure he was on the right road until he saw from the car-window
the armored train still lying on the embankment, the graves beside
it, and the donga into which Winston Churchill pulled and carried the
wounded.
And as the train bumped and halted before the blue and white enamel
sign that marks Colenso station, the places which have made that spot
familiar and momentous fell into line like the buoys which mark the
entrance to a harbor.
We knew that the high bare ridge to the right must be Fort Wylie,
that the plain on the left was where Colonel Long had lost his
artillery, and three officers gained the Victoria Cross, and that the
swift, muddy stream, in which the iron railroad bridge lay humped and
sprawling, was the Tugela River.
