They seemed endless, interminable; there
were cavalry mounted and dismounted, artillery with cracking whips
and cursing drivers, Rough Riders in brown, and regulars, both black
and white, in blue.
Midnight came, and they were still stumbling and
slipping forward.
General Sumner's head-quarters tent was pitched to the right of El
Poso hill. Below us lay the basin a mile and a half in length, and a
mile and a half wide, from which a white mist was rising. Near us,
drowned under the mist, seven thousand men were sleeping, and,
farther to the right, General Chaffee's five thousand were lying
under the bushes along the trails to El Caney, waiting to march on it
and eat it up before breakfast.
The place hardly needs a map to explain it. The trails were like a
pitchfork, with its prongs touching the hills of San Juan. The long
handle of the pitchfork was the trail over which we had just come,
the joining of the handle and the prongs were El Poso. El Caney lay
half-way along the right prong, the left one was the trail down
which, in the morning, the troops were to be hurled upon San Juan.
It was as yet an utterly undiscovered country. Three miles away,
across the basin of mist, we could see the street lamps of Santiago
shining over the San Juan hills. Above us, the tropical moon hung
white and clear in the dark purple sky, pierced with millions of
white stars. As we turned in, there was just a little something in
the air which made saying "good-night" a gentle farce, for no one
went to sleep immediately, but lay looking up at the stars, and after
a long silence, and much restless turning on the blanket which we
shared together, the second lieutenant said: "So, if anything
happens to me, to-morrow, you'll see she gets them, won't you?"
Before the moon rose again, every sixth man who had slept in the mist
that night was either killed or wounded; but the second lieutenant
was sitting on the edge of a Spanish rifle-pit, dirty, sweaty, and
weak for food, but victorious, and the unknown she did not get them.
El Caney had not yet thrown off her blanket of mist before Capron's
battery opened on it from a ridge two miles in the rear. The plan
for the day was that El Caney should fall in an hour. The plan for
the day is interesting chiefly because it is so different from what
happened. According to the plan the army was to advance in two
divisions along the two trails. Incidentally, General Lawton's
division was to pick up El Caney, and when El Caney was eliminated,
his division was to continue forward and join hands on the right with
the divisions of General Sumner and General Kent. The army was then
to rest for that night in the woods, half a mile from San Juan.
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