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.
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