The Roughest Riders (20 page)

The conquest of El Caney took longer than anticipated, and much of the credit for the victory belonged to the black Twenty-Fifth, which launched the major assault on the village that led to its ultimate collapse.

Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division (LC-USZ62-104748)

As the Americans moved closer from all sides, the Spanish kept up a steady attack from the center of the village, the heart of which was the old stone church that sat like a sentinel in the midst of the bloodshed. Despite their mounting losses, the Spaniards refused to submit to the overwhelming tide of American attackers. They held on for the next few hours, until reality overwhelmed them late in the afternoon.

“The action lasted nearly throughout the day, terminating about 4:30 p.m.,” Chaffee wrote in his report. The sheer weight of the numbers against the Spaniards told the final story. Down to the last eighty-four soldiers of the more than five hundred they started with, the Spanish forces collapsed after ten brutal hours of combat.

One of the last to be killed was the general who had inspired his men to rise above their dire circumstances and accomplish the nearly impossible. Rubio was shot through the legs as he fired his gun in the square in front of the church. His men lifted him from his horse and were lowering him onto a stretcher when an American bullet crashed through his head and killed him where he lay. Two of his sons had been lost in action earlier that day. American soldiers buried the Spanish leader with full military honors, praising him as “an incomparable leader; a heroic soul,” whose men had shown “magnificent courage” during the battle for El Caney. Later that year, Rubio's remains were repatriated to Spain, where he received his country's highest military decoration.

As Rubio's life fled from his body, so too did the will to continue flee from the bodies of his men. More than four hundred Spanish soldiers died or were wounded defending El Caney. The survivors escaped past Ludlow's troops and scampered down the road to Santiago. An equal number of Americans were killed or wounded taking the village—which the soldiers soon started calling “Hell Caney”—with the initial successful charge on El Viso spearheaded by the black Twenty-Fifth.

A British officer who witnessed the American assault on El Caney blamed their heavy losses—despite the overwhelming odds on their side—on poor generalship and disorganized planning overall, laying the blame squarely at Shafter's feet. “Is it customary with you to assault blockhouses and rifle pits before they have been searched by artillery?” the Brit asked an American officer.

“Not always,” the officer answered, his embarrassment showing.

The British officer didn't need to point out that in this battle meant to be a speedy prelude to the main action farther south, nearly a tenth of the American troops were badly wounded, killed immediately, or else died later from untreated injuries because of poor medical attention. Adding to the poor showing was the absence of a major part of Shafter's army, who was not able to relieve their comrades at El Caney because they were trying to storm the San Juan Heights. Some of the blame fell on the cautious Lawton, the commanding general in the El Caney operation, but ultimately the buck stopped with the man presiding over the entire war, the bedridden Shafter, hampered by gout and other ailments.

W
ith the battle for El Caney now ended, Lawton decided to rest his men for the night rather than risk more of their lives on a drive southwest toward San Juan over unfamiliar terrain. Instead, he marched them due south, back down the path taken that morning, past Marianage to El Pozo, where they bivouacked overnight. By the time they arrived that evening, Lawton's men were clearly spent, bruised and battered by the rigors of the daylong battle. And even had they headed directly toward San Juan to join the troops fighting there, according to the original plan, it was already too late for them to be of any help to the beleaguered American forces struggling to fight their way up a different set of treacherous hills.

Close to noon on July 1, before Lawton called an end to the ceasefire at El Caney, Roosevelt had deployed the Rough Riders to the right along the San Juan River toward Kettle Hill, hoping that Lawton's men would be heading southwest to their assistance. To his immediate left was Pershing at the head of the Tenth. Roosevelt led his men into a jungle on his right flank as Mauser bullets drove down on them in sheets through the trees, inflicting heavy
casualties. Sumner sent a courier up to Roosevelt's position with instructions to send a search party to make sure the Spanish hadn't planned another ambush for his men. The best Roosevelt could do in the dense foliage was to lead a skirmish line farther into the jungle, taking the lead himself on foot.

His second order from Sumner was to refrain for the time being from firing at the enemy, since Pershing and the Tenth were in the process of advancing ahead of him through more open terrain and he didn't want the Rough Riders putting them in their line of fire. Roosevelt smoldered again at being relegated to reserve status, but he had no option except to follow orders as he waited for an opportunity to engage the Spaniards at closer range. He sent couriers of his own over to Wood, who was leading his own detachment in the direction of San Juan Hill. Roosevelt's men were tumbling around him, their losses growing by the minute, and he hoped that Wood would be more sympathetic to his plight. While Roosevelt inched his skirmish line through the jungle, he encountered six dark-skinned men wearing ragged uniforms he couldn't identify and that were all but slipping off their backs. They claimed to be Cuban rebels looking to return to their unit. Since they were unarmed and Roosevelt had no way of knowing for sure who they were, he let them disappear back into the jungle in the direction they had come from.

Wood could not spare any men to send to Roosevelt's assistance, and neither could Kent at the head of the Twenty-Fourth, or any of the other officers with orders to climb the Heights toward San Juan Hill. The Rough Riders were in no position to move forward as the rifle fire from the enemy's entrenchments blistered through the trees and savaged their ranks, reducing their numbers alarmingly from the more than five hundred they started with. All the men
across the entire American front were pinned down by enemy fire, with the Spaniards mostly hidden from view through the heavy foliage. Roosevelt grew desperate to take more aggressive action before his troops were completely slaughtered as they groped through the brush blindly, unable to respond effectively. Neither Kettle Hill nor San Juan Hill could be clearly seen through the trees. Confusion reigned supreme as the casualties mounted, still with no definitive orders from Shafter on how to proceed.

Kent's men were in dire straits themselves, with Spanish bullets and shells ripping through their ranks. The white troops in front of them refused to push ahead, so Kent ordered them to step aside and let his men pass through. “For the love of country, liberty, honor, and dignity,” Kent pleaded with tears running down his cheeks, “stand up like men and fight, go to the front!” Still, they would not move; some actually tried to head back the other way down the trail, out of the range of enemy fire.

So Kent rushed past them, leading his men in a mad fury in the direction of San Juan Hill. They stormed forward past “the prostrated bodies of the bewildered and stampeded Seventy-First,” wrote Herschel V. Cashin. They rushed wildly across “an open field, attracting the attention of the entire Spanish line, and drawing their concentrated fire.” Their own losses mounted heavily. Kent feared that they had entered a circle of fire, with Spanish guerrillas behind them as well as defenders bombarding them from the hills. But he was in no better position to observe the terrain behind his men than he was to see what faced them on the hill.

“At times I became melancholy and apprehensive as to my fate,” J. W. Galaway, a soldier with the Twenty-Fourth, wrote later, “but it was not from fear, but suspense.” The Twenty-Fourth continued along the route between the Aguadores and San Juan Rivers under heavy, unceasing fire, then Kent ordered some of his men to veer left onto the footpath that the observers in the balloon had spotted. The
footpath had not been visible to the soldiers on the ground, but the Spanish were well aware of its existence and the alternative route it provided to their defenses on San Juan. They unleashed a torrent of fire along the trail, killing and wounding many of the men who had followed it, including four officers. Those who had not been hit by enemy bullets continued to inch ahead through the line of fire.

To their right, Pershing's Tenth faced a similar situation. Sergeant Horace Bivins, who was in charge of the Hotchkiss guns with the unit, said later that they had to stop innumerable times because of bloody mudholes caused mostly by the injured men, and because of other obstacles on the trail. Looking through his field glasses, he saw so much wild game fleeing in terror that he “did not know where to direct [his] first shot.” When he finally did fire toward San Juan Hill, the puffs of black smoke from his guns attracted so much fire from Spanish marksmen that a few men went down around him immediately. Bivins was also hit by a Mauser bullet, which knocked him unconscious for a few minutes. He recovered quickly and got up to continue the assault.

The heat and humidity rapidly became another formidable obstacle bearing down on the American troops. Some stopped to slice their trousers off at the knees, exposing their legs to a wide assortment of biting insects and thorny underbrush. The heavy uniforms chafed their skin, raising red rashes from prickly heat, prompting the men to discard more clothing on the sides of the trails. As they plodded through the chaparral, they reached a point where the San Juan River continued north and the Aguadores River forked to the east and flowed north of El Pozo. Roosevelt abandoned all hope of getting help from Wood or Kent and of hooking up with Lawton heading down the trail from El Caney, so he drove his men forward toward Kettle Hill as best he could in the face of the heavy enemy gunfire.

The Rough Riders came to a halt in the jungle as they waited for further orders from Sumner, Wood, or Shafter. Enemy fire roared in
on them from three locations—San Juan Hill, the Heights, and Kettle Hill—yet they were still under orders from Sumner to hold their fire until Pershing and the Tenth had taken their own advanced positions to their left. The Americans now formed two broken lines as they inched ahead toward the Spanish emplacements. The first, composed mostly of black troops, had approached a meadow on the west side of the San Juan River. Wood's men were behind them spread across both banks of the river, and the Rough Riders were farther to the north facing Kettle Hill. Pershing's Tenth was also ordered to hold its fire once they were in place until new orders were received from Shafter's camp. All of them were more than ready to continue the assault, but still no orders arrived.

Roosevelt decided to pull his men back to the river where they could find some protection behind the western bank. Besides the lethal fire from the hills, Spanish snipers were hidden in the trees shooting the hell out of his men. His blood was boiling, driving him into a rage.

“Boys, this is the day we have trained for!” he yelled to his troops. “You know you are being watched by the regulars. Don't forget you are a Rough Rider!”

Roosevelt was down to about fifty troops now, a tenth of what he had at the onset of hostilities. He panicked that his Rough Riders would be totally wiped out unless he took some drastic action to alleviate the situation. The clatter and din of war rattled the men's eardrums as Spanish shells roared in and Mauser bullets zipped through the grass and leaves.

Indeed, enemy fire put not just men but their animals in danger as well. Horses made tempting targets for Spanish sharpshooters, as many of them reared up on their hind legs in fear, presenting themselves as larger and more visible targets than the men did. Some threw off their riders, and other cavalrymen dismounted, preferring to take their chances on foot. Roosevelt's horse, Texas,
was tethered to a tree nearby, and the future president feared he would be hit by incoming fire, yet his mount stood there neighing nervously and was unharmed through the carnage.

Stephen Crane reported later that the entire battlefield was roaring like a brushfire on the prairie, having observed the action himself through field glasses as he stood in the open. Richard Harding Davis told him impatiently to stop showboating and tempting fate and to look for some protection behind a tree.

Beyond the jungle growth, the chaparral, and the denser foliage lay an open meadow with grass and plants that ran up to the foothills of San Juan and Kettle Hills. The Americans halted at the edge of it, waiting for an opportunity to storm up the slopes. To Roosevelt's left, Pershing's Tenth opened up a round of fire in the direction of San Juan Hill, although their view of the Spanish emplacements was still obstructed. Roosevelt wanted to support them with his own men, but as he turned to one of his aides, Lieutenant Ernest Haskell, on leave from West Point, the lieutenant's body stiffened as he froze in place without crying out. The leader of the Rough Riders could see that Haskell had been shot in the stomach by a Mauser bullet.