Cuba in War Time
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Richard Harding Davis >> Cuba in War Time
On the whole, the Spanish soldiers during this war in Cuba have
contributed little to the information of those who are interested in
military science. The tactics which the officers follow are those which
were found effective at the battle of Waterloo, and in the Peninsular
campaign. When attacked from an ambush a Spanish column forms at once
into a hollow square, with the cavalry in the centre, and the firing is
done in platoons. They know nothing of "open order," or of firing in
skirmish line. If the Cubans were only a little better marksmen than
their enemies they should, with such a target as a square furnishes
them, kill about ten men where they now wound one.
With the war conducted under the conditions described here, there does
not seem to be much promise of its coming to any immediate end unless
some power will interfere. The Spaniards will probably continue to
remain inside their forts, and the officers will continue to pay
themselves well out of the rebellion.
And, on the other hand, the insurgents who call themselves rich when
they have three cartridges, as opposed to the one hundred and fifty
cartridges that every Spanish soldier carries, will probably very
wisely continue to refuse to force the issue in any one battle.
[Illustration: *Fire and sword in Cuba]
The Fate Of The Pacificos
As is already well known in the United States, General Weyler issued an
order some months ago commanding the country people living in the
provinces of Pinar del Rio, Havana and Matanzas to betake themselves
with their belongings to the fortified towns. His object in doing this
was to prevent the pacificos from giving help to the insurgents, and
from sheltering them and the wounded in their huts. So flying columns
of guerrillas and Spanish soldiers were sent to burn these huts, and to
drive the inhabitants into the suburbs of the cities. When I arrived in
Cuba sufficient time had passed for me to note the effects of this
order, and to study the results as they are to be found in the
provinces of Havana, Matanzas and Santa Clara, the order having been
extended to embrace the latter province.
It looked then as though General Weyler was reaping what he had sown,
and was face to face with a problem of his own creating. As far as a
visitor could judge, the results of this famous order seemed to furnish
a better argument to those who think the United States should interfere
in behalf of Cuba, than did the fact that men were being killed there,
and that both sides were devastating the island and wrecking property
worth millions of dollars.
The order, apart from being unprecedented in warfare, proved an
exceedingly short-sighted one, and acted almost immediately after the
manner of a boomerang. The able-bodied men of each family who had
remained loyal or at least neutral, so long as they were permitted to
live undisturbed on their few acres, were not content to exist on the
charity of a city, and they swarmed over to the insurgent ranks by the
hundreds, and it was only the old and infirm and the women and children
who went into the towns, where they at once became a burden on the
Spanish residents, who were already distressed by the lack of trade and
the high prices asked for food.
The order failed also in its original object of embarrassing the
insurgents, for they are used to living out of doors and to finding
food for themselves, and the destruction of the huts where they had
been made welcome was not a great loss to men who, in a few minutes,
with the aid of a machete, can construct a shelter from a palm tree.
So the order failed to distress those against whom it was aimed, but
brought swift and terrible suffering to those who were and are
absolutely innocent of any intent against the government, as well as to
the adherents of the government.
It is easy to imagine what happened when hundreds of people, in some
towns thousands, were herded together on the bare ground, with no food,
with no knowledge of sanitation, with no covering for their heads but
palm leaves, with no privacy for the women and young girls, with no
thought but as to how they could live until to-morrow.
It is true that in the country, also, these people had no covering for
their huts but palm leaves, but those huts were made stoutly to endure.
When a man built one of them he was building his home, not a shelter
tent, and they were placed well apart from one another, with the free
air of the plain or mountain blowing about them, with room for the sun
to beat down and drink up the impurities, and with patches of green
things growing in rows over the few acres. I have seen them like that
all over Cuba, and I am sure that no disease could have sprung from
houses built so admirably to admit the sun and the air.
I have also seen them, I might add in parenthesis, rising in sluggish
columns of black smoke against the sky, hundreds of them, while those
who had lived in them for years stood huddled together at a distance,
watching the flames run over the dry rafters of their homes, roaring
and crackling with delight, like something human or inhuman, and
marring the beautiful sunlit landscape with great blotches of red
flames.
The huts in which these people live at present lean one against the
other, and there are no broad roads nor green tobacco patches to
separate one from another. There are, on the contrary, only narrow
paths, two feet wide, where dogs and cattle and human beings tramp over
daily growing heaps of refuse and garbage and filth, and where malaria
rises at night in a white winding sheet of poisonous mist.
The condition of these people differs in degree; some are living the
life of gypsies, others are as destitute as so many shipwrecked
emigrants, and still others find it difficult to hold up their heads
and breathe.
[Illustration: A Spanish Guerrilla]
In Jaruco, in the Havana province, a town of only two thousand
inhabitants, the deaths from small-pox averaged seven a day for the
month of December, and while Frederic Remington and I were there, six
victims of small-pox were carried past us up the hill to the burying
ground in the space of twelve hours. There were Spanish soldiers as
well as pacificos among these, for the Spanish officers either know or
care nothing about the health of their men.
There is no attempt made to police these military camps, and in Jaruco
the filth covered the streets and the plaza ankle-deep, and even filled
the corners of the church which had been turned into a fort, and had
hammocks swung from the altars. The huts of the pacificos, with from
four to six people in each, were jammed together in rows a quarter of a
mile long, within ten feet of the cavalry barracks, where sixty men and
horses had lived for a month. Next to the stables were the barracks. No
one was vaccinated, no one was clean, and all of them were living on
half rations.
Jaruco was a little worse than the other towns, but I found that the
condition of the people is about the same everywhere. Around every town
and even around the forts outside of the towns, you will see from one
hundred to five hundred of these palm huts, with the people crouched
about them, covered with rags, starving, with no chance to obtain work.
In the city of Matanzas the huts have been built upon a hill, and so
far neither small-pox nor yellow fever has made headway there; but
there is nothing for these people to eat, either, and while I was there
three babies died from plain, old-fashioned starvation and no other
cause.
The government's report for the year just ended gives the number of
deaths in three hospitals of Matanzas as three hundred and eighty for
the year, which is an average of a little over one death a day. As a
matter of fact, in the military hospital alone the soldiers during
several months of last year died at the rate of sixteen a day. It seems
hard that Spain should hold Cuba at such a sacrifice of her own people.
In Cardenas, one of the principal seaport towns of the island, I found
the pacificos lodged in huts at the back of the town and also in
abandoned warehouses along the water front. The condition of these
latter was so pitiable that it is difficult to describe it correctly
and hope to be believed.
The warehouses are built on wooden posts about fifty feet from the
water's edge. They were originally nearly as large in extent as Madison
Square Garden, but the half of the roof of one has fallen in, carrying
the flooring with it, and the adobe walls and one side of the sloping
roof and the high wooden piles on which half of the floor once rested
are all that remain.
Some time ago an unusually high tide swept in under one of these
warehouses and left a pool of water a hundred yards long and as many
wide, around the wooden posts, and it has remained there undisturbed.
This pool is now covered a half-inch thick with green slime, colored
blue and yellow, and with a damp fungus spread over the wooden posts
and up the sides of the walls.
Over this sewage are now living three hundred women and children and a
few men. The floor beneath them has rotted away, and the planks have
broken and fallen into the pool, leaving big gaps, through which rise
day and night deadly stenches and poisonous exhalations from the pool
below.
The people above it are not ignorant of their situation. They know that
they are living over a death-trap, but there is no other place for
them. Bands of guerrillas and flying columns have driven them in like
sheep to this city, and, with no money and no chance to obtain work,
they have taken shelter in the only place that is left open to them.
With planks and blankets and bits of old sheet iron they have, for the
sake of decency, put up barriers across these abandoned warehouses, and
there they are now sitting on the floor or stretched on heaps of rags,
gaunt and hollow-eyed. Outside, in the angles of the fallen walls, and
among the refuse of the warehouses, they have built fireplaces, and,
with the few pots and kettles they use in common, they cook what food
the children can find or beg.
One gentleman of Cardenas told me that a hundred of these people called
at his house every day for a bit of food.
Old negroes and little white children, some of them as beautiful, in
spite of their rags, as any children I ever saw, act as providers for
this hapless colony. They beg the food and gather the sticks and do the
cooking. Inside the old women and young mothers sit on the rotten
planks listless and silent, staring ahead of them at nothing.
I saw the survivors of the Johnstown flood when the horror of that
disaster was still plainly written in their eyes, but destitute as they
were of home and food and clothing, they were in better plight than
those fever-stricken, starving pacificos, who have sinned in no way,
who have given no aid to the rebels, and whose only crime is that they
lived in the country instead of in the town. They are now to suffer
because General Weyler, finding that he cannot hold the country as he
can the towns, lays it waste and treats those who lived there with less
consideration than the Sultan of Morocco shows to the murderers in his
jail at Tangier. Had these people been guilty of the most unnatural
crimes, their punishment could not have been more severe nor their end
more certain.
[Illustration: Murdering the Cuban Wounded]
I found the hospital for this colony behind three blankets which had
been hung across a corner of the warehouse. A young woman and a man
were lying side by side, the girl on a cot and the man on the floor.
The others sat within a few feet of them on the other side of the
blankets, apparently lost to all sense of their danger, and too
dejected and hopeless to even raise their eyes when I gave them money.
A fat little doctor was caring for the sick woman, and he pointed
through the cracks in the floor at the green slime below us, and held
his fingers to his nose and shrugged his shoulders. I asked him what
ailed his patients, and he said it was yellow fever, and pointed again
at the slime, which moved and bubbled in the hot sun.
He showed me babies with the skin drawn so tightly over their little
bodies that the bones showed through as plainly as the rings under a
glove. They were covered with sores, and they protested as loudly as
they could against the treatment which the world was giving them,
clinching their fists and sobbing with pain when the sore places came
in contact with their mothers' arms. A planter who had at one time
employed a large number of these people, and who was moving about among
them, said that five hundred had died in Cardenas since the order to
leave the fields had been issued. Another gentleman told me that in the
huts at the back of the town there had been twenty-five cases of
small-pox in one week, of which seventeen had resulted in death.
I do not know that the United States will interfere in the affairs of
Cuba, but whatever may happen later, this is what is likely to happen
now, and it should have some weight in helping to decide the question
with those whose proper business it is to determine it.
Thousands of human beings are now herded together around the seaport
towns of Cuba who cannot be fed, who have no knowledge of cleanliness
or sanitation, who have no doctors to care for them and who cannot care
for themselves.
Many of them are dying of sickness and some of starvation, and this is
the healthy season. In April and May the rains will come, and the fever
will thrive and spread, and cholera, yellow fever and small-pox will
turn Cuba into one huge plague spot, and the farmers' sons whom Spain
has sent over here to be soldiers, and who are dying by the dozens
before they have learned to pull the comb off a bunch of cartridges,
are going to die by the hundreds, and women and children who are
innocent of any offense will die with them, and there will be a
quarantine against Cuba, and no vessel can come into her ports or leave
them.
All this is going to happen, I am led to believe, not from what I saw
in any one village, but in hundreds of villages. It will not do to put
it aside by saying that "War is war," and that "All war is cruel," or
to ask, "Am I my brother's keeper?"
In other wars men have fought with men, and women have suffered
indirectly because the men were killed, but in this war it is the
women, herded together in the towns like cattle, who are going to die,
while the men, camped in the fields and the mountains, will live.
It is a situation which charity might help to better, but in any event
it is a condition which deserves the most serious consideration from
men of common sense and judgment, and one not to be treated with
hysterical head lines nor put aside as a necessary evil of war.
[Illustration: Bringing in the Wounded]
The Death Of Rodriguez
Adolfo Rodriguez was the only son of a Cuban farmer, who lives nine
miles outside of Santa Clara, beyond the hills that surround that city
to the north.
When the revolution broke out young Rodriguez joined the insurgents,
leaving his father and mother and two sisters at the farm. He was
taken, in December of 1896, by a force of the Guardia Civile, the corps
d'elite of the Spanish army, and defended himself when they tried to
capture him, wounding three of them with his machete.
He was tried by a military court for bearing arms against the
government, and sentenced to be shot by a fusillade some morning,
before sunrise.
Previous to execution, he was confined in the military prison of Santa
Clara, with thirty other insurgents, all of whom were sentenced to be
shot, one after the other, on mornings following the execution of
Rodriguez.
His execution took place the morning of the 19th of January, at a place
a half-mile distant from the city, on the great plain that stretches
from the forts out to the hills, beyond which Rodriguez had lived for
nineteen years. At the time of his death he was twenty years old.
I witnessed his execution, and what follows is an account of the way he
went to death. The young man's friends could not be present, for it was
impossible for them to show themselves in that crowd and that place
with wisdom or without distress, and I like to think that, although
Rodriguez could not know it, there was one person present when he died
who felt keenly for him, and who was a sympathetic though unwilling
spectator.
There had been a full moon the night preceding the execution, and when
the squad of soldiers marched out from town it was still shining
brightly through the mists, although it was past five o'clock. It
lighted a plain two miles in extent broken by ridges and gullies and
covered with thick, high grass and with bunches of cactus and palmetto.
In the hollow of the ridges the mist lay like broad lakes of water, and
on one side of the plain stood the walls of the old town. On the other
rose hills covered with royal palms that showed white in the moonlight,
like hundreds of marble columns. A line of tiny camp fires that the
sentries had built during the night stretched between the forts at
regular intervals and burned brightly.
But as the light grew stronger, and the moonlight faded, these were
stamped out, and when the soldiers came in force the moon was a white
ball in the sky, without radiance, the fires had sunk to ashes, and the
sun had not yet risen.
So, even when the men were formed into three sides of a hollow square,
they were scarcely able to distinguish one another in the uncertain
light of the morning.
There were about three hundred soldiers in the formation. They belonged
to the Volunteers, and they deployed upon the plain with their band in
front, playing a jaunty quickstep, while their officers galloped from
one side to the other through the grass, seeking out a suitable place
for the execution, while the band outside the line still played
merrily.
A few men and boys, who had been dragged out of their beds by the
music, moved about the ridges, behind the soldiers, half-clothed,
unshaven, sleepy-eyed, yawning and stretching themselves nervously and
shivering in the cool, damp air of the morning.
Either owing to discipline or on account of the nature of their errand
or because the men were still but half awake, there was no talking in
the ranks, and the soldiers stood motionless, leaning on their rifles,
with their backs turned to the town, looking out across the plain to
the hills.
The men in the crowd behind them were also grimly silent. They knew
that whatever they might say would be twisted into a word of sympathy
for the condemned man or a protest against the government. So no one
spoke; even the officers gave their orders in gruff whispers, and the
men in the crowd did not mix together, but looked suspiciously at one
another and kept apart.
As the light increased a mass of people came hurrying from the town
with two black figures leading them, and the soldiers drew up at
attention, and part of the double line fell back and left an opening in
the square.
With us a condemned man walks only the short distance from his cell to
the scaffold or the electric chair, shielded from sight by the prison
walls; and it often occurs even then that the short journey is too much
for his strength and courage.
[Illustration: Young Spanish Officer]
But the merciful Spaniards on this morning made the prisoner walk for
over a half-mile across the broken surface of the fields. I expected to
find the man, no matter what his strength at other times might be,
stumbling and faltering on this cruel journey, but as he came nearer I
saw that he led all the others, that the priests on either side of him
were taking two steps to his one, and that they were tripping on their
gowns and stumbling over the hollows, in their efforts to keep pace
with him as he walked, erect and soldierly, at a quick step in advance
of them.
He had a handsome, gentle face of the peasant type, a light, pointed
beard, great wistful eyes and a mass of curly black hair. He was
shockingly young for such a sacrifice, and looked more like a
Neapolitan than a Cuban. You could imagine him sitting on the quay at
Naples or Genoa, lolling in the sun and showing his white teeth when he
laughed. He wore a new scapula around his neck, hanging outside his
linen blouse.
It seems a petty thing to have been pleased with at such a time, but I
confess to have felt a thrill of satisfaction when I saw, as the Cuban
passed me, that he held a cigarette between his lips, not arrogantly
nor with bravado, but with the nonchalance of a man who meets his
punishment fearlessly, and who will let his enemies see that they can
kill but can not frighten him.
It was very quickly finished, with rough, and, but for one frightful
blunder, with merciful swiftness. The crowd fell back when it came to
the square, and the condemned man, the priests and the firing squad of
six young volunteers passed in and the line closed behind them.
The officer who had held the cord that bound the Cuban's arms behind
him and passed across his breast, let it fall on the grass and drew his
sword, and Rodriguez dropped his cigarette from his lips and bent and
kissed the cross which the priest held up before him.
The elder of the priests moved to one side and prayed rapidly in a loud
whisper, while the other, a younger man, walked away behind the firing
squad and covered his face with his hands and turned his back. They had
both spent the last twelve hours with Rodriguez in the chapel of the
prison.
The Cuban walked to where the officer directed him to stand, and turned
his back to the square and faced the hills and the road across them
which led to his father's farm.
As the officer gave the first command he straightened himself as far as
the cords would allow, and held up his head and fixed his eyes
immovably on the morning light which had just begun to show above the
hills.
He made a picture of such pathetic helplessness, but of such courage
and dignity, that he reminded me on the instant of that statue of
Nathan Hale, which stands in the City Hall Park, above the roar of
Broadway, and teaches a lesson daily to the hurrying crowds of
moneymakers who pass beneath.
The Cuban's arms were bound, as are those of the statue, and he stood
firmly, with his weight resting on his heels like a soldier on parade,
and with his face held up fearlessly, as is that of the statue. But
there was this difference, that Rodriguez, while probably as willing to
give six lives for his country as was the American rebel, being only a
peasant, did not think to say so, and he will not, in consequence, live
in bronze during the lives of many men, but will be remembered only as
one of thirty Cubans, one of whom was shot at Santa Clara on each
succeeding day at sunrise.
The officer had given the order, the men had raised their pieces, and
the condemned man had heard the clicks of the triggers as they were
pulled back, and he had not moved. And then happened one of the most
cruelly refined, though unintentional, acts of torture that one can
very well imagine. As the officer slowly raised his sword, preparatory
to giving the signal, one of the mounted officers rode up to him and
pointed out silently what I had already observed with some
satisfaction, that the firing squad were so placed that when they fired
they would shoot several of the soldiers stationed on the extreme end
of the square.
Their captain motioned his men to lower their pieces, and then walked
across the grass and laid his hand on the shoulder of the waiting
prisoner.
It is not pleasant to think what that shock must have been. The man had
steeled himself to receive a volley of bullets in his back. He believed
that in the next instant he would be in another world; he had heard the
command given, had heard the click of the Mausers as the locks
caught--and then, at that supreme moment, a human hand had been laid
upon his shoulder and a voice spoke in his ear.
You would expect that any man who had been snatched back to life in
such a fashion would start and tremble at the reprieve, or would break
down altogether, but this boy turned his head steadily, and followed
with his eyes the direction of the officer's sword, then nodded his
head gravely, and, with his shoulders squared, took up a new position,
straightened his back again, and once more held himself erect.
As an exhibition of self-control this should surely rank above feats of
heroism performed in battle, where there are thousands of comrades to
give inspiration. This man was alone, in the sight of the hills he
knew, with only enemies about him, with no source to draw on for
strength but that which lay within himself.
[Illustration: The Cuban Martyrdom]
The officer of the firing squad, mortified by his blunder, hastily
whipped up his sword, the men once more leveled their rifles, the sword
rose, dropped, and the men fired. At the report the Cuban's head
snapped back almost between his shoulders, but his body fell slowly, as
though some one had pushed him gently forward from behind and he had
stumbled.