Ever After (36 page)

Some time before dawn on the eighth, Bracken sought out the Rough Riders at the camp behind the hotel, for Miles had insisted that it was only friendly for him to travel with them to the port and catch a ride to Cuba on the same transport. Cabot when consulted grinned enviously and said it would do no harm to ask Theodore if he might go along, but be sure to duck. Bracken found the
ex-Assistant
Secretary of the Navy, now a lieutenant-colonel of cavalry, charging about in search of his superior officer, Leonard Wood, who was out hunting for their train, which had not showed up. By this time several other regiments had got aboard their trains, but none of the trains had started. The lieutenant-colonel’s language with regard to the whole situation was free and picturesque. Bracken was swept cordially into his sizzling orbit and contrived not to lose sight of him. At six o’clock the Rough Riders seized some coal cars and in them, with the engine in reverse, backing, they made the journey to the pier, which was now jammed with trains, luggage, troops, and apoplectic officers, all at cross purposes. A K Troop sergeant was heard to remark that hell wouldn’t be more crowded on the Last Day than Tampa pier that morning.

The transports lay out in mid-stream and had to come alongside the pier a few at a time for loading. Bracken tagged at Roosevelt’s heels, a delighted spectator, while the Colonel ran to earth the swamped depot quartermaster and wrung from him the name of a transport which was not yet occupied. She was the
Yucatan,
and she was still out at anchor, and it soon developed that two other
regiments
claimed her. Wood nabbed a stray launch and went out to take possession of her, while Roosevelt pelted back to the train at the far end of the quay and brought up the regiment at the
double-quick
in time to board the
Yucatan
as Wood brought her
alongside
the pier. The two rival regiments came up just too late, and there was some expostulation—the word was Roosevelt’s—to no purpose, for the Rough Riders were firmly embarked. But they weren’t cavalry any more. All the horses had to be left behind,
except those belonging to the officers, and they were on another boat.

Before nightfall the
Yucatan
had pulled off and was anchored again in midstream, her khaki-clad passengers packed in like sardines. A week’s devastating anti-climax followed. Until the thirteenth of June the loaded transports swung at their anchors in the steaming discomfort of Tampa Bay, because of a report that there were Spanish warships at large in the St. Nicholas Channel.

She was not a lovely boat by any standards, being an ancient freighter whose unplaned, built-in bunks were likely to come apart under their occupants. Her capacity was seven hundred and fifty men, and she now carried two hundred more than that. Over her side she wore a waggish sign which read:
Standing
Room
Only.
The meat contained in the travel rations issued to the troops was not salted or corned beef, but terrible stuff called canned fresh beef—stringy and tasteless at best, nauseating in the murderous heat which turned it smelly a few minutes after it was opened. There were no fresh vegetables, no ice, and the water was already bad. The men slept on the bare decks because the air was so stale below, and the only diversion was cards and bathing over the side. Because he was his father’s son, Bracken had the freedom of the bridge.

Their naval convoy was to pick them up at Key West where there was more delay—fourteen mouse-coloured warships accompanied by a disreputable flotilla of dispatch boats, among whom Fitz’s Daisy was not the least presentable, although her deck was piled high with extra coal in sacks. She distinguished herself, among a lot of
irresponsible
behaviour by the other Press boats, by running up and down the straggling lines of transports getting in everybody’s way till she found Bracken, whereupon she cuddled in against the
Yucatan’s
side and Fitz came up a rope, to the admiration of all beholders.

Fitz had telegraph news from Tampa. Cabot was holding his own, and it was time for the attack to abate soon. The show had opened in New York and was a success, and Gwen was well and happy and proud. Some Marines had left Key West to join Admiral Sampson’s patrol off Santiago. This last made everybody more impatient than ever, and hard things were said of the Navy for taking time to coal and provision after the precautionary run into the St. Nicholas Channel, which had netted no Spanish ships.

It was not a very impressive armada when it finally steamed
eastward
from Key West, towing its torpedo-boats and landing-scows and a water-schooner. Its speed was necessarily the speed of the slowest ship in the convoy, so the water-boat set the pace at a spanking five knots. Even Daisy, loaded to the gunwales with coal-bags, had no trouble to keep up. At night they ran with all the lights on and the bands playing ragtime. By day they did the drill in the manual of
arms for exercise, watched the flying-fish and the strange things that float on tropical seas, told tall stories, played poker, and were hungry. The scanty water supply tasted like a frog pond and smelled worse. Heat ailments began to appear.

On the following Sunday, when they entered the Windward
Passage
and encountered the breeze that lives there, everybody lost
interest
even in flying-fish. But the next morning there were mountains to the north of them, rising almost from the water’s edge. Everybody gathered at the rails and cheered the mountains, which were Cuba, and the convoy steamed on past small Navy picket-boats outside Guantanamo Bay where the Marines had already landed, and
everybody
cheered the Marines. That afternoon they knew by the sight of grey-painted warships ahead that they were off Santiago Harbour, and everybody cheered the Navy, which fired a salute to General Shafter. Then the engines stopped and the transports began to wallow idly in the seaway.

Daisy bustled over to look at the headquarters ship, which carried Shafter and his staff and all the attachés and Richard Harding Davis, and after hanging about there for a while came snuffling back to
report
that Admiral Sampson’s chief of staff had gone up over the side from the flagship’s launch. Soon the headquarters ship was seen pulling away towards a conference, and for two more days the
transports
waited on a nasty swell.

The water supply on board had diminished to almost nothing, and nobody had had a decent meal since they could remember. Everybody was bored to death and inclined to curse the Marines, who were cosily encamped on shore with room to move about and a chance to prepare their own food. Fitz unlimbered his Spanish guitar again and drifted melodiously among the transports where they lay, singing songs everybody knew and could join in on, and pennies often rained down on Daisy’s deck, embarrassing her into flight.

Then orders came for a landing to be made in force at daybreak at Daiquiri, which was a small mining hamlet on the shore about eighteen miles east of Santiago and about the same distance west of Guantanamo. Everybody perked up and forgot to be seasick and began to make plans.

Daisy already knew her part. She was to take Fitz and Bracken ashore with the troops and then stand by for Bracken’s first dispatch, ready to rush it off to the nearest cable-head at Jamaica. By the time she returned there would be another dispatch waiting. Fitz was to act as shuttle between Bracken at the front line and Daisy at the pier. Wendell complained bitterly that he and Daisy had been given the short end of the stick and would miss all the fun.

B
EFORE
daybreak Bracken and young Miles were keeping vigil at the rail of the
Yucatan,
shoulder to shoulder with several dozen excited, cheerful members of the regiment. They were watching fires scattered along the shore where Daiquiri was, and which might be signal lights of the Spanish, but nobody knew.

As dawn came up and Bracken’s field-glasses became more helpful, they could see the flock of transports huddled off the indentation of the shore line which was the little mining port. The American firm which owned the iron mines behind the town had built a steel pier, and there was a small rickety wooden dock beside it. These, and the sloping white shingle of the beach were all the landing facilities there were. Out of the landing-craft provided by the Army
quartermaster
to get the men ashore, one lighter had broken down on the way, one had simply got lost, and a tug had deserted.

The watchers at the transport rails saw the borrowed small boats assembling below them like a regatta—empty Navy steam launches and long-boats, and all the lifeboats from all the transports,
bouncing
on the deep blue water.

On shore there was no sign of life visible to Bracken’s glasses. The mining company’s machine shop and a string of ore-cars on the pier were ablaze. The rows of native huts thatched with palm leaves
appeared
to be deserted. Behind them rose the enigmatic jungle-clad Cuban mountains, with a Spanish blockhouse and flagpole crowning a nearby spur. Bracken noticed with something like awe that the men around him seemed in happy ignorance of the obvious fact that, with a little well-placed gunfire from good positions on the hillside below the blockhouse during the landing operations, the white beach beside the pier could become a shambles. The general atmosphere on board was that just before the kick-off on a football game. Or were they all covering up, as he was, a strange crawling sensation in the mid-riff? Glancing at Miles’s eager, unclouded face beside him, Bracken began to wonder if he himself was going to prove to
be—squeamish.

Invasion of a country whose border was a line drawn on a map was comparatively simple. History was full of such things. But
seaborne
invasion of a hostile shore was not a venture to be so lightly undertaken. Look at England, Bracken was thinking, gazing at Cuba from the
Yucatan’s
rail. For centuries twenty-four miles of water had prevented England from molestation by the continental powers. Even Napoleon had thought twice about it. Even Caesar had failed. A hundred years after that, Augustus had managed it.
William the Norman had been the only other one. Landing from boats lengthened the odds to suicide if the land force was ready and competent.

There were very few precedents for this morning’s work in Cuba, Bracken thought, leaning on the rail. Very few rules to go by. But surely these open boats packed with troops in no position to return fire from the beaches and with no protection from it were against even common sense. Where
were
the Spanish? Waiting. Waiting for the range to shorten, of course. Waiting till the invaders were beached and helpless.

The Navy launches towing their long strings of little empty boats were swinging in below the
Iroquois,
and Lawton’s brigade had begun to tumble into them—a difficult business, attended by shouts of rude laughter and blasphemous comment as the men, weighted with cartridge-belt, blanket-roll, haversack, and gun, made the tricky descent overside into the heaving open boats, which either fell away beneath them or rose so high that it doubled them up as they landed. If one of them had missed and hit the water instead, he would never have come up again. But that too seemed not to occur to anybody, to spoil the fun.

The Rough Riders were brigaded with the Regular cavalry under General Young, and both were under General Wheeler, and third on the list for disembarking. Orders had been so worded as to bar correspondents from the first landing, which had caused considerable friction on the headquarters ship where the journalists attempted to argue with the commanding officer. Daisy came alongside the
Yuca
tan
and Bracken shook Miles’s hand and descended to her deck by a sea-ladder, so they would be ready to follow the boats in as soon as possible.

Fitz’s grey eyes met his, candid as a child’s, but thoughtful.
Wendell
was in the wheel-house talking to the captain and for a minute the two cousins stood together at Daisy’s coal-blackened rail, while the tug rocked drunkenly beneath them, their field-glasses trained on the abandoned village.

“Well,” Fitz drawled at last with a sidewise glance round his glasses at Bracken’s silence, “it is sure a nice mornin’ for an ambush.”

“I’m glad you’ve thought of that too,” Bracken grinned. “I began to think maybe I was getting the creeps.”

“Creeps? I’m all over goose-pimples!” Fitz admitted frankly. “All they need is a few Gatling guns up there in the bushes. They’ll wait till we hit the beach, if they’ve got sense, and then—they’ll open up on us. Let’s you and me go home before it starts, huh?”

Bracken laughed, and felt love for the man beside him surge up through his veins where the same blood ran. He knew without even thinking about it that nothing on earth could induce Fitz to leave
Diaquiri before it happened. But because he had not been at
Manassas
and Yellow Tavern, Bracken had no way of knowing that the flicker of pointed light that had appeared in Fitz’s eyes under their lazy lids was the same that had lived in Sedgwick’s during the war their fathers fought, and it had been in St. John Sprague’s at
Camden
and Yorktown too. All the Spragues loved a fight. That was history. And this morning at Daiquiri, waiting for the Spanish guns to open up, Fitz was finally and completely a Sprague. Murrays fought grimly, savagely, cool-headed and dangerous. Spragues fought with laughter and insults and a fierce joy—equally dangerous. Their fathers could have told them. Now they would find it out for themselves.

Standing together, feet wide apart on the rolling tug Daisy,
seasickness
long a thing of the amateur past, they felt between them the strange, heartening, inexplicable bond which is kinship, mutual heritage, mutual memory,
blood
—and each knew without words that there was no man anywhere he would rather have at his side than this one, no matter what happened. Somewhere at the back of Bracken’s consciousness a last wisp or doubt dissolved and was seen no more; for who had said Fitz was different, who said he had an odd strain, who said he was not quite one of them? Not Bracken, ever again.