Ever After (40 page)

Johnny looked in at nightfall, and sat a little while on a stool
beside
the cot, and dried Fitz off with a towel and got him to eat some canned tomatoes and drink a cup of coffee. Fitz began to talk about the mule again. Davis had had a mule at Las Guasimas—

“In the morning,” said Johnny soothingly, afraid to tell him that they were all moving up for another attack. “You get a night’s rest here, and then maybe you can make it. Can’t start now, you know, it’s dark.”

But in the morning Johnny was gone up the trail with the Army. White hospital tents were being put up around the single dingy
railway
building which had done duty as a hospital for the wounded from Las Guasimas. Clara Barton’s Red Cross outfit had arrived and gone to work along with the Army doctors, led by the little Massachusetts spinster who had first begun to bandage and feed wounded soldiers after the battle of Bull Run in ’61. Since then she had seen war and disaster all over the world—Strasbourg, Paris, yellow fever in Florida, the flood at Johnstown, famine in Russia, massacre in Armenia—and now, at seventy-seven, she came to Cuba, to find the Army medical corps seemed to
have learned very little since those hot July days when the Federal retreat had swamped Washington with suffering bewildered men nearly forty years ago.

After a night’s exhausted sleep, Fitz was shaky and light-headed
but fairly comfortable. Siboney was emptying itself slowly up the congested trail towards the entrenchments at San Juan. He lost some more time arguing about mules before he finally boarded an
ammunition
wagon bound for the front and refused to be dislodged from it.

It was a slow way to travel. Every now and then he dropped off and walked ahead and got on another wagon further along the line. When he came at last to Las Guasimas and the camping ground beyond, he found Shafter’s headquarters roundabout there and the Rough Riders gone. They had been moved up to El Poso a couple of miles nearer Santiago.

Fitz threw himself down on a horse blanket and slipped into uneasy slumber. His respite from the fever might be running out, with the setting sun. Any time now the chill could come again. He must get on to El Poso first thing in the morning….

T
HERE
was cold water and hardtack for breakfast, and about seven o’clock the guns began on the right. That was Lawton, firing into El Caney, which he was supposed to take within a couple of hours. Then everybody would move in together on the San Juan
entrenchments
.

Meanwhile there were complete stoppages in the trail, which was barely wide enough anywhere for a column of fours. Fitz gave up the wagons and slithered along at the side, jabbed by chaparral thorns, sworn at by mounted orderlies in a hurry, rudely advised by stalled companies of infantry. This went on till he came to where the track forked left to El Poso, when he learned that the Rough Riders had already been ordered up and were somewhere farther ahead. “Look for the balloon,” he was told. “They’re just in front of the balloon.”

It didn’t seem a very desirable place to be, but Fitz pushed on through the stifling green trough in the jungle. He was now in the firing zone, and met wounded coming back, who said that the
shrapnel
was fierce. Not a breath of air stirred. The balloon was moving along the trail in front of him, and the Spanish were throwing
everything
they had at it, which was cruel punishment for the men
marching
below in a rain of shrapnel. Its presence naturally disclosed the line of march and provided an excellent target for guns which had already studied the range. The troops were jammed in column and unable to return the fire, even if they had known just where it was
coming from, but the Spaniard’s smokeless powder left no trace on the face of the jungle. Also it had begun to occur to them that to retreat would be even more impossible than it had become to advance.

Fitz kept going stubbornly, in pursuit of the Rough Riders. He came to the ford across the Aguadores River, which lay under a nasty dropping fire and was fringed with dead animals. The
crossing
was at the edge of the jungle where it fell away into a sort of grassy meadow. On its far side the meadow was bordered by the little San Juan River which flowed almost at right angles to the Aguadores and which had another ford two hundred yards ahead, at a bend in the trail. Beyond the San Juan, with cat’s cradles of barbed wire across the approaches were the bare, steep slopes of the San Juan ridges and the Spanish rifle-pits and blockhouses near their crests.

At the San Juan ford the balloon had fouled the trees with its anchor ropes and becoming stationary was soon shot down, much to the relief of everybody in the vicinity. A group of wounded Regulars lay neatly on the left, in a magnificent silence of fortitude, where the hospital stewards had assembled them in rows with their feet at the water’s edge and their bodies lying up the muddy bank.
Surgeons
moved calmly among them. Besides the Mauser and shrapnel fire from the front, snipers’ bullets came winging in from everywhere, killing the wounded where they lay, picking off the men with the Red Cross brassard on their arms. A mounted aide drove his horse furiously through the water, splashing everything for yards around, and when he reached the opposite bank dropped like a stone, shot behind the eyes. His horse galloped on alone. Fitz coveted it, but knew it could never be caught now.

By the sound of his guns, Lawton was still held up at El Caney, and someone said the last reserves had gone in. The hospital
personnel
to the rear were swamped with casualties. The Rough Riders had gone off the trail to the right along the bank of the San Juan, where a line of trees provided slight cover before the open meadow began. Immediately in front of them across that meadow was a small round hill crowned with red-tiled ranch buildings which spurted flame.

Fitz turned doggedly to the right, walking sometimes in the water and sometimes along the muddy bank, which slowed his progress still further. You’d think it was good news I’m bringing, he thought, the way I’m hell-bent to tell it. Poor Bracken—in the middle of a battle, too…. Confused by the heat and the fever and the deadly, creeping weakness, the din of trumpet calls and stuttering machine guns, the evil whistling of shrapnel and the boom of distant artillery and the noise of howling, cursing, excited men, Fitz’s mind held
firmly to its one imperative idea—get to Bracken and tell him he has to be the Boss now. Get to Bracken
first,
so he would not have to learn it from a stranger.

The Gatling guns had come up to the ford behind him and began to have some effect on the Spanish trenches on the slopes beyond the meadow. And so Fitz no sooner came to the ground where the Rough Riders had been lying flat on their stomachs while the bullets drove in sheets through the leaves above and around them with a sound like rain, than Roosevelt ordered the charge up the first slope and led the way, riding the little horse Texas, his dotted blue bandanna worn as a havelock streaming out behind.

They were men on foot, toiling up a steep slope in the face of bitter fire, under a blistering sun at mid-day, and they had little breath for cheering now, and none for running up hill. They went quite slowly, bent a little forward, their rifles at the port, slanting across their breasts, taking no notice when comrades dropped
nearby
and lay still. They went in cold-blooded courage, waist-deep in the sharp, hot grass, indomitable, inevitable, and to the watching Spanish inhuman. Only near the top they gathered themselves for a burst of speed, yelling as they swept in on the hacienda whose cellars and walls were speedily vacated by all the Spanish who could still travel. Regulars of the Ninth arrived simultaneously from the left, and there was some argument, even then, as to whether or not the red-and-white silk guidons of the Rough Riders had been planted first on the top of Kettle Hill.

Heavy firing continued from the crests beyond, where the squat San Juan blockhouses were. Above it, the drumming of the Gatling guns which had moved forward from the ford could be heard. Infantry was charging the next hill and Roosevelt got his men
together
again and led them, himself on foot now because of the barbed wire, down across another open grassy meadow and up the slope towards the next line of Spanish entrenchments. Skirmishers from other regiments poured out into the meadow at the same dogged pace, sometimes pausing to fire, with the excited yammer of the Gatling guns as an obbligato to the crashing rifle volleys. Once more near the top there were piercing cowboy yells and a rush, once more the Spanish fled, and San Juan Hill was taken.

All of this ultimate glory was lost on Fitz, whose knees were trembling from fatigue and whose eyes were strained for the flutter of Bracken’s yellow neckerchief. He was aware that he must not be quite right in the head when he found himself trying to buttonhole the sweating, breathless men who were ascending Kettle Hill to ask them if they had seen Bracken Murray. Some didn’t hear, some brushed him off, some cursed him, but finally, to his dazed surprise, one of them had.

“Go back towards the river,” he said. “This side of the ford—right out in the grass below the barbed wire—he had a bandanna like yours—I saw him go down—you better get him out of this sun quick—”

Fitz thanked empty air and turned back towards the river.
I
saw
him
go
down….

T
HE
battle roared on undiminished all around him as he left the slope and started down into the deep grass. Here and there were depressions in it, where wounded or dead men lay. Bullets were whirring and dropping everywhere, but he was too tired to take precautions and plodded on, looking for a man with a yellow scarf, deaf to other men’s pleas and warnings.

He came to a place that was matted with fresh blood. From it a small trail led away towards the trees along the river above the ford—the sort of track a big dog makes through ripe hay. Fitz went to his hands and knees from sheer exhaustion and followed it, crawling, and at the end of it was Bracken, many yards short of the shade he had sought—face down in the hot, rank grass, betrayed to a Spanish sharpshooter by the yellow badge he wore. If the aim had been truer it would have killed him, but the gunsight had wavered to the right. Fitz turned him over and found the wound, bleeding freely, just below the collar-bone.

Bracken opened his eyes.

“Hullo,” he said. “Thought we’d lost you.” Then he fainted.

Patiently, foot by foot, Fitz began to drag him towards the shade at the river bank. It took all the strength he had left, and each effort moved them farther from the sight of possible first aid men following the battle. The bullets weren’t so thick, though, and finally only a few spent ones came in.

Fitz lay down and panted, long, sobbing breaths in the airless heat. Fever took your wind. It was now well past noon and he wondered how much longer he had before the shakes began again. When he had rested a little he would crawl down to the river for some water—enough to bring Bracken to. After that he must go for a surgeon. Couldn’t move Bracken alone, not the way he was.

Lying there beside the unconscious man, Fitz slipped a little too, and lost track of time. When he roused, the sun was much lower and the guns had slackened somewhat. At a little distance in a watchful semi-circle the monstrous land crabs waited, on
tip-toe, twiddling
their beady eyes. Fitz realized with horror what he had never noticed before—that to a man lying down, unable to lift his head, the crabs would be taller than he was. With the same hysteria that he had seen with amused pity in a hundred other men, he waved his hat wildly at them and they withdrew with a rattle and scuttle and a whispering of dry grass. But not far. By the brevity of the sound they made as they went, he knew they were not far away.

He raised himself above the grass but could see nothing of the blockhouses on the crest of San Juan from where they were. Bracken stirred and Fitz turned to him anxiously. He should have had a dressing long ago, but everybody had run out of first aid packets. Fitz made a pad of his pocket handkerchief as they had done for other men, to staunch the wound, and began to untie Bracken’s neckerchief to bind it in place. As he did so he discovered inside Bracken’s shirt a woman’s tiny ball-shaped watch, worn around Bracken’s neck on a jewelled chain.

For a moment Fitz wondered if it was something of Lisl’s, and then dismissed that idea. Bracken had no sentiment about Lisl, it was no keepsake of his marriage. Who then? None of my business, Fitz thought, working at the wound. Must come hard, though, as things are. Must come mighty hard, to wait for that divorce. And he thought of Gwen, and what an obstacle like Lisl would have meant to them once he had tumbled to the fact that Gwen might love him. The time you could lose, over a thing like divorce—time you might have had together—time that would never come again….

Bracken roused under his hands, and cursed him for the pain.

“That’s better,” said Fitz soothingly. “Want a drink? I’ll go down to the river, the canteens are empty.”

But Bracken’s eyes were bright and blank and could not focus, and he fumbled anxiously for the watch.

“It’s there,” Fitz told him. “I didn’t pinch it.” Then he saw that Bracken didn’t know him any more.

“Dinah,” Bracken said. “It belongs to Dinah—you won’t let anyone steal it, will you—I promised her she’d have it—some day—”

“All right, we’ll get it to Dinah, don’t you worry—”

“My mother has the address,” Bracken insisted, as to
a stranger. “Will you take the watch to my mother—ask her to send it—tell Dinah—tell Dinah I didn’t forget—”

“Tell her yourself,” said Fitz. “We’re not done for yet. It’s me, Bracken. It’s Fitz. Lie still, now, while I get some water. Shan’t be long.” He crawled away with the canteens towards the river bank—going on all fours not because of the bullets, for there were none now, but because it was easier.

When he returned Bracken was thrashing feebly at the land crabs with his hat. Fitz waved his arms and yelled at them and they all vanished into watchful silence.