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Authors: Kenneth Whyte

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General Shafter started his attack with an artillery barrage. Four 3.2-inch field cannon under Captain George Grimes were positioned atop a hill known as El Pozo and trained on Spain’s forward position, the San Juan Heights, 2,600 yards away. Shafter intended to soften up the enemy and provide cover for 8,000 U.S. soldiers advancing toward the heights. The black-powder smoke from Grimes’s cannon, however, revealed the position of his battery. Spanish gunners easily found their range and harassed Shafter’s assembled divisions with heavy return fire.
91
 
Hearst and Hemment were riding among the American troops when the Spanish shells began to fly. Hemment heard “a screech through the air as I had never heard before and another and more in quick succession.” He remembers next hearing an officer of the Rough Riders shrieking at him:
“What in hell are you fellows doing? Don’t you see you are drawing the fire from those batteries? For God’s sake, men, get off your horses!” Hearst turned his horse to Hemment, smiled, and said, “Well, I guess possibly we are drawing the fire, but we are not the only ones around here.”
92
 
 
 
After dismounting, they scrambled toward El Pozo for a closer look at Grimes’s artillery. Again, they were admonished by the soldiers—“Have you fellows no sense?” They reluctantly moved back among the reserves, avoiding censure but still finding danger. Shrapnel burst over their heads. Mauser bullets whizzed past their ears and snapped through the tall grass and cactus stalks. In every direction, soldiers were falling. “A man was hit,” observed Hemment, “and he simply sagged down in a heap, sinking into the low bushes without a murmur, without a word.”
93
The effectiveness of the Spanish response quieted Grimes’s guns and left 8,000 Fifth Army soldiers to advance with almost no artillery support.
 
Creelman had meanwhile lit out in another direction. As part of the drive to Santiago, Shafter had ordered a morning attack on the hamlet of El Caney, six miles northeast of the city on the strategically important road from Guantanamo. He anticipated that one division under General Lawton could take El Caney in two hours—between 7 and 9 a.m.—and then advance to reinforce the Fifth Army’s principal assault on the San Juan Heights late in the morning. A friendly general had told Creelman that Lawton would have the toughest fight of the day. The correspondent thus walked the five miles from El Pozo to El Caney under an already scorching sun. The narrow trail was littered with giant land crabs—“green and scarlet, with leprous blotches of white”—and interrupted by suffocating thickets and slimy shallow swamps. Vultures slouched in the tall palms. When he finally reached the battle site it looked idyllic by comparison: “a rumpled landscape of intense green,” with “flowering hills, tall, tossing grasses, and groves of palm trees.”
94
To one side was a misty range of mountains, stretching toward a sea ridge on which Creelman could make out the ancient form of Morro Castle. It yielded just the battle he expected.
 
El Caney’s central feature was a stone fort surrounded by a well-sheltered system of trenches and blockhouses. This proved a strong defensive position for the Spanish. A small garrison of just over five hundred soldiers, armed only with light weapons, fought like lions against a much larger American force.
 
Guns were already blazing by the time Creelman arrived. He was determined to creep forward and observe the Spanish position from close range. The high calling of reportage, he would later write, allowed no consideration for one’s mortal safety. The newspaperman “must be in the very foreground of battle, if he would see with his own eyes the dread scenes that make war worth describing.” He got close enough to peer into the outlying Spanish trenches. He saw a row of straw hats under which young Spanish soldiers—“not a beard among them”—projected the shiny barrels of their Mausers over the earthworks.
95
 
Creelman next made his way to the U.S. lines and stuck to the side of Brigadier General Adna R. Chaffee, whose brigade was firing upward from a position below the old stone fort. He watched Chaffee rage up and down his infantry lines, oblivious to the heat and smoke and noise, his eyes flashing fire, “the soul of war incarnate.” Creelman thought nothing of interrupting him for comment. As they chatted, a bullet clipped a button from Chaffee’s jacket and another ripped the cape from Creelman’s raincoat (“Looks better without it,” observed the general). They retreated under a tree to continue the conversation. In addition to gathering quotes, Creelman told the general what he’d seen of the Spanish positions and suggested a route for a bayonet charge. He was aware that it wasn’t his place, as a correspondent, to make such a proposal. It had always struck him as strange yet necessary to sit quietly, pencil in hand, setting down the sounds and colors of a battle scene “as a matter of business—to be in the midst of the movement, but not a part of it.”
96
Something was different about the El Caney battle, however. He was, for the first time, watching American soldiers in combat, and they fought in service to a cause dear to his own heart. He was passionately committed to this war, to the liberation of Cuba, and to the ouster of Spain from the Caribbean. And so he set aside his customary detachment and laid out his plan for Chaffee, who was not immediately persuaded.
 
By late morning, Hearst and Hemment had also abandoned El Pozo. Following the sound of bursting shells, they reached El Caney around noon. Shafter’s expected two-hour fight was still running hot, with casualties mounting on both sides. Chaffee’s men were advancing slowly; his artillery was blasting away at the old stone fort, weakening the structure but failing to destroy it. Hearst watched it all through field glasses:
As the cannon at our side would bang and the shell would swish through the air with its querulous, vicious, whining note, we would watch its explosion and then turn our attention to the little black specks of infantry dodging in and out between the groups of trees. Now they would disappear wholly from sight in the brush, and again would be seen hurrying along the open spaces, over the grass-covered slopes or across plowed fields. The infantry firing was ceaseless, our men popping away continuously as a string of firecrackers pops. The Spaniards fired in volleys whenever our men came in sight in the open spaces.
 
Many times we heard this volley fire and saw numbers of our brave fellows pitch forward and lie still on the turf while the others hurried on to the next protecting clump of trees.
 
For hours the Spaniards had poured their fire from slits in the stone fort, from their deep trenches and from the windows of the town. For hours our men answered back from trees and brush and gullies. For hours cannon at our side banged and shells screamed through the air and fell upon the fort and town. And always our infantry advanced, drawing nearer and closing up on the village, till at last they formed under the mangrove tree at the foot of the hill on which the stone fort stood.
 
With a rush they swept up the slope and the stone fort was ours.
 
Then you should have heard the yell that went up from the knoll on which our battery stood. Gunners, drivers, Cubans, correspondents, swung their hats and gave a mighty cheer.
97
 
 
 
It is not clear if Hearst noticed the familiar goateed face of James Creelman at the head of the storming party in that final uphill dash. The correspondent had finally coaxed one of Chaffee’s field commanders into taking up the bayonet charge. When it got underway, he took his revolver firmly in hand—the same revolver he had carefully holstered and slung behind his back so that he would not be tempted to draw—and broke into a run. “Foolishly or wisely, recklessly, meddlesomely, or patriotically,” he became by his own admission a part of the army, “a soldier without warrant to kill.” Creelman made the three-hundred-yard uphill charge to the old fort with his heart leaping wildly and his eyes on a Spanish flag as “a glorious prize for my newspaper.”
98
 
The few remaining soldiers in the stone fort now finally gave up the fight. Half of their garrison had been killed; many others had scattered. Creelman was shocked at the scene inside the battered structure, the “dead and wounded strewn across the floor in every conceivable position. Men writhing and wailing in their own blood.”
99
He ran back outside to claim the red and yellow Spanish flag that had drawn him up the hill. It was now lying in the dust, a fragment of the staff still attached. He picked it up and began waving it in celebration, attracting to himself the fire of lingering Spanish snipers. He felt what seemed like a punch in the upper part of his left arm; it whirled him around. The next moment he felt numb, and the next brought a darting pain as his arm fell loose and he collapsed to the ground. He was pulled back into the fort and helped onto a hammock.
 
The bullet had entered Creelman’s left shoulder, shattering the blade and exiting high on his back. He lay listening to his own blood drip on the floor until a half dozen soldiers carried him down the hill with the other wounded, the captured flag thrown over his body. The shock of his wound and the terrific heat blurred his vision, making everything around him swim. He later wrote,
Someone knelt in the grass beside me and put his hand on my fevered head. Opening my eyes, I saw Mr. Hearst, the proprietor of the
New York Journal,
a straw hat with a bright ribbon on his head, a revolver on his belt, and a pencil and note-book in his hand. The man who had provoked the war had come to see the result with his own eyes and, finding one of his correspondents prostrate, was doing the work himself. Slowly he took down my story of the fight. Again and again the tinging of Mauser bullets interrupted. But he seemed unmoved. That battle had to be reported somehow.
 
“I’m sorry you’re hurt, but”—and his face was radiant with enthusiasm—“wasn’t it a splendid fight? We must beat every paper in the world.”
 
After doing what he could to make me comfortable, Mr. Hearst mounted his horse and dashed away for the seacoast, where a fast steamer was waiting to carry him across the sea to a cable station.
100
 
 
 
Hearst’s account of this meeting, published in the
Journal,
was shorter but corresponds in its essentials: “When I left the fort to hunt for Creelman I found him bloody and bandaged, lying on his back on a blanket on the ground, but shown all care that a kindly skillful surgeon could give him. He was pretty well dazed and said, ‘I’m afraid I can’t write much of a story. If you will write it for me I will describe it the best I can.’”
101
 
Hemment says Hearst left Creelman with the surgeons and proceeded to Siboney to file his report. It opened with a dramatic dateline and ran a full page on July 4:
With the army in front of Santiago, July 1, midnight, via Kingston, Jamaica—To-night as I write, ambulance trains are bringing wounded soldiers from the fierce battle around the little village of El Caney.
 
Siboney, the base of the army, is a hospital, and nothing more. There is no saying when the slaughter will cease. Tents are crowded with wounded, and hard worked surgeons are busy with medical work. There is an odor of antiseptics, and ambulances clatter through one narrow street.
 
 
 
Hearst went on discuss the early morning artillery barrages, and complimented the soldiers for doing their best with inadequate guns. He criticized Shafter’s decision to locate a battery at El Pozo on the grounds that the Spaniards, having formerly occupied it as a fort, knew the precise range and were able to make it unpleasant for U.S. troops. He noted that when he stopped for lunch he discovered that a piece of shrapnel had passed clean through a can of pressed beef carried by his pack mule. He discussed with some precision the positioning of forces and angles of attack at El Caney, and described General Chaffee flashing about “with his hat on the back of his head like a magnificent cowboy.” He paid tribute to the discipline of the Spanish soldiers and closed with his account of the final charge, quoted above.
 
 
 
AS CREELMAN LAY BLEEDING AT EL CANEY, General Shafter was failing in his objective of overrunning Santiago in a day, stallling a mile away at the San Juan Heights. General Linares, commander of Spain’s Santiago Division, had kept his main body of 10,000 troops garrisoned in Santiago. He was holding the heights, a series of sun-baked hills, including San Juan Hill and Kettle Hill, with a deployment of 750 men. Nestled into a line of well-constructed hilltop trenches, the Spaniards took advantage of good sightlines to pick off American troops as they made their approach below through thickets, clearings of long slippery grass, and tangles of barbed wire. With Lawton still tied up at El Caney, Shafter aimed two divisions at the heights and suffered three times the losses of the enemy. If it had not been for the timely appearance of a Gatling-gun detachment, the slaughter would have been worse. Firing 3,600 rounds per minute, the Gatlings forced the Spaniards from their positions, allowing the U.S. infantry to climb San Juan Hill. Meanwhile, Lieutenant Colonel Roosevelt, tired of catching bullets at the base of Kettle Hill and emboldened by the arrival of the Gatlings, led his Rough Riders on a charge for the summit. It was one of the most dramatic acts in U.S. military history. As the
Journal
reported it,
Roosevelt [on horseback] was in the lead, waving his sword. Out into the open and up the hill where death seemed certain in the face of the continuous crackle of the Mausers came the Rough Riders with the Tenth Cavalry alongside. Not a man flinched, all continuing to fire as they ran.
 
Roosevelt was a hundred feet ahead of his troops, yelling like a Sioux, while his own men and the colored cavalry cheered him as he charged up the hill. There was no stopping as men’s neighbors fell, but on they went, faster and faster.
 
Suddenly Roosevelt’s horse stopped, pawed the air for a moment and fell in a heap. Before the horse was down Roosevelt disengaged himself from the saddle and landing on his feet again yelled to his men and, sword in hand, charged on afoot. It was something terrible to watch these men race up that hill with death. Fast as they were going it seemed that they would never reach the crest.
 
They did not stop to fire, but poured in rifle shots as they marched in the ranks. We could clearly see the wonderful work the dusky veterans of the Tenth were doing. Such splendid shooting was probably never done under these conditions.
 
As fast as the Spanish fire thinned their ranks the gaps were closed up, and after an eternity they gained the top of the hill and rushed the few remaining yards to the Spanish trenches.
 
Had the enemy remained staunch the slaughter at close range would have been appalling, but the daring of the Americans dazed the [Spaniards]. Their fire driveled to nothing. They wavered and then ran. Our fellows dropped to one knee and picked them off like partridges in the brush. The position was won.
102
 
 
BOOK: The Uncrowned King: The Sensational Rise of William Randolph Hearst
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