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  THE SURRENDER
  OF SANTIAGO

  AN ACCOUNT OF THE
  HISTORIC SURRENDER OF SANTIAGO
  TO GENERAL SHAFTER
  JULY 17, 1898

  BY FRANK NORRIS

  SAN FRANCISCO
  PAUL ELDER AND COMPANY
  NINETEEN SEVENTEEN




  Copyright, 1913, 1917
  by Otis F. Wood




THE SURRENDER OF SANTIAGO


For two days we had been at the headquarters of the Second Brigade
(General McKibben's), so blissfully contented because at last we had a
real wooden and tiled roof over our heads that even the
tarantulas--Archibald shook two of them from his blanket in one
night--had no terrors for us.

The headquarters were in an abandoned country seat, a little six-roomed
villa, all on one floor, called the Hacienda San Pablo. To the left of
us along the crest of hills, in a mighty crescent that reached almost to
the sea, lay the army, panting from the effort of the first, second and
third days of the month, resting on its arms, its eyes to its sights,
Maxim, Hotchkiss and Krag-Jorgenson held ready, alert, watchful,
straining in the leash, waiting the expiration of the last truce that
had now been on for twenty-four hours.

That night we sat up very late on the porch of the hacienda, singing
"The Spanish Cavalier"--if you will recollect the words, singularly
appropriate--"The Star-Spangled Banner," and

  'Tis a way we had at Caney, sir,
  'Tis a way we had at Caney, sir,
  'Tis a way we had at Caney, sir,
      To drive the Dons away,

an adaptation by one of the General's aides, which had a great success.

Inside, the General himself lay on his spread blankets, his hands
clasped under his head, a pipe in his teeth, feebly applauding us at
intervals and trying to pretend that we sang out of tune. The night was
fine and very still. The wonderful Cuban fireflies, that are like little
electric lights gone somehow adrift, glowed and faded in the mango and
bamboo trees, and after a while a whip-poor-will began his lamentable
little plaint somewhere in the branches of the gorgeous vermilion
Flamboyana that overhung the hacienda.

The air was heavy with smells, smells that inevitable afternoon
downpours had distilled from the vast jungle of bush and vine and
thicket all up and down the valley. In Cuba everything, the very mud and
water, has a smell. After every rain, as soon as the red-hot sun is out
again, vegetation reeks and smokes and sweats, and these smells steam
off into the air all night, thick and stupefying, like the interior of a
cathedral after high mass.

The orderly who brought the despatch should have dashed up at a gallop,
clicked his spurs, saluted and begun with "The commanding General's
compliments, sir," et cetera. Instead, he dragged a very tired horse up
the trail, knee-deep in mud, brought to, standing with a gasp of relief,
and said, as he pushed his hat back from his forehead:

"Say, is here where General McKibben is?"

We stopped singing and took our feet down from the railing of the
veranda. In the room back of us we heard the General raise on an elbow
and tell his orderly to light a candle. The orderly went inside, drawing
a paper from his pocket, and the aides followed. Through the open window
we could plainly hear what followed, and see, too, for that matter, by
twisting a bit on our chairs.

The General had mislaid his eyeglasses and so passed the despatch to one
of his aides, saying: "I'll get you to read this for me, Nolan." On one
knee, and holding the despatch to the candle-light, Nolan read it aloud.

It began tamely enough with the usual military formulas, and the first
thirty words might have been part of any one of the many despatches the
General had been receiving during the last three days. And then "to
accompany the commanding General to a point midway between the Spanish
and American lines and there to receive the surrender of General Toral.
At noon, precisely, the American flag will be raised over the Governor's
Palace in the city of Santiago. A salute of twenty-one guns will be
fired from Captain Capron's battery. The regimental bands will play 'The
Star-Spangled Banner' and the troops will cheer. SHAFTER."

There was a silence. The aide returned the paper to the General and
straightened up, rubbing the dust from his knee. The General shifted his
pipe to the other corner of his mouth. The little green parrot who lived
in the premises trundled gravely across the brick floor, and for an
instant we all watched her with the intensest attention.

"Hum," muttered the General reflectively between his teeth. "Hum.
They've caved in. Well, you won't have to make that little
reconnaissance of yours down the railroad, after all, Mr. Nolan." And so
it was that we first heard of the surrender of Santiago de Cuba.

We were up betimes the next morning. By six o'clock the General had us
all astir and searching in our blanket rolls and haversacks for "any
kind of a black tie." It was an article none of us possessed, and the
General was more troubled over this lack of a black tie than the fact
that he had neither vest nor blouse to do honor to the city's
capitulation.

But we had our own troubles. The flag was to be raised over the city at
noon. Sometime during the morning the Spanish General would surrender to
the American. The General--our General--and his aides, as well as all
the division and brigade commanders, would ride out to be present at the
ceremony--but how about the correspondents?

Almost to a certainty they would be refused. Privileges extended to
journalists and magazine writers had been few and very far between
throughout the campaign. We would watch the affair through glasses from
some hilltop, two miles, or three maybe, to the rear. But for all that,
we saddled our horses and when the General and his staff started to ride
down to corps headquarters, fell in with the aides, and resolved to keep
up with the procession as far as our ingenuity and perseverance would
make possible.

It was early when we started and the heat had not yet begun to be
oppressive. All along and through the lines there were signs of the
greatest activity. Over night the men had been withdrawn from the
trenches and were pitching their shelter tents on the higher and drier
ground, and where our road crossed the road from Caney to Santiago we
came upon hundreds of refugees returning to the city whence they had
been driven a few days previous.

Headquarters had been moved a mile or two nearer the trenches during the
truce, and we found it occupying the site of General Wheeler's tent on
the battlefield of San Juan. The ground is high and open hereabouts,
and, as we came up we could see the general officers--each of them
accompanied by his staff--closing in from every side upon the same spot.

It was a great gathering. We had seen but few of these generals; most of
them had been but mere names, names that found place in a breathless
fragment of news shouted by an orderly galloping to or from the front.
But now they were all here: Wheeler, small, white-bearded and wiry;
Ludlow, who always contrived to appear better dressed than everyone
else, in his trim field uniform and white leggings; Randolph, with his
bull neck and fine, salient chin, perhaps the most soldierly-looking of
all, and others and others and others; Kent, Lawton, Wood, Chaffee,
Young, Roosevelt, and our own General, who, barring Wheeler, had perhaps
done more actual fighting in the course of his life than any three of
the others put together, yet who was like the man in Mr. Nye's song,
"without coat or vest," even without "any kind of a black tie."

Shafter himself sat under the fly of his tent, his inevitable pith
helmet on his head, a headgear he had worn ever since leaving the ship,
holding court as it were on this, his own particular day. In the field
below, the cavalry escort was forming, and aides, orderlies and
adjutants came and went at the top speed of their horses, just as the
military dramas had taught us to expect they should.

But, except ourselves, not a correspondent was in sight, and we were
very like to be ordered back at any moment. But the god descended from
the machine in the person of Captain McKittrick of the commanding
General's staff, and we were given an unqualified permission to fall in
so soon as the start should be made, provided only that we fell in at
the rear of any one of the generals' staffs.

But here a difficulty developed itself. The procession started almost
immediately, and when we fell in at the rear of one of the staffs we
found ourselves naturally at the head of the one immediately behind. It
was a time when, if ever, precedence and rank were of paramount
importance, and a brigadier-general does not take it kindly when two
rather forlorn-appearing men, wearing neither stripe nor shoulder strap,
and mounted upon an unkempt mule and a lamentable little white pony,
rank him out of his place when he is marching to receive an enemy's
surrender. As much was said to us, at first with military terseness, and
latterly, this proving of no effect, with cursings and blasphemies. Our
_deus ex machina_ was far ahead with General Shafter by this time, and
it was only our mule that saved us from ultimate discomfiture. He
belonged to a pack-train and his life had been spent in following close
upon the footsteps of the animal in front of him. He was a mule with one
idea; his universe collapsed, his cosmos came tumbling about his ears
the instant that it became impossible for him to follow in a train. It
was all one that Archibald tore and tugged at the bit, or roweled him
red. He could as easily have reined a locomotive from its track as to
have swerved the creature from its direct line of travel by so much as
an inch.

So what with this and with that, we worried along until just beyond the
line of our trenches, where the road broadened very considerably and we
could compromise by riding on the flanks of the column.

And an imposing column it was, nearly three hundred strong, and it
actually appeared as if one-half was made up of brigadier-generals,
major-generals, generals commanding divisions, staff officers and the
like. A mere colonel was hardly better than a private on that day. We
moved forward at a quick trot, General Shafter's pith helmet bobbing
briskly along on ahead. As we passed through our lines there was a smart
cheer or two from the men, and at one point a band was banging away at a
nimble Sousa quickstep as we trotted by.

We were now on what had been the debatable ground, as much the enemy's
as ours, and had not gone far before we were suddenly aware of a group
of Spanish horsemen over the hedge of cactus to the left of the road,
brightly dressed young fellows wearing the blue linen and red facings of
the _guarda civile_, who at the sight of us turned and dashed back
through the fields as though to give news of our approach. Then there
was a freshly macheted opening in the hedge; the column turned in,
advanced parallel with the road some hundred yards through a field of
standing grass and at last halted.

At once the place was alive with Spanish soldiery. They came forward to
meet us in very brave and gay attire. First a corps of trumpeters
sounded a pretty trumpet march. They blew defiantly, did these Spanish
trumpeters, and as loudly as ever they could, just to show us that they
were not afraid--that they did not care, not they, pooh! After these
came a small detachment of _guarda_, with arms, who watched the Yankee
soldiers with bovine intentness while they came to a halt and ordered
arms in front of our position.

Toral, the defeated General, came next. Suddenly it had become very
quiet. The trumpeters had ceased blowing, and the rattling accoutrements
of the moving troops had fallen still with the halt. The beaten General
came out into the open space ahead of his staff, and General Shafter
rode out to meet him, and they both removed their hats.

I cast a quick glance around the scene, at the Spaniards in their blue
linen uniforms, the red and lacquer of the _guarda civile_, the ordered
Mausers, the trumpeters resting their trumpets on their hips, at our own
array, McKibben in his black shirt, Ludlow in his white leggings, and
the rank and file of the escort, the bronzed, blue-trousered troopers,
erect and motionless upon their mounts. It was war, and it was
magnificent, seen there under the flash of a tropic sun with all that
welter of green to set it off, and there was a bigness about it so that
to be there seeing it at all, and, in a way, part of it, made you feel
that for that moment you were living larger and stronger than ever
before. It was Appomattox again, and Mexico and Yorktown. Tomorrow
nearly a hundred million people the world round would read of this
scene, and as many more, yet unborn, would read of it, but today you
could sit in your saddle on the back of your little white bronco and
view it as easily as a play.

Toral rode forward toward Shafter and, as I say, both uncovered. Toral
was well-looking, his face rather red from the sun and half hidden by a
fine gray mustache. He was a little bald and his forehead was high and
round. As the two Generals shook hands it was so still that the noise of
a man chopping wood in our lines nearly half a mile away was plainly
audible. Immediately at