Part 11 (1/2)
Our opinions are the result of careful personal observation, and they are also based on the unanimous opinion of our medical officers with the army, and who understand the situation absolutely.
This letter was signed by Generals Kent, Bates, Chaffee, Sumner, Ludlow, Ames, and Wood, and Colonel Roosevelt.
In view of such a state of affairs as that disclosed by this letter there was, of course, only one thing to be done. The War Department decided to remove the Fifth Army-Corps at once from Cuba, and before the middle of August a large part of General Shatter's command was on its way to Montauk Point.
As a result, I presume, of sleeping without shelter from the heavy dew in the field-hospital at the front, and over-exerting myself by walking around the lines of the army in the blazing suns.h.i.+ne of midday, I was finally prostrated with illness myself. At three o'clock on the night of Tuesday, July 26, I awoke in a chill, and before morning I had all the symptoms of calenture, with a temperature of 104.
Calenture, or Cuban malarial fever, comes on rather suddenly with a chill of greater or less severity and a violent headache. The temperature frequently rises to 105, and the fever, instead of being intermittent, runs continuously with little, if any, diurnal variation.
If the attack is not a very severe one the headache gradually subsides; the temperature falls to 102 or 103, and in the course of three or four days the disease begins to yield to treatment. In some cases the fever is interrupted by a second chill, followed by another rise of temperature; but, as a rule, there is only one chill, and the fever, after running from four days to a week, gradually abates. The treatment most favored in Santiago consists of the administration of a large dose of sulphate of magnesia at the outset, followed up with quinine and calomel, or perhaps quinine and sulphur. The patient is not allowed to take any nourishment while the fever lasts, and if he keeps quiet, avoids sudden changes of temperature, and does not fret, he generally recovers in a week or ten days. He suffers from languor and prostration, however, for a fortnight or more, and if he overeats, moves about in the suns.h.i.+ne, or exposes himself to the night air, he is liable to have another chill, with a relapse, in which the fever is higher and more obstinate, perhaps, than at first. Under ordinary circ.u.mstances the fever is not dangerous, and the worst thing about it is the wretched, half-dead, half-alive condition in which it leaves one. My attack was not a very severe one, and in the course of ten days I was able to walk about again; but the first time I went out into the suns.h.i.+ne I had a relapse, which reduced me to such a state of weakness and helplessness that I could no longer care for myself, and had either to leave the country or go into one of the crowded Santiago hospitals and run the risk of being sent as a ”suspect” to the yellow-fever camp near Siboney.
Upon the advice of Dr. Egan, I decided to take the first steamer for New York, and sailed from Santiago on August 12, after a Cuban campaign of only seven weeks.
CHAPTER XIX
THE SANTIAGO CAMPAIGN
It is my purpose, in the concluding chapters of this volume, to review as fully and dispa.s.sionately as I can the series of military operations known collectively as ”the Santiago campaign,” including, first, the organization and equipment of the expedition of General Shafter at Tampa; second, the disembarkation of troops and the landing of supplies at Daiquiri and Siboney; third, the strategic plan of the campaign and its execution; and, fourth, the wrecking of the army by disease after the decisive battle of July 1-2. The point of view from which I shall regard this campaign is not that of a trained military expert or critic, but merely that of an attentive and fair-minded civilian observer. I do not pretend to speak _ex cathedra_, nor do I claim for my judgments any other value than that given to them by such inherent reasonableness and fairness as they may seem to have. I went to Cuba without any prejudice for or against any particular plan of operations; I had very little acquaintance with or knowledge of the officers of the Fifth Army-Corps; and the opinions and conclusions that I shall here set forth are based on personal observations made in the field without conscious bias or prepossession of any kind.
In reviewing a military campaign, an arctic expedition, a voyage of discovery, or any other enterprise involving the employment of a certain force for the accomplishment of a certain purpose, the first question to be considered is the question of responsibility. Who is to be held accountable for the management and the results of this enterprise--the leader who directed and had charge of it, or the superior power which gave him his orders, furnished him with his equipment, and sent him into the field? When General Shafter was ordered to ”go and capture the garrison at Santiago and a.s.sist in capturing the harbor and the fleet,” did he become personally responsible for the management and the results of the campaign, or did he share that responsibility with the War Department? Unless there is some evidence to the contrary, the presumption in such a case is that the general in command of the army is told in due time where he is to go and what he is expected to do, and is then allowed to make his own plan of campaign, and to call upon the War Department for such supplies and means of transportation as, in the exercise of his individual judgment, he may think necessary for the successful execution of that plan. If he is given time enough to acquaint himself thoroughly with the field in which he is to operate, if his plan of campaign, in its general outlines, is approved, and if all his requisitions for vessels, horses, mules, wagons, ambulances, tents, guns, ammunition, and miscellaneous supplies are duly honored, there is no reason that I can see why he should not be held to a strict personal accountability for results, both generally and in detail. He has made his own plan; he has had everything that he asked for; and if the campaign does not go as it should, he, and not the War Department, is to blame. If, however, the department, after selecting him and approving his plan, does _not_ furnish him with the transportation and the stores that he needs and has called for, he ought to protect himself and his own reputation by referring respectfully to that fact in his report of the campaign, so that, if any of his bricks are imperfect for lack of straw, the people may know that he was not supplied with straw and had no means whatever of getting it in the field to which he was sent. The importance of this point will become apparent when an attempt is made to ascertain the causes and fix the responsibility for the wrecking of the Fifth Army-Corps by disease in the short s.p.a.ce of one calendar month.
There is nothing in the official doc.u.ments thus far published to indicate that General Shafter was unreasonably hurried, or that he failed to get from the War Department anything for which he made timely requisition. The invasion of eastern Cuba was planned as early as the first week in May--possibly much earlier than that, and, at any rate, long before Admiral Cervera's fleet took refuge in Santiago harbor.
Colonel Babc.o.c.k, Shafter's adjutant-general, told me on May 7 that the government had decided to send the army of invasion to the eastern end of the island, and to leave Havana and the western provinces unmolested until later in the season. Before General Shafter sailed from Tampa, therefore, he had nearly or quite six weeks in which to acquaint himself with the Santiago field and mature a plan of operations. The question whether or not he was furnished with all the means of transportation and all the supplies for which he made requisition is in more doubt; but, inasmuch as he seems to have made no complaint or protest, and does not refer in his official reports to deficiencies of any kind, it may be a.s.sumed, for the purposes of this review, that he had been furnished by the War Department with everything for which he asked. Upon this a.s.sumption he was unquestionably responsible for the whole Santiago campaign, and must not only be given credit for the success that crowned it, but be held accountable for the blunders and oversights by which it was marred. He can relieve himself from such accountability only by showing that his equipment was inadequate and that the inadequacy was the result of causes beyond his control.
We are now prepared to consider:
I. The organization and equipment of the Santiago expedition.
When a general is appointed to lead and direct an expedition in a foreign country, the first questions, I think, that he must ask himself are: (1) What is the nature of the field in which I am to operate, and what are the difficulties--especially the unusual and unfamiliar difficulties--with which I shall have to contend? (2) Can I disembark my army in a harbor, or shall I have to land it on an open, unprotected coast, and perhaps through surf? (3) Are there any roads leading back into the interior, and, if so, what is their nature, and what is likely to be their condition at this season of the year? (4) Is the climate of the country to which I am going an unhealthful one, and, if so, how can I best protect my men from the diseases likely to attack them?
It is not always practicable to obtain satisfactory answers to such questions as these; but that answers should be had, if possible, and that the equipment of the force and the plan of campaign should be made to accord with the information obtained by means of them, is unquestionable. In the particular case now under consideration there was no difficulty whatever in getting full and satisfactory replies, not only to all of the above questions, but to scores of others of a similar nature that might have been and ought to have been asked. For nearly a month before General Shafter sailed from Tampa the vessels of Admiral Sampson's fleet had been patrolling the southeastern coast of Cuba from Santiago harbor to Guantanamo Bay, and their officers were in a position to furnish all the information that might be desired with regard to the nature of the coast, the facilities for landing an army, the strength and direction of the prevailing winds, the danger to be apprehended from heavy surf, and a dozen other matters of vital importance to an invading army. At Daiquiri, Siboney, and Santiago there were stations of an American iron-mining company, and its officers and employees, who might easily have been found, were in a position to furnish any amount of accurate and trustworthy information with regard to climate, topography, roads, rains, surf, and local conditions generally, in the very field that General Shafter's army was to occupy.
The sources of information above indicated were not the only sources accessible at the time when the Santiago campaign was decided upon; but they were the most important ones, and it is fair to presume that General Shafter made use of them to the fullest possible extent. If so, he was able to answer the questions above suggested in some such way as this:
1. The field to which I am going is a tropical field, and the unusual and unfamiliar difficulties with which I shall have to contend are probably those dependent upon climatic conditions.
2. There are no sheltered harbors on the southeastern coast of Cuba between Cape Cruz and Cape Maysi except the harbor of Santiago and the Bay of Guantanamo. The former is in possession of the enemy, and cannot, therefore, be used, while the latter is too far away from the city of Santiago, which I am ordered to capture. It is probable, therefore, that I shall have to land my army on an unsheltered part of the coast. The prevailing winds in the summer are from the east and southeast, and the swell that rolls in from the Caribbean Sea often breaks on the exposed coast-line in heavy and dangerous surf.
3. The roads leading back into the interior in the direction of Santiago are generally narrow and bad; they traverse almost impenetrable jungles; and they are liable, at this season of the year, to be rendered impa.s.sable for wheeled vehicles by heavy and frequent rains.
4. The climate is unhealthful, and unless men from the North are well fed, suitably clothed, securely sheltered, and furnished with boiled water for drinking purposes, they are almost certain to suffer from calenture, the characteristic fever of the region, as well as from yellow fever and dysentery.
This, in the briefest possible summary, is the information that General Shafter had, or might have had, before he sailed from Tampa. What preparation did he make to meet the difficulties suggested by this knowledge, and how far is the influence of it to be traced in the organization and equipment of his command?
Take, first, the problem of disembarking an army of sixteen thousand men, with the supplies necessary for its maintenance, on an unsheltered coast.
In 1847, when General Scott had in contemplation the landing of an army of twelve thousand men on the open beach at Vera Cruz, he caused sixty-seven surf-boats to be built for that particular service, each of them capable of holding from seventy to eighty men. Every detail of the disembarkation had been carefully considered and planned; every contingency that could be foreseen had been provided for; and the landing was successfully made in the course of two or three hours, without a single error or accident.
When General Shafter sailed from Tampa, on June 14, with an army considerably larger than that of General Scott, his equipment for disembarkation on an exposed, surf-beaten coast consisted, according to his own report, of only two scows! One of these went adrift at sea, and the loss of it, the general says, ”proved to be very serious and was greatly felt.” I don't wonder! Two scows, for an army of sixteen thousand men and ten or fifteen s.h.i.+p-loads of supplies, was a sufficiently economical allowance; and when that number was reduced by half, and a whole army-corps became dependent upon one scow, I am not surprised to learn that ”the disembarkation was delayed and embarra.s.sed.” There is a reference in the report to certain ”lighters sent by the quartermaster's department,” and intended, apparently, for use on the Cuban coast; but when and by what route they were ”sent” does not appear, and inasmuch as they were lost at sea before they came into General Shafter's control, they can hardly be regarded as a part of his equipment. All that he had with him was this flotilla of two scows. I heard vague reports of a pontoon-train stowed away under hundreds of tons of other stuff in the hold of one of the transports; but whether it was intended to supplement the flotilla of scows, or to be employed in the bridging of rivers, I am unable to say. I do not think it was ever unloaded in Cuba, and I am quite sure that it never was used.