Title: The Surrender of Santiago - An Account of the Historic Surrender of Santiago to General - Shafter, July 17, 1898
Author: Norris, Frank, 1870-1902
Language: English
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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 their backs the staffs of the two watched. The
escort watched. Back along the Spanish and the American trenches
thousands of men stood in line and watched; Santiago watched, and
Washington, Spain and the United States, the two hemispheres, the Old
World and the New, paused on that moment, watching. A sentence or two
was spoken in low tones and the Generals replaced their hats and shook
hands smilingly.

Instantly a great creaking of saddles took place as the men eased their
positions, and conversation began again. The Spanish soldiers filed off
through a break in the barbed wire fence, the defiant trumpeters playing
their pretty march-call more defiantly than ever.

Introductions were the order of the next few moments, Shafter
introducing all his major and brigadier-generals to Toral. Meanwhile
Spanish soldiers were defiling past us along the road going toward our
lines, and without arms. There was no rancor or bitterness in the
expression of these men. They evinced mostly an abnormal curiosity in
observing the cavalrymen who formed our escort, and the cavalry repaid
it in kind. The soldiers on both sides wanted to know just what manner
of men they had been fighting these last few weeks.

I, myself, became lost in the fascination of these silent-shod soldiers
(for they wear a kind of tennis shoe) filing off at their rapid marching
gait. We noted that most of them were young, jolly, rather
innocent-looking fellows, and we looked especially for officers,
studying them and watching to see how "they took it." One fellow led a
very fat cow, with his knapsack and impedimenta bound to her horns.

They had nearly gone by and the end of their pack-train of little
donkeys was already in sight when a general movement of our escort made
me gather up the reins. The head of our column was just descending into
the road, going on at a trot. The ride into the city was beginning.

Shall I ever forget that ride? We rode three abreast, always at a rapid
trot and sometimes even at a canter, the General himself always setting
the pace. Just after leaving the field where the surrender had taken
place the road broadened still more until it became a veritable highway,
the broadest and best we had ever seen in Cuba, but disfigured here and
there with the dead horses of officers, the saddle and headstall still
on the carcass. The city was in plain sight now, but its aspect, with
which we had become so familiar, was changing with every hundred yards.

At the junction of the Caney road a block house was passed with its
usual trench and trocha, strong enough against infantry, as we all knew
by now. This one was of unusual strength and we would have given it more
serious attention had not our eyes been smitten with the sight of a
veritable marvel. It might have been the white swan of Lohengrin there
on the stony margin of the road, or the green dragon of Whantley, or the
Holland submarine torpedo boat; but it was none of these. It was a
carriage--a carriage.

I say it was a carriage, a hack, with girls in white muslin frocks in
it, the driver lounging on the box and two miserable horses dozing in
the harness. I suppose it would be quite impossible to make a reader
understand how incongruous this apparition seemed to us. It was in use,
no doubt, carrying refugees from Caney back into the city and its
presence was easily accounted for. But Mr. Kipling's phantom rickshaw
could hardly have produced a greater sensation.

"A carriage!"

"Say, will you look at that!"

"Well, for God's sake!"

"Damned if it isn't a carriage!"

"Say, Jim, look at the carriage!"

"It is a carriage for a fact--well, of all the things!"

"Well, that get's me--a carriage!"

It was among the troopers of the escort that the carriage had the
greatest success. They chuckled over it as if it had some hidden,
mirthful significance. They addressed strange allusions to the lounging
driver, and when they had ridden by they turned in their saddles and
watched it out of sight at the risk of breaking their necks. They rode
the sprucer for it; they were in better spirits for it. They laughed,
they talked, they went at a faster pace, they cocked their hats, they
were gay, they were debonair. They had seen a carriage!

And now we were close up. Here was the hospital on the very outskirts,
with its plethora of Red Cross flags. It was a hospital, after all, and
not a barracks, as we had said, studying it through our field glasses
during the last week, for blanketed and beflanneled objects,
hollow-eyed, with bandaged heads, crowded silently at the grated windows
staring at us galloping past. Here was an abandoned trench, and
here--steady all, pull down to a walk--here is the barbed wire
entanglement we have heard so much about. Formidable enough, surely;
three lines of posts right across the road with barbed wire interwoven.
A rabbit could not have passed here; and back of it trenches and rifle
pits; nothing but artillery could have forced these lines. What fools to
have abandoned them--well.

We passed through the gap single file and gingerly, then forward again
at a hard gallop, clattering rough-shod over paved streets, for now at
last we were in the city of Santiago.

Soldiers without arms, refugees, the men in brown derby hats--Cubans,
negroes, dark women with black lace upon their heads, and children
absolutely naked, watched us very silently from the sidewalks and from
balconies. The houses were of adobe, painted pale blue and pink, and
roofed with rugged lichen-blackened tiles. The windows reached from
sidewalk to roof and were grated heavily, the doors oak and clenched
with great nail heads. Santiago, Santiago at last, after so many days of
sailing, of marching, of countermarching, and of fighting.

Here we were in the city at last, riding in, hoofs clattering, sabres
rattling, saddles creaking, and suddenly a great wave of exultation came
over us all. I know the General felt it. I know the last trooper of the
escort felt it. There was no thought of humanitarian principles then.
The war was not a "crusade," we were not fighting for Cubans just then,
it was not for disinterested motives that we were there sabred and
revolvered and carbined. Santiago was ours--was ours, ours, by the sword
we had acquired, we, Americans, with no one to help--and the Anglo-Saxon
blood of us, the blood of the race that has fought its way out of a
swamp in Friesland, conquering and conquering and conquering, on to the
westward, the race whose blood instinct is the acquiring of land, went
galloping through our veins to the beat of our horses' hoofs.

Every trooper that day looked down from his saddle upon Cuban and
Spanish soldier as from a throne. Even though not a soldier, it was
impossible not to know their feeling, glorying, arrogant, the fine,
brutal arrogance of the Anglo-Saxon, and we rode on there at a gallop
through the crowded streets of the fallen city, heads high, sabres
clattering, a thousand iron hoofs beating out a long roll--triumphant,
arrogant conquerors.

At the Plaza we halted and dismounted. The Cathedral was here, the Cuban
and Spanish clubs and the Governor's Palace, a rather unimposing affair
all on one floor, with the architectural magnificence of a railway
station of the French provinces. The General and the generals went in
and crowded the hall of audience, very clinquant with its black and
white floor, glass chandeliers, long mirrors and single gilded center
table. Here for an hour deputations were received. The Chief of Police,
Leonardo Ras y Rodriguez, the ex-Governor, and last of all and most
imposing, Monsignor Francisco Saenz de Urturi, the Archbishop, in his
robes, purple cap and gold chain, followed by his suite. Him, General
Shafter, came forward to meet, and the two shook hands under the tawdry
chandelier. It was a strange enough sight. By many and devious and
bloody ways had the priest and the soldier come to meet each other on
that day.

But it was drawing toward noon. I went out into the Plaza again. The
troops were already forming a line of cavalry that stretched along the
street immediately before the Governor's Palace, and two companies of
the Ninth Infantry and the band occupied the center where the little
park is. I went across the Plaza and stood on the terrace in front of
the main doors of the Cathedral. Directly opposite was the Governor's
Palace, the naked flagstaff on the roof over the door standing out lean
and stark against the background of green hills.

The sidewalks and streets outside the lines of soldiers were crowded
with an even mixture of civilians and disarmed Spanish soldiers. The
Spanish Club on the left was suddenly closed, but the balconies of the
San Carlos--the Cuban Club--were filled with black-bearded, voluble
gentlemen in white ducks and straw hats. Every window in the "hotel" was
occupied, each one of the little balconies of the Cafe Venus had its
gathering, while the terrace of the Cathedral was packed close. There
were perhaps five thousand in the Plaza de Armas of Santiago on that
seventeenth day of July.

At five minutes of the noon hour everything fell quiet. Captain
McKittrick and Lieutenant Miley had appeared on the roof of the Palace
by the flagstaff. Unfortunately there was not a breath of wind. The
minutes passed, two, three, four. The silence was profound, nobody
spoke. In all those five thousand people there was scarcely a movement.

Then back of us from the direction of the Cathedral's clock tower there
came a slow wheezing as of the expansion of decrepit lungs, a creaking
and jarring of springs and cog-wheels that grew rapidly louder till it
culminated abruptly in a single sonorous stroke. At once Captain
McKittrick laid his hand to the halyards of the flagstaff, a bundle of
bunting rose in the air, shapeless and without definite color. But
suddenly, wonderful enough, there came a breeze, a brisk spurt out of
the north. The bunting caught it, twisted upon itself, tumbled, writhed,
then suddenly shook itself free, and in a single long billow rolled out
into the Stars and Stripes of Old Glory.

"Pre-sent h' ar-r-r!"

That was from the square, and in answer to the order came the
Krag-Jorgensons leaping to the fists and the cavalry sabres swishing and
flashing out into the sunlight.

Then the band: "Oh, say, can you see--" while far off on the hills from
our intrenchments Capron's battery began to thunder the salute.

The moment was perhaps the most intense of the whole campaign. There was
no cheering and that was the best of it. It is hard to understand this,
but the occasion was too big for mere shouting, and infinitely too
solemn. I have heard the "Miserere" in the Sistine Chapel, and in
comparison with the raising of the flag over the city of Santiago it was
opera comique.

For perhaps a full minute we stood with bared heads reverently watching
the great flag as it strained in the breeze that, curiously enough, was
now steady and strong, watching it as it strained and stiffened and grew
out broader and broader over the conquered city till you believed the
glory of it and the splendor and radiance of it must go flashing off
there over those leagues of tumbling water till it blazed like a comet
over Madrid itself.

And the great names came to the mind again--Lexington, Trenton,
Yorktown, 1812, Chapultepec, Mexico, Shiloh, Gettysburg, the Wilderness,
Appomattox, and now--Guasima, San Juan, El Caney, Santiago.



PUBLISHED FOR THE BENEFIT OF THE RED CROSS FUNDS


The Surrender of Santiago, a thrilling account of an historic event, was
graphically set down by the late Frank Morris, and first published by
Otis F. Wood, in the Sun, New York, through whose courtesy it is now
reprinted in booklet form. Issued by Paul Elder & Company at their
Tomoye Press, under the direction of Ricardo J. Orozco, in May, nineteen
seventeen.





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