The Boys of '98

June 11. It was three o’clock on Saturday afternoon; Colonel Huntington’s marines were disposed about the camp according to duty or fancy; some were bathing, and a detail was engaged in the work of carrying water. Suddenly the sharp report of a musket was heard, followed by another and another until the rattle of firearms told that a skirmish of considerable importance was in progress on the picket-line.

The principal portion of the enemy’s fire appeared to come from a small island about a thousand yards away, and a squad of men was detailed with a 3-inch field-gun to look out for the enemy in this direction, while the main force defended the camp.

After perhaps an hour had passed, during which time the boys of ’98 were virtually firing at random, the men on the picket-line fell back on the camp. Two of their number were missing. The battalion was formed on three sides of a hollow square, and stood ready to resist an attack which was not to be made until considerably later.

The firing ceased as abruptly as it had begun. Skirmishers were sent out and failed to find anything save a broad trail, marked here and there by blood, which came to an end at the water’s edge.

There were no longer detonations to be heard from the island. The 3-inch gun had been well served.

The skirmishers which had been sent out returned, bearing the bodies of two boys in blue who had been killed by the first shots, and, after death, mutilated by blows from Spanish machetes.

Night came; heavy clouds hung low in the sky; the force of the wind had increased almost to a gale; below in the bay the war-ships were anchored, their search-lights streaming out here and there like ribbons of gold on a pall of black velvet.

No signs of the enemy on land or sea, and, save for those two cold, lifeless forms on the heights, one might have believed the previous rattle of musketry had been heard only by the imagination.

Until nine o’clock in the evening the occupants of the camp kept careful watch, and then without warning, as before, the crack of repeating rifles broke the almost painful stillness.

The enemy was making his presence known once more, and this time it became evident he was in larger force.

Another 3-inch gun was brought into play; a launch from the Marblehead, with a Colt machine gun in her bow, steamed swiftly shoreward and opened fire; skirmish lines were thrown out through the tangle of foliage, and only when a dark form was seen, which might have been that of a Spaniard, or only the swaying branches of the trees, did the boys in blue have a target.

It was guerrilla warfare, and well-calculated to test the nerves of the young soldiers who were receiving their “baptism of blood.”

Until midnight this random firing continued, and then a large body of Spanish troops charged up the hill until they were face to face with the defenders of the camp, when they retreated, being lost to view almost immediately in the blackness of the night.

June 12. Again and again the firing was renewed from this quarter or that, but the enemy did not show himself until the morning came like a flash of light, as it does in the tropics, disclosing scurrying bands of Spanish soldiers as they sought shelter in the thicket.

Now more guns were brought into play at the camp; the war-ships began shelling the shore, and the action was speedily brought to an end. Four Americans had been killed, and among them one of the surgeons.

At intervals during the day the crack of a rifle would tell that Spanish sharpshooters were hovering around the camp; but not until eight o’clock in the evening did the enemy approach in any great numbers.

Then the battle was on once more; again did the little band of bluejackets stand to their posts, fighting against an unseen foe. Again the war-ships flashed their search-lights and sent shell after shell into the thicket, and all the while the Spanish fire was continued with deadly effect.

Lieutenants Neville and Shaw, each with a squad of ten men, were sent out to dislodge the advance line of the enemy, and as the boys in blue swung around into the thicket with a steady, swinging stride, the Spaniards gave way, firing rapidly while so doing.

The Americans, heeding not the danger, pursued, following the foe nearly to a small stone house near the coast, which had been used as a fort. They were well up to this structure when the bullets rained upon them in every direction from out the darkness. Sergeant Goode fell fatally wounded, and the Spaniards charged, forcing the Americans to the very edge of a cliff, over which one man fell and was killed; another fell, but with no further injury than a broken leg. A third was shot through the arm, after which he and the man with the broken limb joined forces, fighting on their own account. One more was wounded, and then the Americans made a desperate charge, forcing the enemy back into the stone house, and then out again, after fifteen had been killed.

Meanwhile severe fighting was going on in the vicinity of the camp; but six field-pieces were brought up, and the second battle was ended after two Americans had been killed and seven wounded.

June 13. The camp was moved to a less exposed position, while the war-ships poured shell and shrapnel into the woods, and then the marines filed solemnly out to a portion of the hill overlooking the bay where were six newly made graves.

All the marines could not attend the funeral, many having to continue the work of moving camp, or to rest on their guns, keeping a constant watch for the lurking Spaniards; but all who could do so followed the stumbling bearers of the dead over the loose gravel, and grouped themselves about the graves.

The stretcher bearing the bodies had just been lifted to its place, and Chaplain Jones of the Texas was about to begin the reading of the burial service, when the Spaniards began shooting at the party from the western chaparral.

“Fall in, Company A, Company B, Company C, fall in!”

“Fall in!” was the word from one end of the camp to the other. The graves were deserted by all save the chaplain and escort, who still stood unmoved.

The men sprang to arms, and then placed themselves behind the rolled tents, their knapsacks, the bushes in the hollows, boxes and piles of stones, their rifles ready, their eyes strained into the brush.

Howitzers roared, blue smoke arose where the shells struck and burst in the chaparral, and rifles sounded angrily.

The Texas fired seven shots at the place from which the shooting came, and the Spaniards, as usual, fled out of sight.

The funeral services had hardly been resumed when there was another attack; but this time the pits near the old blockhouse got the range of the malignant marksmen and shattered them with a few shots. The Texas and Panther shelled the brush to the eastward, but the chaplain kept right on with the service, and from that time until night there was little shooting from the cover.

On this day the dynamite cruiser Vesuvius joined Admiral Sampson’s fleet, and the weary marines, holding their posts on shore against overwhelming odds, hoped that her arrival betokened the speedy coming of the soldiers who were so sadly needed.

June 14. Substantial recognition was given by the Navy Department to the members of the gallant crew who took the Merrimac into the entrance of Santiago Harbour and sunk her across the channel under the very muzzles of the Spanish guns.

The orders sent to Admiral Sampson directed the promotion of the men as follows:

Daniel Montague, master-at-arms, to be a boatswain, from fifty dollars a month to thirteen hundred dollars a year.

George Charette, gunner’s mate, to be a gunner, from fifty dollars a month to thirteen hundred dollars a year.

Rudolph Clausen, Osborne Deignan, and – Murphy, coxswains, to be chief boatswain’s mates, an increase of twenty dollars a month.

George F. Phillips, machinist, from forty dollars a month to seventy dollars a month.

Francis Kelly, water tender, to be chief machinist, from thirty-seven dollars a month to seventy dollars a month.

Lieutenant Hobson’s reward would come through Congress.

While a grateful people were discussing the manner in which their heroes should be crowned, that little band of marines on the shore of Guantanamo Bay, worn almost to exhaustion by the harassing fire of the enemy during seventy-two hours, was once more battling against a vastly superior force in point of numbers.

From the afternoon of the eleventh of June until this morning of the fourteenth, the Americans had remained on the defensive, – seven hundred against two thousand or more. Now, however, different tactics were to be used. Colonel Huntington had decided that it was time to turn the tables, and before the night was come the occupants of the graves on the crest of the hill had been avenged.

A scouting party, made up of nine officers, two hundred and eighty marines, and forty-one Cubans, was divided into four divisions, the first of which had orders to destroy a water-tank from which the enemy drew supplies. The second was to attack the Spanish camp beyond the first range of hills. The third had for its objective point a signal-station from which information as to the movements of the American fleet had been flashed into Santiago. The fourth division was to act as the reserve.

In half an hour from the time of leaving camp the signal-station was in the hands of the Americans, and the heliograph outfit lost to the enemy. The boys of ’98 had suffered no loss, while eight Spaniards lay with faces upturned to the rays of the burning sun.

At noon the Spanish camp had been taken, with a loss of two Cubans killed, one American and four Cubans wounded. Twenty-three Spaniards were dead.

The water-tank was destroyed, and the enemy, panic-stricken, was fleeing here and there, yet further harassed by a heavy fire from the Dolphin, who sent her shells among the fugitives whenever they came in view.

When the day drew near its close, and the weary but triumphant marines returned to camp, a hundred of the enemy lay out on the hills dead; more than twice that number must have been wounded, and eighteen were being brought in as prisoners.

On this night of June 14th, at the entrance to Santiago Harbour, the dynamite cruiser Vesuvius– that experimental engine of destruction – was given a test in actual warfare, and the result is thus graphically pictured by a correspondent of the New York Herald:

“Three shells, each containing two hundred pounds of guncotton, were fired last night from the dynamite guns of the Vesuvius at the hill at the western entrance to Santiago Harbour, on which there is a fort.

“The frightful execution done by those three shots will be historic.

“Guns in that fort had not been silenced when the fleet drew off after the attack that followed the discovery of the presence of the Spanish fleet in the harbour.

“In the intense darkness of last night the Vesuvius steamed into close range and let go one of her mysterious missiles.