The rise of Theodore Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [334]
This was hardly the most sophisticated reconnaissance briefing, but it was good enough for Fighting Joe. Shortly before dawn the next morning, 24 June, his dismounted cavalrymen began a two-column advance upon Las Guásimas. The right thrust, on the west, was undertaken by General Young and about 470 Regulars, marching directly up the Camino Real. The left thrust, up a high but roughly parallel trail half a mile to the west, was undertaken by Wood and 500 Rough Riders. If Cuban information was correct, trail and road would meet about where the dead guerrilla lay, enabling Young and Wood to deploy, touch flanks, then lead their thousand men against the enemy-held ridge together. Spanish forces were estimated at about 2,000.39
Climbing quickly out of the valley at 6:00 A.M., the Rough Riders took their last look at Siboney, seven hundred feet below. Gilded by the sun, half-shrouded in early morning mist, the squalid little port looked almost pretty. It gave off faint sounds, “like blasts from faery trumpets.”40 Evidently Lawton’s men were at last waking up.
From this viewpoint the trail led northwest along a forest ridge, the vegetation growing ever taller and thicker until it closed overhead. The Rough Riders found themselves irradiated with chlorophyllic half-light; its effect would have been eerily charming had the tropical warmth not made it sinister. “The jungle had a kind of hot, sullen beauty,” one trooper remembered. “We had the feeling that it resented our intrusion—that, if we penetrated too far, it would rise up in anger, and smother us.”41 From time to time a cooing of wood-doves, and the call of a tropical cuckoo, strange to Roosevelt’s ears, sounded in the trees,42 although the birds themselves were never seen.
The Rough Riders advanced like Indians, behind a “point” tipped by those two steely giants, Sergeant Fish and Captain Capron. After them came Wood, flanked by three aides, and Roosevelt, flanked by his two favorite reporters, Richard Harding Davis of the Herald and Edward Marshall of the Journal. Both men had reported favorably, in the past, on his exploits as Police Commissioner; he now relied on them to glorify him as a warrior, and cultivated them accordingly. Stephen Crane of the World, whom Roosevelt did not like at all,43 was left to bring up the extreme rear.
Half a mile west and two or three hundred feet lower, on the valley road, General Young’s infantrymen were marching in a roughly parallel direction. But the intervening vegetation was so dense that they could be neither seen nor heard, save for a bugle-call now and then.44
After about an hour’s march, Captain Capron came back through the trees to announce that his scout had discovered the body of the dead guerrilla. Wood turned to Roosevelt. “Pass the word back to keep silence in the ranks.”45 Then he disappeared up the trail with Capron, leaving Roosevelt and Marshall to discuss coolly—and disobediently—a lunch they had once had with William Randolph Hearst at the Astor House. Meanwhile the men relaxed on the ground, chewing blades of grass and fanning the stagnant air with their hats.46
As Roosevelt talked, his glance fell on some barbed wire curling from a fence to the left of the trail. He reached for a strand, gazed at it with the expert eye of a ranchman, and started. “My God! This wire has been cut today.”
“What makes you think so?” asked Marshall.
“The end is bright, and there has been enough dew, even since sunrise, to put a light rust on it …”47
Just as he spoke, the regimental surgeon came up from behind, riding noisily on a mule. Roosevelt leaped to silence him. Then, as the Rough Riders held their breath, a terrifying sound came winging through the bushes.48
MARSHALL, WHO WAS to hear the sound endlessly repeated that day, and would find himself paralyzed from the waist down by it, described it as a z-z-z-z-z-eu,