The rise of Theodore Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [343]
On the same day Shafter, blustering out of sheer panic, sent a warning to General José Toral, of the city garrison:
I shall be obliged, unless you surrender, to shell Santiago de Cuba. Please inform the citizens of foreign countries, and all women and children, that they should leave the city before 10 o’clock tomorrow morning.126
Toral’s response was to admit a further 3,600 Spanish troops who had somehow managed to elude a watch force of insurrectos to the north of the city. That afternoon, while the U.S. Army sweated and sickened in its muddy trenches along the Heights, hostilities suddenly broke out in Santiago Harbor. Admiral Cervera’s imprisoned ironclads attempted to rush Admiral Sampson’s blockade, with suicidal results. By 10:00 P.M. Shafter was able to inform Washington, “The Spanish fleet … is reported practically destroyed.” He promptly demanded surrender of the city. Toral replied that a truce might be possible.127
There followed a week of uneasy cease-fire as delicate negotiations went on, designed to ensure the capitulation of Santiago at no harm to Spanish honor. On 4 July, bands along the Heights tried to enliven matters with a selection of patriotic tunes (the Rough Riders ensemble contributing “Fair Harvard”), but the music had no charms for men sitting in mud, and it soon died away on the still morning air.128
General Toral’s dignity was saved by an ingenious compromise worked out on 15 July. The Santiago garrison would surrender in two days if His Excellency, the Commander in Chief of the American forces, would kindly bombard the city (shooting at a safe height above the houses), until all Spanish soldiers had handed in their arms. They might thus be truthfully said to have capitulated under fire.129 That night the air shook convincingly all over Santiago, and on Sunday, 17 July, the Stars and Stripes was hauled up the palace flagpole, just as church bells rang in the hour of noon.130 It was time for Spain to begin her withdrawal from Cuba, after four centuries of imperial dominion in the New World. But first, lunch, wine, and siesta.
ON MONDAY, 18 JULY, Colonel Theodore Roosevelt—the title was official now131—marched with the Cavalry Division over San Juan Hill to a camping ground on the foothills west of El Caney. The move away from the stinking, mosquito-filled trenches was deemed essential because of yellow fever. Already more than half the Rough Riders were, in Roosevelt’s words, “dead or disabled by wounds and sickness.” But the mosquitoes inland were just as poisonous as those nearer the coast, and his sick list lengthened.132
Although mildly diverted by the “curious” fact that “the colored troops seemed to suffer as heavily as the white,”133 he did not leave the problem to medics or the commissariat. His men must eat and build up their strength for another possible campaign in Puerto Rico. Accordingly he sent a pack-train into Santiago with instructions to buy, at his expense, whatever “simple delicacies” they could find to supplement the nauseating rations in camp. One Rough Rider claimed that Roosevelt spent $5,000 in personal funds during the next few weeks—an exaggeration no doubt, but it at least indicates the extent of his generosity and concern.134
As for himself, he remained healthy and strong as ever—so much so that he proposed to swim in the Caribbean one day with Lieutenant Jack Greenway.135 The two officers had been invited to Morro Castle by General Fitzhugh Lee, and Roosevelt’s attention was drawn to the wreck of the Merrimac, some