Burning boy, p.83
Burning Boy, page 83
* * *
He was in Cuba for only a month before his health broke down, but that was the most crucial month of the war, and Crane was in the thick of it from beginning to end, immersed in the grisly, nonstop business of mayhem and slaughter as he darted around the island from one confrontation to the next. First, the landing with the marines at Guantánamo Bay on June tenth, then to Cuzco with Captain Elliott on the fourteenth, then to Santiago with Scovel on the seventeenth, where they set up the World ’s headquarters and then, in the afternoon, “swam two Jamaican horses ashore from the Triton, found some insurgents and took a journey into the hills.” Their object was to assess the activities of the Spanish fleet in the harbor, and at five o’clock the next morning, continually threading their way through enemy lines, they began a twenty-five-mile trek that included an arduous uphill climb and equally demanding downhill climb of a two-thousand-foot mountain—from which they had a clear view of what Crane would later call “the doomed ships”—that brought them to the shore again, where the Three Friends had just left without them. Improvising as they went along, they hitched a ride with two Cubans in a dugout and were eventually hauled up onto the dispatch tug, which carried them to Sampson’s flagship, the New York, where they gave the admiral a full report on what they had learned about the position of Cervera’s fleet.*
June 22: At dawn, six thousand troops took part in the American invasion at Daiquirí under the command of Major General Joseph Wheeler (“Crane Tells the Story of the Disembarkment,” the World, July 7).
June 23: Crane, McCready, Edward Marshall (working for the New York Journal), and photographer Burr McIntosh (Leslie’s Weekly) marched to Siboney behind the Rough Riders.
June 24: Following a jungle trail from Siboney to Las Guásimas, the Rough Riders were ambushed by Cuban guerrillas armed with smokeless Mausers and suffered numerous casualties. Marshall was shot in the spine, which led to temporary paralysis, permanent disabilities, and a partial amputation of his left leg. He later wrote: “When I regained consciousness, hours after the fight had ended, one of the first faces I saw was that of Stephen Crane. The day was hot.… The thermometer … would have shown a temperature of something like 100 degrees. Yet Stephen Crane—and mind you, he was there in the interest of another newspaper—took the dispatch which I managed to write five or six miles to the coast and cabled it for me. He had to walk, for he could get no horse or mule. Then he rushed about in the heat and arranged with a number of men to bring a stretcher up from the coast and carry me back on it. He was probably as tired then as a man could be and still walk. But he trudged back from the coast to the field hospital where I was lying and saw to it that I was properly conveyed to the coast.”
June 25: Crane wrote and filed his report on Las Guásimas, “Roosevelt’s Rough Riders’ Loss Due to a Gallant Blunder” (the World, June 26).
June 27: From Siboney, Crane sent off his article about the June seventeenth trek with Scovel, “Hunger Has Made Cubans Fatalists” (published in the World on July 7).
July 1: The day of the “white gleaming raincoat,” which was also one of the most eventful days of the war. Early in the morning, the Americans advanced toward the fortifications at San Juan, just outside Santiago, and launched an assault on the village of El Caney, six miles to the northeast, where Spanish forces were entrenched. From a vantage point a couple of miles away at El Pozo, Crane and several others (among them Frederic Remington) observed the shelling of the Spanish led by Captain Allyn Capron and the attack on El Caney by General Henry Lawton’s troops. At eleven o’clock, the 71st New York Volunteer Regiment met with heavy fire on the Santiago road, and in less than an hour four hundred men from the unit were killed or wounded. At one o’clock, with Lawton’s troops bogged down at El Caney, Roosevelt led the Rough Riders in a charge up Kettle Hill with regular troops following close behind—which became the subject of S.C.’s longest article for the World, “Stephen Crane’s Vivid Story of the Battle of San Juan” (published July 14). At three o’clock, Crane and Jimmy Hare arrived at Wood’s entrenchment, which was under heavy Spanish fire. That was the “neon target moment” when Crane pretended not to hear Wood’s order to lie down and went on standing until Hare or Davis (or perhaps both of them at different times) shamed him into joining the others in the trench. That evening, when Davis suffered a sudden, excruciating attack of sciatica, Crane and Hare held him up as the three of them walked slowly, ever so slowly, to the correspondents’ camp near El Pozo. For more than a mile of their stumbling journey, the trail was under enemy fire. Davis: “Whenever I protested and refused their sacrifice and pointed out the risk they were taking they smiled as at the ravings of a naughty child, and when I lay down in the road and refused to budge unless they left me, Crane called the attention of Hare to the effect of the setting sun behind the palm-trees.”
July 2: In the morning, sitting on San Juan Hill, Crane observed Lawton’s troops returning from their victory at El Caney to take their positions on the San Juan Heights, which were still under attack. In the afternoon, he stopped in at the town church in El Caney, which had been transformed into a makeshift hospital where Spanish and Cuban guerrilla prisoners were being treated by American doctors. That evening, he traveled by boat to the cable station in Port Antonio, Jamaica, to wire his dispatches.
July 3: The conclusive naval battle that destroyed the Spanish fleet began while Crane was still in Jamaica, and by the time he returned to Cuba, the fighting had ended.
July 5: Crane wrote his article “Spanish Deserters Among the Refugees at El Caney” (the World, July 8). “One saw in this great, gaunt assemblage the true horror of war. The sick, the lame, and the blind were there. Women and men, tottering upon the verge of death, plodded doggedly onward.… Their air was stolid and indifferent. It was a forlorn hope at best. If this was safety, well and good. If death, what difference how it came.”
July 7: Datelined “General Shafter’s Headquarters,” Crane’s “Captured Mausers for Volunteers” (the World, July 17) was highly critical of the black-powder, twenty-five-year-old Springfield rifles used by the American volunteers, which continually betrayed their positions to Spanish forces hidden behind the surrounding shrubs and thickets and led to many unnecessary deaths from bullets fired by undetectable, smokeless Mausers. The piece concludes: “In war anything is justified save killing your own men through laziness or gross stupidity.”
July 8: Delirious from an attack of malaria and running a high, out-of-control fever, Crane was put aboard the City of Washington at Siboney and shipped back to the United States for medical treatment.
* * *
He had landed in Key West just two and a half months earlier, but the events he lived through in that short span had a monumental effect on him, and they generated an abundant outflow of writing both during and after the war. The twenty-four articles for the World to begin with, followed by ten short stories about the Cuban campaign (among them “The Price of the Harness”), and then the extraordinary, first-person, lightly fictionalized “War Memories,” a forty-two-page retelling of his experiences during the first ten weeks of the campaign—up to and including his evacuation to Old Point Comfort, Virginia—which was composed in August 1899, eight months after his return to England.
It is the strongest, most inventive piece of work he wrote during the last year of his life, and in ways he had never quite allowed himself to do earlier, he opens up and speaks to the reader directly about himself—and with the veil suddenly lifted, he manages to establish an intimate, deeply personal manner of telling, a voice of multiple, shifting tonalities that range from the somber to the buoyant and everything in between, the full Crane in all his contradictory manyness.
On the death of Assistant Surgeon John Blair Gibbs of the U.S. Navy in the early morning hours of June twelfth:
I went in search of Gibbs, but I soon gave over an active search for the more congenial occupation of lying flat and feeling the hot hiss of bullets trying to cut my hair. For the moment I was no longer a cynic. I was a child who, in a fit of ignorance, had jumped into the vat of war. I heard somebody dying near me. He was dying hard. Hard. It took him a long time to die. He breathed as all noble machinery breathes when it is making its gallant strife against breaking, breaking. But he was going to break. He was going to break. It seemed to me, this breathing, the noise of a heroic pump which strives to subdue a mud which comes upon it in tons. The darkness was impenetrable. The man was lying in some depression within seven feet of me. Every wave, vibration, of his anguish beat upon my senses. He was long past groaning. There was only the bitter strife for air which pulsed out into the night in a clear penetrating whistle, with intervals of terrible silence in which I held my own breath in the common unconscious aspiration to help. I thought this man would never die. I wanted him to die. Ultimately he died. At the moment, the adjutant came bustling along erect amid the spitting bullets. I knew him by his voice. “Where’s the doctor? There’s some wounded men over there. Where’s the doctor?” A man answered briskly: “Just died this minute, sir.” It was as if he had said: “Just gone around the corner this minute, sir.”
Memorial plaque to Dr. John Blair Gibbs at the University Club, New York City. (PHOTOGRAPH BY SPENCER OSTRANDER)
After tramping five or six miles to Siboney with Marshall’s dispatch, Crane recalls how he tried to round up help for his wounded friend, an effort that began with this maddening conversation:
One of these correspondents replied … “Marshall? Marshall? Why, Marshall isn’t in Cuba at all. He left for New York before the expedition sailed from Tampa.” I said: “Beg pardon, but I remarked that Marshall was shot in the fight this morning, and have you seen any Journal people?” After a pause, he said: “I am sure Marshall is not down here at all. He’s in New York.” I said: “Pardon me, but I remarked that Marshall was shot in the fight this morning, and have you seen any Journal people?” He said: “No; now look here, you must have gotten two chaps mixed up somehow. Marshall isn’t in Cuba at all. How could he be shot?” I said: “Pardon me, but I remarked that Marshall was shot in the fight this morning, and have you seen any Journal people?” He said: “But it can’t really be Marshall, you know, for the simple reason that he’s not down here.” I clasped my hands to my temples, gave one piercing cry to heaven and fled from his presence.
On the night of July first, when he came upon an old friend and classmate from Claverack, Reuben McNab:
Then I looked down into a miserable huddle at Bloody Bend, a huddle of hurt men, dying men, dead men. And there I saw Reuben McNab, a corporal in the 71st New York Volunteers, and with a hole through his lung. Also several holes through his clothing. “Well, they got me,” he said in greeting. Usually they said that. There were no long speeches. “Well, they got me.” That was sufficient. The duty of the upright, unhurt man is then difficult. I doubt if many of us learned how to speak to our own wounded.… “Well, they got me,” said Reuben McNab. I had looked upon five hundred wounded men with stolidity, or with a conscious indifference, which filled me with amazement. But the apparition of Reuben McNab, the schoolmate lying there in the mud with a hole through his lung, awed me into stutterings, set me trembling with a sense of terrible intimacy with this war which theretofore I could have believed was a dream—almost. Twenty shot men rolled their eyes and looked at me. Only one man paid no heed. He was dying; he had no time. The bullets hummed low over them all. Death, having already struck, still insisted upon raising a venomous crest. “If you’re goin’ by the hospital, step in and see me,” said Reuben McNab. That was all.
On visiting the makeshift hospital at El Caney:
Pushing through the throng in the plaza we came in sight of the door of the church, and here was a strange scene. The church had been turned into a hospital for Spanish wounded who had fallen into American hands. The interior of the church was too cavelike in its gloom for the eyes of the operating surgeons, so they had the altar-table carried to the doorway, where there was a bright light. Framed then in the black archway was the altar-table with the figure of a man upon it. He was naked save for a breech-clout, and so close, so clear was the ecclesiastic suggestion, that one’s mind leaped to a fantasy that this thin pale figure had just been torn down from a cross. The flash of the impression was like light, and for this instant it illumined all the dark recesses of one’s remotest ideas of sacrilege, ghastly and wanton. I bring this to you merely as an effect—an effect of mental light and shade, if you like; something done in thought similar to that which the French Impressionists do in color; something meaningless and at the same time overwhelming, crushing, monstrous.
On falling ill:
Very soon after this the end of the campaign came for me. I caught a fever. I am not sure to this day what kind of a fever it was. It was defined variously. I know, at any rate, that I first developed a languorous indifference to everything in the world. Then I developed a tendency to ride a horse even as a man lies on a cot. Then I—I am not sure—I think I groveled and groaned about Siboney for several days. My colleagues, Scovel and George Rhea, found me and gave me of their best, but I didn’t know whether London Bridge was falling down or whether there was a war with Spain. It was all the same. What of it? Nothing of it. Everything happened, perhaps. But I cared not a jot. Life, death, dishonor—all were nothing to me. All I cared for was pickles. Pickles at any price! Pickles!!
And then, after speeding along through forty-two pages of horror, comic blunders, and head-spinning action, he comes to an abrupt halt and blows it all up:
The episode was closed. And you can depend on it that I have told you nothing at all, nothing at all, nothing at all.
* * *
The crossing to Virginia was a rough one for Crane, rough not only because of its length (five days) but also because “the only fact of the universe was that my veins burned and boiled.” On top of that, the captain refused to feed him, and the army doctor on board, after one quick glance at Crane, misdiagnosed the malaria he was suffering from as yellow fever (an almost certain death sentence) and barked at him to isolate himself from the others. More than two hundred wounded soldiers were traveling on the City of Washington, the majority of them from the 71st New York Volunteer Regiment, and Crane spent most of the voyage lying on deck with a little rug under his body. Still, as he later wrote, “it wasn’t so bad,” and with most of the men in worse condition than he was, and with his long fever at last beginning to break, at mess time someone would invariably take the trouble of handing him “a tin plate of something,” and so he did not starve and did not die, after all. The first thing he did when he set foot on land was to walk to the nearest soda fountain and treat himself to an ice-cream soda, something he had developed an immense and irrational craving for “somewhere in the woods between Siboney and Santiago.” He asked for orange.
From the veranda of the Chamberlin Hotel, he watched the soldiers from the ship disembark as a throng of onlookers welcomed them home. Men cheered, women wept, and when the wounded were carried off to the hospital on flatcars and stretchers, Crane observed that this “dirty, ragged, emaciated, half-starved, band of cripples” hung their heads and seemed to be afflicted by something akin to stage fright. So much for the triumphs and satisfactions of war.
He stayed for about a week, perhaps a bit longer, and filed what would prove to be his last dispatches for the World, the long account of the Battle of San Juan and “Regulars Get No Glory.” At one point, he went to Fort Monroe and outfitted himself with a fresh suit of clothes. His old clothes were in tatters by then, as Davis describes in an article for Harper’s New Monthly Magazine: “One of the best known of the correspondents … was sent home, desperately ill with fever, in the same clothes he had been forced to wear for three weeks. He had forded streams in them, slept on bare ground in them, and sweated in them from the heat and from fever, and when he reached Fortress Monroe he bought himself a complete new outfit at the modest expenditure of twenty-four dollars.” That correspondent was Crane, and those twenty-four dollars would soon be turned into one of the bullets used by Seitz to kill Crane’s tenure at the World.
Meanwhile, another bullet was being manufactured in Cuba. It came off the assembly line on July sixteenth in the form of a controversial, unsigned article written for the World by Scovel that Seitz and the paper’s New York business staff (for unfathomable reasons) convinced themselves had been written by Crane. Add in the other bullet produced when their disloyal employee trudged five or six miles through the jungle to send off the dispatch written by the injured Marshall—a correspondent for a rival paper—and suddenly there was every reason to give Crane the boot. And since he no longer worked for them, Seitz and company blithely refused to cover “the modest expenditure” of trading in a pile of rags for a new suit of clothes. It wasn’t just the twenty-four dollars, you understand, it was the principle of the thing.
Scovel’s article blamed the July first rout of the New York infantry division on the cowardice and incompetence of the unit’s officers, a charge so grave that it set off a volley of countercharges from the Journal and blossomed into one of the most ferocious battles in the yearslong newspaper war between Pulitzer and Hearst. It began on July sixteenth (when Crane was still in Virginia), and the next day the valiant, hardworking Scovel, who had been in Cuba longer than any other American correspondent and had taken more risks than any of them, damaged his career as a journalist when, in one hotheaded moment during the formal surrender of Santiago, he took it upon himself to slug the corpulent, preening General Shafter in the face. Accounts differ on whether Shafter struck back, but no sooner had the scuffle broken out than Crane’s friend was put under arrest and expelled from Cuba.*
