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 Over night the men had been withdrawn from the trenches and were pitching their shelter tents on the higher and drier ground, and where our road crossed the road from Caney to Santiago we came upon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.