I, myself, became lost in the fascination of these silent-shod soldiers (for they wear a kind of tennis shoe) filing off at their rapid marching gait. We noted that most of them were young, jolly, rather innocent-looking fellows, and we looked especially for officers, studying them and watching to see how "they took it." One fellow led a very fat cow, with his knapsack and impedimenta bound to her horns.
They had nearly gone by and the end of their pack-train of little donkeys was already in sight when a general movement of our escort made me gather up the reins. The head of our column was just descending into the road, going on at a trot. The ride into the city was beginning.
Shall I ever forget that ride? We rode three abreast, always at a rapid trot and sometimes even at a canter, the General himself always setting the pace. Just after leaving the field where the surrender had taken place the road broadened still more until it became a veritable highway, the broadest and best we had ever seen in Cuba, but disfigured here and there with the dead horses of officers, the saddle and headstall still on the carcass. The city was in plain sight now, but its aspect, with which we had become so familiar, was changing with every hundred yards.
At the junction of the Caney road a block house was passed with its usual trench and trocha, strong enough against infantry, as we all knew by now. This one was of unusual strength and we would have given it more serious attention had not our eyes been smitten with the sight of a veritable marvel. It might have been the white swan of Lohengrin there on the stony margin of the road, or the green dragon of Whantley, or the Holland submarine torpedo boat; but it was none of these. It was a carriage—a carriage.
I say it was a carriage, a hack, with girls in white muslin frocks in it, the driver lounging on the box and two miserable horses dozing in the harness. I suppose it would be quite impossible to make a reader understand how incongruous this apparition seemed to us. It was in use, no doubt, carrying refugees from Caney back into the city and its presence was easily accounted for. But Mr. Kipling's phantom rickshaw could hardly have produced a greater sensation.
"A carriage!"
"Say, will you look at that!"
"Well, for God's sake!"
"Damned if it isn't a carriage!"
"Say, Jim, look at the carriage!"
"It is a carriage for a fact—well, of all the things!"
"Well, that get's me—a carriage!"
It was among the troopers of the escort that the carriage had the greatest success. They chuckled over it as if it had some hidden, mirthful significance. They addressed strange allusions to the lounging driver, and when they had ridden by they turned in their saddles and watched it out of sight at the risk of breaking their necks. They rode the sprucer for it; they were in better spirits for it. They laughed, they talked, they went at a faster pace, they cocked their hats, they were gay, they were debonair. They had seen a carriage!
And now we were close up. Here was the hospital on the very outskirts, with its plethora of Red Cross flags. It was a hospital, after all, and not a barracks, as we had said, studying it through our field glasses during the last week, for blanketed and beflanneled objects, hollow-eyed, with bandaged heads, crowded silently at the grated windows staring at us galloping past. Here was an abandoned trench, and here—steady all, pull down to a walk—here is the barbed wire entanglement we have heard so much about. Formidable enough, surely; three lines of posts right across the road with barbed wire interwoven. A rabbit could not have passed here; and back of it trenches and rifle pits; nothing but artillery could have forced these lines. What fools to have abandoned them—well.
We passed through the gap single file and gingerly, then forward again at a hard gallop, clattering rough-shod over paved streets, for now at last we were in the city of Santiago.
Soldiers without arms, refugees, the men in brown derby hats—Cubans, negroes, dark women with black lace upon their heads, and children absolutely naked, watched us very silently from the sidewalks and from balconies. The houses were of adobe, painted pale blue and pink, and roofed with rugged lichen-blackened tiles. The windows reached from sidewalk to roof and were grated heavily, the doors oak and clenched with great nail heads. Santiago, Santiago at last, after so many days of sailing, of marching, of countermarching, and of fighting.