The Land Fight at Santiago: Havana

Meanwhile ten or twelve days had elapsed and I had received quite a number of volunteer regiments -- two from Michigan, the First District of Columbia, a Massachusetts regiment, and an Ohio regiment, the Eighth Ohio -- all splendid troops and well equipped, and while they were not there at the hardest of the fighting they were there during the suffering, and everything that soldiers were called upon to do they did like men. It is a great deal harder to stand up day after day and see companions die from sickness and disease than it is to face the perils of battle. When I told General Toral that we would carry his men back he said: "Does that include my entire command?" I said: "What is your command and where are they?" He replied, the Fourth Army Corps; 11,500 men in the city, 3,000 twenty miles in the rear of us; 7,500 he said were up the coast less than sixty miles, and about 1,500 who were 125 to 150 miles off on the northeastern coast.

There were 3,440 odd, and at a place less than sixty miles east there were over 7,500, I know, as we counted them and took their arms. The result of that surrender was probably as unexpected to us as it was to every person in the United States. There was simply a little army there, which had gone down to assist the navy in getting the Spanish fleet out and capturing that town. Then we expected no other result from it than victory on the spot at the utmost, but in attacking the limb we got the whole body. It was expected that, beginning about the first of October, the objective point of the campaign was to be Havana, where we knew there were from 125,000 to 150,000 men. It was also expected that about the first of October a large army would be sent over there, and the battle that would decide the war would be fought in the vicinity of Havana. I think that was the universal feeling, but the loss of Santiago and of those 24,000 men -- 23,376, to be accurate -- so dispirited the enemy that within a week the proposition of Spain to close the war was made, and, happily, the war was ended.

The difficulties of that campaign were not in the fighting. That was the easiest part of it. The difficulties were in getting food and medicine to the front. There was but a single road, a muddy and terrible road, and with five or six wagons going over it the sixth wagon would be mired up to the axle-tree. In taking up some artillery I had fourteen horses to one battery that was usually drawn by four. Even with that number it went out of sight. We had to leave it and dig it out after the water had subsided.