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An Irrepressible Conflict of Testimony: Spaniards

And the Spaniards had their innings, if we can believe their own accounts: General Gonzalez Munoz reports that he has dispersed the rebels who were besieging Fort Zanja, near Manzanillo. He went to the assistance of the beleagured garrison with a column of troops on four gunboats and two tugs. The rebels retired as soon as the troops landed, and the gunboats opened fire upon them. The garrison made a glorious defense. They were besieged for five days by 3,600 rebels, commanded by Mayai, Rodrigues, Rabi and other leaders. The fort, when relieved, was without water, the tank having been destroyed by the rebel fire. The insurgents fired 111 volleys of grapeshot. They had two rapid fire guns that were recently landed at Guayabal. The artillery was served by American gunners.

There is an unusual pretense of authenticity about this paragraph: The official report of the fight on the Fermina ranch, near Jovellanos, states that the rebels lost eight killed. The troops lost seven wounded. The Spaniards pursued the rebels, and in skirmishes killed eighteen without loss to themselves.

One of the troubles with this history of the war by double-entry bookkeeping is the impracticability of the verification in many cases of the incidents. The two inevitable tales about the same battle are so different in all important particulars, with perhaps the exception of locality and names of officers, that the laborious seeker of truth is driven close upon the theory that instead of one affair there must have been two or more. Mr. Frank Clark, agent of the United Press, very recently from Havana, and a most vigilant observer, makes a statement that may assist to clear the minds of analytical readers. He says:

Before the arrival of Gen. Weyler, correspondents were permitted to accompany Spanish columns, and in the early stage of the war Spanish generals even permitted correspondents to visit the enemy's camps. Since the enemy has grown from scattered bands to organized and fairly well armed and drilled columns, it is a matter of life and death for a correspondent to penetrate the rebel lines. He would be welcomed by the insurgents, but shot upon his return to Spanish camps. I have had experience with four captain-generals--Calleja, Campos, Marin and Weyler. The last is the only one of them who made the life of a war correspondent burdensome. Suave and courteous in his talk, profuse in his offers to aid correspondents in sifting truth from error, polite in his reception of all Americans, yet he has a way of impressing upon a correspondent without putting it into words, that it would conduce to his personal safety to report nothing but Spanish official news. As these reports fail to mention a single insurgent success from the beginning, and are a record of many Spanish victories which exist on paper only, the correspondent who accepts them at face value beguiles his readers. If Spain were winning battles, why not permit accredited correspondents to accompany columns of troops and report from personal observation? If battles are fought whenever announced officially, why are safe-conduct passes refused to correspondents when all is over?

The Spanish correspondents of Madrid papers, the Spanish reporters of Havana papers, all subject to the press censor, and the American correspondents are penned up in Havana, and every effort is made to keep the world in darkness as to what is being done in Cuba. Every cable despatch is carefully edited before it can be transmitted. Everything unfavorable to Spain or favorable to the Cuban cause is eliminated. The mails are searched to prevent newspaper correspondence being sent off. But with all these precautions the truth cannot be suppressed, and every Wednesday and Saturday the papers of the United States arrive in Havana, and long accounts of rebel victories and Spanish brutalities, which are true, are read by the English-speaking residents and translated for the benefit of Spaniards.

It is this system of suppressing the facts officially, and doctoring the news for the bulletins until they are ciphers, that inflames the imaginative faculties and produces the daily dime novel of current Cuban literature. But there is a mystery in the atmosphere which involves a fact--a most notable one--of the disposition of the volunteers, so that the result of two candid and intelligent men trying to tell the truth about them is as follows: (THIS IS FROM AN INSURGENT GENERAL, OPERATING NEAR HAVANA, AND TELLING OF HIS EXPERIENCES IN A CAPTURED TOWN.) To demonstrate the feeling of the volunteers in the town I will give an episode of my raid. One of my men demanded of a Spanish grocer, a volunteer, the arms and ammunition in his possession. His answer was: "If you promise to respect my property then you shall be welcome to it. I do not hate, and will not fight, the revolutionists while they do me no harm. I would fight for the integrity of Spain, but this is not Spain, it is Cuba, and you should have as much right to govern yourselves as we have in Spain. The volunteer service has already cost me many hundred dollars. My comrades have the same story to tell, and if you could convince us that our families and properties would be protected, we would all join the revolution." (FROM A HAVANA CORRESPONDENT RELATING PERSONAL CONVERSATION.) The source of danger is the volunteers. I was talking with my hotel waiter recently after he had been away for a day. He said he was out doing duty as a volunteer. He is a little sawed-off ignoramus, and I was curious enough to ask him how his companions felt toward Uncle Sam. "Muerta Senor Sam," he hissed, bringing his fist down with a whack on the table. "Death to Mr. Sam?" I repeated. "Why so?" "He is going to help the insurrectors. We'll have to kill them all." "But I'm an American; would you kill me, too?"