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The Second Year of the Second War: Campos

As Gomez marched, the smoke of burning cane darkened the air and signaled far and wide that the tide of war rolled steadily west. Campos turned his columns from place to place and called for more and more men, but fire in the cane did not spread so fast or far as the flames of the conflagration of the rebellion, and as industry ceased, the men of labor took up arms, their machetes if nothing else, and horses and saddles and joined the army of destruction and liberation.

The Spaniards hoped to check the advance of the destroyers in Santa Clara and failed, and then in Matanzas and failed again; and there was a wild, vain rush to protect the province of Havana. Still the fire reddening and the smoke obscuring the indigo sky of Cuba, the pillars of flame and the pillars of cloud, told the march of the liberators moved ever westward and invaded the province never before disturbed beyond Havana, where the tobacco stalks yield leaves of gold; and on the tobacco, as on the sugar lands, the insurgent armies were recruited, and productive Cuba ceased; and the dreadful character of the war was developed.

Campos strove to gain for the cause of which he was the leader, the goodwill of civilization, and was met by the command that he should use the same weapons the rebels did, and make the warfare one of savagry, but the proportions of the insurrection were so vast that the inadequacy of the recommendation was obvious except to those whose vision was perverted by passion. The Spanish, not obtaining decisive victories, demanded severities, and as shouts of triumph were not warranted there were cries for vengeance, and Campos, beaten and discredited, retired.

Then came Weyler as a terror, and was intimidated by his own reputation; and unable to resist importunity for assurances, made promises that were irredeemable, and he found his occupations at Havana so exacting and so many scenes of military action calling for supervision, that he did not follow the example of his illustrious predecessor and rush fitfully to the field, but he evolved the scheme of surrounding the enemy, which proved a failure as palpable as the other conception of lines and fortifications that the insurgents could not pass from the Atlantic to the Caribbean Sea. As to these lines there is the most serious attempt of the Spaniards that has been made, to confine the daring Maceo in the western province, where he has been for weeks alternately dodging the Spaniards and charging them, fighting for ammunition, and foraging in a country that has become so war wasted that living on it is very precarious. The Spaniards seem to have given up attempts to defend property, and to have adopted in a modified degree the tactics of the Cubans. The Cuban theory has been for a year that in order to liberate the Island it must be laid in ashes and, in an agricultural and commercial sense, completely ruined. They have believed the Spaniards would themselves become so impoverished by the extinction of the resources in the Island and the enormous expenses of their exertions in keeping a force of nearly two hundred thousand men engaged by land and sea, that their aggressiveness at least would be extinguished by exhaustion.

The most intelligent Spaniards must be aware that the Island is lost to them in the sense that it can no longer be profitable to them; and there is in the reports from the scattered scenes of the customary circumstances, that the Spaniards are becoming fiercely disposed to destroy the villages and plantations the rebels have spared, and to slaughter remorselessly the people who have sought to evade participation in the war. The design behind this is that the country shall be reduced to such a state of indigence that the rebels cannot find food, and must disband or become so divided as to be unable to cope with Spanish battalions. Certainly the game of desolating a land is one that two can play at, and both parties in Cuba seem to be playing it. All the world now knows the rebel war operations are an answer to the Spanish political economy that confines the industries of the Cubans to the two great specialties of sugar and tobacco, forcing Cuba to take Spanish manufactures and refusing fair reciprocity for Cuban products. No more intolerable tyranny than is involved in this policy can be conceived. The Cubans have destroyed the sugar and tobacco crops, and strike Spain through her revenues and manufactures. In order to do this the insurgents have to keep moving, and operate without bases, depots or hospitals or objective points. This is, indeed, the only system of war permitted in Cuba, surrounded as she is by the sea, in possession of Spain, and trampled by an army that amounts to one man in eight of the whole native population of the Island, white, black and mixed. Weyler ordered the country stores emptied, and that the people should concentrate themselves in the towns; but forced to do this, they must be assisted to food or starve, and they are starving. The great body of the country is therefore given up to the insurgents, among whom as a vital matter there is rigorous discipline. The Spaniards, who claim to understand and abide by the honor of arms, become insane in combat, and revengeful as they are successful; and a wide margin is left for the totally depraved bandits, who stop at no crime and kill alike and are impartially killed by Spaniards and Cubans.

The effect of the marching to and fro of Gomez and Maceo, and the manoeuvres of the regular troops, and the reign of terror of the robbers, is to fearfully disorganize society. It is said in some countries in Europe that the men and horses go to the war, or at least to the army, and the women and cows do the work. In Cuba there does not appear to be even the diversion of women and cows industrious in providing food, and the Spanish are aiding in the work of ruin they could not quell or limit, believing that, at the same time, Spain is deprived of money, or any form of the fatness that has hitherto characterized Cuba, the Cubans will find themselves unable to get anything to eat, and must disband so far as to make no showing of an army, and they are acting on the principle that each Cuban killed stops a possible rebel recruit. There has been no precedent of such warfare as this in any civilized land, and there is a question whether, in the interests of humanity, there must not be interposition to restrain the continuance of the horrible combat, which never was conducted with the usages of organized people, but is an endless system of skirmishes in ambuscades and, according to the combatants themselves, has largely lost the forms of civilization and become a competition of incendiaries and assassins. It is not they alone who take the sword that perish by the sword, and make good the old word, but they who take the torch perish by the torch also, and the ghastly spectre of the yellow fever will soon waste at noonday and walk in darkness. There is already famine, and the fever--and we have the three horrors, war, pestilence, and famine! There is reason for estimating carefully the probabilities, when reading the daily supply of "Outrages upon American Citizens" that are furnished to the country. The demand for this sort of thing is as continuous as the supply is copious, but the Spaniards, while excited and resentful towards Americans on account of their peculiar interest in Cuba, have sense enough not to be picking quarrels with the United States. There are, however, so many of our citizens engaged in the rebellion, that it is only with much caution that encounters with them by the Spanish authorities can be avoided, and the Spaniards, it is to be presumed, are not unwilling to annoy our official representatives by dealing with citizens who use the name of America as a cloak, to cause embarrassing cases.

It would relieve the American public of a good deal of anxiety and indignation to remember that the news by way of Key West and Tampa is manipulated in the insurgent interest just as fashionably as that of Havana is in the Spanish interest. One could give both sides of a thousand stories of "battles" in the bushes without imparting any real information. As reported, with a manifest mixture of expression and exaggerations, there is not a sensation in 500 fights, and history must deal with general results.