h join at
the apex of a V, three miles from the seaport town of Siboney, and
continue merged in a single trail to Santiago. General Wheeler, guided
by the Cubans, reconnoitred this trail on the 23rd of June, and with the
position of the enemy fully explained to him, returned to Siboney and
informed General Young and Colonel Wood that on the following morning he
would attack the Spanish position at Guasimas. It has been stated that
at Guasimas, the Rough Riders were trapped in an ambush, but, as the plan
was discussed while I was present, I know that so far from any ones
running into an ambush, every one of the officers concerned had a full
knowledge of where he would find the enemy, and what he was to do when he
found him.

That night no one slept, for until two o'clock in the morning, troops
were still being disembarked in the surf, and two ships of war had their
searchlights turned on the landing-place, and made Siboney as light as a
ball-room. Back of the searchlights was an ocean white with moonlight,
and on the shore red camp-fires, at which the half-drowned troops were
drying their uniforms, and the Rough Riders, who had just marched in from
Baiquiri, were cooking a late supper, or early breakfast of coffee and
bacon. Below the former home of the Spanish comandante, which General
Wheeler had made his head-quarters, lay the camp of the Rough Riders, and
through it Cuban officers were riding their half-starved ponies, and
scattering the ashes of the camp-fires. Below them was the beach and the
roaring surf, in which a thousand or so naked men were assisting and
impeding the progress shoreward of their comrades, in pontoons and shore
boats, which were being hurled at the beach like sleds down a water
chute.

It was one of the most weird and remarkable scenes of the war, probably
of any war. An army was being landed on an enemy's coast at the dead of
night, but with the same cheers and shrieks and laughter that rise from
the bathers at Coney Island on a hot Sunday. It was a pandemonium of
noises. The men still to be landed from the "prison hulks," as they
called the transports, were singing in chorus, the men already on shore
were dancing naked around the camp-fires on the beach, or shouting with
delight as they plunged into the first bath that had offered in seven
days, and those in the launches as they were pitched head-first at the
soil of Cuba, signalized their arrival by howls of triumph. On either
sid