t. Then I remembered him. As now he had been covered with blood
and dirt and perspiration, but then he wore a canvas jacket and the man
he carried on his shoulders was trying to hold him back from a
white-washed line. And I recognized the young doctor, with the blood
bathing his breeches, as "Bob" Church, of Princeton. That was only one
of four badly wounded men he carried that day on his shoulders over a
half-mile of trail that stretched from the firing-line back to the
dressing station and under an unceasing fire. {3} As the senior surgeon
was absent he had chief responsibility that day for all the wounded, and
that so few of them died is greatly due to this young man who went down
into the firing-line and pulled them from it, and bore them out of
danger. The comic paragraphers who wrote of the members of the
Knickerbocker Club and the college swells of the Rough Riders and of
their imaginary valets and golf clubs, should, in decency, since the
fight at Guasimas apologize. For the same spirit that once sent these
men down a white-washed field against their opponents' rush line was the
spirit that sent Church, Channing, Devereux, Ronalds, Wrenn, Cash, Bull,
Lamed, Goodrich, Greenway, Dudley Dean, and a dozen others through the
high hot grass at Guasimas, not shouting, as their friends the cowboys
did, but each with his mouth tightly shut, with his eyes on the ball, and
moving in obedience to the captain's signals.

Judging from the sound, our firing-line now seemed to be half a mile in
advance of the place where the head of the column had first halted. This
showed that the Spaniards had been driven back at least three hundred
yards from their original position. It was impossible to see any of our
men in the field, so I ran down the trail with the idea that it would
lead me back to the troop I had left when I had stopped at the dressing
station. The walk down that trail presented one of the most grewsome
pictures of the war. It narrowed as it descended; it was for that reason
the enemy had selected that part of it for the attack, and the vines and
bushes interlaced so closely above it that the sun could not come
through.

The rocks on either side were spattered with blood and the rank grass was
matted with it. Blanket rolls, haversacks, carbines, and canteens had
been abandoned all along its length. It looked as though a retreating
army had fled along it, rather than that one troop had fought its way
throu