ey seemed endless, interminable; there were cavalry mounted
and dismounted, artillery with cracking whips and cursing drivers, Rough
Riders in brown, and regulars, both black and white, in blue. Midnight
came, and they were still stumbling and slipping forward.

General Sumner's head-quarters tent was pitched to the right of El Poso
hill. Below us lay the basin a mile and a half in length, and a mile and
a half wide, from which a white mist was rising. Near us, drowned under
the mist, seven thousand men were sleeping, and, farther to the right,
General Chaffee's five thousand were lying under the bushes along the
trails to El Caney, waiting to march on it and eat it up before
breakfast.

The place hardly needs a map to explain it. The trails were like a
pitchfork, with its prongs touching the hills of San Juan. The long
handle of the pitchfork was the trail over which we had just come, the
joining of the handle and the prongs were El Poso. El Caney lay half-way
along the right prong, the left one was the trail down which, in the
morning, the troops were to be hurled upon San Juan. It was as yet an
utterly undiscovered country. Three miles away, across the basin of
mist, we could see the street lamps of Santiago shining over the San Juan
hills. Above us, the tropical moon hung white and clear in the dark
purple sky, pierced with millions of white stars. As we turned in, there
was just a little something in the air which made saying "good-night" a
gentle farce, for no one went to sleep immediately, but lay looking up at
the stars, and after a long silence, and much restless turning on the
blanket which we shared together, the second lieutenant said: "So, if
anything happens to me, to-morrow, you'll see she gets them, won't you?"
Before the moon rose again, every sixth man who had slept in the mist
that night was either killed or wounded; but the second lieutenant was
sitting on the edge of a Spanish rifle-pit, dirty, sweaty, and weak for
food, but victorious, and the unknown she did not get them.

El Caney had not yet thrown off her blanket of mist before Capron's
battery opened on it from a ridge two miles in the rear. The plan for
the day was that El Caney should fall in an hour. The plan for the day
is interesting chiefly because it is so different from what happened.
According to the plan the army was to advance in two divisions along the
two trails. Incidentally, General Lawton's division was to pick up