battle of San Juan my men had really become veterans; they
and I understood each other perfectly, and trusted each other
implicitly; they knew I would share every hardship and danger with
them, would do everything in my power to see that they were fed, and
so far as might be, sheltered and spared; and in return I knew that
they would endure every kind of hardship and fatigue without a murmur
and face every danger with entire fearlessness. I felt utter
confidence in them, and would have been more than willing to put them
to any task which any crack regiment of the world, at home or abroad,
could perform. They were natural fighters, men of great intelligence,
great courage, great hardihood, and physical prowess; and I could draw
on these qualities and upon their spirit of ready, soldierly obedience
to make up for any deficiencies in the technique of the trade which
they had temporarily adopted. It must be remembered that they were
already good individual fighters, skilled in the use of the horse and
the rifle, so that there was no need of putting them through the kind
of training in which the ordinary raw recruit must spend his first
year or two.

On July 2nd, as the day wore on, the fight, though raging fitfully at
intervals, gradually died away. The Spanish guerillas were causing us
much trouble. They showed great courage, exactly as did their soldiers
who were defending the trenches. In fact, the Spaniards throughout
showed precisely the qualities they did early in the century, when, as
every student will remember, their fleets were a helpless prey to the
English war-ships, and their armies utterly unable to stand in the
open against those of Napoleon's marshals, while on the other hand
their guerillas performed marvellous feats, and their defence of
intrenchments and walled towns, as at Saragossa and Gerona, were the
wonder of the civilized world.

In our front their sharp-shooters crept up before dawn and either
lay in the thick jungle or climbed into some tree with dense foliage.
In these places it proved almost impossible to place them, as they
kept cover very carefully, and their smokeless powder betrayed not the
slightest sign of their whereabouts. They caused us a great deal of
annoyance and some little loss, and though our own sharp-shooters were
continually taking shots at the places where they supposed them to be,
and though occasionally we would play a Gatling or a Colt all through
the top of a suspicious