Cuba in War Time | Page 6

his dinner, certainly not enough to pay for champagne
and diamonds; so it is not unfair to suppose that the rebellion is a
profitable experience for the officers, and they have no intention of
losing the golden eggs.
And the insurgents on the other side are equally determined to continue
the conflict. From every point of view this is all that is left for them to
do. They know by terrible experience how little of mercy or even of
justice they may expect from the enemy, and, patriotism or the love of
independence aside, it is better for them to die in the field than to risk
the other alternative; a lingering life in an African penal settlement or
the fusillade against the east wall of Cabañas prison. In an island with a
soil so rich and productive as is that of Cuba there will always be roots
and fruits for the insurgents to live upon, and with the cattle that they
have hidden away in the laurel or on the mountains they can keep their
troops in rations for an indefinite period. What they most need now are

cartridges and rifles. Of men they have already more than they can arm.
People in the United States frequently express impatience at the small
amount of fighting which takes place in this struggle for liberty, and it
is true that the lists of killed show that the death rate in battle is
inconsiderable. Indeed, when compared with the number of men and
women who die daily of small-pox and fever and those who are
butchered on the plantations, the proportion of killed in battle is
probably about one to fifteen.
I have no statistics to prove these figures, but, judging from the hospital
reports and from what the consuls tell of the many murders of pacificos,
I judge that that proportion would be rather under than above the truth.
George Bronson Rae, the Herald correspondent, who was for nine
months with Maceo and Gomez, and who saw eighty fights and was
twice wounded, told me that the largest number of insurgents he had
seen killed in one battle was thirteen.
Another correspondent said that a Spanish officer had told him that he
had killed forty insurgents out of four hundred who had attacked his
column. "But how do you know you killed that many?" the
correspondent asked. "You say you were never nearer than half a mile
to them, and that you fell back into the town as soon as they ceased
firing."
[Illustration: Insurgents Firing on a Spanish Fort "One Shot for a
Hundred"]
"Ah, but I counted the cartridges my men had used," the officer replied.
"I found they had expended four hundred. By allowing ten bullets to
each man killed, I was able to learn that we had killed forty men."
These stories show how little reason there is to speak of these
skirmishes as battles, and it also throws some light on the Spaniard's
idea of his own marksmanship. As a plain statement of fact, and
without any exaggeration, one of the chief reasons why half the
insurgents in Cuba are not dead to-day is because the Spanish soldiers
cannot shoot well enough to hit them. The Mauser rifle, which is used

by all the Spanish soldiers, with the exception of the Guardia Civile, is
a most excellent weapon for those who like clean, gentlemanly warfare,
in which the object is to wound or to kill outright, and not to "shock"
the enemy nor to tear his flesh in pieces. The weapon has hardly any
trajectory up to one thousand yards, but, in spite of its precision, it is as
useless in the hands of a guerrilla or the average Spanish soldier as a
bow and arrow would be. The fact that when the Spaniards say "within
gun fire of the forts" they mean within one hundred and fifty yards of
them shows how they estimate their own skill. Major Grover Flint, the
Journal correspondent, told me of a fight that he witnessed in which
the Spaniards fired two thousand rounds at forty insurgents only two
hundred yards away, and only succeeded in wounding three of them.
Sylvester Scovel once explained this bad marksmanship to me by
pointing out that to shift the cartridge in a Mauser, it is necessary to
hold the rifle at an almost perpendicular angle, and close up under the
shoulder. After the fresh cartridge has gone home the temptation to
bring the butt to the shoulder before the barrel is level is too great for
the Spanish Tommy, and, in his excitement, he fires most of his
ammunition in the air over the heads of the enemy. He also fires so
recklessly and rapidly that his gun often becomes too hot for him to