Spanish Prisoners of War | Page 4

or seventeen
hundred Spanish prisoners from Santiago de Cuba. They were partly
soldiers of the land forces picked up by our troops in the fights before
the city, but by far the greater part were sailors and marines from
Cervera's ill-fated fleet. I have not much stomach for war, but the
poetry of the fact I have stated made a very potent appeal to me on my
literary side, and I did not hold out against it longer than to let the St.
Louis get away with Cervera to Annapolis, when only her less dignified
captives remained with those of the Harvard to feed either the vainglory
or the pensive curiosity of the spectator. Then I went over from our
summer colony to Kittery Point, and got a boat, and sailed out to have a
look at these subordinate enemies in the first hours of their
imprisonment.

I.
It was an afternoon of the brilliancy known only to an afternoon of the
American summer, and the water of the swift Piscataqua River glittered
in the sun with a really incomparable brilliancy. But nothing could light
up the great monster of a ship, painted the dismal lead-color which our
White Squadrons put on with the outbreak of the war, and she lay
sullen in the stream with a look of ponderous repose, to which the
activities of the coaling-barges at her side, and of the sailors washing
her decks, seemed quite unrelated. A long gun forward and a long gun
aft threatened the fleet of launches, tugs, dories, and cat-boats which
fluttered about her, but the Harvard looked tired and bored, and seemed
as if asleep. She had, in fact, finished her mission. The captives whom
death had released had been carried out and sunk in the sea; those who
survived to a further imprisonment had all been taken to the pretty
island a mile farther up in the river, where the tide rushes back and
forth through the Narrows like a torrent. Its defiant rapidity has won it
there the graphic name of Pull-and-be-Damned; and we could only
hope to reach the island by a series of skilful tacks, which should
humor both the wind and the tide, both dead against us. Our boatman,
one of those shore New Englanders who are born with a knowledge of
sailing, was easily master of the art of this, but it took time, and gave
me more than the leisure I wanted for trying to see the shore with the
strange eyes of the captives who had just looked upon it. It was

beautiful, I had to own, even in my quality of exile and prisoner. The
meadows and the orchards came down to the water, or, where the
wandering line of the land was broken and lifted in black fronts of rock,
they crept to the edge of the cliff and peered over it. A summer hotel
stretched its verandas along a lovely level; everywhere in clovery
hollows and on breezy knolls were gray old farm- houses and summer
cottages-like weather-beaten birds' nests, and like freshly painted
marten-boxes; but all of a cold New England neatness which made me
homesick for my malodorous Spanish fishing-village, shambling down
in stony lanes to the warm tides of my native seas. Here, every place
looked as if it had been newly scrubbed with soap and water, and
rubbed down with a coarse towel, and was of an antipathetic alertness.
The sweet, keen breeze made me shiver, and the northern sky, from
which my blinding southern sun was blazing, was as hard as sapphire. I
tried to bewilder myself in the ignorance of a Catalonian or Asturian
fisherman, and to wonder with his darkened mind why it should all or
any of it have been, and why I should have escaped from the iron hell
in which I had fought no quarrel of my own to fall into the hands of
strangers, and to be haled over seas to these alien shores for a captivity
of unknown term. But I need not have been at so much pains; the
intelligence (I do not wish to boast) of an American author would have
sufficed; for if there is anything more grotesque than another in war it
is its monstrous inconsequence. If we had a grief with the Spanish
government, and if it was so mortal we must do murder for it, we might
have sent a joint committee of the House and Senate, and, with the
improved means of assassination which modern science has put at our
command, killed off the Spanish cabinet, and even the queen--mother
and the little king. This would have been consequent, logical, and in a
sort reasonable; but to butcher and capture a lot of wretched Spanish
peasants and fishermen, hapless conscripts