Spanish Prisoners of War | Page 5

to whom personally and
nationally we were as so many men in the moon, was that melancholy
and humiliating necessity of war which makes it homicide in which
there is not even the saving grace of hate, or the excuse of hot blood.
I was able to console myself perhaps a little better for the captivity of
the Spaniards than if I had really been one of them, as we drew nearer
and nearer their prison isle, and it opened its knotty points and little
ravines, overrun with sweet-fern, blueberry-bushes, bay, and low

blackberry-vines, and rigidly traversed with a high stockade of yellow
pine boards. Six or eight long, low, wooden barracks stretched side by
side across the general slope, with the captive officers' quarters,
sheathed in weather-proof black paper, at one end of them. About their
doors swarmed the common prisoners, spilling out over the steps and
on the grass, where some of them lounged smoking. One operatic
figure in a long blanket stalked athwart an open space; but there was
such poverty of drama in the spectacle at the distance we were keeping
that we were glad of so much as a shirt-sleeved contractor driving out
of the stockade in his buggy. On the heights overlooking the enclosure
Gatling guns were posted at three or four points, and every thirty or
forty feet sentries met and parted, so indifferent to us, apparently, that
we wondered if we might get nearer. We ventured, but at a certain
moment a sentry called to us, "Fifty yards off, please!" Our young
skipper answered, "All right," and as the sentry had a gun on his
shoulder which we had every reason to believe was loaded, it was
easily our pleasure to retreat to the specified limit. In fact, we came
away altogether, after that, so little promise was there of our being able
to satisfy our curiosity further. We came away care fully nursing such
impression as we had got of a spec tacle whose historical quality we
did our poor best to feel. It related us, after solicitation, to the wars
against the Moors, against the Mexicans and Peruvians, against the
Dutch; to the Italian campaigns of the Gran Capitan, to the Siege of
Florence, to the Sack of Rome, to the wars of the Spanish Succession,
and what others. I do not deny that there was a certain aesthetic joy in
having the Spanish prisoners there for this effect; we came away duly
grateful for what we had seen of them; and we had long duly resigned
ourselves to seeing no more, when word was sent to us that our young
skipper had got a permit to visit the island, and wished us to go with
him.

II.
It was just such another afternoon when we went again, but this time
we took the joyous trolley-car, and bounded and pirouetted along as far
as the navyyard of Kittery, and there we dismounted and walked among
the vast, ghostly ship-sheds, so long empty of ships. The grass grew in
the Kittery navy-yard, but it was all the pleasanter for the grass, and

those pale, silent sheds were far more impressive in their silence than
they would have been if resonant with saw and hammer. At several
points, an unarmed marine left his leisure somewhere, and lunged
across our path with a mute appeal for our permit; but we were
nowhere delayed till we came to the office where it had to be
countersigned, and after that we had presently crossed a bridge, by
shady, rustic ways, and were on the prison island. Here, if possible, the
sense of something pastoral deepened; a man driving a file of cows
passed before us under kindly trees, and the bell which the foremost of
these milky mothers wore about her silken throat sent forth its clear,
tender note as if from the depth of some grassy bosk, and instantly
witched me away to the woods-pastures which my boyhood knew in
southern Ohio. Even when we got to what seemed fortifications they
turned out to be the walls of an old reservoir, and bore on their gate a
paternal warning that children unaccompanied by adults were not
allowed within.
We mounted some stone steps over this portal and were met by a young
marine, who left his Gatling gun for a moment to ask for our permit,
and then went back satisfied. Then we found ourselves in the presence
of a sentry with a rifle on his shoulder, who was rather more exacting.
Still, he only wished to be convinced, and when he had pointed out the
headquarters where we were next to go, he let us over his beat. At the
headquarters there was another sentry, equally serious, but equally civil,
and with the intervention