Spanish Prisoners of War | Page 6

of an orderly our leader saw the officer of the
day. He came out of the quarters looking rather blank, for he had
learned that his pass admitted our party to the lines, but not to the
stockade, which we might approach, at a certain point of vantage and
look over into, but not penetrate. We resigned ourselves, as we must,
and made what we could of the nearest prison barrack, whose door
overflowed and whose windows swarmed with swarthy captives. Here
they were, at such close quarters that their black, eager eyes easily
pierced the pockets full of cigarettes which we had brought for them.
They looked mostly very young, and there was one smiling rogue at the
first window who was obviously prepared to catch anything thrown to
him. He caught, in fact, the first box of cigarettes shied over the
stockade; the next box flew open, and spilled its precious contents
outside the dead-line under the window, where I hope some

compassionate guard gathered them up and gave them to the captives.
Our fellows looked capable of any kindness to their wards short of
letting them go. They were a most friendly company, with an effect of
picnicking there among the sweet-fern and blueberries, where they had
pitched their wooden tents with as little disturbance to the shrubbery as
possible. They were very polite to us, and when, after that
misadventure with the cigarettes (I had put our young leader up to
throwing the box, merely supplying the corpus delicti myself), I
wandered vaguely towards a Gatling gun planted on an earthen
platform where the laurel and the dogroses had been cut away for it, the
man in charge explained with a smile of apology that I must not pass a
certain path I had already crossed.
One always accepts the apologies of a man with a Gatling gun to back
them, and I retreated. That seemed the end; and we were going
crestfallenly away when the officer of the day came out and allowed us
to make his acquaintance. He permitted us, with laughing reluctance, to
learn that he had been in the fight at Santiago, and had come with the
prisoners, and he was most obligingly sorry that our permit did not let
us into the stockade. I said I had some cigarettes for the prisoners, and I
supposed I might send them; in, but he said he could not allow this, for
they had money to buy tobacco; and he answered another of our party,
who had not a soul above buttons, and who asked if she could get one
from the Spaniards, that so far from promoting her wish, he would have
been obliged to take away any buttons she might have got from them.
"The fact is," he explained, "you've come to the wrong end for
transactions in buttons and tobacco."
But perhaps innocence so great as ours had wrought upon him. When
we said we were going, and thanked him for his unavailing good-will,
he looked at his watch and said they were just going to feed the
prisoners; and after some parley he suddenly called out, "Music of the
guard!" Instead of a regimental band, which I had supposed summoned,
a single corporal ran out the barracks, touching his cap.
"Take this party round to the gate," the officer said, and he promised us
that he would see us there, and hoped we would not mind a rough walk.
We could have answered that to see his prisoners fed we would wade
through fathoms of red-tape; but in fact we were arrested at the last
point by nothing worse than the barbed wire which fortified the outer

gate. Here two marines were willing to tell us how well the prisoners
lived, while we stared into the stockade through an inner gate of plank
which was run back for us. They said the Spaniards had a breakfast of
coffee, and hash or stew and potatoes, and a dinner of soup and roast;
and now at five o'clock they were to have bread and coffee, which
indeed we saw the white-capped, whitejacketed cooks bringing out in
huge tin wash-boilers. Our marines were of opinion, and no doubt
rightly, that these poor Spaniards had never known in their lives before
what it was to have full stomachs. But the marines said they never
acknowledged it, and the one who had a German accent intimated that
gratitude was not a virtue of any Roman (I suppose he meant Latin)
people. But I do not know that if I were a prisoner, for no fault of my
own, I should be very explicitly thankful for being unusually well fed. I
thought (or I think now) that a fig or a bunch of grapes would have
been more