Spanish Prisoners of War | Page 7

acceptable to me under my own vine and fig-tree than the
stew and roast of captors who were indeed showing themselves less my
enemies than my own government, but were still not quite my hosts.

III.
How is it the great pieces of good luck fall to us? The clock strikes
twelve as it strikes two, and with no more premonition. As we stood
there expecting nothing better of it than three at the most, it suddenly
struck twelve. Our officer appeared at the inner gate and bade our
marines slide away the gate of barbed wire and let us into the enclosure,
where he welcomed us to seats on the grass against the stockade, with
many polite regrets that the tough little knots of earth beside it were not
chairs.
The prisoners were already filing out of their quarters, at a rapid trot
towards the benches where those great wash-boilers of coffee were set.
Each man had a soup-plate and bowl of enamelled tin, and each in his
turn received quarter of a loaf of fresh bread and a big ladleful of
steaming coffee, which he made off with to his place at one of the long
tables under a shed at the side of the stockade. One young fellow tried
to get a place not his own in the shade, and our officer when he came
back explained that he was a guerrillero, and rather unruly. We heard
that eight of the prisoners were in irons, by sentence of their own
officers, for misconduct, but all save this guerrillero here were docile

and obedient enough, and seemed only too glad to get peacefully at
their bread and coffee.
First among them came the men of the Cristobal Colon, and these were
the best looking of all the captives. From their pretty fair average the
others varied to worse and worse, till a very scrub lot, said to be ex-
convicts, brought up the rear. They were nearly all little fellows, and
very dark, though here and there a six-footer towered up, or a blond
showed among them. They were joking and laughing together,
harmlessly enough, but I must own that they looked a crew of rather
sorry jail- birds; though whether any run of humanity clad in misfits of
our navy blue and white, and other chance garments, with close-shaven
heads, and sometimes bare feet, would have looked much less like
jail-birds I am not sure. Still, they were not prepossessing, and though
some of them were pathetically young, they had none of the charm of
boyhood. No doubt they did not do themselves justice, and to be herded
there like cattle did not improve their chances of making a favorable
impression on the observer. They were kindly used by our officer and
his subordinates, who mixed among them, and straightened out the
confusion they got into at times, and perhaps sometimes wilfully. Their
guards employed a few handy words of Spanish with them; where these
did not avail, they took them by the arm and directed them; but I did
not hear a harsh tone, and I saw no violence, or even so much indignity
offered them as the ordinary trolley- car passenger is subjected to in
Broadway. At a certain bugle-call they dispersed, when they had
finished their bread and coffee, and scattered about over the grass, or
returned to their barracks. We were told that these children of the sun
dreaded its heat, and kept out of it whenever they could, even in its
decline; but they seemed not so much to withdraw and hide themselves
from that, as to vanish into the history of "old, unhappy, far-off" times,
where prisoners of war, properly belong. I roused myself with a start as
if I had lost them in the past.
Our officer came towards us and said gayly, "Well, you have seen the
animals fed," and let us take our grateful leave. I think we were rather a
loss, in our going, to the marines, who seemed glad of a chance to talk.
I am sure we were a loss to the man on guard at the inner gate, who
walked his beat with reluctance when it took him from us, and eagerly
when it brought him back. Then he delayed for a rapid and

comprehensive exchange of opinions and ideas, successfully blending
military subordination with American equality in his manner.
The whole thing was very American in the perfect decorum and the
utter absence of ceremony. Those good fellows were in the clothes they
wore through the fights at Santiago, and they could not have put on
much splendor if they had wished, but apparently they did not wish.
They were simple, straightforward, and adequate. There was some dry
joking about the superiority of the