“Consider it my little contribution to the war, along with my troop of cavalry who are entirely useless on this hill.”
Lang’s sixty troopers had been a welcome addition to Ryder’s forces. “Your horses might not have a role to play right now, but you say that your men are all excellent shots and they sure look mean as hell.”
Lang agreed. “Some of the older boys fought for the Confederacy, but the younger ones just wanted to get the hell out of Texas and see at least some of the world and a part of it that is green instead of a desert, and where there’s an ocean. I’ve got ten thousand acres of shit land that is flat and burned dry most of the time, which, I suppose, is better than having only one thousand acres of shit land. Then I’d really be poor and I’m not. You know, sometimes I wonder just why we wanted to take Texas from the Mexicans in the first place. As to my boys, they see this as maybe a once in a lifetime chance to do something exciting. That and they didn’t think it would hurt none to take a few shots at Spaniards. There’s no love lost between Texans and Mexicans and most of the boys don’t see much difference between a Mexican and a Spaniard.”
They walked the perimeter of the trenches, always keeping their heads down. The Spanish had snipers and some of them were pretty good. To prove the point, there was the snap of a gunshot and the sound of swearing a few yards away. The sniper had missed, but the shot had come close and they weren’t always that lucky. Two of his men had been wounded before everyone got the message that some Spaniards actually could shoot straight. Barnes had recalled seeing a contraption consisting of a couple of mirrors and a box that enabled spectators to see over crowds at big events. He also recalled that the navy had some and that they were called prisms or periscopes. He had a couple constructed and they helped out a lot. The men were protected and they could still see the enemy if they started to approach.
The snipers had made it necessary to install the wire at night, when the soldiers were hidden by darkness. Ryder had his own sharpshooters and there was continuous skirmishing between the two forces.
Ryder yawned. He was exhausted. He missed Sarah. It annoyed him that his stocky gremlin of a sergeant, Haney, was finding many excuses for going into town to see his own lover. He would have to make up his own excuse. Perhaps he would raise an issue about sanitation problems and ask her for assistance resolving them. A lot of his men had come down with diarrhea recently. That, he smiled and thought, would not be a very romantic excuse. He wondered if Sarah would mind making love on a pile of tenting like Haney and Ruth did. She’d probably turn him down flat, he sighed, and she’d be right. Sarah was worthy of far better things.
“Anybody watching the weather?” asked Barnes. “We might want to take a look to the west.”
The trees on the hill had obscured their view and, besides, they’d been concentrating on the barbed wire and the Spanish. A wall of dark clouds was approaching. As they watched, the wind began to pick up and heavy raindrops commenced to fall. They’d all been told that it was a couple of months before hurricane season, but that did not mean that Cuba was exempt from enormous thunderstorms.
Ryder was annoyed. “Barnes, are you telling me that nobody on the towers saw this coming?” Barnes said he’d check it out later. The lookout towers had been built on the hill to extend their view of the bay and the enemy. It was likely that the men fifty additional feet in the air didn’t think a few dark clouds were very important. It was something else that would have to be corrected.
“I think it’s time to batten down the hatches,” Ryder said and the others began to scurry to cover. He thought about sending a warning to the army down below but realized that he had no real way of doing it. He could ring alarm bells but they were supposed to be used in the event of a Spanish attack. Ring them and the American army would run to their positions, which might not be the best idea. He decided to send a telegram from the hill to headquarters on their recently installed line and hope somebody did something about getting the men undercover. And, of course, there was always the heliograph. Maybe Kendrick would write an article about soldiers and tropical storms. The reporter had been hiding with Ryder’s men on the hill.
There was a rumor that Custer, now ensconced in St. Augustine, was mad as hell and wanted Kendrick arrested. That was not going to happen. Ryder had quickly decided that he owed the man too much. Custer could find Kendrick all by himself if he wanted him that badly. Thus, Kendrick had been doing a good job of keeping himself out of sight on the hill with Ryder.
Then Ryder had another thought. When was the last time he’d seen Kendrick? He looked around, “Just where the hell is Kendrick?”
* * *
Sarah and the other nurses took shelter from the violent storm in the magnificent and elegant seventeenth century church of San Charles de Borromeo that was now being used as their hospital. The thought of going through the downpour to their rooms was put on hold. The rain couldn’t last forever, could it? No more than forty days and nights, they’d laughed. Ruth brought up the thought of thousands of American soldiers stripping off their uniforms to shower in the rain and be clean for the first time in weeks. It reminded them of the sight of soldiers bathing in the gentle surf as they landed at Matanzas.
“I hope they have enough sense to dry off when they’re done. I’d hate to have them all hear dying of pneumonia,” Sarah said.
“Be honest,” said Ruth, “you’d very much like to see Martin Ryder frolicking naked in the rain and I’ll bet you’d like to be with him.”
Sarah agreed that she’d like to be rained upon and genuinely clean, although jumping around in a rain puddle did not seem like something they were quite ready for. She wondered if they could rig something on the flat roof of the house where they lived that they could use for real cleansing during a rainstorm instead of using water in a metal tub that came from some filthy stream. Water for drinking they boiled, but not the water for bathing.
At first she’d thought it mildly sacrilegious that the church would be used to house the wounded but quickly changed her mind. What could be better than a church to help heal men’s bodies as well as their souls? Statues of the Virgin Mary and other saints gazed benignly down on the men.
A couple of the non-Catholic chaplains and some of the officers had complained about the overwhelmingly Catholic nature of the building and urged that the statues and other symbols be removed or at least covered. General Miles had sternly confronted them and told them that what they wished was impossible without gutting the building and offending the local population even though those people had largely fled. He added that when they left Matanzas the U.S. Army would not leave a desecrated church in its wake. The protestors had reluctantly accepted that reasoning and the comforting thought that they wouldn’t be in Matanzas forever.
At this time, there were very few wounded being treated. Most of the serious casualties from earlier fighting had been patched up and then sent by ship to St. Augustine where there were better facilities. The hospital ships were clearly marked with very large Red Crosses and the Spanish government in both Havana and Madrid had agreed to honor their safe passage as long as no military supplies were transported. In the event that a Spanish warship hadn’t gotten the message, ships’ captains traveled with passes signed by the Spaniards. It was an oasis of decency in an increasingly ugly war.
At least they were dry in the church, Sarah thought. Most of the permanent buildings in and around Matanzas had been built of some concrete like substance the locals called adobe. Fascinating stuff, it held in the heat at night and kept buildings cooler during the day. Right now she was thankful that it kept them dry. Other than a couple of leaks in the roof, the men in their beds were comfortable and dry.