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Updated: May 12, 2025
I have seen soldiers mutiny, a squadron of them, because they hated their chief and loved two of their sous-officers; and I have seen the end of it all a few hundred men, blind and drunk with despair, at bay against as many thousands, and walled in with four lines of steel and artillery, and fired on from a score of cannon-mouths volley on volley, like the thunder till not one living man was left, and there was only a shapeless, heaving, moaning mass, with the black smoke over all.
Then some thoughtful soldier pulled a box of hardtack across the trenches and the little Spanish soldiers fell upon it like schoolboys and scrambled like pickaninnies for a penny. Thus it was that day all around the shining circle of sheathed bayonets, silent carbines, and dumb cannon-mouths at the American trenches around Santiago, where the fighting was done.
The names of the ships were printed underneath. On the print there was little to be seen but mast-heads and cannon-mouths, and a confusion of smoke, but in this had the child lived whole years of her life; and many a time in fancy had she stood there and fought the Englishman.
In it he had always recognized the form of a brig he had seen hove-to in Portsmouth Harbor high poop, skyward-sticking bowsprit and ominous, even row of gun-ports where she carried her carronades three on a side. How those black cannon-mouths had gaped at the small boy on the dock! He wondered "Boom...!" came a hollow sound that seemed to hang like mist in a long echo over the island.
On one side a hundred thousand men, seventeen harnessed batteries, six thousand cannon-mouths in the forts, magazines, arsenals, ammunition sufficient to carry out a Russian campaign; on the other a hundred and twenty Representatives, a thousand or twelve hundred patriots, six hundred muskets, two cartridges per man, not a drum to beat to arms, not a bell to sound the tocsin, not a printing office to print a Proclamation; barely here and there a lithographic press, and a cellar where a hand-bill can be hurriedly and furtively printed with the brush; the penalty of death against any one who unearths a paving stone, penalty of death against any one who would enlist in our ranks, penalty of death against any one who is found in a secret meeting, penalty of death against any one who shall post up an appeal to arms; if you are taken during the combat, death; if you are taken after the combat, transportation or exile; on the one side an army and a Crime; on the other a handful of men and Right.
We were officially informed to that effect, after the King Humbert manner, and the condolences were great. Yesterday, also, during the evening, shelling suddenly commenced and the cannon-mouths that have been leering at us from a distance in dull curiosity at their inactivity have barked themselves hoarsely to life again.
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