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Updated: June 5, 2025
There was a very smart officers' club at Ciego well supplied with a bar and billiard tables, which I made some excuse for not entering, but which could be seen through its open doors, and I suggested to one of the members that it must be a comfort to have such a place, where the officers might go after their day's march on the mud banks of the trocha, and where they could bathe and be cool and clean.
Gomez advanced to Marianao, at Havana's very door, and that city was terrified. Maceo was operating immediately beyond him in Pinar del Rio, through the most important part of which he swept with torch and machete. The Spaniards built a trocha there from Mariel southward. Maceo crossed it and continued his work of destruction, in which large numbers of the people of the region joined.
A trocha in an open plain, as were the English trochas in the desert around Suakin, makes an admirable defence, when a few men are forced to withstand the assault of a great many, but fighting behind a trocha in a jungle is like fighting in an ambush, and if the trocha at Moron is ever attacked in force it will prove to be a Valley of Death to the Spanish troops. The Question Of Atrocities
I was free to enlist, since I couldn't reach Lopez, and I came to join our forces in the Orient. "That is how you found me in this province. Lopez's man never delivered those despatches, for we were taken crossing the trocha- -at least I was taken, for Pablo was killed. They'd have made an end of me, too, I dare say, only I was so weak. It seems a century since that night.
In the Civil War our block-house system was just as effective, but in another direction. We used it for the purpose of protecting our lines of communication, not as a trocha, or a line connected with wire fencing and other obstructions, as used by the British and by the Spaniards in the Cuban War. The British built theirs of bags filled with earth.
We need only say here that, despite its cost and the number of men it tied up on guard duty, the trocha failed to restrain the alert islanders. Gomez had crossed it in his movement westward, and Maceo now followed with equal readiness.
This narrowness, and the comparative facility of communication indicated by the railroads, enabled Spain, during her occupation, effectually to prevent combined movements between the insurgents in the east and those in the west; a power which Weyler endeavored to increase by the trocha system, a ditch or ditches, with closely supporting works, extending across the island.
It was not intended to include the trocha, but I argued that if a trocha was not a "fortified place" nothing else was, and I persuaded the commandante at Jucaro to take that view of it and to vise Weyler's order.
Every sheet of armor plate, every corrugated zinc roof, every roll of barbed wire, every plank, beam, rafter and girder, even the nails that hold the planks together, the forts themselves, shipped in sections, which are numbered in readiness for setting up, the ties for the military railroad which clings to the trocha from one sea to the other all of these have been supplied by manufacturers in the United States.
From a military point of view the trocha impressed me as a weapon which could be made to cut both ways.
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