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+The Project Gutenberg Etext of Spanish Prisoners of War, by Howells
+#30 in our series by William Dean Howells
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+Title: Spanish Prisoners of War
+
+Author: William Dean Howells
+
+Release Date: August, 2002  [Etext #3383]
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+[The actual date this file first posted = 03/29/01]
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+Edition: 11
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+Language: English
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+The Project Gutenberg Etext of Spanish Prisoners of War, by Howells
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+
+LITERATURE AND LIFE--Spanish Prisoners of War
+
+by William Dean Howells
+
+
+
+
+SPANISH PRISONERS OF WAR
+
+
+Certain summers ago our cruisers, the St. Louis and the Harvard, arrived
+at Portsmouth, New Hampshire, with sixteen or seventeen hundred Spanish
+prisoners from Santiago de Cuba.  They were partly soldiers of the land
+forces picked up by our troops in the fights before the city, but by far
+the greater part were sailors and marines from Cervera's ill-fated fleet.
+I have not much stomach for war, but the poetry of the fact I have stated
+made a very potent appeal to me on my literary side, and I did not hold
+out against it longer than to let the St. Louis get away with Cervera to
+Annapolis, when only her less dignified captives remained with those of
+the Harvard to feed either the vainglory or the pensive curiosity of the
+spectator.  Then I went over from our summer colony to Kittery Point, and
+got a boat, and sailed out to have a look at these subordinate enemies in
+the first hours of their imprisonment.
+
+
+
+
+I.
+
+It was an afternoon of the brilliancy known only to an afternoon of the
+American summer, and the water of the swift Piscataqua River glittered in
+the sun with a really incomparable brilliancy.  But nothing could light
+up the great monster of a ship, painted the dismal lead-color which our
+White Squadrons put on with the outbreak of the war, and she lay sullen
+in the stream with a look of ponderous repose, to which the activities of
+the coaling-barges at her side, and of the sailors washing her decks,
+seemed quite unrelated.  A long gun forward and a long gun aft threatened
+the fleet of launches, tugs, dories, and cat-boats which fluttered about
+her, but the Harvard looked tired and bored, and seemed as if asleep.
+She had, in fact, finished her mission.  The captives whom death had
+released had been carried out and sunk in the sea; those who survived to
+a further imprisonment had all been taken to the pretty island a mile
+farther up in the river, where the tide rushes back and forth through the
+Narrows like a torrent.  Its defiant rapidity has won it there the
+graphic name of Pull-and-be-Damned; and we could only hope to reach the
+island by a series of skilful tacks, which should humor both the wind and
+the tide, both dead against us.  Our boatman, one of those shore New
+Englanders who are born with a knowledge of sailing, was easily master of
+the art of this, but it took time, and gave me more than the leisure I
+wanted for trying to see the shore with the strange eyes of the captives
+who had just looked upon it.  It was beautiful, I had to own, even in my
+quality of exile and prisoner.  The meadows and the orchards came down to
+the water, or, where the wandering line of the land was broken and lifted
+in black fronts of rock, they crept to the edge of the cliff and peered
+over it.  A summer hotel stretched its verandas along a lovely level;
+everywhere in clovery hollows and on breezy knolls were gray old farm-
+houses and summer cottages-like weather-beaten birds' nests, and like
+freshly painted marten-boxes; but all of a cold New England neatness
+which made me homesick for my malodorous Spanish fishing-village,
+shambling down in stony lanes to the warm tides of my native seas.  Here,
+every place looked as if it had been newly scrubbed with soap and water,
+and rubbed down with a coarse towel, and was of an antipathetic
+alertness.  The sweet, keen breeze made me shiver, and the northern sky,
+from which my blinding southern sun was blazing, was as hard as sapphire.
+I tried to bewilder myself in the ignorance of a Catalonian or Asturian
+fisherman, and to wonder with his darkened mind why it should all or any
+of it have been, and why I should have escaped from the iron hell in
+which I had fought no quarrel of my own to fall into the hands of
+strangers, and to be haled over seas to these alien shores for a
+captivity of unknown term.  But I need not have been at so much pains;
+the intelligence (I do not wish to boast) of an American author would
+have sufficed; for if there is anything more grotesque than another in
+war it is its monstrous inconsequence.  If we had a grief with the
+Spanish government, and if it was so mortal we must do murder for it, we
+might have sent a joint committee of the House and Senate, and, with the
+improved means of assassination which modern science has put at our
+command, killed off the Spanish cabinet, and even the queen--mother and
+the little king.  This would have been consequent, logical, and in a sort
+reasonable; but to butcher and capture a lot of wretched Spanish peasants
+and fishermen, hapless conscripts to whom personally and nationally we
+were as so many men in the moon, was that melancholy and humiliating
+necessity of war which makes it homicide in which there is not even the
+saving grace of hate, or the excuse of hot blood.
+
+I was able to console myself perhaps a little better for the captivity of
+the Spaniards than if I had really been one of them, as we drew nearer
+and nearer their prison isle, and it opened its knotty points and little
+ravines, overrun with sweet-fern, blueberry-bushes, bay, and low
+blackberry-vines, and rigidly traversed with a high stockade of yellow
+pine boards.  Six or eight long, low, wooden barracks stretched side by
+side across the general slope, with the captive officers' quarters,
+sheathed in weather-proof black paper, at one end of them.  About their
+doors swarmed the common prisoners, spilling out over the steps and on
+the grass, where some of them lounged smoking.  One operatic figure in a
+long blanket stalked athwart an open space; but there was such poverty of
+drama in the spectacle at the distance we were keeping that we were glad
+of so much as a shirt-sleeved contractor driving out of the stockade in
+his buggy.  On the heights overlooking the enclosure Gatling guns were
+posted at three or four points, and every thirty or forty feet sentries
+met and parted, so indifferent to us, apparently, that we wondered if we
+might get nearer. We ventured, but at a certain moment a sentry called to
+us, "Fifty yards off, please!"  Our young skipper answered, "All right,"
+and as the sentry had a gun on his shoulder which we had every reason to
+believe was loaded, it was easily our pleasure to retreat to the
+specified limit.  In fact, we came away altogether, after that, so little
+promise was there of our being able to satisfy our curiosity further.
+We came away care fully nursing such impression as we had got of a spec
+tacle whose historical quality we did our poor best to feel.  It related
+us, after solicitation, to the wars against the Moors, against the
+Mexicans and Peruvians, against the Dutch; to the Italian campaigns of
+the Gran Capitan, to the Siege of Florence, to the Sack of Rome, to the
+wars of the Spanish Succession, and what others.  I do not deny that
+there was a certain aesthetic joy in having the Spanish prisoners there
+for this effect; we came away duly grateful for what we had seen of them;
+and we had long duly resigned ourselves to seeing no more, when word was
+sent to us that our young skipper had got a permit to visit the island,
+and wished us to go with him.
+
+
+
+
+II.
+
+It was just such another afternoon when we went again, but this time we
+took the joyous trolley-car, and bounded and pirouetted along as far as
+the navyyard of Kittery, and there we dismounted and walked among the
+vast, ghostly ship-sheds, so long empty of ships.  The grass grew in the
+Kittery navy-yard, but it was all the pleasanter for the grass, and those
+pale, silent sheds were far more impressive in their silence than they
+would have been if resonant with saw and hammer.  At several points, an
+unarmed marine left his leisure somewhere, and lunged across our path
+with a mute appeal for our permit; but we were nowhere delayed till we
+came to the office where it had to be countersigned, and after that we
+had presently crossed a bridge, by shady, rustic ways, and were on the
+prison island.  Here, if possible, the sense of something pastoral
+deepened; a man driving a file of cows passed before us under kindly
+trees, and the bell which the foremost of these milky mothers wore about
+her silken throat sent forth its clear, tender note as if from the depth
+of some grassy bosk, and instantly witched me away to the woods-pastures
+which my boyhood knew in southern Ohio.  Even when we got to what seemed
+fortifications they turned out to be the walls of an old reservoir, and
+bore on their gate a paternal warning that children unaccompanied by
+adults were not allowed within.
+
+We mounted some stone steps over this portal and were met by a young
+marine, who left his Gatling gun for a moment to ask for our permit, and
+then went back satisfied.  Then we found ourselves in the presence of a
+sentry with a rifle on his shoulder, who was rather more exacting.
+Still, he only wished to be convinced, and when he had pointed out the
+headquarters where we were next to go, he let us over his beat.  At the
+headquarters there was another sentry, equally serious, but equally
+civil, and with the intervention 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 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 prisoners' rations and lodgings, and our officer
+ironically professed his intention of messing with the Spanish officers.
+But there was no grudge, and not a shadow of ill will, or of that stupid
+and atrocious hate towards the public enemy which abominable newspapers
+and politicians had tried to breed in the popular mind.  There was
+nothing manifest but a sort of cheerful purpose to live up to that
+military ideal of duty which is so much nobler than the civil ideal of
+self-interest.  Perhaps duty will yet become the civil ideal, when the
+peoples shall have learned to live for the common good, and are united
+for the operation of the industries as they now are for the hostilities.
+
+
+
+
+IV.
+
+Shall I say that a sense of something domestic, something homelike,
+imparted itself from what I had seen?  Or was this more properly an
+effect from our visit, on the way back to the hospital, where a hundred
+and fifty of the prisoners lay sick of wounds and fevers?  I cannot say
+that a humaner spirit prevailed here than in the camp; it was only a more
+positive humanity which was at work.  Most of the sufferers were
+stretched on the clean cots of two long, airy, wooden shells, which
+received them, four days after the orders for their reception had come,
+with every equipment for their comfort.  At five o'clock, when we passed
+down the aisles between their beds, many of them had a gay, nonchalant
+effect of having toothpicks or cigarettes in their mouths; but it was
+really the thermometers with which the nurses were taking their
+temperature.  It suggested a possibility to me, however, and I asked if
+they were allowed to smoke, and being answered that they did smoke,
+anyway, whenever they could, I got rid at last of those boxes of
+cigarettes which had been burning my pockets, as it were, all afternoon.
+I gave them to such as I was told were the most deserving among the sick
+captives, but Heaven knows I would as willingly have given them to the
+least.  They took my largesse gravely, as became Spaniards; one said,
+smiling sadly, "Muchas gracias," but the others merely smiled sadly; and
+I looked in vain for the response which would have twinkled up in the
+faces of even moribund Italians at our looks of pity.  Italians would
+have met our sympathy halfway; but these poor fellows were of another
+tradition, and in fact not all the Latin peoples are the same, though we
+sometimes conveniently group them together for our detestation.  Perhaps
+there are even personal distinctions among their several nationalities,
+and there are some Spaniards who are as true and kind as some Americans.
+When we remember Cortez let us not forget Las Casas.
+
+They lay in their beds there, these little Spanish men, whose dark faces
+their sickness could not blanch to more than a sickly sallow, and as they
+turned their dull black eyes upon us I must own that I could not "support
+the government" so fiercely as I might have done elsewhere.  But the
+truth is, I was demoralized by the looks of these poor little men, who,
+in spite of their character of public enemies, did look so much like
+somebody's brothers, and even somebody's children.  I may have been
+infected by the air of compassion, of scientific compassion, which
+prevailed in the place.  There it was as wholly business to be kind and
+to cure as in another branch of the service it was business to be cruel
+and to kill.  How droll these things are!  The surgeons had their
+favorites among the patients, to all of whom they were equally devoted;
+inarticulate friendships had sprung up between them and certain of their
+hapless foes, whom they spoke of as "a sort of pets."  One of these was
+very useful in making the mutinous take their medicine; another was liked
+apparently because he was so likable.  At a certain cot the chief surgeon
+stopped and said, "We did not expect this boy to live through the night."
+He took the boy's wrist between his thumb and finger, and asked tenderly
+as he leaned over him, "Poco mejor?"  The boy could not speak to say that
+he was a little better; he tried to smile--such things do move the
+witness; nor does the sight of a man whose bandaged cheek has been half
+chopped away by a machete tend to restore one's composure.
+
+
+
+
+End of this Project Gutenberg Etext of Spanish Prisoners of War,
+by William Dean Howells