In reference to Mr. Bonsal’s account of the Guasimas fight, Mr. Richard Harding Davis writes me as follows:
We had already halted several times to give the men a chance to rest, and when we halted for the last time I thought it was for this same purpose, and began taking photographs of the men of L Troop, who were so near that they asked me to be sure and save them a photograph. Wood had twice disappeared down the trail beyond them and returned. As he came back for the second time I remember that you walked up to him (we were all dismounted then), and saluted and said: “Colonel, Doctor La Motte reports that the pace is too fast for the men, and that over fifty have fallen out from exhaustion.” Wood replied sharply: “I have no time to bother with sick men now.” You replied, more in answer, I suppose, to his tone than to his words: “I merely repeated what the Surgeon reported to me.” Wood then turned and said in explanation: “I have no time for them now; I mean that we are in sight of the enemy.”
This was the only information we received that the men of L Troop had been ambushed by the Spaniards, and, if they were, they were very calm about it, and I certainly was taking photographs of them at the time, and the rest of the regiment, instead of being half an hour’s march away, was seated comfortably along the trail not twenty feet distant from the men of L Troop. You deployed G Troop under Captain Llewellen into the jungle at the right and sent K Troop after it, and Wood ordered Troops E and F into the field on our left. It must have been from ten to fifteen minutes after Capron and Wood had located the Spaniards before either side fired a shot. When the firing did come I went over to you and joined G Troop and a detachment of K Troop under Woodbury Kane, and we located more of the enemy on a ridge.
If it is to be ambushed when you find the enemy exactly where you went to find him, and your scouts see him soon enough to give you sufficient time to spread five troops in skirmish order to attack him, and you then drive him back out of three positions for a mile and a half, then most certainly, as Bonsal says, “L Troop of the Rough Riders was ambushed by the Spaniards on the morning of June 24th.”
General Wood also writes me at length about Mr. Bonsal’s book, stating that his account of the Guasimas fight is without foundation in fact. He says: “We had five troops completely deployed before the first shot was fired. Captain Capron was not wounded until the fight had been going on fully thirty-five minutes. The statement that Captain Capron’s troop was ambushed is absolutely untrue. We had been informed, as you know, by Castillo’s people that we should find the dead guerilla a few hundred yards on the Siboney side of the Spanish lines.”
He then alludes to the waving of the guidon by K Troop as “the only means of communication with the regulars.” He mentions that his orders did not come from General Wheeler, and that he had no instructions from General Wheeler directly or indirectly at any time previous to the fight.
General Wood does not think that I give quite enough credit to the Rough Riders as compared to the regulars in this Guasimas fight, and believes that I greatly underestimate the Spanish force and loss, and that Lieutenant Tejeiro is not to be trusted at all on these points. He states that we began the fight ten minutes before the regulars, and that the main attack was made and decided by us. This was the view that I and all the rest of us in the regiment took at the time; but as I had found since that the members of the First and Tenth Regular Regiments held with equal sincerity the view that the main part was taken by their own commands, I have come to the conclusion that the way I have described the action is substantially correct. Owing to the fact that the Tenth Cavalry, which was originally in support, moved forward until it got mixed with the First, it is very difficult to get the exact relative position of the different troops of the First and Tenth in making the advance. Beck and Galbraith were on the left; apparently Wainwright was farthest over on the right. General Wood states that Leonardo Ros, the Civil Governor of Santiago at the time of the surrender, told him that the Spanish force at Guasimas consisted of not less than 2,600 men, and that there were nearly 300 of them killed and wounded. I do not myself see how it was possible for us, as we were the attacking party and were advancing against superior numbers well sheltered, to inflict five times as much damage as we received; but as we buried eleven dead Spaniards, and as they carried off some of their dead, I believe the loss to have been very much heavier than Lieutenant Tejeiro reports.
General Wood believes that in following Lieutenant Tejeiro I have greatly underestimated the number of Spanish troops who were defending Santiago on July 1st, and here I think he completely makes out his case, he taking the view that Lieutenant
