The Most Beautiful Girl in Cuba - Chanel Cleeton Page 0,113

ashore.

The woods are dense, the ride more grueling than I had envisioned. I haven’t ridden in years, since I was a young girl, and I spend as much time trying to maintain my seat as I do taking in my surroundings.

The reports we’ve received about the destruction of the countryside have been accurate. It is starkly barren, and I do not think I see one living animal native to the area. The war between the United States and Spain might be starting, but it’s obvious the conflict has already ravaged this land.

In contrast to the destruction around us, the men riding to war do so joyously, whooping and hollering with little care for the enemy hearing their movements. It’s as if there’s been so much pent-up energy geared to the effort that now that the fighting is here, they are ready to greet it with gusto.

At eight in the morning, the first land engagement begins as fifteen hundred Spanish soldiers under the command of General Antero Rubin start firing their rifles. The air fills with the sounds of their short pops, followed by the heavier reports of the American guns.

Theodore Roosevelt and his Rough Riders are here, and Richard Harding Davis, Edward Marshall, and other journalists from the Journal throw themselves into the fray as though daring the Spanish to shoot at them alongside the American soldiers.

Is Rafael somewhere in this throng?

I hang back with some of the party, watching from a safe distance, not close enough to the direct fighting to be on the front lines. I haven’t quite decided what I’m going to report on here. War doesn’t fill me with the same level of excitement with which it seems to infuse the men, but after spending so much time writing about Cuba from the comfort of my newsroom in New York City, I wanted to see the real people we wrote about from a distance. There’s a story here. I’m just not sure this is the one I want to be reporting on.

The air fills with smoke from the German rifles, making it difficult to see anything. The sounds emerging from the battle are ominous, yells and cries mixing with the firing of weapons. My horse dances uneasily beneath me; the polo ponies Hearst procured hardly have temperaments suited for this sort of thing.

Neither do I.

Off in the distance, men are dying and I can’t help but think of all the stories we wrote about the Maine, the fervor we whipped up with Evangelina’s case, the statements Hearst made to me when I first spoke with him in his office about using the news to shape policy.

Did we push the world to this point? Were we heroes or were we too caught up in our circulation battle?

Maybe Pulitzer was right all along. Maybe I don’t have the stomach for this.

How many will be dead when the smoke clears?

One million men volunteered. When they signed up all over the country, did they envision the reality of what war would be like? Of the horror of battle? Is this what my father experienced? Were these the memories that haunted him?

When the smoke clears and the battle ends, the dead and wounded lie on the ground off in the distance. We were careful to stay out of the line of fire, but it’s still close enough to smell the blood and the gun smoke, to hear the cries of the wounded. It’s close enough to see death on a scale I never have before.

Hearst pulls up alongside me on his horse, and mine shies away for a moment.

“Edward Marshall was wounded,” Hearst yells to our party. “Shot in the back. Stephen Crane carried him off the battlefield and then went to file his dispatch. They’re saying we lost sixteen Americans. Dozens are wounded. The Spanish casualties are a bit lower. They’re claiming a victory, too.”

He sounds so alive, so invigorated by the conflict despite our losses. He’s been waiting for this war for years, and now that it’s here, it seems he wants to drink every drop of it.

“Will Marshall survive?” I ask, horrified at the thought of one of my fellow reporters lying on the battlefield wounded.

“I think so. He seemed in pretty good spirits, all things considered. Let’s go back to the boat and get to work.” Hearst grins at us. “We got some good material today. I don’t think anyone else could have done better.”

Hearst and a few reporters break off from our group to speak with