It was a great gathering. We had seen but few of these generals; most of them had been but mere names, names that found place in a breathless fragment of news shouted by an orderly galloping to or from the front. But now they were all here: Wheeler, small, white-bearded and wiry; Ludlow, who always contrived to appear better dressed than everyone else, in his trim field uniform and white leggings; Randolph, with his bull neck and fine, salient chin, perhaps the most soldierly-looking of all, and others and others and others; Kent, Lawton, Wood, Chaffee, Young, Roosevelt, and our own General, who, barring Wheeler, had perhaps done more actual fighting in the course of his life than any three of the others put together, yet who was like the man in Mr. Nye's song, "without coat or vest," even without "any kind of a black tie."

Shafter himself sat under the fly of his tent, his inevitable pith helmet on his head, a headgear he had worn ever since leaving the ship, holding court as it were on this, his own particular day. In the field below, the cavalry escort was forming, and aides, orderlies and adjutants came and went at the top speed of their horses, just as the military dramas had taught us to expect they should.

But, except ourselves, not a correspondent was in sight, and we were very like to be ordered back at any moment. But the god descended from the machine in the person of Captain McKittrick of the commanding General's staff, and we were given an unqualified permission to fall in so soon as the start should be made, provided only that we fell in at the rear of any one of the generals' staffs.

But here a difficulty developed itself. The procession started almost immediately, and when we fell in at the rear of one of the staffs we found ourselves naturally at the head of the one immediately behind. It was a time when, if ever, precedence and rank were of paramount importance, and a brigadier-general does not take it kindly when two rather forlorn-appearing men, wearing neither stripe nor shoulder strap, and mounted upon an unkempt mule and a lamentable little white pony, rank him out of his place when he is marching to receive an enemy's surrender. As much was said to us, at first with military terseness, and latterly, this proving of no effect, with cursings and blasphemies. Our deus ex machina was far ahead with General Shafter by this time, and it was only our mule that saved us from ultimate discomfiture. He belonged to a pack-train and his life had been spent in following close upon the footsteps of the animal in front of him. He was a mule with one idea; his universe collapsed, his cosmos came tumbling about his ears the instant that it became impossible for him to follow in a train. It was all one that Archibald tore and tugged at the bit, or roweled him red. He could as easily have reined a locomotive from its track as to have swerved the creature from its direct line of travel by so much as an inch.

So what with this and with that, we worried along until just beyond the line of our trenches, where the road broadened very considerably and we could compromise by riding on the flanks of the column.

And an imposing column it was, nearly three hundred strong, and it actually appeared as if one-half was made up of brigadier-generals, major-generals, generals commanding divisions, staff officers and the like. A mere colonel was hardly better than a private on that day. We moved forward at a quick trot, General Shafter's pith helmet bobbing briskly along on ahead. As we passed through our lines there was a smart cheer or two from the men, and at one point a band was banging away at a nimble Sousa quickstep as we trotted by.

We were now on what had been the debatable ground, as much the enemy's as ours, and had not gone far before we were suddenly aware of a group of Spanish horsemen over the hedge of cactus to the left of the road, brightly dressed young fellows wearing the blue linen and red facings of the guarda civile, who at the sight of us turned and dashed back through the fields as though to give news of our approach. Then there was a freshly macheted opening in the hedge; the column turned in, advanced parallel with the road some hundred yards through a field of standing grass and at last halted.

At once the place was alive with Spanish soldiery. They came forward to meet us in very brave and gay attire. First a corps of trumpeters sounded a pretty trumpet march. They blew defiantly, did these Spanish trumpeters, and as loudly as ever they could, just to show us that they were not afraid—that they did not care, not they, pooh! After these came a small detachment of guarda, with arms, who watched the Yankee soldiers with bovine intentness while they came to a halt and ordered arms in front of our position.

Toral, the defeated General, came next. Suddenly it had become very quiet. The trumpeters had ceased blowing, and the rattling accoutrements of the moving troops had fallen still with the halt. The beaten General came out into the open space ahead of his staff, and General Shafter rode out to meet him, and they both removed their hats.

I cast a quick glance around the scene, at the Spaniards in their blue linen uniforms, the red and lacquer of the guarda civile, the ordered Mausers, the trumpeters resting their trumpets on their hips, at our own array, McKibben in his black shirt, Ludlow in his white leggings, and the rank and file of the escort, the bronzed, blue-trousered troopers, erect and motionless upon their mounts. It was war, and it was magnificent, seen there under the flash of a tropic sun with all that welter of green to set it off, and there was a bigness about it so that to be there seeing it at all, and, in a way, part of it, made you feel that for that moment you were living larger and stronger than ever before. It was Appomattox again, and Mexico and Yorktown. Tomorrow nearly a hundred million people the world round would read of this scene, and as many more, yet unborn, would read of it, but today you could sit in your saddle on the back of your little white bronco and view it as easily as a play.

Toral rode forward toward Shafter and, as I say, both uncovered. Toral was well-looking, his face rather red from the sun and half hidden by a fine gray mustache. He was a little bald and his forehead was high and round. As the two Generals shook hands it was so still that the noise of a man chopping wood in our lines nearly half a mile away was plainly audible. Immediately at their backs the staffs of the two watched. The escort watched. Back along the Spanish and the American trenches thousands of men stood in line and watched; Santiago watched, and Washington, Spain and the United States, the two hemispheres, the Old World and the New, paused on that moment, watching. A sentence or two was spoken in low tones and the Generals replaced their hats and shook hands smilingly.

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