IN THE FIELD WITH GOMEZ.
By Grover Flint.
[Editor's Note.—The following account of General Gomez, the commander-in-chief of the Cuban insurgents, has the special value of coming from one who has lived in intimate relations with him, in all the hard conditions of his present life, and has been his companion in camp, on the march, and in battle. Before going to Cuba, in 1896, Mr. Flint had had experience of the life of a United States soldier on the Western plains. He had also, by a residence in Spain, become familiar with the Spanish language and the Spanish character. He went to Cuba with the single purpose of seeing for himself what the condition of affairs was there. He went first to Havana; but, after a brief stay, he found that to get the full information he was seeking, he must go out among the insurgents, and he, accordingly, took up his residence with General Gomez. He made careful notes of all he saw, and also, as there were subjects and opportunity, drew pictures. Out of the material thus gathered, he prepared, on coming home, a valuable book which has just been published by Lamson, Wolff e and Co., Boston, entitled "Marching with Gomez," with an introduction by Prof. John Fiske. It is from this book, by special permission, that the present article and most of the pictures illustrating it are taken.]
HE is a gray little man. His clothes do not fit well, and, perhaps, if you saw it in a photograph, his figure might seem old and ordinary. But the moment he turns his keen eyes on you, they strike like a blow from the shoulder. You feel the will, the fearlessness, and the experience of men that is in those eyes, and their owner becomes a giant before you.
He is a farmer by birth, the son of a farmer, with an Anglo-Saxon tenacity of purpose, and a sense of honor as clean and true as the blade of his little Santo Domingo machete.
When the revolution broke out in Santo Domingo, he served as a lieutenant in the Spanish army against the land of his birth, in her struggle for independence.[1] He was fighting for rank, I have heard him say; but the example of the Dominican patriots and the methods of his brother soldiers made him think. In later years he came to believe with the Cubans that Cuba should be free; and when others dared only whisper, he proclaimed his sympathies, and was relieved of a captain's commission in consequence.
When the Ten Years' War broke out, in 1868, Gomez and Modesto Diaz, another Dominican and ex-Spanish officer, were among the first to offer their swords to the insurgents. Both were experienced soldiers, energetic, and of the character of iron. … Diaz died after it was over; but Gomez lived to be the man under the hub, to whose genius alone is due the credit of having lifted the Cuban cause from a rut and pushed it successfully from Cape Maisi to the Point of San Antonio.
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CARRYING THE WOUNDED.
At the beginning of the present war, Gomez was offered the command of the forces such as they might be or might become; and he accepted, with the distinct stipulation that the commander-in-chief of the army should have supreme and exclusive control
- ↑ "Not so much to serve Spain as in reality to combat one of the many political bands that in that time divided San Domingo, did General Gomez become one of those that proclaimed the reestablishment of Spanish rule on that Island." So wrote an eminent Cuban whom I questioned on this point.
