f _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.

Instantly a great creaking of saddles took place as the men eased their
positions, and conversation began again. The Spanish soldiers filed off
through a break in the barbed wire fenc