site of General Wheeler's tent on
the battlefield of San Juan. The ground is high and open hereabouts,
and, as we came up we could see the general officers--each of them
accompanied by his staff--closing in from every side upon the same spot.

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