be
done with the White House in Washington, or any especially important
messages were to be sent, I personally did the telegraphing. At the
Executive Mansion was Colonel B. F. Montgomery, signal corps, in charge
of the telegraph office, so when anything special passed, no one knew
it but the colonel and myself.

The Tampa Bay hotel was at this time the scene of the most dazzling and
brilliant gaiety. Shafter's 5th Corps was preparing for its Santiago
campaign and each night many officers and their wives would meet in the
hotel and pass the time away listening to the music of some regimental
band or in pleasant conversation. Men who had not seen each other since
the close of the great civil war renewed old acquaintances and spun
reminiscences by the yard. Military attaches from all the countries of
the world were daily arriving, and their gaudy uniforms added a dash of
color to the already brilliant panorama. The bright gold of Captain
Paget, the English naval attache, the deep blue of Colonel Yermeloff,
who represented Russia, contrasted vividly with the blue and yellow of
Japanese Major Shiska, and the scarlet and black of Count Goetzen of
Germany. But prominent among all this moving panorama of color was the
plain blue of the volunteer, and the brown khaki of the regular. My view
of the scene was limited to fleeting glimpses from my office where I was
nightly scanning messages, doing telegraphing or overlooking 30,000 or
40,000 words of correspondents' copy. Preparations for the embarkation
were going on with feverish haste, and orders were daily expected for
the army to move.

There were at this time nearly two hundred newspaper correspondents
scattered around through the hotel and in the various camps. They
represented papers from all over the world, and were typical
representatives of the brain and sinew of the newspaper profession, and
were there to accompany the army when it moved. Such men as Richard
Harding Davis, Stephen Bonsai, Frederick Remington, Caspar Whitney,
Grover Flint, Edward Marshall, Maurice Low, John Taylor, John Klein,
Louis Seibold, George Farman and Mr. Akers of the London papers, and
scores of others. They were quick and active, intensely patriotic, alert
for all the news, a "scoop" for them was the blood of life, and the
censorship came like a wet blanket. In a small way I had been
corresponding for a paper since the beginning of the war, but when the
detail as censor came I gave it up as t