The Roughest Riders by Jerome Tuccille

Author:Jerome Tuccille
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
Published: 2015-09-05T04:00:00+00:00

21

At about 1:00 in the afternoon, Ludlow’s brigade commenced firing again at the Spanish emplacements from its position southwest of El Viso. Lawton ordered Miles and Chaffee to move forward with the white Fourth and black Twenty-Fifth to see if they could get any closer to the fort. A second line of black troops, led by Lieutenant James A. Moss, followed about two hundred yards behind them, firing over their heads in the direction of El Viso.

Moss was an 1894 graduate of West Point who had earned some earlier fame experimenting with the use of bicycles in war. In 1896, he formed the Twenty-Fifth Bicycle Corps, which covered forty miles a day over rugged mountain terrain, crossing streams, and even hauling their bikes over fences up to nine feet high. Each soldier carried a knapsack, blanket roll, and shelter-half strapped to his handlebars, plus a rifle containing fifty rounds of ammunition slung on his back. Moss designed the bikes himself and had them built by the sporting good company Spalding with steel rims, tandem spokes, extra-heavy side forks and crowns, gear cases, luggage carriers, frame cases, brakes, and special saddles. Fully packed, the bicycles weighed about sixty pounds.

Now Moss found himself leading black foot soldiers in battle. Two lines of trees that ran along a railroad track hid him and his second rank of attackers from the eyes of the Spaniards. Just north of the trees stood a line of barbed wire, beyond which lay an open field of pineapples. No sooner did Moss and his men in the rear cross over into the pineapple field than a hail of Spanish bullets and shells roared down on them, raking them as they crossed open ground with no protection. Moss was more concerned about the carnage inflicted on his men than he was for his own wellbeing. “It’s raining lead!” he wrote later. “The line recoils like a mighty serpent, and then in confusion, advances again! The Spaniards now see us and pour a murderous fire into our ranks! Men are dropping everywhere … the bullets cut up the pineapple at our feet … the slaughter is awful…. Our men are being shot down at our very feet, and we, their officers, can do nothing for them!”

Chaffee, to the right, ordered his own men to move ahead, away from the deadly gunfire behind them and closer to El Viso. Slowly, his troops closed to within two hundred yards of the fort and could begin to make out the shapes of the Spanish riflemen inside the structure as well as in the rifle pits around it. He called for his best sharpshooters to come to the front of the line and take aim at the enemy. Close to forty of them inched forward, took their positions, and opened fire. This time, the American bullets found their marks. Spanish troops began to fall, shot where they lay in their rifle pits and winged in the head and shoulders by bullets that made it through the firing slots in the wall of the fort.

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