Page 36 of Two Wars and a Wedding

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Las Guasimas, Cuba

June 24, 1898

Holt buckled as something hit him, hard, just above the knee.

The whizzing, whirring sound was everywhere, followed by strange, wet thuds, like the sound of a carpet being beaten. But it wasn’t a carpet beater. It was Mauser bullets, pounding into flesh.

They didn’t scream, the men who fell. Just that wet thud, and then they pitched over.

“Down!” shouted Captain Capron. “Everyone down! On your bellies!”

Holt dropped. His leg was damp. Not sweat. Blood. His hand came away red. He yanked the bandana out from around his neck, twisting sideways to tie it tight around his leg. De Almendares had been right. It made a nice neat hole, these Mauser bullets. Straight through, and barely ripped his trousers.

Holt gripped his Krag, trying to make out the distinctive conical hats of the Spanish soldiers, but it was hard to see anything through the smoke. Not the Spanish smoke. The Spanish, professional soldiers, had smokeless powder. Their own smoke, clouding their vision, giving away their location. Every time they fired, they announced their presence as surely as a flag.

Not that the Spanish needed any announcement. They had them pinned. Fire was coming from not just ahead of them but both sides. They’d walked right into a deadly trap. They’d skipped into it, gossiping away like schoolgirls at a picnic.

Holt’s leg protested as he slithered forward.

Next to him, Paul was lying flat on his belly, squinting through the haze. “Where the devil are the bastards?”

“In front of us. On either side of us. Take your pick.” Holt chambered a round and fired. Chambered another, fired again, trying to ignore the pain in his leg and the buzzing around him, that horrible buzzing, the buzz and thud and thud and thud.

The Spanish were firing: organized, rapid volleys, one after the other after the other. Bullets dropped like hail, biting, stinging, killing. It felt like all of Spain was massed against Troop L. Where in the devil was the rest of the regiment? Where were the army regulars?

Ham Fish gasped. “I’m wounded.” He sounded more surprised than alarmed.

Paul turned. “Ham?”

Fish didn’t answer.

“Ham?” Paul started to lift himself, and then dove facedown again as something exploded, raining down bark and leaves and shrapnel. Shells. The shells de Almendares had warned them were worse than bullets.

Up ahead, Captain Capron jerked and stiffened.

The next in command, Lieutenant Thomas, jumped up to take his place, and almost immediately fell, trying desperately to stand and falling back down again.

“Hell!” Paul rose to his feet and dashed to the lieutenant, as if those were Harvard linebackers coming at him, not scraps of shell.

Cursing, Holt ducked and dodged after him, hunching his shoulders against the rain of bullets and leaves, flopping onto his stomach next to Paul just as the welcome sound of hoofbeats interrupted the buzz of bullets.

Colonel Wood, impervious to his own safety, galloped up next to his fallen subordinates and swung down off his mount.

There was an odd pinging sound. Wood looked down with an expression of mild surprise on his face. The gold cuff link that had been on his wrist a moment before lay in two halves on the ground, neatly shot off by a Spanish gun.

Ignoring it—and all the bullets whispering around him—Wood looked to Thomas. “Mount up. You’re losing too much blood. You need the surgeon.”

“Not on your horse.” Lieutenant Thomas’s voice was so faint Holt could hardly hear him. “The men need to see you up there. They need to see their commander in front of them.”

“Fine.” Wood snapped his fingers at Holt and Paul, the two nearest. “Take him to the rear.”

“What?” Lieutenant Thomas struggled against their hold as Holt grasped him under the armpits, Paul by the ankles. “You can’t take me back there. They killed my captain. Those Spanish bastards killed my captain. Take me back to the front! You’re going the wrong way, damn you!”

“Orders,” Holt rasped, his own leg hurting like the devil as they shimmied backward, jerking their faces to the side to avoid falling debris.

It seemed to take years to reach Dr. Stringfellow, the air thick with that buzzing, twigs and bits of leaves raining down around them, Thomas struggling until he finally passed out from the loss of blood. They tripped over vines and the bodies of the fallen, Holt sweating and shivering, his leg aching, his mind refusing to comprehend what he was seeing.