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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 fence, the defiant trumpeters playing their pretty march-call more defiantly than ever.

Introductions were the order of the next few moments, Shafter introducing all his major and brigadier-generals to Toral. Meanwhile Spanish soldiers were defiling past us along the road going toward our lines, and without arms. There was no rancor or bitterness in the expression of these men. They evinced mostly an abnormal curiosity in observing the cavalrymen who formed our escort, and the cavalry repaid it in kind. The soldiers on both sides wanted to know just what manner of men they had been fighting these last few weeks.

I, myself, became lost in the fascination of these silent-shod soldiers (for they wear a kind of tennis shoe) filing off at their rapid marching gait. We noted that most of them were young, jolly, rather innocent-looking fellows, and we looked especially for officers, studying them and watching to see how “they took it.” One fellow led a very fat cow, with his knapsack and impedimenta bound to her horns.

They had nearly gone by and the end of their pack-train of little donkeys was already in sight when a general movement of our escort made me gather up the reins. The head of our column was just descending into the road, going on at a trot. The ride into the city was beginning.

Shall I ever forget that ride? We rode three abreast, always at a rapid trot and sometimes even at a canter, the General himself always setting the pace. Just after leaving the field where the surrender had taken place the road broadened still more until it became a veritable highway, the broadest and best we had ever seen in Cuba, but disfigured here and there with the dead horses of officers, the saddle and headstall still on the carcass. The city was in plain sight now, but its aspect, with which we had become so familiar, was changing with every hundred yards.