Quaint Little Hell

THE LITTLE WAR OF PRIVATE POST (340 pp.) -- Charles Johnson Post -- Little, Brov/n ($6.50).

Red flannel was at a premium. Every girl was sewing a red flannel bellyband for her favorite soldier, the theory being that it would keep out tropical fevers by day and the jungle damp by night. Private Charles Johnson Post was especially lucky. True, he had no ammunition when he left for the Spanish-American War, but he did have two gorgeous red bellybands.

By hindsight, it was a quaint, old-fashioned war, and Author Post puts it distinctively and persuasively into print in this graceful memoir. Post, who died in 1956 at the age of 83, was a writer-illustrator (Harper's, Cosmopolitan) with a lifelong appetite for adventure. He ran mule trains over the Andes, witnessed insurrections in Cuba and Venezuela, and honeymooned in the Mexican jungles. But nostalgia's finest hour remained for him the charge up San Juan Hill.

"Like Centipedes." A volunteer shopped for a regiment in those gentlemanly days. Indeed, a man of means could recruit his own in a saloon and make himself colonel. Private Post picked the 71st Infantry, a regiment heavily manned with flask-toting, city-bred New Yorkers. No one needed to be caught alive or dead in olive drab; the uniform was a brilliant cerulean blue with a flashy stripe down the trouser leg. The training grounds were the fields of Hempstead, Long Island. The close-order drill came from Gettysburg and Waterloo, and the chow seemed almost as old. Writes Post:

"Hardtack belongs in the ceramic group and is the best substitute for a durable bathroom tile yet discovered."

The regiment entrained for Florida, and Post caught his first glimpse of Teddy Roosevelt grinning from a boxcar door. T.R.'s uniform "looked as if he had slept in it--as it always did." For T.R.'s "personal press agent," famed Reporter Richard Harding Davis, Post conceived an immediate and lasting dislike: "Richard Harding Davis was busy conning his Social Register and keeping himself and his silk undies in perfect condition for the rigors of the coming campaign." In Florida, the men got an issue of .45-caliber training ammunition, which "could, properly directed, knock down two men, the one it hit and the one who fired it." They held amphibious boat drills ("We rowed like centipedes").

"Hey, Willie!" They embarked in June 1898, bound for Siboney, Cuba. By his account, it was the third notable amphibious operation in U.S. history. (First two: Washington crossing the Delaware and the landing at Vera Cruz during the Mexican War.) Since the troop transports were commercially chartered, the skipper could choose his own disembarkation point, which ranged up to a half-mile offshore. The horses and mules panicked, with the result that the Rough Riders rode in name only. The first quasi action of Post's outfit was to rush up and relieve the Rough Riders who had got themselves ambushed, or, as an accompanying correspondent delicately put it: "The American troops met the Spaniards before they had expected to."

As Post's outfit filed forward for the payoff battle of San Juan Hill, it seemed as if they were being reviewed by a long-legged, black-clad civilian on muleback who sported a red tie and a straw boater. It was William Randolph Hearst, whose yacht lay offshore. "Hey, Willie!" yelled the troops. The deadpan press lord managed only the ghost of a smile, doffed his boater and said mildly, "Boys, good luck be with you."

"We Were Home." They needed it. Even small wars are not complete without bungles. Brigadier General J. Ford Kent managed to maneuver three regiments, including Private Post and his outfit, onto a single cowpath over which a U.S. observation balloon served as a perfect marker for Spanish firepower. More than 400 men were killed or wounded at "Bloody Ford," and at one point Private Post found himself slipping on mud "made by the blood of the dead and wounded." When the men got to San Juan Hill, they rushed up as if it were "a football field when the game is over and a mess of people are straggling across it, except that these men were on the run, yelling, and with no time to lose."

San Juan was a major victory. An estimated 12,000 U.S. troops in all had sealed off the Spanish stronghold of Santiago, from which 24,000 Spanish troops emerged on July 17, 1898, to surrender. But, thanks to bureaucratic dunderheads, victory had a swift and deadly aftermath. Kept in position through lack of orders, and on starvation rations through lack of supplies, the men sickened, and many died of yellow fever and dysentery. There were no medicines. Taps was sounded so often that it was finally banned at the burials for fear of what was happening to the survivors' morale.

That morale did not recover until, weeks later, "in one slow, sweet cool of dawn, we saw against the horizon the low, purple silhouette of the hill of Montauk Point, Long Island . . . We heard the hoarse rattle of anchor chain through the hawsepipes. We were home."

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