Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: THE FIGHT FOR SANTIAGO CHAPTER I HOW THE WAR BEGAN Had the Psalmist lived to see that sight, he would not have written
terrible as an army with banners, but drawn his simile from the spectacle of those ashen-hued battleships, as they tugged at their anchor chains, smoked with suppressed fury, and moaned hoarsely with the rise and fall of the waves. Now and again one of the sinister-looking torpedo-boats would whip in and out amid the sullen squadron, peeping with open-eyed astonishment at the floating volcanoes which were sleeping upon the blue waters of Key West Bay. Perhaps you think for the moment that this little messenger of war has at last brought the word which is to loosen the leash that holds these marine monsters. Perhaps the spell is to be broken, and from out of their ominous turrets will now belch forth shot and shell, flame and desolation. You tremble, and are not a little relieved when the sharp-nosed, sinuous craft glides in and out, and is gone from view like a fish that dives beneath the waves, leaving the battleships to ride with sullen, unsatisfied moans, close to their anchor buoys. So they rode for days and weeks, until the gray-green of their war paint grew mottled and streaked with the brine of the sea; so they were held in check while the vultures hovered over the blackened wreck in Havana Harbor, while a greatpeople gave a sublime example of self-restraint; while the provocation to war, the last argument of men as well as kings, and perhaps the only argument which a savage race will heed, was carefully, conscientiously weighed: until our course became clear: until intervention in Cuba was accepted as a duty, an inexorable duty, by the whole nation. It was a little before midnight on April 22d. The great fleet of twenty-one sail was as…