when the regiment took a part in it. These young gentlemen unconsciously did a very great injury to the men of the regular army, in persuading the public at home that the volunteer is an effective fighting machine, instead of making it clear that he is an amateur," and, as such, is a menace and a danger to the safety of the country.

The points of view of these several correspondents were entirely different. Writers like Stephen Crane, John Fox, Caspar Whitney, and Stephen Bonsal were interested in what was most dramatic and picturesque. The fact that the Rough Riders sang "Fair Harvard" in the rifle pits, within easy ear-shot of the enemy, was of as much value to them as the move

H. E. ARMSTRONG.

ments of Sampson's squadron or the terms of the surrender.

But the men in the news-gathering class, although they possessed as quick an eye for what was striking and human as did the magazine-writers, found that their duty led them in another direction. It was their part to treat the whole campaign as a series of events, to describe it as they would a political convention, to ascertain exactly what orders were given and exactly who carried them into effect. The best of these, as a rule, were the representatives of the Associated Press, and they entered into the work in the same impersonal spirit with which they would have handled an annual encampment of the G.A.R., or the first night of a new play. They looked on the thing broadly and from all sides. They wanted the news, all the news, but nothing but the news. The last words of a dying soldier were not important to them. His name, spelled correctly, and the letter of his troop, were to their employers of the highest value. These correspondents were ubiquitous. They were in Jamaica one day, and the next ploughing through heavy seas, and a few hours later back on the firing-line. They were anonymous, and their work, which was at times both brilliant and of historic value, was sunk and lost under the levelling head-line of a press bureau, a machine which would make all men equal, and for which writers sell their birthright of originality and humor and personal point of view. Howard Thompson, the Washington correspondent of the Associated Press, and E. R. Johnstone, managing editor of the Minneapolis Times, are perhaps the two men who, by their individuality, have risen above the anonymity of the bureau they serve. In them the personal element predominates. They are young men who would be conspicuous on a sinking ship or at a dinner table. They are the confidants of Presidents and would-be Presidents, Senators and their "bosses," and they are equally at home in an Indian uprising or at a Presidential convention.

Lyman, of the Associated Press, paid the penalty of serving at Siboney by dying a month after the war of fever.

It is a difficult thing for a correspondent to praise the work of his comrades. Such expression of appreciation would come with more weight from some of the officers of the army, except that these lat

ous.

ter could not be free from prejudice, as not a few of them owe much to the young men who made their victories conspicuBut there are some of the correspondents of whose courage and regard for duty a correspondent can speak more fully, because he knows them more intimately than can the men of the army.

Caspar Whitney and John Fox were distinctly among the most earnest, honest, and brilliant. If each of them had not been well known before the war, one as a novelist, the other as an explorer, their conduct during it would have made their reputations. But there were many others who had never written books in covers, nor explored unknown lands, nor tried themselves by facing unknown dangers.

There were so many of these that it would be unfair to mention one before another, but the one who appealed to me the most was Frank Collins, the correspondent of the Boston Journal. Only his nearest friends really know how much that young man risked losing when he offered to represent his paper at the front. He was a reporter of the law courts, and he accompanied the Second Massachusetts Regiment. There was no press-boat be

longing exclusively to his paper, and while in Cuba he was unable to obtain a horse, so that in order to file his despatches he was forced to go on foot to Siboney, and trust to the kindness of his comrades to see that his copy was taken to Jamaica. He worked by day, and by night tramped through the jungle. A more gentle, courteous, and manly man I have seldom met. He nursed the sick and bandaged the wounded, wrote letters for the dying, and acted as postman for the living. He was always at the front, and he never complained nor grumbled. The first time I met him he was gathering flowers to place on the body of a volunteer who had died at Lakeland, and the last time was before the battle of San Juan, when I was unable to walk, and he persuaded a mule-driver to give me a lift in his wagon. Two weeks later, racked

with fever and worn out with lack of food, he died, as much a martyr to the war as the men in uniform who were killed by Mauser bullets. We could not have better spared a better man, because better men than Frank Collins are very few.

If the correspondents on land encountered hardships, their condition in com

parison was preferable to that of the correspondents who followed the fleet. Their days and nights were spent in dirty tug boats, tossing and turning in heavy seas. They were sick for sleep, wet to the skin, and sometimes seasick as well. The crews of their boats were always in a state of active or threatened mutiny, and they were engaged in constant struggles with censors, cable companies, and the authorities of the different ports. John R. Spears, of Scribner's and the New York Sun, Harry S. Brown, of the Herald, Walter Howard, of the Journal, and Charles H. Diehl are perhaps the four men who most successfully battled with the waves,

JAMES F. J. ARCHIBALD.

eluded the cannon balls from the warships, and overcame the difficulties which the censors and the officials of the cable companies placed in the way of their duty. It is impossible to give too much credit to the men who manned the pressboats. They were not able to take anything for granted, and soon learned that they could depend upon no one save themselves. They were forced to learn navigation, geography, diplomacy, and finance. In time each man knew just how many motions of the wheel would carry his tug to Jamaica, how much coal was needed to feed her fires, and how much his crew would drink before they would

scramble on deck and demand an increase of wages before deserting in a body. He was captain, engineer, supercargo, and deck hand. With a salary of forty dollars a week, he was responsible for thousands of dollars. One cable alone to the New York Herald cost five thousand dollars. He had also to pay for boat hire, port dues, and salaries. These many responsibilities were carried by young men who were, for the most part, under thirty years of age, who had previously never been farther from New York city than Coney Island, and with an experience as executives which was limited to guessing at the insurance on a fire and reporting Dr. Depew's speeches. Yet with all these duties pressing upon them they were forced to sit in a choking cabin and write accurate and dramatic pictures of bombardments, engagements with shore batteries, and races after blockaderunners, while the cabin table was at an angle of forty-five degrees, and the cabin lamp swung in complete somersaults. Their reward was a hastily scribbled cablegram of congratulation from the

The great proportion of correspondents sent home ill was out of all proper relation to their numbers. One reason for this was that too many of them selected to live at Siboney, and made their headquarters in the former huts of the Cubans. These huts were little better than ill-kept dog-kennels, and reeked with fever, which, with the lack of proper food and the hot sun, incapacitated over thirty of the newspaper representatives. It is also true that almost all of the other correspondents who were at the front suffered from fever; in fact, I know of but one or two who escaped it. With but few exceptions, the employers at home made but little effort to preserve the health of their correspondents in the field, which they might easily have done by forwarding them food, tents, and clothing by the pressboats from Jamaica. An occasional cablegram of congratulation, while gratifying to the pride, is not so effective a preventive against fever as quinine or a rubber poncho." One of the best known of the correspondents, who was on the firing-line at Guantanamo, Guasimas, and

ill with fever, in the same clothes he had been forced to wear for three weeks. He had forded streams in them, slept on the bare ground in them, and sweated in them from the heat and from fever, and when he reached Fortress Monroe he bought himself a complete new outfit at the modest expenditure of twenty-four dollars. For this his paper refused to pay. This was the same paper that discharged Sylvester Scovel for telling the truth about the Seventy-first New York Volunteers and for returning a blow.

The correspondents who suffered from wounds were four in number-Edward Marshall, who was shot through the body near the spine, and who, after he had been told he could not live, wrote his despatch to his paper as he lay bleeding on his blanket; James Whigham; James F. J. Archibald; and James Creelman. Archibald was one of the "fighting" correspondents, who rendered as effective service as many of the junior officers. He was attached to the First Regiment, and was in command of a squad of men at the time of the landing of the Gussie ex

pedition. He was shot through the arm at that time, and was the only man wounded.

There has been no attempt made in this article to describe the acts of every correspondent who acquitted himself well, and there were many whose work was as conspicuous as that of those mentioned here; but what has been said of one is deserved by nearly all. The water-front" correspondents, as those were called who remained at Siboney, were perhaps the only men who did not perform their whole duty. At that place, thirteen miles from the side lines," it was impossible, obviously, to obtain any knowledge of the operations of the army, except as it was carried to the rear by stragglers or by the wounded, who were in no fit mental condition to give an accurate account of what had occurred. But the information furnished by these men formed the basis for the news sent out by "water front" correspondents, and owing to the fact that they were thirteen miles nearer the press - boats than the correspondents with the army. their alarming and visionary accounts were usually the first to reach the American people. This was not only unfair to the reading public, but to the men who were gathering the facts at the front at some personal risk and with some hardships. When the despatches of these latter, which were complete and accurate, reached Jamaica, the wires already

were

choked with the

premature and sensational stories of their less adventurous brothers. It was an instance of "he who is first shall be last." Of the men, besides those already mentioned, who acquitted themselves most notably, and who in the event of another war would be of the first value to any newspaper, are Millard of the Herald, Root and Armstrong of the Sun, Henry Roberts of the Eagle, and John F. Bass, of Harper's Weekly. C. E Akers, of the London Times, Phil Robinson, and Seppings Wright were easily the most able and distinguished among the English correspondents. artists and photographers, Frederic Remington, Wilson of the Herald. Christy, Floyd Campbell, Dinwiddie, Burton, and James Hare are of the greatest prominence. These are the men to whom the public owe a debt of gratitude. They kept the American people informed of what their countrymen-their brothers, fathers, and friends-were doing at the front. They cared for the soldiers when they wounded,

were

and, as Americans, helped Americans against a common enemy by reconnoitring, scouting. and fighting. They had no uniform to protect them; they were under sentence to be shot as spies if captured by the Spaniards, and they were bound, not by an oath as were the soldiers, but merely by a sense of duty to a newspaper, and by a natural desire to be of service to their countrymen in any way that offered.