GENERAL WEYLER'S CAMPAIGN.

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BY CRITTENDEN MARRIOTT.

Correspondent in Cuba, of the Chicago Record.

HE second Spanish campaign of the war in Cuba has now come to an inglorious end. The rainy season has fairly begun, military operations have been suspended, several thousand troops have been sent back to Spain, and most of the regulars have been withdrawn from the interior towns and concentrated in the coast cities, leaving the local troops to defend their own homes. Military operations cannot be recommenced on any large scale until next October, by which time we may expect important changes in the situation. This, therefore, seems the proper time to review the state of Cuba, and ascertain, as accurately as may be, what Spain has achieved, and what she has still to achieve before reconquering the island.

I arrived in Cuba on January 19th, and left it on April 24th, my visit there covering the entire campaign of General Weyler against the great province of Santa Clara. I went there as a newspaper correspondent, and as such, while not permitted to accompany the Spanish troops, I followed, preceded, or encircled their line of march, keeping a close watch on all their movements. I did not attempt to reach the insurgent armies, but, through a series of circumstances too long to explain, was in close and constant communication with them during the last two months of my stay.

This alleged war has been, in many ways, one of the most singular that the world has ever seen. It is a war without battles; there has not been a real battle in Cuba since the spring of 1896, all reports to the contrary notwithstanding. The thrilling combats narrated with circumstantial detail in certain newspapers simply do not take place.

It is a war where the invading army, in all 260,000 strong, opposing a retreating, bushwhacking, battle-avoiding force of from 12,000 to 40,000 (according to different au

thorities), yet puts more than two-thirds of its numbers behind stone walls, in forts, trochas, and other forms of defensive fortifications.

It is a war where, for every insurgent killed in fight, two Spaniards are so killed and five die of disease. Worse, it is a war where the chief fury of the attacking party seems to be directed against the non-combatants, and where starvation is a potent weapon relentlessly employed against a vast throng of people who were never hostile, and who are now utterly desolate and vainly pleading for mercy.

Once more, it is a war where the mother country is bleeding at every pore, where her credit is getting worse and worse every day, where her debt is already so enormous that it will exclude her for years from any place amongst the powers of the world, where her armies are unable to bring the foe to give battle; and yet it is also a war where her officers are all amassing riches, stolen partly from the Cubans, but mostly from the coffers of their mother country, and where (most ludicrous of all, but a fitting termination of the farce) her general in command is claiming that he has pacified Cuba, although dozens of skirmishes take place daily, and he knows, and the world knows, that there are more rebels in arms to-day than ever before.

On the other hand are the rebels, who follow the amazing, if effective, policy of hoping to win their freedom without fighting for it; who permit their friends to be butchered without an effort in their defense; whose chief aggressive tactics involve the blowing up of railway trains with dynamite, and the forming of ambushes, in which half-a-dozen Spaniards are killed, followed by a precipitate flight through fear of being brought to close quarters.

Add, that both sides have deliberately set out to destroy the country, the rebels burning or ruining the sugar-cane and tobacco fields, and the Spanish destroying everything else, including the farm buildings and the orchards, and it must be admitted that the situation has rarely been paralleled.

General Weyler started west from Havana on January 19, 1897, with an army alleged to consist of 16,000 men. This he gradually increased to 25,000 from garrisons scattered

along his route. He reached the city of Santa Clara on February 1, and at once issued "concentration" orders for that province similar to those already put into effect in the three western provinces. On February 9th he marched to Placetas, and thence south to Sancti Spiritus, both important towns. Three weeks later he returned to Havana, discouraged by his inability to bring the rebels to bay. On March 8th he received orders from Spain, directing him to enter into negotiations with the rebels. He was kept at Havana for some time by a severe cold, but finally, on March 28th, reached Cienfuegos, whence he sent a commission of three Cubans, leaders in the last war, to negotiate with the rebels. General Gomez refused to receive them, threatening to hang them if they came to his camp. Gen. Weyler thereupon, after marching here and there in the province for two weeks longer, on April 22 declared it pacified.

Meanwhile, General Gomez and President Cisneros crossed the central trocha from Jucaro to Moron in January, and attacked the town of Arroyo Blanco. The garrison resisted gallantly, and on February 3rd were relieved by General Weyler's advance guard. Gomez then detached General Magia Rodriguez to pass General Weyler, get in his rear, and create a diversion in Havana and Mantazas provinces, left partially stripped of troops by the Spanish. This Rodriguez did with great success.

General Gomez himself scorned to retreat. Sending President Cisneros and his cabinet back across the trocha to a place of safety, he established himself within ten miles of Arroyo Blanco, and has remained there ever since. The Spanish have reported three battles with him at almost the same place, and in each have claimed a great victory. It is noticeable, however, that it is the rebels who have held their ground and the Spanish who have retreated. For more than four months previous to the date of this writing (June 1), General Gomez has been within five miles of the field of La Reforma, his position perfectly well known to both friend and foe, keeping up regular communications with the world at large.

The truth of the matter is that there have been no such

battles as the Spanish claim. There have been a few longrange skirmishes, and that is all. The Spaniards, though enormously overnumbering the insurgents, have not cared to come to close quarters with Gomez, and he, as a matter of policy, preferred to harass Weyler by ambushes and skirmishes, rather than risk a battle, which would mean ruin if he were defeated. The Spanish army, therefore, if not beaten, has at least been ineffective. This is due chiefly to its childishness, corruption, and cowardice.

Many newspaper writers have remarked on the youthfulness and apparent stupidity of the regulars. I suppose seventyfive per cent of them are under twenty-one, and ninety-five per cent are under twenty-five. They are mostly plowboys, freshly caught by the conscription, and shipped across the seas without any training or drill whatever. Spain has kept her older troops at home to protect herself against the Carlists and the Republicans who are supposed to be plotting against the government.

These boys are set down far from home, in a strange land where yellow fever and smallpox prevail by turns the year around. They are treated with the greatest brutality by their officers, robbed by the commissaries, insufficiently clothed and fed, shot down from ambush by enemies whom they cannot see and cannot catch, and are paid irregularly or not at all. Can such soldiers be expected to prove efficient? I have seen a whole company crying like children because one of their number had received a letter from home, and the rest were homesick. I have seen a major-general in the Spanish army lash a private over his face and head with a whip, because the man did not notice his approach and failed to salute him quickly enough. I have seen half-a-dozen of these soldiers scrambling on the floor of a coffee-house for a few coppers contemptously thrown to them by an American correspondent. Are these the proud soldiers of Spain, the descendants of the foot soldiery that were the terror of Europe a few centuries ago?

The contrast between the officers and the privates is most striking. The former are the handsomest race of men I have ever seen. Not very tall, but well set up, of good figure, with

intelligence in every feature, kindly, courteous, and polite in civil life, no doubt, but cruel in war. The men are heavy, dull, with vacuous faces, badly developed figures, and, though young, are bowed by labor. No one seeing the private and his officer together would imagine that they belonged to the same race. Yet the officer, equally with the man, has his faults, and terrible faults they are. I do not speak of his cruelty, fiendish as it is, for opinions may differ as to that, but of his corruption and his cowardice and his mendacity. From the highest to the lowest the Spanish officers in Cuba are corrupt; corrupt with a deadly, destructive corruption, which strikes at the very heart of their mother country. It is a jest in Havana that General Weyler has made a half-million dollars out of the war. Merchants there have shown me on their books the records of enormous bribes to him and to other generals. Colonels carry on the rolls of their regiments the names of dozens of men killed in battle, claim pay in their names, and will appropriate it when Spain pays the soldiers. Captains and lieutenants make large profits by taking their troops on numbers of unnecessary railway journeys, and sending in false vouchers about them. The commissary department robs the government at home and the soldier in the field, ruining the one and half starving the other. A general officer has been recalled to Spain, charged with having accepted a bribe of $40,000 to change his line of march and avoid a fight with the rebels. Nine-tenths of the rebels' ammunition nowadays is bought, in the original boxes, from Spanish officers. I do not speak from hearsay, but tell what I know.

The officers are cowardly, too, and shrink from active service. The coffee-houses in the cities are crowded with them. On a railroad train fired on by half-a-dozen rebels from alongside the track, I have seen them, clad in full regimentals, grovelling in the dust of the floor underneath the seats to avoid the bullets, while the train, in spite of its large military escort, put on extra steam and ran away. It is only when he gets some poor devil of a pacifico tied to a tree, and at his mercy, that the Spanish officer shows how courageously he can fight for Spain. The murder of non-combatant prisoners is the first article of his creed.