THE SPANISH-AMERICAN WAR. 366 essential part of his plan for the capture of San Juan that both divisions should co-operate,and he now sent orders to General Lawton to abandon the attack on El Caney and move his ■brigades towards the left to join hands with GeneralKent's division in the directadvance on San Juan and Santiago. Lawton took it upon himself to disregard the distinct order of the Commander-in-Chief. To have retired from El Caneyafter having been heldincheck beforeit "during six hours of hard fighting would be to acknowledgedefeat. He sent back word that he meant to hold onand take the place.

a struggle against imminent defeat. "It is a kind of sorrow to me," he says," that the finest, most desperate, most brilliant battle of the Santiago campaign should represent itself to me for ever now as a fight that the Spaniards made against us— as oneof which they werein an especial way the heroes, in spite of noble, unfailing, distinguished bravery on the part of our soldiers. Ishall never cease to see, when the wordCaney is spoken, a line of some fifty or sixty light-blue-clad men standing in a trench, the line bent in the middle at right angles by the square turning of the ditch;at the bending of this line some blue-jacketed young officer standing, always exposed to the belt,and sometimes, as he stood up on the level ground, exposed to the feet; the men rising at the word of this officer's command for hours and hours, delivering volley aster volley full in our faces;standing, as they7 did so, exposed to the waist, confronting 3,000 men, grimly and coolly facing death, drawing their dead up out of the trench as they fell to make standing room for living men,holding thus their trench immovably from morninguntil evening— this is whatCaney willalways mean to me first of all, by virtue of an impression as vivid as the light of day and as ineffaceable as the image of death. Isay it is a sorrow, becauseIshould like to have my picture of the first great fight Iwas ever in centre around some such deed of my own countrymen. But the trench-fighting of the Spaniards w-ith their Mausers was in veryfact the heart and centre of that day's work; and as for that, the heroismof our men appears none the less in the light of the heroism of their antagonists. These figures of Spaniards in the shallow ditch were reallyvery uncouth. Their jackets of poor, thin blue cotton were mere!} loose tunics, too short and coarse to have any dignity, and the trousers were baggy and illfitting. On their heads, as long as they wore them, the men had great straw hats, almost black with use, with brims turned up behind and down before. Sometimes the hats came oft ; and with my glass Iwatched along the trench the shaggy black heads of Castilian youths, whichlookedbetter."

An hour later, about half-past two, Lawton sent for General Bates's reserve brigade of two regularbattalions,which was calledup to fill the gapin the line south-east ofElCaney,between the right of General Ludlow's brigade and the left of General Chaffee's. Lawton had by this time a battery andeight battalionsin action,and three in reserve, and it was just eight hours since the first shot hadbeen fired.

Against this formidable force the Spaniards had just 520 men in action. General Linares had to provide for the defenceof the sea forts, the city, the ground towards Aguadores, the northern approaches to Santiago, 'and the advanced positions of El Caney and San Juan, out of a garrison of less than 7,000 men. He ■could, therefore,only spare a mere handful for ElCaney. The detachment which held it was under the orders of- one of the best of his officers, General Vara de Rey. He had with him in the little town three companies of the 29th lineregiment,knownas the regimentodela Conslitucion,half a companyof the regiment 01 Cuba, and two small companies of irregulars— 520 rifles in all. There were forty men in the stone fort, a companyoutside in the trench on the hillside. Other companies heldthe trenches and blockhouses on the south, east, and west sides of the town. The irregulars were in the trees and loopholed houses. There was no .reserveavailable. No men ever made a better fight than this handful of Spaniards ;and after the fight the Americans at first found it difficult to believe that so small a garrison had held them in check for a long summer day. One 01 the American correspondents who accompanied Chaffee's brigade has given his impressions of the way in which the Spaniards fought as they held the north-eastern trench at Caney His words deserve to be quoted, not merely as a vivid description of the fight, but also as a generous tribute to those who made so brave And again he writes:— " The thing that fascinated me was the sight of the Spaniards in this trench. My glass revealed every movement they made— eventhe cool turning of the head that was in onebig straw hat to make some observation to another. In the very midst of the ripping, crashing