When the reserves came up there was no hesitation. Colonel Wood, with the right wing, charged straight at a blockhouse eight hundred yards away, and Colonel Roosevelt, on the left, charged at the same time. Up the men went, yelling like fiends, and never stopping to return the fire of the Spaniards, but keeping on with a grim determination to capture that blockhouse.
That charge was the end. When within five hundred yards of the coveted point, the Spaniards broke and ran, and for the first time the boys of '98 had the pleasure which the Spaniards had been experiencing all through the engagement, of shooting with the enemy in sight.
The losses among the Rough Riders were reported as thirteen killed and forty wounded; while the First Cavalry lost sixteen wounded. Edward Marshall, a newspaper correspondent, was seriously wounded.
While the land-forces were fighting four miles northwest of Juragua, Rear-Admiral Sampson learned that the Spaniards were endeavouring to destroy the railroad leading from Juragua to Santiago de Cuba.
This road runs west along the seashore, under cover of the guns of the American fleet, until within three miles of El Morro, and then cuts through the mountains along the river into Santiago.
When the attempt of the Spaniards was discovered, the _New York_, _Scorpion_, and _Wasp_ closed in and cleared the hill and brush of Spaniards.
_June 26._ The American lines were advanced to within four miles of Santiago, and the boys could look into the doomed city. It was possible to make accurate note of the defences, and most likely officers as well as men were astonished by the preparations which had been made.
There were blockhouses on every hill; from the harbour batteries, sweeping in a semicircle to the eastward of the city, were rifle-pits and intrenchments skilfully arranged. Earthworks, in a regular line, completely shut off approach to the city, and in front of the entrenchments and rifle-pits were barbed-wire fences, or trochas.
Three more charges of guncotton did the dynamite cruiser _Vesuvius_ throw into the batteries at the mouth of Santiago Harbour on the night of June 26th, and next morning the evidences of her work could be seen on the western battery, a portion of which was in ruins. The water-mains which supplied the city of Santiago were cut on the same night, and the doomed city thus brought so much nearer to capitulation.