If you thought the phenomenon of overhyped anchors on the front lines was an invention of television, just look at the front page of the New York Journal on January 17, 1897, which had the banner headline, “Richard Harding Davis and Frederic Remington in Cuba for the Journal,” with half the page devoted to their portraits. This was the golden age of yellow journalism, and Hearst was pushing for the US to intervene against the Spanish. As he apocryphally wired Remington, “You furnish the pictures, I’ll furnish the war.”
Hearst didn’t need to furnish anything—a brutal war was underway. Davis offered acute descriptions of what he saw, as well as startlingly clear-eyed analyses of the underlying forces at play. As you read the first pages of Cuba in War Time, you will be surprised at how crisply Davis describes wartime dynamics that so many people—including politicians who keep sending soldiers into unwinnable wars—mistakenly regard as novel to their times or completely unexpected. Almost anyone who covers a war believes, in a moment of hubris, that they are making an original point, but Davis’s work is a humbling reminder of how downstream most have been.
Take the following passage, for instance, and substitute “fortified places” with the “green zones” that constituted US bases after the 2003 invasion of Iraq. “The island is divided into two great military camps, one situated within the forts, and the other scattered over the fields and mountains outside them,” Davis writes of Cuba. “The Spaniards have absolute control over everything within the fortified places…The insurgents are in possession of all the rest. They are not in fixed possession, but they have control much as a mad bull may be said to have control of a ten-acre lot when he goes on the rampage.” Swap “strategic hamlets” for “green zones” and you’re in Vietnam. Davis saw and described the illusion of territorial control in guerrilla war fare long before the rest of us.
More than seventy years before the Vietnam War gave us its infamous “body counts,” Davis also was documenting the fabrication of enemy casualties. The Spanish military inflated, or just created out of thin air, the numbers of Cuban rebels it supposedly killed. “I counted the cartridges my men had used,” a Spanish officer says in the pages of this book. “I found they had expended four hundred. By allowing ten bullets to each man killed, I was able to learn that we had killed forty men.” However unique our moment might feel, we are caught in patterns that long predate us.