A gigantic hotel, brilliant with lights, music, flowers, women; halls and corridors filled with bustling officers, uniformed from empty straps to stars; volunteer and regular—­easily distinguished by the ease of one and the new and conscious erectness of the other; adjutants, millionaire aids, civilian inspectors; gorgeous attaches—­English, German, Swedish, Russian, Prussian, Japanese—­each wondrous to the dazzled republican eye; Cubans with cigarettes, Cubans—­little and big, war-like, with the tail of the dark eye ever womanward, brave with machetes; on the divans Cuban senoritas—­refugees at Tampa—­dark-eyed, of course, languid of manner, to be sure, and with the eloquent fan, ever present, omnipotent—­shutting and closing, shutting and closing, like the wings of a gigantic butterfly; adventurers, adventuresses; artists, photographers; correspondents by the score—­female correspondents; story writers, novelists, real war correspondents, and real draughtsmen—­artists, indeed; and a host of lesser men with spurs yet to win—­all crowding the hotel day and night, night and day.

And outside, to the sea—­camped in fine white sand dust, under thick stars and a hot sun—­soldiers, soldiers everywhere, lounging through the streets and the railway stations, overrunning the suburbs; drilling—­horseback and on foot—­through clouds of sand; drilling at skirmish over burnt sedge-grass and stunted and charred pine woods; riding horses into the sea, and plunging in themselves like truant schoolboys.  In the bay a fleet of waiting transports, and all over dock, camp, town, and hotel an atmosphere of fierce unrest and of eager longing to fill those wooden hulks, rising and falling with such maddening patience on the tide, and to be away.  All the time, meanwhile, soldiers coming in—­more and more soldiers—­in freight-box, day-coach, and palace-car.

That night, in the hotel, Grafton and Crittenden watched the crowd from a divan of red plush, Grafton chatting incessantly.  Around them moved and sat the women of the “House of the Hundred Thousand”—­officers’ wives and daughters and sisters and sweethearts and army widows—­claiming rank and giving it more or less consciously, according to the rank of the man whom they represented.  The big man with the monocle and the suit of towering white from foot to crown was the English naval attache.  He stalked through the hotel as though he had the British Empire at his back.

“And he has, too,” said Grafton.  “You ought to see him go down the steps to the cafe.  The door is too low for him.  Other tall people bend forward—­he always rears back.”

And the picturesque little fellow with the helmet was the English military attache.  Crittenden had seen him at Chickamauga, and Grafton said they would hear of him in Cuba.  The Prussian was handsome, and a Count.  The big, boyish blond was a Russian, and a Prince, as was the quiet, modest, little Japanese—­a mighty warrior in his own country.  And the Swede, the polite, the exquisite!