We were kept several days on the transport, which was jammed with men, so that it was hard to move about on the deck.  Then the fleet got under way, and we steamed slowly down to Santiago.  Here we disembarked, higgledy-piggledy, just as we had embarked.  Different parts of different outfits were jumbled together, and it was no light labor afterwards to assemble the various batteries.  For instance, one transport had guns, and another the locks for the guns; the two not getting together for several days after one of them had been landed.  Soldiers went here, provisions there; and who got ashore first largely depended upon individual activity.  Fortunately for us, my former naval aide, when I had been Assistant Secretary of the Navy, Lieutenant-Commander Sharp, a first-class fellow, was there in command of a little ship to which I had succeeded in getting him appointed before I left the Navy Department.  He gave us a black pilot, who took our transport right in shore, the others following like a flock of sheep; and we disembarked with our rifles, ammunition belts, and not much else.  In theory it was out of our turn, but if we had not disembarked then, Heaven only knows when our turn would have come, and we did not intend to be out of the fighting if we could help it.  I carried some food in my pockets, and a light waterproof coat, which was my sole camp equipment for the next two or three days.  Twenty-four hours after getting ashore we marched from Daiquiri, where we had landed, to Siboney, also on the coast, reaching it during a terrific downpour of rain.  When this was over, we built a fire, dried our clothes, and ate whatever we had brought with us.

We were brigaded with the First and Tenth Regular Cavalry, under Brigadier-General Sam Young.  He was a fine type of the American regular.  Like General Chaffee, another of the same type, he had entered the army in the Civil War as a private.  Later, when I was President, it was my good fortune to make each of them in succession Lieutenant-General of the army of the United States.  When General Young retired and General Chaffee was to take his place, the former sent to the latter his three stars to wear on his first official presentation, with a note that they were from “Private Young to Private Chaffee.”  The two fine old fellows had served in the ranks, one in the cavalry, one in the infantry, in their golden youth, in the days of the great war nearly half a century before; each had grown gray in a lifetime of honorable service under the flag, and each closed his active career in command of the army.  General Young was one of the few men who had given and taken wounds with the saber.  He was an old friend of mine, and when in Washington before starting for the front he told me that if we got in his brigade he would put us into the fighting all right.  He kept his word.