Page:McClure's Magazine volume 10.djvu/585



E is a gray little man. His clothes do not fit well, and, perhaps, if you saw it in a photograph, his figure might seem old and ordinary. But the moment he turns his keen eyes on you, they strike like a blow from the shoulder. You feel the will, the fearlessness, and the experience of men that is in those eyes, and their owner becomes a giant before you.

He is a farmer by birth, the son of a farmer, with an Anglo-Saxon tenacity of purpose, and a sense of honor as clean and true as the blade of his little Santo Domingo machete.

When the revolution broke out in Santo Domingo, he served as a lieutenant in the Spanish army against the land of his birth, in her struggle for independence. He was fighting for rank, I have heard him say; but the example of the Dominican patriots and the methods of his brother soldiers made him think. In later years he came to believe with the Cubans that Cuba should be free; and when others dared only whisper, he proclaimed his sympathies, and was relieved of a captain's commission in consequence.

When the Ten Years' War broke out, in 1868, Gomez and Modesto Diaz, another Dominican and ex-Spanish officer, were among the first to offer their swords to the insurgents. Both were experienced soldiers, energetic, and of the character of iron. … Diaz died after it was over; but Gomez lived to be the man under the hub, to whose genius alone is due the credit of having lifted the Cuban cause from a rut and pushed it successfully from Cape Maisi to the Point of San Antonio.

At the beginning of the present war, Gomez was offered the command of the forces such as they might be or might become; and he accepted, with the distinct stipulation that the commander-in-chief of the army should have supreme and exclusive control