Whether General Sumner or General Kent directly and personally ordered this charge or not, I cannot say; but from statements made to me by officers and men who participated in it, I am inclined to believe that it really was--as it has since been called--a "great popular movement," the credit for which belongs chiefly to the regimental and company officers and their men. That General Shafter had nothing to do with it is evident. He might have ordered it if he had been there; but he was not there. One of the wounded men in the field-hospital told me a story of a sergeant in one of the colored regiments, who was lying, with his comrades, in the woods, under the hot fire from the San Juan heights. Getting no order to advance, and tiring of the inaction, he finally sprang to his feet and rushed out into the open, shouting to the men of his company: "Come on, boys! Let's knock h--l out of the blankety-blanks!" whereupon the whole regiment rose like a single man, and started, at a dead run, for the hill. The story is doubtless apocryphal, but it will serve as an illustration of the way in which the charge up the slope of San Juan may have originated. Our men in the edge of the woods, in the bushes, and in the grain-fields had perhaps become so tired of inaction, and so exasperated by the deadly fire which was picking them off, one by one, as they lay, that they were ready for any desperate venture; and when somebody--no matter who--started forward, or said, "Come on, boys!" they simply rose en masse and charged. I cannot find, in the official reports of the engagement, any record of a definite order by any general officer to storm the heights; but the men were just in the mood for such a movement, and either with orders or without orders they charged up the hill, in the face of a tremendous fire from batteries, trenches, and blockhouses, and, in the words of an English officer, quoted by General Breckenridge in his testimony before the Investigating Commission, they not only covered themselves with glory, but extricated their corps commander "from a devil of a fix."