Our first fight came early in February. We had lain outside of the walled city on the Lunetta Driveway for nearly three months. We knew that Aguinaldo, with eighty thousand men, armed with guns we had given him, and those of the Spanish, was in our front, feeling his way. It was nine o’clock Saturday night, February 4th, when the attack began. We heard shots from the enemy, then three in rapid succession from our pickets. It meant help. The men, who had been grumbling for three months for fear they would have to go back home without a scrap, sprang like school boys to a playground. Then the front lit up with a crackle of fire. Our rear was another sheet of it from the fleet in the bay, firing over our heads. It was a hot fighting front, the First Colorado, Tenth Pennsylvania, Thirteenth Minnesota, Fifty-First Iowa, and First North Dakota standing the brunt. We chafed all night, standing in line down by the beach, away in the rear, the very base of our half-circle battle line. All night we stood hoping that we might go into it before it was over, our blood stirred by the battle and roar in front, and the thunder behind. At breakfast Sunday morning we still stood in line, expectant, keyed to a fiddle’s string, eager. The cook passed our Sunday fare up the line, chicken and hot coffee. How little things stick in excitement! Then we saw a courier come out of the smoke and flame, and old Hawthorne rode Satan to our front. "Boys," he said quietly, "they have asked us to take the Filipino trenches, and we are going to take them. Attention, regiment! right shoulder arms, fours right, march!" A Utah battery and the Nebraska boys supported us as we charged over San Juan bridge under fire and across a rice field. We kept step to the _boom—boom—boom_—of the thirteen-inch shells firing over us from the guns of the Monadnoc. Down the bloody lane we charged, the bullets humming like hornets. "Listen, boys," said a man in my company, "listen how they hum!" An old sergeant of the Regulars passed us, going to the rear. He was binding a handkerchief around his arm, from which the blood was squirting. But he laughed and called to us, "Oh, don’t worry about those that you hear humming—them you hear won’t hurt you!" Then the trenches grinned in our front, spitting fire. We prepared to charge. Behind us were Regulars, and in the crisis of it all I saw Braxton Bragg. I hate to write this of the blood of a Rutherford. My shame, my sorrow was greater than his. His nerve had simply left him. He had got down from the hissing bullets behind a sandhill. He had quit before his own men. They did not shoot him, they did not have time; they charged with me, backing my own company. It was a quick rush and soon over. The Filipinos left their breakfast of rice in the trenches. But we left some of our bravest there, too.