d
lead him to decline the assistance of trained young women who, although
capable of rendering the highest kind of professional service, were
ready and willing to scrub floors, if necessary, and who asked nothing
more than to help him make a clean, decent hospital out of an empty,
dirty, abandoned Spanish house.

When told by Dr. Winter that they were not wanted, the nurses went to
the Cuban hospital, in a neighboring building, where their services were
accepted not only with eagerness, but with grateful appreciation. Before
night they had swept, disinfected, and scrubbed out that hospital with
soap and water, and had bathed the Cuban patients, fed them, and put
them into clean, fresh cot-beds. Our own soldiers, at the same time,
were lying, without blankets or pillows, on the floor, in a building
which Dr. Winter and his assistants had neither cleaned nor attempted to
clean.

Dr. Appel of the hospital steamer _Olivette_, in an official report to
the surgeon-general of the army, published, in part, in the New York
"Herald" of November 4, 1898, says:

"There was, at that time [the time when we arrived off Siboney], a
number of surgeons on board the _State of Texas_, and four trained
nurses; but, although we were working night and day, taking care of our
sick and wounded, no assistance was given by them until some days
afterward, when our own men were ready to drop from fatigue."

The idea conveyed by this ungenerous and misleading statement is that
the surgeons and Red Cross nurses on the _State of Texas_ neglected or
evaded the very duty that they went to Cuba to perform, and remained,
idle and useless, on their steamer, while Dr. Appel and his associates
worked themselves into a state of complete physical exhaustion. So far
as the statement contains this implication, it is wholly and absolutely
false. _The State of Texas_ arrived off Siboney at eight o'clock on the
evening of Sunday, June 26. In less than an hour the Red Cross surgeons
had offered their services to Major Havard, chief surgeon of the cavalry
division, and as early as possible on the following morning Dr. Lesser
and four or five Red Cross nurses reported at the American hospital,
offered the surgeon in charge the cots, blankets, and hospital supplies
which they had brought, or were ready to bring, on shore, and asked to
be set to work. When, on account of some prejudice or misapprehension,
Dr. Winter declined to let them help him in taking care of ou