ed all day Friday at our ambulances and at our
wounded as they were brought back from the battle-line, and killed two
of our Red Cross men. There was good reason to fear, therefore, that
they would fire into the hospital. It required some nerve on the part of
our surgeons to stand beside operating-tables all night with their backs
to a dark tropical jungle out of which came at intervals the sharp
reports of guerrillas' rifles. But there was not a sign of hesitation or
fear. Finding that they could not work satisfactorily by moonlight,
brilliant although it was, they relighted their candles and took the
risk. Before daybreak on Saturday morning they had performed more than
three hundred operations, and then, as the wounded had ceased to come
in, and all cases requiring immediate attention had been disposed of,
they retired to their tents for a little rest. The five men who composed
the original hospital force had worked incessantly for twenty-one hours.

Of course the wounded who had been operated upon, or the greater part of
them, had to lie out all night on the water-soaked ground; and in order
to appreciate the suffering they endured the reader must try to imagine
the conditions and the environment. It rained in torrents there almost
every afternoon for a period of from ten minutes to half an hour, and
the ground, therefore, was usually water-soaked and soft. All the time
that it did not rain the sun shone with a fierceness of heat that I have
seldom seen equaled, and yet at night it grew cool and damp so rapidly
as to necessitate the putting on of thicker clothing or a light
overcoat. Many of the wounded soldiers, who were brought to the hospital
from a distance of three miles in a jolting ambulance or army wagon, had
lost their upper clothing at the bandaging-stations just back of the
battle-line, where the field-surgeons had stripped them in order to
examine or treat their wounds. They arrived there, consequently, half
naked and without either rubber or woolen blankets; and as the very
limited hospital supply of shirts and blankets had been exhausted, there
was nothing to clothe or cover them with. The tents set apart for
wounded soldiers were already full to overflowing, and all that a
litter-squad could do with a man when they lifted him from the
operating-table on Friday night was to carry him away and lay him down,
half naked as he was, on the water-soaked ground under the stars. Weak
and shaken from agony under