washed the excrement from them down under the floors to saturate further
the already contaminated soil.

When we returned from the front on July 9, we found the condition of the
village worse than ever. No attempt, apparently, had been made to clean
or disinfect it; no sanitary precautions had been taken or health
regulations enforced; hundreds of incredibly dirty and ragged
Cubans--some of them employed in discharging the government transports
and some of them merely loafers, camp-followers, and thieves--thronged
the beach, evacuating their bowels in the bushes and throwing remnants
of food about on the ground to rot in the hot sunshine; there was a dead
and decomposing mule in one of the stagnant pools behind the village,
and the whole place stank. If, under such conditions, an epidemic of
fever had not broken out, it would have been so strange as to border on
the miraculous. Nature alone would probably have brought it about, but
when nature and man cooeperated the result was certain. On July 8 the
army surgeons reported three cases of yellow fever among the sick in the
abandoned Spanish houses on shore. On the 10th the number of cases had
increased to thirty, and included Dr. Lesser, chief surgeon of the Red
Cross, and his wife, two Red Cross nurses, and Mrs. Trumbull White, wife
of the correspondent of the Chicago "Record," who had been working as a
nurse in the Red Cross hospital.

On the 11th General Miles arrived from Washington, and on ascertaining
the state of affairs ordered the burning of every house in the village.
I doubt very much whether this step was necessary or judicious, for the
reason that it was taken too late. If there was any reason to believe,
when the army first began to disembark at Siboney, that the houses of
the village were likely to become sources of infection, they should have
been burned or fumigated at once. To burn them after they had set yellow
fever afloat in that malarious and polluted atmosphere was like locking
the stable door after the horse has been stolen. But it is very
questionable whether they should have been burned at any time. In a
country like eastern Cuba, where at intervals of two or three days
throughout the wet season there is a tropical downpour of rain which
deluges the ground and beats through the most closely woven tent, a
house with a tight zinc roof and a dry floor is a most valuable
possession, and it should not be destroyed if there is any way of
disinfecti